Part three: View on Vancouver’s live music venues

Green could add the Media Club and, thankfully, some green shoots indicating new life in Vancouver’s eternal search for places where the seeds of new sounds and bands can be planted. The Rickshaw Theatre is a new space in an old place on Main, while on Kingsway the Biltmore Cabaret has become a welcome home for many bands.

“It was ludicrous,” he says, “because you could play a jukebox or CDs, or have a DJ, but nothing for live music, which is completely opposite of how things work if you want to develop your cultural sector and make Vancouver the vibrant city that it claims to be.”

In fact, Green has fallen in love with the Biltmore’s Sunday afternoon rockabilly jams.

“It’s a great thing,” he enthuses, “because people can get together to enjoy themselves, and of course on a Sunday afternoon the Biltmore would probably be closed, so it works for everyone.”

Schubert works hard to make his 350-seat room a focal point for live music.

“When I got here my big goal was to try and give us a brand and a type of look that people are going to be attracted to, something different,” he says. “We want to be a music venue where people look forward to coming here and feel like, ‘Wow, we had an amazing night at the Biltmore.’”

Schubert’s optimism about the future for “live” venues — “It was rough there for a while, but right now I believe we are in better shape than we have been in years” — is fuelled in part by an interesting observation.

“The cops threw the book at ’em,” says Schubert.

Coun. Heather Deal has been struggling with red tape to try to help new venues deal with liquor licences as well as noise and nuisance bylaws.

“I just think that there’s so much energy in the music community here,” says Deal. “They’re looking for places to play and our challenge is finding affordable places that are safe and are managing the noise issues. If we can’t make it possible for them to operate legally then yes, they do tend to go underground.”

And that’s a slippery slope, Deal adds.

“My primary concern is human safety. I don’t think we need to control people’s behaviour too much; we need to control the impact on others, but mostly it’s the safety issue — one of the challenges has been that many of the affordable buildings in town are our oldest buildings, and they have both safety and sound challenges.”

Just ask David Duprey at the Rickshaw Theatre, which went through extensive renovations before opening its doors a couple of months ago at 254 East Hastings.

“The city allowed us that for now,” he says. “Everybody on city staff, and all the way up to council, acknowledges that there’s a problem with liquor licensing and how it’s strangling things like live music, and so a lot of people are trying to deal with that — we may be part of an experiment, considering us as a project to see how things could possibly work.”

At the nearby Cobalt Hotel, rock promoter Wendy13 is facing eviction.

“That is a really important punk place,” says Deal, “and I don’t think there’s anything we can do to help her, because that’s between her and her landlord.”

“I don’t know if we’d be able to fill the gap,” says Duprey. “We’ll try, of course, but I don’t know if we’re the right fit for that, which is a drag because those people are going to need somewhere to go.”

Duprey has gone to great lengths to try to placate neighbours — “This place has been closed since 1984, so it’s quite a shock to go from zero to 60” — but remains pessimistic about the potential for more live-music venues.

“The whole not-in-my-backyard thing is really prevalent here in Vancouver, and council’s scared to piss anybody off,” he says. “Hey, I don’t want to live next to a nightclub, but when you live in a densely packed city like this, there are going to be nightclubs in high-density areas.”