Club: Boa Café, 25 Bellair

Years in operation: 1989-1998

History: This is a tale of two interconnected yet vastly different Toronto venues, each influential in its own way. For this article, I will be focussing on the first, Boa Café; the story of its second incarnation, Boa Redux, will be told in the next edition of Then & Now.

At the story’s centre lies Rony Hitti.

“I grew up in a family of restaurateurs and hoteliers, and was supposed to be the banker in the family,” says Hitti, who would instead become owner-operator of both Boas.

Hitti dutifully studied business finance and politics at York University, but also DJed steadily during the 1980s. He played a variety of Midtown-area clubs, and started his own DJ company, dubbed Earthquake in reference to the powerful Sensurround sound system created for the 1974 film of the same name.

“It used to shake movie theatres, and I bought one. I did pretty much all of the dances at York with that system.”

Banking didn’t work out for Hitti at the time, nor did dishwashing at his father’s restaurant. Instead, he studied culinary arts in Switzerland for a year. Upon returning, Hitti brainstormed a business plan with Charles Khabouth; the two Lebanese-Canadians had become friends as Hitti spent much time at Khabouth’s trendsetting Stilife nightclub.

“Charles and I were really close. We hung out, and traveled together. On a trip to Montreal, we went to a place called Lola’s Paradise. Lola’s was fine dining with that really cool Montreal vibe. We thought Toronto could use something like it.

“Back then, last call was 1 a.m. and, inevitably at that time, everybody was looking for something to do. The only places to go were in Chinatown, for bad Chinese food, or Bemelmans on Bloor. We realized that the city needed a funky late-night dining spot that catered to a Stilife-like crowd.”

Initially 50/50 partners, the men envisioned a chic, but relaxed social spot that would serve quality food and drinks from noon until late night, five days a week. They looked to Yorkville for the location, and found 25 Bellair, formerly a daytime coffee shop. Five steps down from the sidewalk, but with a sizable window looking out at street level, the location was one long, narrow room that Hitti and Khabouth would greatly re-design.

“Yorkville was very much ’80s yuppie central,” Hitti recounts. “We wanted to bring Queen Street cool to Yorkville glam.”

Boa Café opened in October of 1989. There was nothing understated about it.

From the October, 28, 1989 edition of the Toronto Star

Why it was important: Although Boa Café only seated 40, it had “the instant distinction of being the trendiest place in Toronto,” wrote the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume in an appreciative review dated October 28, 1989.

Boa became one of this city’s most coveted social spots thanks to a confluence of key elements and people. It certainly was an eye-popping location, whether one chose to hang out by day—magazines, chess, and backgammon were all on offer—or night.

“There was nothing like Boa in the city at that time,” says early staffer Marcos Durian, then also a production assistant in both film and still photography. “It was a small space with incredible design that drew the masses from early afternoon to the break of dawn. Boa may have been in Yorkville, but it was so un-Yorkville.”

The aesthetic of Boa’s 1,200 square feet was largely imagined by Rony’s cousins Gregory and Alexander Gatserelia, together known as Gatserelia Design. Artist Kenny Baird, who had created installations and core elements for many clubs in the U.S. and Canada (including Khabouth’s Stilife), contributed Boa’s signature mosaic tiling, which covered much of the space.

“This was the ’80s, when it was the more detail the better,” chuckles Hitti. “Every single inch of it was designed, including the washrooms. The look of it was very whimsical; Gregory’s description was ‘It’s Antoni Gaudi meets Cocteau.’”

A bar ran the length of Boa’s room, with benches by the entrance and rows of tables filling the floor space.

“Boa packed a heavy visual punch,” says Durian. “It was dark and intimate, with warm lighting fixtures, specially treated sinuous metal, and a copper-bar top. An intricate, colourful, serpentine mosaic stretched across the floor and south wall from the front door to the restrooms in the back. A curved sheet-metal sculpture hung from the ceiling. The walls were a sponged dark brown with one gold-leaf wall that curved, like the contours of a snake behind the bar. Hence ‘Boa,’ as in the snake.”

But it wasn’t just Boa’s aesthetic details that attracted patrons; it was also the energy, talents, and youth of the Café’s early staff. Most were already friends, or became connected as patrons of Boa. Durian hung out before being hired as a waiter and bartender because his pal Thomas Koonings worked there in the same role. Both became super tight with Mark Bacci, a teenager who grew to become a star chef at Boa Café after Hitti showed him the ropes.

“Mark could not break an egg at the outset, but had an incredible palate,” says Hitti.

“I learned to cook from Rony in the early days,” agrees Bacci. “I was a natural at it, but he showed me a lot.”

Also central was Bassam “Sam” Nicolas, who had worked for Hitti’s parents for a decade prior to becoming Rony’s “right-hand man” and general manager at Boa. Hitti gives credit as well to “all-star waitresses” Rebecca Shafrir and Sacha Grierson, both of whom became part of the Boa team while still in university.

“Mostly, we didn’t feel like we were working,” says Shafrir by email, echoing a common sentiment. “It was rather like we were having fun in our own very edgy salon.”

All of these people personified Boa Café during its first year, a year that Hitti actually describes as “very difficult, business-wise” for himself and partner Khabouth.

“We lost our shirts, and Charles was starting to experience problems at Stilife because of Oceans [the club’s adjoined restaurant],” states Hitti. “The relationship went sour between the two of us, and we decided to go our separate ways.

“That’s when Boa became my baby. I made the food more dining, and less café-ish. I also decided to bring in some of the sound equipment from my house for the music, place a DJ behind the bar, and turn it into more of a party venue. It worked.”

