KHABBAZ o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-08-25 published
CARMICHAEL,
Donald
Norman
Surrounded by family, Friends, and an abundance of love. Don
bid us farewell on Thursday August 23, 2007 at Scarborough Grace
Hospital. Don was a most loving and devoted husband to Mary Therese.
He was an extremely proud father and father-in-law to Robb and
Deb, Ron, Doug and Joan, David and Erica, and Danny and Dawn.
Don was a treasured Papa to Erica, Geneva, Benjamin, Ryan, Aaron,
Chloe, Madeline, Nathan, Abigail and Adam. Don will be especially
remembered by many other close family members and long-time Friends.
Don was a kind and gentle man who will live on in all of our
hearts. A special thank you to Doctor
HUROWITZ,
Doctor
KHABBAZ and
the palliative care team for all of their advice and support.
Friends may visit at Highland Funeral Home (416-773-0933), 3280 Sheppard
Ave. E., west of Warden, on Sunday, August 26th from 2-4 p.m.
and 7-9 p.m. A Memorial Mass will be held on Monday August 27th
at 10: 00 a.m. at Holy Spirit Church, 3526 Sheppard Ave. E., west
of Birchmount. Burial service at Holy Cross Cemetery at 8361 Yonge
Street, south of Hwy. 7 and Hwy. 407. In lieu of flowers, a donations
to the ALS Society or World Vision would be appreciated.
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KHAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2007-10-27 published
His BamBoo club transformed the nightlife of restrained Toronto
Onetime freelance writer and his business partner took an abandoned
laundry and turned it into the cornerstone of Toronto's funky
Queen Street West scene through the 1980s and 1990s
By Ron CSILLAG,
Special to The Globe and Mail, Page S11
Toronto -- Richard
O'BRIEN was the arbiter of cool in a city
that never stops obsessing over its image. Only he dared to pair
plates of redolent Thai spicy noodles and feverish jerk chicken,
washed down with a Tusker lager or two, with the throbbing beat
of a Zairean soukous band.
Maybe he was crazy like a fox, for the marriage between exotic
world music and Asian/Caribbean cuisine kept Toronto's landmark
BamBoo club pulsating for nearly 20 years. As The Globe noted
five years ago this month, when the BamBoo finally shuttered
its fabled doors, "long before the Gap and Starbucks sent Queen
Street West spiralling into a retail frenzy, stopping in at the
BamBoo for a beer or a bite was a rite of passage for city residents
and out-of-towners alike."
Indeed, the decidedly unslick 'Boo (once described, though lovingly,
as "a carefully crappy-looking dive") was the cornerstone of
Toronto's funky Queen Street West scene through the 1980s and
1990s, showcasing cutting-edge reggae, funk, R&B, Latin, jazz
and soul acts, and hosting some of the wildest private parties
staid Toronto had seen. The eclectic kitchen staff, meantime,
cranked out signature Caribbean, Indonesian and Thai dishes that
kept the joint at the top of virtually every "best-place-to-eat"
list in the city since the day it opened.
The music was loud, the place usually packed (and sweltering),
the food piquant and the atmosphere laid-back and aggressively
Third World. It worked.
In the days before random club shootings and refrigerator-sized
bouncers, the BamBoo was more a community centre for artists
and musicians. "And it was an awesome community," recalled Lorraine
SEGATO, lead singer for the long-defunct Parachute Club, which
played the BamBoo in July, 1983, to celebrate their debut release,
a month before the club officially opened.
(As Patti HABIB,
Mr.
O'BRIEN's friend and business partner for
some 30 years, recalled with some satisfaction, the place that
night "was jammed to the rafters, and it was totally illegal.
We had no liquor license and no running water. You'd never get
away with that kind of stuff today.")
What fascinated Ms.
SEGATO about the BamBoo was its timing. Toronto
"was just starting to bust out in terms of a cultural product
that was coming from all the immigrants. So the music scene was
really ripe."
"The timing was really extraordinary," she said wistfully. "It
was a confluence of energies. More importantly, it was home to
so many people who considered themselves either artists or, you
know, different. The 'Boo was this safe haven."
That's precisely how Mr.
O'BRIEN and Ms.
HABIB planned it.
"Richard never turned down artists or musicians," Ms.
HABIB said.
"People felt the BamBoo was their home because it was a very
relaxed atmosphere. No women ever had to feel scared. We never
had fights. It was a very warm place."
A bearish man who bore a striking resemblance to film director
Francis
Ford
Coppola and favoured retro Hawaiian shirts, Mr.
O'BRIEN
could be sarcastic and cantankerous (his favourite expressions
were, "Is everybody mental around here?" and "What's the big
deal?"). He was also gregarious and passionate, an unabashed
party animal and a lover of the arts. Even as a child, he showed
interest in art and theatre, said his 97-year-old mother, Catherine
O'BRIEN.
Adopted when he was four years old, he was a product of Toronto's
Catholic schools. At 17, he and a buddy hopped on a motorcycle
to see a girl in North Carolina. Mr.
O'BRIEN kept going, and
wound up in California in 1965. He bummed around, studied writing
and broadcast journalism, and played drums in a small jazz club
in San Francisco, where such giants as Miles Davis and McCoy
Tyner dropped in to record. Four years after leaving, he returned
to Toronto, sold some drawings and freelanced articles to newspapers.
He went to work for TVOntario, then the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, where he got to interview reggae icons Bob Marley
and Peter Tosh.
In the late 1970s, Mr.
