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The importance of the Rivoli to Toronto music lore can’t be overstated. Upon opening in 1982, the Queen Road West venue turned an epicenter of native bohemia, with a streetfront restaurant serving up pad thai to artwork college students on first dates, a second-floor pool corridor the place you may wager away the final of your beer cash, and most crucially, an intimate, 200-capacity brick-walled efficiency room the place town’s freaks had free rein. By means of the ’80s, it was the house the place queercore pioneers Fifth Column turned their gigs into Tremendous 8 movie happenings, the Cowboy Junkies perfected their model of codeined nation, and a pre-TV Children within the Corridor pushed sketch comedy to anarchic extremes. Within the late ’90s, it was the place the place a younger Leslie Feist workshopped songs and tended bar. And a decade after that, you may’ve caught a teenage Aubrey Graham making an attempt his hand at improv. Even now, lengthy after the Queen West neighborhood’s cachet has diminished, the Rivoli remains to be a spot the place music historical past is made: Final November, it hosted arguably the strangest Neil Younger and Loopy Horse gig ever.
There’s nothing that surprising about an artist of Neil Younger’s stature enjoying a room as tiny because the Riv—the shock small-venue underplay is a reasonably frequent transfer for arena-level acts selling a brand new album or warming up for a giant tour. However the circumstances surrounding the Rivoli present—a non-public Fiftieth-birthday social gathering for billionaire Canada Goose parka poobah Dani Reiss—raised just a few eyebrows, on condition that Neil’s spent an excellent chunk of his profession placing firms in his crosshairs. (Possibly, after spending his childhood in Winnipeg, Neil simply actually appreciates a heat winter coat.) What’s much more unfathomable is that Neil Younger and Loopy Horse have been really the opening act—consistent with the social gathering’s theme of “age earlier than magnificence,” their set was adopted by an look from Canadian rock-radio mainstays the Arkells. However the live-album doc of the gig, titled Fu##in’ Up, is greater than only a glorified memento from the form of party that presumably required its company to signal NDAs.
On the Rivoli, Neil and the Horse carried out a track-by-track (minus one) run-through of 1990’s Ragged Glory, and in a nod to the gig’s secretive logistics, all the songs—save for the quilt of the ’60s garage-band normal “Farmer John”—have been rebranded for Fu##in’ Up with new titles pulled from their respective lyrics. If 1989’s course-correcting Freedom supplied an encouraging signal that Neil hadn’t utterly misplaced the plot throughout his notorious ’80s wilderness years, Ragged Glory affirmed his elder-statesman standing for a brand new era of flannel-clad suggestions addicts, prompting excursions with Sonic Youth and 1,000,000 “godfather of grunge” plaudits. The album topped the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ ballot and was broadly hailed as an electrifying show of vitality from a veteran band getting into their third decade collectively—and that was 34 years in the past. Now that Neil and his bandmates are pushing 80 (if not already there) Ragged Glory’s spirit of camaraderie, perseverance, and bittersweet nostalgia feels all of the extra trenchant. If a line like “There’s only a few of us left, my pal, from the times that was” carried a whiff of melancholy in 1991, think about what it feels wish to sing it now.
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