No matter the hour, if Boa was open, so was its kitchen. Many describe the Café’s food in loving detail. (“There were chicken sandwiches with aioli to die for, the best tomato spaghetti by Mark Bacci, and a yellow plum tomato salad that no other fine dining restaurant could better,” writes Shafrir.)

“It was a small, eclectic menu with French, Italian, and Middle Eastern influences,” says Durian. “Mark Bacci was a one-man show, with two hot plates and a convection oven. I don’t know how we serviced all those people with the small work space and tools at our disposal.”

So too grew Boa’s focus on music. It had been integral from day one, as Hitti and DJs from Stilife provided funky mixtapes of soul, rare groove, deep disco, and early house, but the Café became more synonymous with its sounds after Hitti placed his turntables behind Boa’s bar.

“Boa was the first bar/restaurant in Toronto to incorporate a DJ at all times,” he claims.

At first, all of Boa’s staff took turns behind the decks, with Stilife DJs including Chris Klaodatos stepping in to play occasional late-night parties for which the tables and chairs would be pushed aside. Boa also hosted art exhibits, film-festival parties, fashion shows, and other events. The late night crowds began to swell.

“Boa was like the cool people’s secret,” recalls Shafrir, who left after her first summer to continue studies. (She is now a Trade Commissioner for the Government of Canada, working in Tel Aviv.)

“It was small, and from the street no one could guess it was the place to be,” she adds. “Yorkville was flashy and fake; Boa was the real deal. It had a crowd of regulars who kept it alive. It was a rather underground, artsy vibe.”

“Boa blew up at night, into this after-hours scene,” describes Bacci. “Everyone from the industry found themself at Boa. It was like this underground hub of what was cool in the city. It wasn’t a boozecan; people actually came to hang out, eat, and drink. Every top chef went, along with restaurant owners and workers. We would throw parties once a month that became an insane night, spilling out onto the streets of Bellair. Cops never bothered us—because they were customers, and because the food was so good that it just wasn’t that kind of place.

“Because of Boa, and the fact that everyone came there, a 17-year-old [like myself at the time] got reservations at top restaurants in the city on a last-minute call, or just by walking in.”

Kenny Baird’s signature mosaic tiling, as featured in the Oct. 1991 edition of Interior Design magazine.
(Courtesy of INK Entertainment.)

Occasional parties gave rise to DJs on Boa’s decks Thursdays through Saturdays, when the Café would be open as late as 5 or 6 a.m. Boa became the late-night hangout for a huge range of people.

“It all happened very organically,” says Hitti. “We didn’t decide to become a boozecan; we were open late, serving food, and once in a while we’d have friends come in. They would get their ‘cold tea,’ and slowly but surely, the circle of friends became bigger and bigger. We basically became the hangout for everyone from politicians to crown attorneys, senior cops, very wealthy people, and at the same time even some of the biggest drug dealers in the city. The cross-section was amazing.”

“Boa was a kind of enigma where it wasn’t a club, a full-blown restaurant or a bar, yet it managed to be all these things and more in one night,” describes Durian. “Boa had a myriad of identities, which changed by the hour and by the clientele. You couldn’t cast half the people that came in.

“It was a melting pot, a mash up from every aspect and genre of nightlife in the city, especially on the weekends. You had the Stilife crowd, the Go-Go mob, everyone that worked at the clubs, bars, and restaurants. You had city brass, weekend warriors, pro athletes, hip-hop artists, the gays, the fashionistas, actors, producers, those looking for fame, and those just looking for a good time. You had nobodies, freaks and geeks, the rich and the not rich of all races. There was no end to the diversity that walked through that door.”

Durian, who left Boa in 1992 to study film in London and then New York (he’s now a Los Angeles-based director and cinematographer), mentions visits from the likes of Ben Kingsley, Lennox Lewis, Kid ‘n Play, and members of both the Toronto Maple Leafs and Blue Jays.

“When the Blue Jays won the World Series [in 1992, 1993], we were the place they came to celebrate,” confirms Hitti. “Boa was one of, if not the only place, you could find Galen Weston sitting adjacent to [later murdered] mob enforcer Eddie ‘Hurricane’ Melo, sitting next to a bevy a models, next to Queen Street types, next to other socialites and low lives all in perfect harmony. We operated on a face-and-attitude door policy: We either knew you, or you were cool enough to get in. It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about being famous.” (Interior photos of Boa Cafe are rare; as Hitti admits, ”We didn’t allow cameras in there, for obvious reasons.”)

A young Susur Lee is reported to have been a Boa regular, as were owners of restaurants including Rodneyʼs Oyster House, Splendido, and Centro. A new generation of club and restaurant promoters and owners (or owners-to-be) also hung out, including the Assoon brothers (Twilight Zone), Edney Hendrickson (Octopus Lounge), and Leslie Ng and Byron Dill (Kubo DX and more).

Dill, in fact, was such a regular at Boa, he later joined the staff as a bartender and event promoter.

“Byron brought that very Queen Streetish crowd vibe,” Hitti admits. “He and his friends helped make Boa Café what it was in a lot of ways.”

Bacci, in turn, credits Hitti with connecting scenes and communities.

“Yorkville was dud central at the time, [full of] dated places,” says Bacci. “It was like what Rony did in its own strange way harkened back to the Yorkville of the 1960s, like when Joso’s was just a place to drink. Boa somehow became the centre of the universe for the downtown scene. You felt like you were a part of something [that was] almost before its time for the city.”

