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Gary Topp ushered Toronto into the cultural future—and he’s still making alternative history

JL;DR SUMMARY Gary Topp revolutionized Toronto's cultural scene in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing countercultural acts to Canada and transforming venues like the Roxy Theatre into hubs for underground culture. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski.

  • At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself.
  • This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude.
  • Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from.
  • But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
  • And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.
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Tags

1970sTorontoCultural TransformationPunk MusicCommunity ImpactGary ToppThe Two GarysRoxy TheatreIndie CinemaHe Hijacked My Brain

Places mentioned

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
"It's visual. It's, you know, it's a book. It's a whole community of people talking together about an entire time, and particularly in the music and movies and culture scene of Toronto."
Quebec, Canada
"I'm sorry. It's like it really affected me, like talking to his daughter and his grandson. Like this buff kid who's like a personal trainer now talking about how his sabah, how his fondest memory is building a SpongeBob SquarePants doll out of wood with him in the workshop. It was just, it got you, you know? My name is Joel Chiaoushou, and I'm the Quebec correspondent for the Canadian Jewish News."
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
"We had a riot. The very last show we did at the Horseshoe Tavern was called The Last Pogo, which was a play on words with the band's last waltz, and at the end of the night, some, some off-duty cops who had been drinking at the bar got a little out of hand and thought everything was out of hand. I mean, and there were like 700 people in the place with a capacity of about five, but they wanted to stop the show, and the teenage head were on stage, and they went up, and they were talking to the manager on stage, and I was told to get on the mic where I was, sitting at the soundboard, and to ask everybody to politely to leave, that the show was canceled, was being stopped, and I did that, and being the DJ that I was, I pressed the button on the tape recorder, and on came anarchy in the UK, and immediately it was like a ballroom brawl. You know, wooden chairs flying, flying, slamming, it was like lumberjacks, like a hundred lumberjacks right behind you, you know?"
Yorkville, Ontario, Canada
"My ideal retirement... Lobby.ecause I still get to curate. I feel I do good for the people that I book. I still can... I still promote. Promote the shows like I would, you know, a bigger venue. It's all the same. It brings me back also to, you know, my teenage years, early 60s, when we went to, you know, folk clubs and jazz clubs that were like living rooms, you know, in Yorkville or by Yorkville."
This podcast episode was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 41518
Cairo Source ID 73
Retrieved 2025-01-14 05:30:45 UTC
Curated 2025-01-14 06:04:55 UTC