For all the starry-eyed talk about the independent art and music scene in Toronto, most of our community institutions exist in the abstract. Our supportive group-huggy ethos comes in the form of collectives like Wavelength, labels (or “recording clubs”) like Blocks, and series like ALL CAPS, No Shame and Over The Top. The closest thing we have to “community centres” are spaces like the Tranzac and Sneaky Dee’s, venues that have been colonized by indie artists in a de facto sense, rather than having been built from the ground up as hubs for grassroots cultural production.
So it’s rather inspirational to hear about places like The Smell, the all-ages punk-rock venue located in downtown LA, a DIY fantasyland that boasts a vegan snack bar and a library and sounds like what Presto in Kensington Market might’ve been had it not been a Nike-branded disaster. Founded at the beginning of ’98, The Smell has been the focus of considerable attention lately thanks to the breakout success of raucous acts like No Age and, more recently, exuberant art-punk kids Abe Vigoda, both groups who cut their teeth on the club’s stage.
To hear Abe Vigoda guitarist/yelper Juan Velasquez talk about it, his band owes pretty much everything — or at least their core ethic and substantial success — to The Smell.
“I didn’t grow up in LA proper, so I didn’t know that world at all,” the self-professed Smashing Pumpkins geek confesses. “The shows I went to were more corporate, all at bigger venues. Then one day, I found out Xiu Xiu was playing at The Smell and a friend of mine who lived in LA brought me and [bandmate] Michael [Vidal] there. It was crazy. After that, we started going all the time, even if we didn’t know any of the bands that were playing there.”
By Velasquez’s estimation, the tropical punk bashers have sailed through upwards of 100 shows at the venue.
The fact that Abe Vigoda have such deep roots in such a DIY community makes it seem especially weird to think that their gig this Tuesday (Oct. 21) in Toronto is taking place at CiRCA, arguably one of the city’s slickest and least grassroots nightclubs. Weirder still is the fact that the punk kids are playing alongside dance floor mash-up king Diplo, as part of the Mad Decent tour.
“We were really confused when we were first asked to be part of the tour,” says Velasquez. “Diplo’s cool and all, but… what? We didn’t know if it’d fit, and we couldn’t decide whether it was a good idea to do it, so we kinda put off agreeing to join the tour.”
After much coaxing by Diplo himself (who called back to convince them), Abe Vigoda agreed to participate, reckoning they might reach audiences outside their comfort zone.
And lest you assume CiRCA’s the wackiest place the dissonant maulers have ever played, think again. According to Velasquez, that honour goes to a bizarro coffeeshop-cum-performance space in Houston, called Notsuoh. “The owner was an older guy with long blond hair, kinda hippie, kinda spacey. He asked if we wanted to see the rest of the building.”
Velasquez and his bandmates discovered that it was a massive warehouse filled with antiques. “Along one wall, there were stacks and stacks of all these vintage women’s shoes in boxes. It was like a glorified grandma’s attic.”