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Strictly Canadian Celebrates the Spirit of Spirit of ’67 (and ’57, and ’77)
Photo by Julia Chan.
Strictly Canadian
The Avro (750 Queen Street East)
Monday, June 27, 9 p.m.–1 a.m.
Imagine that you could travel back to Toronto in 1969 to catch just one local gig. Would it be the Rock ‘n Roll Revival at Varsity Stadium—an event that saw an appearance by the Doors and John Lennon’s debut as part of the Plastic Ono Band? Would you check out a Neil Young show at legendary Yorkville coffee house The Riverboat? Or would you opt to catch Jamaican-born reggae sensation Jackie Mittoo performing up in Rexdale?
While that last option likely rings fewer bells with many Torontonians, it might just tempt Beau Levitt. The Toronto-area DJ counts himself as a devotee to artists like Mittoo, whom he describes as “the lesser-known heroes of Canadian music history.” And with Strictly Canadian—his new DJ night at Leslieville’s The Avro—Levitt is now shining a light on Canada’s best unsung artists from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Levitt admits that he hadn’t always been such a Can-Con aficianado: “When I was a kid, a lot of people grew up with the position that they hated Canadian music… I didn’t personally own any Canadian CDs in high school. Lots of it wasn’t played on the radio, and if it was, it was Loverboy, Bryan Adams, and Anne Murray.”
Years later though, as Levitt started getting into audio blogs, he noticed a similar lack of attention being paid to Canadian artists. He decided to start his own blog, Five Bucks on By-Tor, spotlighting albums by long-forgotten Canuck musicians. Levitt would scour local thrift stores for old records, sometimes coming home with thirty or forty selections. “For a while,” he explains, “I was buying almost anything that was Canadian, and it would be very hit-and-miss. But I wanted to be respectful of everything I put up. I wasn’t going to put up any songs I didn’t like, and I didn’t make fun of the cover [art]—that’s not what I set out to do.”
Levitt came across a lot of country and pop albums, but in Toronto he was able to pick up a wider selection—from reggae and R&B to German choirs and Ukrainian folk music. “I would go in, and the more records I bought, the more I found out about musicians,” he says. “I saw ads on the back [of records], and it got to the point where I started to recognize producers and engineers who appeared on lots, so I thought, ‘I would have to pick this.’” Sometimes, though, Levitt’s unique finds included some more familiar names.
“I picked up Anne Murray’s first album, which was recorded when she was 17 or 18, when she was a backup singer for a TV show. I was shocked—shocked!—that it was good. It was so different from her other songs; it had a psychedelic tinge. I almost didn’t buy it; I was all, ‘Anne Murray, why bother?’ But holy cow!”
Levitt posted sample mp3s from each album he reviewed on the blog, with a standard disclaimer that if any artist or recording company objected to it, he would take the songs down. “But pretty much everyone was flattered that anyone was taking an interest,” he says. “A lot of the time they would contact me, saying, ‘I knew that guy!’ […] Hearing from some of the musicians and their relatives has been incredibly gratifying.”
While running the blog, Levitt began pitching a DJ night to a few bars around the city that would focus on his hidden gems, but didn’t find much interest. He forgot about it until The Avro opened in Leslieville. “It had the Canadian theme going on with the name and all, and on a whim, I walked in an asked to speak to the manager, who was actually bartending that night, and who said it sounded interesting.”
Now a few months into the series, Strictly Canadian is steadily growing in popularity. Spinning playlists of songs digitized from his own collection, Levitt aims for variety: “People like garage rock, and R&B gets the biggest reactions,” he says. “I’m a big reggae fan, so I’ve played a lot of that. I try to play stuff that isn’t too esoteric or weird. I had a lot of weird kraut rock, stuff that was twenty minutes long. That would drive people out of the bar.”
Sometimes, though, the obscure and the familiar intersect: “After a few drinks, a friend of mine wanted to hear a song from the 1970s, ‘People City,’” he notes, referring to the tune that was used as a sign-on and sign-off in the early days of Citytv. “There are a lot of weird little things from over the years, theme songs for towns, tourism ads, stuff around the centennial—the government put out a lot of music then—praising the virtues of Canada.”
And certainly, Levitt is able to see the big picture when it comes to Canada’s long-lost artists: “I [get] to hear all this amazing music that I’d never heard of, learning more about Canada, how all these musicians and their history fit in with Canadian society of the time and the Canadian music industry… It’s humbling how much there is.”
“Part of that whole process of coming back to Canadian music, engaging with it again, felt sometimes like doing penance for being so down on it as a kid.”
[Disclosure: Shoshana Wasser works for University of Toronto Press, which published Canuck Rock in 2009. Copies of the book will be given away at Levitt’s Monday night show.]