Like friends Durian and Thomas Koonings, Bacci left Boa in the early ’90s. He moved on to cook at restaurants including Left Bank and 80 Scollard, before re-locating to New York for film school. He’s made his way as a U.S.-based actor, writer, and director ever since, maintaining ties to both Boa and Toronto. And though he and his family split time between L.A. and Hawaii, Bacci co-owns a number of Toronto restaurants, including the Lil Baci locations. (Durian has served as Director of Photography on all of Bacci’s films.)

Food remained very much a focus at Boa long after Bacci’s departure, but its DJs and late-night dancing continued to grow in popularity. After DJ Chris Klaodatos left as resident, Energy 108’s DJ Fran stepped in as Boa’s main weekend spinner from 1993 to 1996, with DJ Radamés Nieves blending Latin and Afro beats on Thursdays and occasional Fridays.

For a six-month-period of Saturdays in 1996, Fran was also joined by Hedley Jones a.k.a. Deadly Hedley, a CFNY and Klub Max alumni who, by then, also worked for Energy 108. Fran and Hedley’s popular live-to-air from Boa Café ended abruptly when Fran was found dead one Sunday morning, after he’d left the party. (Jones is now based in Los Angeles where he works as a photographer.)

“In a way, a bit of the spirit of Boa went out with Fran,” says Hitti. “It was a very close-knit group.”

The Boa bar, as featured in the Oct. 1991 edition of Interior Design magazine. (Courtesy of INK Entertainment.)

What happened to it: By 1996, Boa Café was so busy that a second room was added, doubling the venue’s square footage and creating a designated dancefloor. Many hundreds of people would come through on weekends, packed in “like sardines,” according to Hitti.

“If one person danced, everybody danced. People would dance on tables and chairs, they’d dance on the bar, there were people having sex. It was absolute debauchery.”

That said, Boa didn’t receive a lot of police attention.

“I would get raided twice a year, and the charges would disappear,” shares Hitti. “Everybody thought that I was paying off half the city. I never paid anyone a single dime, but I kept good relations with everybody, and I guess people thought, ‘Why not? The place doesn’t have any problems.’ There was no overt drug dealing, everybody was having fun, and it was a discreet venue in Yorkville. It kind of took on a life of its own.”

But Hitti acknowledges, “It got to the point where the place was so busy that eventually this was its downfall.

“Literally, people would get off a plane at 1 a.m., ask where they could get a drink, and taxi drivers would bring them down. People would show up at the door, and many would be told they could not come in. We had just one doorman, Larry Trump; he could handle all those crowds by himself.

“One night in 1996, Larry told some guys they could not come in. I was called over, and said the same. One of them looked at me and said, ‘I’ll come back and spray the place.’ He went to his car in the parking lot, pulled out a machine gun, and shot seven bullets through the window. We had two of those incidents, and that’s largely what motivated me not to renew the lease in the end. Both times when it happened, the place was packed and bullets literally flew over everybody’s heads. Nobody got hurt. Twice lucky, we weren’t going to risk a third time.”

By 1998, when Hitti’s lease at 25 Bellair came up for renewal, he also owned businesses including Brasserie Zola (“a very bourgeois French restaurant”), Winston’s (“probably the highest-rated fine-dining restaurant in the city [at the time]”), and Turkish Bath, the member’s-only nightclub beneath it.

“My name was associated with being a chef, and owner of fine dining establishments,” Hitti concludes. “The last thing I wanted was my name in the newspaper associated with a shooting.”

The lower level of 25 Bellair is now home to Vaticano Restaurant.

The story of Boa continues in the next edition of Then & Now, when I revisit the club’s resurrection in the early 2000s as after-hours dance club Boa Redux on Spadina.

Thank-you to participants Mark Bacci, Marcos Durian, Rebecca Shafrir, and Rony Hitti, as well as to Hedley Jones and Thomas Koonings.

To date, Then & Now has explored the stories of more than 35 influential clubs. Read this ongoing series, devoted to Toronto nightlife history, here at The Grid and join the conversation at Denise Benson’s related Facebook page.

You can also join Denise this Saturday (May 25) at 3 p.m., when she’ll be speaking about Toronto club culture at the City Hall Rotunda as part of Doors Open. Details can be found here.

At 5:45 on a Tuesday evening in April, the staff of the Drake Hotel is busy preparing for the night’s fundraiser—an event called “Celebrate Shary Boyle” in support of the Toronto artist chosen to represent Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennale international art exhibition. Chefs are spinning up rolls of sushi. Bartenders are slicing citrus. Waitresses are doing that thing with cocktail napkins where you put your fist on a stack and twist them just so, creating a classy little pinwheel.

On stage, VAG HALEN is sound-checking through a verse of Judas Priest’s “Breaking the Law,” guitarists Heather Kirby and Jackie Mohr playing that heavy-metal riff over a sampled police siren. VAG HALEN (all-caps theirs) is an all-female queer art band that plays hard-rock covers. In sweaty bars around the city, lead singer Vanessa Dunn performs like the possessed daughter of Freddie Mercury and Robert Plant, stripping down to a leather daddy hat and nipple-covering flying Vs of electrical tape while her band cranks out hard-rock classics with note-perfect precision.

So, yes: A $250-a-head party for the kind of silver-haired philanthropists whose names you see in the thank-you section of playbills and on the walls of museums isn’t their usual show. Indeed, when Shary Boyle first told organizers from the National Gallery that she wanted to bring a seven-piece feminist cover band to play Zeppelin tunes for the muckety-mucks of the international art world at the Biennale, the “Olympics of contemporary art,” there was, unsurprisingly, a certain amount of resistance.

