2013

The smell comes first. Impossible to forget, that violent mix of ancient, stale carpets, drywall dust, and above it all, the overwhelming presence of cigarette smoke. It's been over ten years but that smell hits me out of nowhere like the weight of the world. Windowless and without ventilation, the potpourri of bad perfume, weed smoke, and stale beer lingers. I rack my brain to try to remember any other details about this place that so briefly lived in my past life yet continues to abut itself aggressively against my present mind. Slowly, a picture emerges, hazy through both fog of memory and literal darkness.

The main room is small, low ceilinged, and lit only in red. Utterly out of place, shoved against the far wall are a couple restaurant booths with black patent leather seating. The walls remain largely unadorned; the back wall is black, the side walls were once white, now a shabby grey. A crude graffito scrawls the message, "Eat A Butt 2013." A colourful collage of red Solo cups and liquor store receipts litters the floor. At one end of the room is a cluster of amps, a drum set, guitars, and a cheap PA system. Opposite it is a glass retail display case turned bar slinging cans of beer and packs of cigarettes. Just outside the main room is the staircase and something of a foyer. Down the stairs and back out the door, into a damp and narrow outdoor corridor. Standing there, phone in hand, is a large, burly man. Down the corridor and out the gate, the only way back in is to call the phone in that man's hand and say the key words: "I'm here for the Dead Lobster."

2025

The memories flood in like a fever dream, disparate and jumbled. Some details remain crystal, yet so much seems muddy. Do I trust the recollections that filter through a decade plus of life? I look at my phone contacts and see Lobster Phone still in there, so it must have existed, it's not all an elaborate lucid dream I'm experiencing. Surely, though, if I was there, there were others, too. Do they remember the Dead Lobster? And if I don't document it, will it fade into wisps of memories told between those in the know? What separates it in Winnipeg lore from other after-hours spots like Arbin's, the Cave, Lithium, the Orphanage, and countless nameless others? One thing remains certain, I can't get that smell out of my nose.

2012

It was a tough era for Winnipeg live music. The Lo Pub closed in late August 2012. The Albert was never the same after the water main break flooded it in 2011. Key underground art spaces like Frame Arts Warehouse and Negative Space were cracked down upon for having live music, in the opening salvos of what would be a losing war against Exchange District gentrification. Union Sound Hall had opened in summer 2013 and despite initial efforts to include smaller local events, it quickly shifted to larger shows and club nights exclusively. Park Theatre remained strong but outside the city's centre. There was a couple years where the best spots to book an independent local show in the core area were the Windsor, the Cavern, and the Rose N Bee Pub. From late 2012 through 2013, things were bleak. It was in this climate that something like the Dead Lobster could be born, but its birth was not unprecedented, its spiritual parentage stretching back decades to the jazz era, through the rock and roll and disco years, and into the hip-hop heyday.

1940s to 1960s

For an establishment whose entire raison d'être is to remain hidden from public view, it is hard to gain a toe hold in the history books. Contemporaneous advertisements and promotional material were likely either not created at all or passed along quietly with a wink and a nod. These bars were word of mouth, places you heard about from a friend of a friend. Nonetheless, looking back through Winnipeg's history in the forgotten but seminal book "Musical Ghosts: A History of Winnipeg Jazz Bands 1914-1966" author Owen Clark describes a number of clubs from the jazz era that could be defined as after-hours. Clark details the long history of club owner Charlie Mazzone, who got his start in the 1940s running the Cafe Don Carlos, a jazz club at 291 Kennedy Street that operated in the basement of the International Order of the Oddfellows Hall, and stayed open until four a.m. The club had a short run of a year or so, but Mazzone, who was also a musician, would continue as bar/restaurant owner for years, including running Rancho Don Carlos on Pembina Highway until the early 1960s. To quote Clark’s book, “There’s a hundred years of musical ghosts [in Winnipeg]. They’re on the street, in the basements and in the air where some of the old buildings used to stand.”

Similarly, author and local rock historian John Einarson, both in a chat with me over coffee in early March and in the pages of his book, "Heart of Gold: A History of Winnipeg Music" lays out how the Cellar, with its entrance off an alley behind Fort Street, served as a teenage focused live music hub during the community club rock and roll era of Burton Cummings and Neil Young in the early 1960s. John also points to venues like the famous Blue Note on Main Street and Club Morocco on Portage Avenue and Langside Street (located in the Kirkwood Block, which sadly burned down in 2022). Those venues, primarily known as jazz clubs, would be popular destinations for musicians of all stripes looking to hang out and have a drink after finishing their sets at other bars around the city. Liquor was served into the wee hours, but hush-hush, often in tea cups or coffee mugs to hide its true contents. Unbeknownst or not to the operators of the Dead Lobster, they were following in this tradition decades later with their clothing store-cum-rehearsal space-cum-unlicensed after-hours bar in the early 2010s.

2012

In the early 2010s, personally, I was beginning a phase of being a show rat, hanging around drinking Standards by the bottle in dingy bars, as long as I could walk or bike there from my apartment on Colony Street. Initially, I began venturing out to local shows in Winnipeg when I was a teenager; some of the first ones I remember attending were the annual Joe Strummer tribute show at the West End Cultural Centre (the old West End, before the renos and additions, when it was smaller and grimier) and indie rock shows at Ragpickers, back when it had two floors on McDermot Avenue. I had a strong base of all ages shows under my belt, plus a lot of bigger out of town acts seen at the Pyramid Cabaret, but I really started attending a lot of live music in bars in 2011, 2012, in large part because of the Lo Pub.