O'BRIEN started hosting a popular Toronto
booze can, the Dream Factory (where his friend Marcus O'Hara
launched the annual Martian Awareness Ball to coincide with St.
Patrick's Day. Little green men - get it?)
With Ms. HABIB, he also ran one the city's hippest speakeasies,
the legendary MBC. A lot of people joked that it meant "My
Booze Can," but the name was a playful dig at the inability of
Mr. O'BRIEN and some Friends to buy the nearby Embassy Tavern.
MBC, open only on Mondays and Thursdays, was a hit, featuring
live music until 6 a.m. with acts that included Rough Trade with
Carole Pope.
"We didn't just start a club with no background," Mr.
HABIB pointed
out. "We had been doing different events around the city and
compiling a mailing list."
The two also frequented a rooftop after-hours boîte called the
Paper Door, where Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLaughlin were regular
acts. Significantly, it looked down onto a dumpy building that
had had housed a Chinese laundry for 80 years but was used to
store wicker furniture.
"It was the most derelict place," Ms.
HABIB recalls with a laugh.
"It was condemned, had no running water, no heat and no floor
to speak of. But we said, 'Wouldn't it be a fabulous place to
throw a party?' "
To their surprise, the space was for rent, and in 1982, "Richard,
not me, put a [$2,500] deposit down on six-months' rent, thinking
he could build a club." The couple had three months to renovate
about 1,500 square metres of space.
Investors were brought in but money was short. The couple set
up a flea market of Christmas trees in an event dubbed "Tree
and Flea." Banks turned them down for loans, so another group
of investors came in with the funds needed to finish the job,
but charged a mob-like interest rate of 100 per cent over two
years (successfully paid).
Meantime, nothing in the club was new. The lime-green wrought-iron
front gates came from a wrecking company, and the banquette seating
was from the Drake Hotel. Toilets were bought for $50 from a
pinball parlour that was going under. The bar was salvaged from
an Irish social club in Buffalo.
After $85,000 in renovations, the place opened on August 26,
1983, and was christened the BamBoo as a tribute to its former
incarnation. There were lineups almost right away.
"It was always full," recalled Fergus Hambleton, lead singer
for Toronto's poster band for reggae, the Sattalites, who became
regulars. "It was partially that we're fabulous," Mr. Hambleton
said half-jokingly, "but other than that, it was also a time
when that club was right and the whole Queen Street thing was
developing."
In Toronto, the 'Boo was to the eighties music scene what the
El Mocambo was in the seventies or the Riverboat in the sixties.
On any given night, one could hear a Nigerian-style juju group,
a West African highlife act, ska, or a soca (soul calypso) band.
Sometimes, jazz greats Buddy Rich and DIzzy Gillespie would follow
reggae giants Bunny Wailer and Toots and the Maytalls.
The club couldn't have a liquor license unless it served food,
so veteran chefs Vera
KHAN handled the Caribbean fare, while
Wandee YOUNG did the Thai cooking. Both put their stamp on a
1997 cookbook, The BamBoo Cooks. And rumour had it that rocker
David Bowie simply had to have the BamBoo's ka kai soup whenever
he was in town.
It all made Mr.
O'BRIEN, in the eyes of Ms.
HABIB, "really, really
brave. When you're in his circle of people, 'no' doesn't come
into your repertoire. I had to be dragged into this circle of
the BamBoo, but when Richard was around, the possibilities were
endless. He'd think big, act big, and I think that takes a fairly
brave person."
Mr. Hambleton had a similar take. "Everybody at some point had
a screaming argument with Richard because he just had a big personality.
He brought an artistic flair to everything he did. He had a prodigious
knowledge of all cultural things. He blustered. But at the bottom
was this creative personality that was driven to share."
In 2000, Mr.
O'BRIEN suffered a debilitating stroke that caused
paralysis on his left side and put him in a wheelchair. The end
of the BamBoo came in the summer of 2002, when the building's
landlord announced he'd rented the space to another tenant, and
gave the club 90 days to vacate. There was a final farewell bash,
"Boo
Hoo" on October 31 that year. Mr.
O'BRIEN wasn't all that
upset. "He thought it was a good sign to get out of Queen Street,"
Ms. HABIB said.
Besides, she'd been thinking of selling the place. "It was just
too much running a club at night, especially by myself."
Months later, Mr.
O'BRIEN became restless, and
in March, 2003,
he and some partners unveiled Bambu By The Lake, an even larger
club/restaurant on Toronto's waterfront. "I really loved the
old BamBoo," he explained in an interview, "but this really makes
me forget it quick. We took the best of the old parts of the
old BamBoo and incorporated them."
His involvement in the new venture lasted six months. According
to Ms. HABIB, he lost everything, save for his Toronto Islands
house, which he'd mortgaged to the hilt.
His final contribution to the city was an attempt to beautify
the islands' grim concrete ferry terminal. He re-learned to use
a computer well enough to Photoshop his colour-splashed ideas
into the landscape, and called it Terminal Art.
Mr. O'BRIEN suffered a second massive stroke earlier this month.
His last words were, "What's the big deal?"
Richard Kevin
O'BRIEN was born in Montreal on July 28, 1948,
and died in Toronto on October 14, 2007, of neurological complications.
He was 59. He is survived by his mother, Catherine
O'BRIEN, and
sisters Colleen and Marylou. He also leaves his godson, Alexander
HABIB. He was predeceased by his father, Joe
O'BRIEN and his
brother Gregory.
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