“I pretty much had to convince everyone at the National Gallery,” says Boyle. “Why them and not somebody more mainstream, more tasteful, more pleasant?”

Boyle was insistent, though, so tonight’s fundraiser also serves as a bit of an introduction—a chance for the donors to see the band they’re reluctantly sending to the Canadian pavilion’s opening party on May 29.

You can sense a little defensiveness on the band’s part, as if they aren’t sure whether to be nervous about their reception or just give a pre-emptive eff-you to the suits and Rosedale grandpas. “I’m gonna do an impression of our audience,” says bassist Katie Ritchie. She sits at a table, props her head in her hand, and then delicately turns it away from the stage, the picture of politely suppressed disdain.

Sound check continues. In the corner, a server in starchy whites revs up the meat slicer and begins shaving off slivers of prosciutto for the charcuterie board.

“This is going to be the weirdest show ever,” says Dunn.

Vanessa Dunn was raised on big-haired dude-rock. The daughter of a Scarborough esthetician and the sister of two much older brothers, Dunn remembers watching the video for “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake, featuring classic video vixen Tawny Kitaen writhing on top of a Jaguar in white lingerie, and falling in love. “I looked at that and thought, ‘That’s it,’” says Dunn. “There’s something so beautiful and powerful about that woman. That’s what I wanted to be.”

At a certain point, as she got older, this worship got a bit knottier. It became difficult to love those bands unequivocally. You can only hear so many hilarious stories about Led Zeppelin’s underage groupies before something sours. “It became kind of a problematic relationship, because a lot of those songs aren’t so hot on women,” Dunn says.

VAG HALEN is, among other things, a performance-art project designed to reconcile those problems. It’s Whitesnake reimagined with seven Tawny Kitaens on vox, guitar, bass, and drums. The band was formed when Dunn, an actor, and her wife, Katie Ritchie, former singer of the well-loved Vancouver band The Organ, decided they wanted to work on a project together. They coralled some friends, musicians who’ve played in local indie-pop bands like Ohbijou and the Phonemes, and put together a set of rock tunes for a “Steers & Queers” night in a west-end bar in November of 2011.

The project is simultaneously a high-concept lark—lesbians play cock-rock—and a serious musical undertaking. It’s camp, of course, but they’re not interested in performing as some kind of winky joke. “There’s nothing ironic about this,” says Dunn. “I would not work this hard at something and think this hard about something that was just an ironic cover band. That’s just not interesting to me.”

Since that first show, the band has taken off in ways unimaginable for many cover bands. While most bar bands playing Guns N’ Roses can, at best, hope to play a well-catered wedding, VAG HALEN has somehow managed to open theatre festivals, captivate the crowd at Fucked Up’s multidisciplinary Long Winter festival, and book a gig at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Much like Sheezer, Toronto’s all-female Weezer tribute band, VAG HALEN has been able to transcend its cover-band status, establishing a growing fan base that brings together supporters from unlikely corners—the queer community, west-end hipsters, fans of Black Sabbath. Ask the band members what makes them different, and they’ll give the classic artist answer: intent. Ask their fans, the people who have seen them tear it up at The Piston or at a Vazaleen: Shame party during Pride, and they’ll only say that some alchemy of the band’s charisma, skill, and cheeky approach creates an experience, transforming familiar songs into original art.

When Shary Boyle saw the band at the El Mocambo in January 2012, she was blown away. She knew they would be the ideal band to start a party at the Biennale. “They’re from Toronto, which is representing a city that often doesn’t get that much cred in the art world. They’re just extraordinary musicians, but it’s also super fun to see them subvert that iconic masculine music.”

The band plays covers, yes, but you only need to turn on cottage-country radio to know that nothing is more Canadian than American ’80s rock. “If you had to get a Canadian band that sang about Canada, I think the only person just died—Stompin’ Tom Connors,” says Boyle.

At 7:45 at the Drake, with a healthy crowd assembled, 82-year-old Jim Fleck is on stage. Fleck is a giant in the world of arts fundraising, the chair or president of more foundations and councils than you can name. As one of the big fundraisers for the Biennale, he is also tonight’s emcee, delivering the latest news from Venice and thanking the assembled donors before leaving the stage to applause.

While people mingle, munching on lamb rib chops and shrimp dumplings, Fleck weaves his way through the crowd.

“How long until the band?” he asks the Drake’s curator.

“Ten, 15 minutes,” she says.

“Can you make it five?” Fleck says.

The curator laughs—obligingly, nervously. “For you, Jim, I’ll see what I can do.”

There is a brief pause. “I better go see about the band,” she says.

Let’s say you want to make art. Well, Toronto is a good place for that. Put on a play, start a band, make a strange and beautiful porcelain sculpture: This city’s artistic communities are surprisingly welcoming. Here, our stereotypical “niceness,” often so infuriating, feels like an asset. A little while ago, novelist Sheila Heti wrote about the way that artists collaborate in a place like Toronto: “I often think of how the ethos here makes it easy to even find someone to rip tickets at the door of your show.”

Much of this art will be easy to scoff at, if that’s what you’re into. Some will be meaningful to just a few people for just a few hours. But some will grow and find an audience and, at a certain point, big institutions take notice.

Art, then, becomes an activity that is stage-managed by high-minded bureaucracies. In time, official-sounding organizations, like the National Gallery and the Canada Council, call the philanthropists—those precious few who have, at a certain point, become not just art fans or art enthusiasts but “patrons of the arts.”

