R.I.P. the Railway Club (1931-2016)

Opening for Oh My Darling, March 3, 2011. (Photo by Mark Donovan.)

We were basically a generation too late to appreciate the apex of Vancouver's live music nightlife, with the Town Pump merely a distant, hazy memory by the time we hit the scene, and even the Starfish Room and Richard's on Richard's left by the wayside by the time we started making plans to take the stage. The somewhat stranger territory left for us to claim was in splendidly marginal rooms such as The Sugar Refinery and Ms. T's Cabaret. (Also other since-departed venues that briefly played host to the magic, like Cafe Montmartre and the Little Mountain Gallery.) But there was one room we could name that wouldn't make our parents scratch (or shake, more likely) their head.

At Memewar issue 8 launch, Feb 19, 2009.

We just celebrated our 11th anniversary; our first appearance at the Railway was a month shy of a decade ago, one of T. Nile's Connect nights April 24, 2006, meaning it had taken us a little bit more than a year to go from freshly-formed to semi-legitimate. (Many people's recollections are of playing their bands' first shows at the Railway, which makes me wonder if booking standards weren't a little slacker back in the Golden Age.) We were back again for the Family Stump Xmas Extravaganza Dec 10th of that year, and were rather getting used to the idea of becoming regulars. That never quite ended up happening, but we did gather momentum even as the venue itself shed it, peaking with a series of appearances there through 2008 and 2009 as the Memewar magazine house band.

The gig-by-gig analysis would put you all to sleep (and then we played Creep, and THEN, we played Dead Man's Pants... again! and THEN...) but you can enjoy this partial tapestry, in reverse order, of some of our numerous appearances at the Railway Club:

(Dieter caught us missing out on one: we hadn't gotten our hands on a copy of the poster, but it turns out he still had the original hanging on his wall. If anyone else has any more missing ones, I would happily throw them in the mix here.)

We didn't know how good we had it when the sun set on Janet Forsyth's tenure over the club's booking and administration. Her successor Steve demonstrated a keener concern for the bottom line -- could we put a band with more draw on the bill? Thanks, now we can draw a big enough crowd for our paid admissions to cover the salary of a staff member working at the door! -- but the irritating nickle-and-diming was in retrospect more understandable upon learning that the venue was paying $10 000 in rent, monthly, back in 2008. (Our "aha" moment was when our band pulled in more money playing to a dozen friends for an hour at a field house in a Vancouver park than we did performing for three hours to a crowd of over 50 at the Railway. You can make money and you can live out rockstar fantasies, but not always at the same place and time.) Over the course of his era the Railway Club suffered a hollowing-out, as regular and long-time staff, especially those on the organized labour side of things, disappeared as regular fixtures of the cozy space. The Railway provided a fertile ground for us to revisit our stalled ambitions to host annual birthday concerts for ourselves, starting there in our sixth year and continuing through years seven, eight and nine (indeed a tradition that continues on today -- elsewhere, as the more birthday visits we had there, the less like home it felt, our friends in the peanut gallery of regulars having found friendlier haunts.)

All the same, things manage to sour but still persist every day, as we continue along our separate paths and grow apart, like estranged adults who still exist, just not in each others' everyday lives. I feel much the same way about Downtown Vancouver (indeed, playing at the Railway was one of my very few reasons to ever venture in there at night) and indeed it's not hard to imagine that I'll feel this way about Vancouver proper before too long. But I digress. An institution is easy to take for granted, and despite the relatively recent announcement of the business being up for sale, it was impossible to expect that it might cease to be. But here we are.

Before I go off on any more tangents, let me introduce this post's true function: an excellent excuse to dig up and share some photos of Good Times being had with Creaking Planks at the Railway Club. I believe these are from our 8th anniversary concert with T. Nile and Raghu Lokanathan, a Deet Street blowout with perhaps the most Planks ever on-stage at the same time and a series of encores demanded by an audience who simply would not allow us to leave. (Taking a page from the "That's My Brain... And You're Killing It!" playbook, escape was finally achieved only by leading the band off the stage, through the crowd, and into the bathroom.)

This room is heating up... quick, deploy the secret chord!

All right, that's enough fun. Lucy, settle them down with the moo tube!

No good, it's backfired, they're dancing harder than ever! We're going to have to warp out of here! Hold on to your music stands everyone... in 3... 2... 1... BLAST OFF!

After opening for us (he headlined, but playing last interferes with his libation schedule) at the First Annual Accordion Noir Festival Of Squeeze, our patron saint Geoff Berner staggered over to us and sagely proclaimed that on any given night, somewhere on the planet, some band is the best band in the world... and that on that night, with that crowd (going down the infamous Railway stairs and out around the corner!) suitably warmed up by Geoff's best antics, that band was us. So let's remember those good times and rage (rage!) against the dying of the light. Good luck, Vancouver -- you're going to need it filling the Railway's boots!