When the last booming kick drum stops echoing around the massive Guvernment nightclub tonight, it will be the final time the dust on the rafters gets disturbed by pounding bass. Staying open for almost 19 years of operation would be a remarkably long run for any club, not to mention the previous decade it operated as RPM, and before that as Fresh. When you take that larger history into account, the sprawling complex at 132 Queens Quay East has been a pivotal entry point into dance music and DJ culture for multiple generations of Toronto partiers, as well as being the venue of choice for artists that are about to outgrow the club scene and graduate to filling stadiums.
While you don’t have to dig very far to find music fans willing to complain about the club, even the haters have to admit that the closing of the long-running venue will leave a major hole in Toronto. You don’t realize how necessary a place like this is until a band like Interpol can’t find a general admission room in town big enough to hold them, due to Sound Academy also closing down imminently for renovations. Sure, Guvernment owner Charles Khabouth has pledged to transform Sound Academy into something new and exciting to fill that void, but most music fans seem only cautiously optimistic that it will be possible to address the many complaints about that other waterfront venue.
Before Khabouth transformed the space into the Guvernment, it had already played a pivotal role in the Toronto music scene as RPM. Chris Sheppard’s live-to-air DJ sets and the club’s regular all-ages events meant that it often provided the first taste of dance music for many Toronto teens in the 80s. Those early experiences would lead many of those kids to later play important roles in the DJ scene of the 90s, like future Industry Nightclub cofounder DJ Matt C, who got his start playing there. The cavernous Warehouse space attached to RPM was also a key live music venue of that era, hosting everyone from Bon Jovi to Jesus and Mary Chain, a function that it later continued to serve as Kool Haus.
When Khabouth took over in 1995, the club was in bad need of an overhaul, and so he gutted it and stripped away all traces of the grimy rock’n’roll-dance-club vibe of RPM. Initially the plan was to target an upscale mainstream demographic, but it quickly became evident that the dress code crowd wasn’t going to be enough to fill the place every week. Sensing an opportunity in the exploding rave scene, Khabouth let his resident Saturday night DJ Mark Oliver tap into that energy, and the Guvernment became the late night party palace we know it as today. There can’t be many other DJs on the planet who’ve played a weekly gig at one room for as long as Oliver.
As massive as the dance music scene in Toronto was in the 90s, trance and progressive house alone still couldn’t have kept a place that big consistently busy, which is why the network of smaller mini-clubs and rooms within the complex was so important to its success. For a crossover audience of mostly out-of-towners, being able to provide a spectrum of other sounds allowed it to enjoy a much wider appeal than had it been exclusively a rave club.
But while there’s plenty to praise about the space, but there’s also no shortage of stuff to grumble about. On busy nights the crowds made it hard to navigate around the room, and it’s never been easy to get to by transit. The Kool Haus space is notoriously boomy sounding, and the searches at the door were legendarily intrusive at times (which is somewhat understandable, given the 2000 fatal shooting of security guard Howard Gairy).
Still, that powerful Phazon sound system in the Guvernment’s main room is unparallelled in Toronto, even after almost two decades of abuse. Hearing iconic NYC house DJ Danny Tenaglia put it through its paces two weeks ago really highlighted just how seriously the club takes production values. And not many other rooms can claim to have hosted not only pretty much every big name big room DJ in the world, but also many of the biggest pop and rock stars on the planet, including everyone from the Rolling Stones to David Bowie, Prince, Coldplay, Lady Gaga and countless others.
Some of our favourite concerts ever happened at Kool Haus, despite how much fun it is to slag that room. My Bloody Valentine’s deafening 2008 comeback tour is still ringing in our ears, and memories of LCD Soundsystem’s 2010 farewell tour still make us feel a bit misty-eyed.
Every year for the past decade there have been rumours of the Guvernment getting demolished to make way for condos, but it still feels surreal that they’ve finally come true.
Benjaminb@nowtoronto.com