Foundations are summoned, signature cocktails prepared. As a sign of goodwill, Adrienne Clarkson sends her personal assistant—an affable young man who makes sure to eat before the event so as not to embarrass himself scarfing down sliders or hovering over the cheese board. These are some of the ways that art gets made in a place like Toronto.

Fifteen minutes after his request, Jim Fleck is on stage to introduce the entertainment. “We don’t have Shary, but we have the next best thing,” Fleck says. “This is the band that Shary insisted be at the party in Venice.”

A few weeks earlier, a magazine piece had touched on the donors’ reluctance to bring VAG HALEN to the Biennale, and now Fleck brings it up on stage.

“There was an article in Maclean’s that said some of the donors wondered why they needed a band,” he says. “I was one of those donors. So I’m particularly interested in being here tonight and hearing what I’ll hear in Venice.”

As far as rock-band introductions go, it isn’t the most enthusiastic. Nevertheless, while the band starts playing the opening chords to “Iron Man,” Dunn and backup singer Stephanie Markowitz enter through the crowd, holding hands high above their heads.

You can sense wariness on both sides, the mutual distrust that can exist between the young and beautiful and the old and powerful. No one wants to feel like they’re being condescended to, after all.

Dunn is wearing a threadbare wife-beater with “Free Pussy Riot” written in black marker, and black jean shorts cut as high as it is possible to cut shorts. The band busts through “Iron Man” and “Breaking the Law” and “Panama.” Jim Fleck sits in a booth.

“Thanks to all of you that wanted us here,” Dunn says between songs. “And to all of you that didn’t.”

Writing about a band like VAG HALEN, it’s tempting to dwell on politics and performance art and how they subvert masculine rock postures, reclaiming them for queer females, et cetera. And that’s undeniably part of the appeal. It’s a pleasure to see a song by Van Halen—a band whose entire catalogue is pretty much just a list of sexualized female body parts—played by a half-dozen women. There is an intellectual fun in sussing out the layers of Dunn aping Robert Plant on “Whole Lotta Love,” watching a woman imitating a man imitating a woman having an orgasm.

Mostly, though, it’s a party. Dunn is on stage pulling out moves from the canon of cock-rock dancing. She’s grasping the mic stand for support and thrusting her hips in time. She’s crawling across the ground on all fours. She’s slinking along the stage, peering down the brim of her hat with a touch of invigorating menace.

The old rock ’n’ roll gestures—calcified through the years to the point where it’s virtually incomprehensible that the Mick Jagger shimmy was once meant to signify danger and virility—suddenly seem sexy and fun and, against all odds, weirdly powerful. When was the last time you saw a frontman straddle a mic stand and howl like he meant it? Where was the last concert you saw a singer “rock out” without a tinge of embarrassment? Show me the last unironic crotch thrust.

And heard here, rather than on a Sunday afternoon on Q-107, it’s apparent how good these songs are. Jackie Mohr—the young shredder they call “Junior,” who moved to Toronto to record an album with Hawksley Workman—is nailing every solo. Susan Gale is pounding the drums. Dunn is singing in a perfect, throat-tearing howl. Who can resist the chugging opening riff of “Breaking the Law”? What kind of po-faced monster would deny himself the rich pleasures of a passionately performed “Welcome to the Jungle,” the second “knees” of the kicker delivered like the most urgent of questions, as in “sha-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na knees, KNEES?”

You could see it happen before your eyes, the room collectively realizing that, no, they weren’t the butt of some hipster inside joke, and deciding to drop their mistrust.

Dress shirts were untucked. Middle-aged women in pearls danced, hard. People did that upright version of the Twist that is the default move for crowds of a certain age looking to get down. Had the girls heard of the Dutch ’70s rock band Golden Earring, a man in a tan suit jacket wondered aloud, flashing his rock ’n’ roll bona fides? Adrienne Clarkson’s young assistant took out his phone and snapped a pic. “VAG HALEN has got everyone moving!” he tweeted. By “Whole Lotta Love,” Dunn had the crowd with her. “I wanna give you every inch of my love!” she wailed—a phrase that seemed funny and incongruous and totally righteous all at the same time.

After that, the show just kind of ended. I don’t think Dunn ever said, “This is our last song.” Jim Fleck slowly made his way to the stage.

He shook Dunn’s hand. Did the band have a card, he wondered? Never mind, here was his—“James D. Fleck.” When the band landed in Venice, he wanted them to call him. They were invited to dine with him and his wife in their Venetian apartment. Years ago—before she became an Anglican minister, before he became a patron of the arts—his wife had been a ballet dancer. The band will eat food and drink wine with their patrons. And then, a few days later, they will play those surprisingly potent old songs to the people who had gathered to see what Canadian culture is all about.

COMPLETE COVERAGE

Obviously, VAG HALEN isn’t the only Toronto band that makes a habit—if not a living—out of performing other people’s songs. Here are some of the city’s primo cover acts.

Sheezer: Girls, sometimes in creatively themed costumes, taking Weezer to the next level.

Horsey Craze: The Constantines (R.I.P.) tearing up Neil Young and Crazy Horse tunes.

Loving in the Name Of: Electrifying soul and Motown covers by killer musicians and guest vocalists.

Dwayne Gretzky: Classic rock, couched in the drive and charisma of a certain hockey great.

Wannabe: A journey through the greatest hits of the Spice Girls’ catalogue.

Pretzel Logic: Steely Dan, served with maximum sax and drums, and extra pizzazz.

River Street Band: Springsteen, transplanted from the Jersey shore to midtown Toronto.

The Neil Young’uns: Duh.

Floyd Factor: “Canada’s most comprehensive multimedia tribute to Pink Floyd.”

With an extensive guest list that includes Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers, disco forefather Giorgio Moroder, and Paul Williams (the guy who co-wrote “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit), Daft Punk’s new album partly resembles an episode of Cher’s 1970s variety show—and that’s not a bad thing.

On Random Access Memories, French duo Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter eschew the delicious Kraftwerk-on-steroids EDM they essentially spawned in order to create a sprawling yet surprisingly restrained epic, a White Album–style tour through a jaw-dropping variety of musical genres. The end result is a gloriously audacious masterpiece—a scintillating mashup that plays with notions of nostalgia and retro-futurism but sounds utterly contemporary.

“Touch,” for example, is an eight-minute mindbender that combines space rock, Dixieland jazz, a choir, a “Theme From Shaft”–like guitar riff, and a showtune-inspired lead vocal by Williams about the need to connect. Yes, it sounds insane, but somehow it all coheres. The visiting musicians infuse the project with a warmth and melancholy not present in Daft Punk’s previous work. Chilly Gonzales co-wrote and plays on “Within”—a song as achingly beautiful as anything on the Toronto homeboy’s Solo Piano album. And despite their hedonistic titles (“Get Lucky,” “Lose Yourself to Dance”), the lush disco tracks produced with Rodgers and Pharrell Williams are mid-tempo, even wistful.

This is Daft Punk’s most human-sounding album yet, proof positive that there have always been hearts beating inside those Gallic robot suits.

Playlist picks: “Touch,” “Within,” “Get Lucky”

If the early releases by Majical Cloudz on red-hot Montreal label Arbutus Records suggested the imminent arrival of a great young Canadian talent, the band’s new full-length, Impersonator, confirms it.

This sublime series of synth ballads, conceived by Montreal-based Devon Welsh and his collaborator, Matthew Otto, is built upon the interplay between sonic shadows and light. Atop an impressionistic landscape of Otto’s cascading synths and electronic beats, Welsh delivers a series of haunting vocal performances in a crystal-clear baritone.

The immediacy of his melodies, which soar over the often-murky arrangements, is remarkable. As he sings, Welsh ruminates on life’s earliest and most significant moments: Far-off memories of infancy (“This Is Magic”), formative events (“Childhood’s End”), and the confusion of doomed, young love (on the album’s goosebump-inducing showstopper “Bugs Don’t Buzz”).

In interviews, Welsh has stressed the premium he places on crafting songs that feel stark and direct, and his work has paid off: Every song on Impersonator strikes right to the core.

Playlist picks: “Bugs Don’t Buzz,” “Turns, Turns, Turns,” “This Is Magic”

Dirty Beaches’ 2011 debut, Badlands, was not so much the sound of a young artist finding his voice as a school-project PowerPoint presentation of eternally cool signifiers: jet-black pompadours, Ray-Bans, tattoos, back-from-the-grave Elvis grunts, and Suicide synths, all wrapped in grainy, greyscale production to capture that foggy, lost-highway ambience. There was no doubt that globetrotting one-man band Alex Zhang Hungtai had thoroughly studied his sources, but it remained to be seen if there was more to him than just artfully constructed retro-chic.

This follow-up release doubles down in the affirmative, presenting two different but complementary records that provide a more intimate, absorbing look at Hungtai’s nomadic, dichotomous existence. Drifters is a logical extension of Badlands’ rock-noir seediness, contemporizing and toughening its sound with electro-fied rhythms while maintaining an air of simmering psychosis, though it’s still beholden to obvious influences: “Au Revoir Mon Visage” is sung in French, but that can’t mask the fact it’s still a black-and-white Xerox of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.”

If Drifters offers more hoot-‘n’-holler fodder for Hungtai’s notoriously hot-and-bothered live performances, Love Is the Devil is a meditative soundtrack for the long drives, half-awake train rides, and eternal daydreams that transpire in between. Ironically, these shapeless instrumentals—built from desolate organ drones, wandering piano lines, and beautifully damaged guitar scraping—prove more poignant and revealing than anything Hungtai has communicated through a microphone.

Taken together, these two records dance along the double-edged sword that is autonomy, exemplifying the self-empowering rewards of forging your own path, while reinforcing the isolating effects of spending too much time in your head.

Playlist picks: Drifters: “Night Walk,” “Mirage Hall”; Love Is the Devil: “Alone at the Danube River,” “Berlin”

It’s appropriate that British folk musician Laura Marling uses mythological figures to channel her feelings in her music—the young singer-songwriter is practically mythical herself. She dropped out of school and moved to London at 16 to pursue her music career, put out her first album just after she turned 18, and now, at 23, is releasing her fourth.

Once I Was an Eagle proves Marling is miles ahead of her Brit-folk contemporaries, both in the originality and craft of her songwriting and the effortless eloquence of her delivery. She is unparalleled in her vocal phrasing, instilling more meaning in the word “and” than other singers are able to communicate through entire albums. The first four songs, starting with the laid-back “Take the Night Off,” blend seamlessly into one another, a fitting introduction to an album so rich and full of surprises—like the unexpected bossa-nova chorus on “Little Bird,” or the Spanish-inflected guitar on the moody “Little Love Caster.”

Marling favours sparse arrangements, often just her voice and acoustic guitar, but the two most radio-friendly songs are more fleshed-out—drums pound fiercely on “Master Hunter” and a gorgeous organ sings throughout “Where Can I Go?,” a gently rollicking road tune (“All I see is road / No one takes me home”) that hints at Marling’s recent move to L.A. If there’s a confessional aspect to her lyrics, however, you’ll have to wade through some heavy symbolism to access it. Marling is anachronistic in her reluctance to open herself up to public scrutiny—she says what she needs to say in her songs, which paint a picture of a major talent whose voice will be heard for generations.

Playlist picks: “Master Hunter,” “Where Can I Go?,” “When Were You Happy? (And How Long Has That Been)”

Laura Marling plays 99 Sudbury (99 Sudbury St.) on May 25.

“Intimacy” in art can mean different things. There’s the kind that leaves you flushed and flustered and feeling as though you’ve stumbled into the middle of someone’s private meltdown, and there’s the kind that seems like a serendipitous gift: an overheard revelation, a fleeting view from someone else’s perspective, a profound truth.

Both kinds have their place, but happily, Montrealer Michael Feuerstack’s latest album—his first under his own name—falls into the latter category. It’s warm and hushed, and Feuerstack’s mellow, comfortably worn vocals sit high in the mix, so it often feels like he’s murmuring straight into your ear. On  “Leave Me Alone,” a stirring, piano-driven duet with Little Scream’s Laurel Sprengelmeyer, that closeness makes you the mediator in a pre-dawn standoff between a pair of weary but well-meaning lovers.

Feuerstack often slips into an open, swaying Nick Drake cadence, and his metaphors are similarly guileless: “Flowers in the City” is an ode to hardy beauty in unlikely places; the opening track, about life’s ups and downs, reflects on how “scavengers and doves use the same sky.” Though the songs are built on simple skeletons—muted acoustic guitar and plain melodies—they’re fleshed out with carefully calibrated arrangements. Colin Stetson smothers the end of album closer “Scorekeeper” with a mass of shuddering, honking horns and woodwinds that gradually spiral out into controlled chaos. On the beautifully understated “Trees,” Arcade Fire’s Jeremy Gara adds “broken synth” that sounds like a cross between a singing saw and rubbed-glass harmonics—his eerie echoes could be the voices of “the sycamore, the juniper, the old oak, the redwood, and the fir” about which Feuerstack sings so tenderly.

True, the small revelations here, piled on top of one another, can feel a bit suffocating, and there’s a sleepy sameness to the songs in terms of tempo and tone. Still, it’s a gift to be let in on these candid confidences, and it would seem contrived if Feuerstack tried to force some sort of inorganic variety on such direct intimacy.

Playlist picks: “Leave Me Alone,” “Trees,” “Flowers in the City”

Michael Feuerstack plays The Piston (937 Bloor St. W.) on May 23.

When The National played the Phoenix back in 2007, they brought Hayden on stage for a song, and National frontman Matt Berninger mentioned that he’d been a longtime fan of the esteemed Toronto singer-songwriter. As it turns out, that fandom dates back to the time Berninger took a trip with a girlfriend to India, only to have the relationship dissolve along the way. He found solace in a copy of Hayden’s 1998 album, The Closer I Get. Naturally, when Berninger passed through the city during Hot Docs, we thought it would be neat to set him up for an interview with the typically private Hayden. Here’s what they talked about.

Hayden Desser: When did we first meet?

Matt Berninger: I don’t remember when we first met.

H: I do. It was in the dank basement of the Opera House in Toronto. Or it was just before that, at a Jamaican place called The Real Jerk, right beside the Opera House. And then after the show I came down and met all you guys.

M: I remember when [our tour manager] Brandon said he was bringing Hayden by, I was really nervous. I had a crazy connection with [The Closer I Get]. You know how some records just line up with your life and they kind of become a friend? Your record was definitely a friend when I needed it, so I was nervous to meet you.

H: Are you surprised by the emotional impact your music has on people?

M: Writing the songs moves me and has gotten me through hard times. I don’t take that for granted at all. Because that’s the way I have felt about so many [people’s work], including your records. The Smiths helped me figure out my high-school years and helped me feel like not so much of a weirdo. And honestly, The Closer I Get is one of a handful of records that was kind of a lifeline—not a lifeline, maybe that’s a little melodramatic, but a connection to somebody that makes you feel not completely alone or lost. Certain records are sometimes flashlights in your life. So when people say that about our records, I get it.

H: You’ve described Boxer as dark and stately, and High Violet as black fun. What would be your quick description of the new record?

M: Easygoing death. I don’t know. [Trouble Will Find Me] is much more relaxed than any of our records, but there are a lot of songs about mortality. We’re sort of a stressed-out band, but this one wasn’t very stressed-out for some reason. I think it might have been that Aaron has a kid now, my daughter’s four, and Bryan has two kids. I think things were put into perspective. Our band doesn’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. It’s not that we don’t value it and hold it dear, but when we took that cerebral anxiety and self-consciousness out of the equation—and I think having kids did that—the process of making [music] was more fluid. We let our guard down, and you can hear that in the record.

H: I wanted to ask if your daughter, Isla, likes your music.

M: [Isla] likes any kind of music. She just likes loud noise if she can pretend to ballet dance or princess dance. She likes to get married to whoever is in the room when our music is on. She’s been to a couple of weddings and she thinks that’s the most amazing thing she’s ever seen. She’s forced my brother to marry my father-in-law in a ceremony to the sound of our music—that’s a complicated image. I think she likes it.

H: This is a weird one: Do you find yourself thinking about the end of the band, and what might cause that to happen?

M: The band has almost ended here and there. I think we got past a lot of the ways it could have ended and ended badly. I think we got though those dark times—just relationship issues, and frustration, and anxiety, and exhaustion, and tempers. [R.E.M.’s] Michael Stipe always used to say, Remember that you were friends first. We had to remind ourselves of that. I don’t know how long is healthy to be a rock band. We’ve been on for almost 14 years, so another five years might be too much. We’re actually at a better place with each other than we’ve ever been. I don’t think our band would end with an acrimonious situation any more. I think we’ve learned to love and respect each other now and we’re kind of past all that stuff. I don’t know if that means we’ll stay a band for a lot longer—but for a little while, at least.

The National’s new album, Trouble Will Find Me, comes out on May 21, and they play Yonge-Dundas Square for free on June 14 as part of North By Northeast (nxne.com). Hayden will be performing at Arts & Crafts’ Field Trip Festival at Fort York on June 8. 100 Garrison Rd., fieldtriplife.com.

Wanna get in touch with your American-ness? Go west, young man.

When Vampire Weekend songwriting duo Ezra Koenig and Rostam Batmanglij started to craft their third LP, Modern Vampires of the City, they aimed to add a new dimension to the band’s worldly sonic palette: They wanted the album to feel American. “We thought it was exciting to approach our own American-ness in a way we hadn’t before,” says Koenig. “It’s a bit tricky because Americana is a genre [that’s] pretty boring, and has very specific rules—a ‘Vampire Weekend does country’ album sounds…miserable. Whereas [American music in general] is an amazing combination of sounds from around the world, but sometimes you have to rediscover it and listen to it with fresh ears.” The two decamped to Los Angeles to work with rising producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Usher, Snoop Lion, Charli XCX), who happens to be an old friend of Batmanglij’s. “Pretty quickly, we were all on the same page,” says Batmanglij. “We wanted to combine really strong songwriting with organic sounds and preserve that catchiness. He helped us [reach that] goal. It was like he was another member of the band.”

Thorny existential dilemmas aren’t quite as easy to solve as grammar problems, but they do make for some pretty heady lyrics.

With lyrics that explore some of life’s heaviest themes, Modern Vampires is an obvious departure from the band’s lighthearted early work. “I was always so deathly scared of writing things that were overly sentimental or overly serious,” says Koenig, who’s been known to contemplate serial commas in song. “With this album, I was more confident: I finally felt like I knew how to express big ideas about love or death without feeling embarrassed by them. It’s about finding the right way to blend humour and darkness.” Though he gets into some deep lyrical soul-searching, Koenig tries to avoid didacticism, preferring to leave things open-ended. “There are a lot of questions: What do you put your faith in? What do you do if something you believed in disappears? How do you deal with time passing? That all kind of lingers there.”

Worry about the apocalypse (but not too much).

Alongside musings on subjects as wide-ranging as the death of British explorer Henry Hudson and the meanings of Babylon and Zion in Rastafarian culture, Modern Vampires also contains a pervasive sense of dread, or what Pitchfork recently described as “millennial unease.” “Like everybody, I sometimes have sleepless nights, going really deep on internet conspiracy theories, reading stuff that convinces me that the dollar is about to become worthless and that people have been lying about oil reserves, stuff like that,” Koenig says. “People in every generation always feel like the world is about to end. It’s hard to escape those doomsday feelings, but you also take it with a grain of salt, knowing that your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents always thought things were on the cusp of permanent decline, and it’s yet to actually happen.” While the threat of impending disaster still keeps him up at night, Koenig says he’s working through his anxiety the best way he knows how: reading critically. “I think you can always get a little bit closer to the truth, and hopefully you can get enough information to live your life in a way that’s doing more good than harm, at the very least.”

A documentary can turn you into an aspiring foodie.

Along with members of the bands Das Racist, Yeasayer, and Neon Indian, Batmanglij recently co-starred in Dosa Hunt, a short documentary directed by Stereogum editor Amrit Singh. The doc follows what one film-festival program dubbed “a who’s who of New York’s brown musical cognoscenti” on a day-long quest across New York in search of the city’s best dosa, a savoury South Indian crêpe dish. Critics lauded the film for its youthful take on the Indian-American identity, but Batmanglij says it also opened his eyes to a number of culinary delights. “I’d never been to the Patel Brothers market, which is in Queens. They have stuff you can’t find anywhere else. I want to go back and buy some of those obscure vegetables.”

Vampire Weekend play the Sony Centre on May 16. 1 Front St. E. Sold out.

Arts & Crafts signed this Vancouver quartet—one of the label’s most promising new discoveries—on the strength of the singles “City Of Quartz” and “Time To Kill,” the pair of sinister synth-rock tunes that bookend this highly anticipated debut full-length.

Deftly fusing electro-charged energy and darkly romantic atmospherics, Gold & Youth channel a sound that’s heavily indebted to Depeche Mode—at times it feels like singer Matthew Lyall has even mastered David Gahan’s posh-accented cadence. Highlighted by its rich, brilliantly layered instrumentation, Beyond Wilderness has a lot to like, even if the choruses don’t always soar the way your heart hopes they will.

That said, there’s ample room for Gold & Youth to explore new territory: The mood gets more intense on the record’s second half, when Lyall starts to share vocal duties with bassist Louise Burns. Factor in the eminently danceable, near-tropical grooves they channel on standouts “Little Wild Love” and “Quarters,” and it’s easy to suggest Gold & Youth have what it takes to anchor Arts & Crafts’ next decade of great Canadian music.

Playlist picks: “Quarters,” “Little Wild Love,” “Palm Villas”

Gold & Youth play Arts & Crafts’ Field Trip Music & Arts Festival at Fort York and Garrison Common (100 Garrison Rd.) on June 8.