Located in a dead end on Kennedy Street behind Portage Place Mall, the Lo Pub was on the main floor of the Hosteling International (HI) hostel, the bar occupying a long and extremely low ceilinged, narrow room with a big, elevated stage. To enter, you had to pass right in front of the stage, with the L shaped bar located at the very back below a beautifully tiled ceiling. It shouldn't have been a good venue for seeing live music but it was. Also the owner and main booker, Jack Jonasson, did an amazing job of bringing in stellar out of town acts and booking solid local shows. A number of my friends worked at the bar, so I would just go to hang out, or to see other friend's bands play. It was the place to be - until suddenly it wasn't.

The last night of the Lo Pub is infamous, packed to the gills, even opening the interior courtyard for the only time I remember, while the bar sold out of absolutely everything. But I remember being there the night before that, August 24th, 2012, when word rippled through the half full venue there to see the kickass Alberta punk band Fist City that the Lo Pub was closing and tomorrow would be the last night. We huddled in groups around the bar asking for details. All they were saying was that tomorrow would be the last night, and sadly it was. "Lo Pub Shuts Down Amidst Local Venue Downfall" read the headline in the Manitoban; "Local Bar's Closure A Sign Of Much Larger Problems" opined the Spectator Tribune. By fall 2014, most of the Lo Pub's lost gigs had been picked up by the near simultaneous October openings of The Handsome Daughter and The Good Will, but the loose era of a bar just being a bar, without a profile on every platform, when people's nightlife choices were not algorithmically driven, would die with the Lo Pub.

1980s

When I was writing and researching my book, "Gritty City: An Oral History of Winnipeg Hip-Hop Music 1980-2005" I heard about a lot of the different hip-hop and reggae focused after-hours venues that were going strong in decades past. Back in the 1980s, hip-hop was not accepted in nightclubs locally, in large part due to racist stereotypes held by club owners and promoters. But the people who loved hip-hop, reggae, and dancehall, mostly Black and Brown people of Caribbean ancestry, still wanted a place to listen to their music and party with their friends. The biggest of these parties was almost always the boat cruises, special summer events where one of the Paddlewheel Queen or the River Rouge were rented out to cruise down the city's riverways with music bumping. These were a hot ticket, but so were the after parties that happened once the boat docked. If you wanted to keep that vibe going with both feet on dry land, you'd head across the street from the dock to what was officially called Main Tower but was generally just known as Arbin's, after the proprietor, Arbin Blair. Benefitting from being sandwiched between the river and an industrial area on Nairn Avenue, Arbin's was given a pass.

Looking to learn more about Arbin's and the Caribbean after-hours joints of the '80s, I reconnect in late March with DJ Bunny, Winnipeg hip-hop's longest active DJ and the first person I interviewed for "Gritty City." Bunny was born in Jamaica but came to Canada in his youth, with his passion for music stretching back to his teen years in the 1970s. He explains that the boat cruise was so hot that, "People could come in from out of town for it, people would call me up from Calgary, Edmonton, trying to get tickets for the boat cruise." And if you're coming in from out of town for a weekend of partying, you're going to keep it going late into the night, which is one reason Arbin's thrived.

Arbin was one of Bunny's best friends, so naturally Bunny would DJ there frequently, sometimes with a one night social liquor licence in place, sometimes just with the booze on the down low. But it was also a hangout spot, with dominoes and table tennis happening during the day, and band or DJ rehearsals happening in the evening. Come night time, though, there were full band concerts by reggae and funk groups like Rockalypso and some of the great Gerry Atwell's bands, often with Winnipeg Blue Bomber and visiting CFL players in attendance. Bunny looks back on it fondly, saying, "We had it running for a while with no problem, the cops would come check it out but they’d see it was just kids having fun and we weren’t disturbing no one 'cause there was no residences around there."

While Arbin's was a key spot due to its proximity to the boat cruise's docking station, throughout the '80s there was a wide range of underground and after-hours spots happening in the funk and reggae community (that later evolved into the hip-hop scene as the '80s pressed on). For Bunny, it all started when he was a teenager at the Key Girl Discotheque at the corner of Broadway and Sherbrook, in a building that now houses a flooring company. Key Girl was an all ages venue with no liquor licence, but with George Licorish (of cable access show Dynamite Soul/Music Makers fame) DJing, the spot would stay open late and the older crowd would surreptitiously sip their booze. As we chatted on the phone late one afternoon, Bunny rattled off a whole number of infamous house party spots, including Grandmaster Funk and his wife Heather's spot on Henderson Highway; the Brickhouse party house in Wolseley; and of course the famous Alverstone Posse house in the West End (be sure to pick up a copy of "Gritty City" to learn more about both Grandmaster Funk and the wild Alverstone Posse days).

Bunny wasn't done, though, telling me about some of the other unlicensed "booze cans" that catered to the Black and Caribbean community throughout the 1980s included Muscle Man Dave's, located near Notre Dame and Sherbrook Street, ran by a former competitive body builder. There was also the Cave, a former pizza place at the corner of St. Matthews and Arlington, where the Alverstone Posse also operated out of after their house parties got too big. One of the better known ones was informally known as Ziggy's, ran by Grandmaster Funk's brother Ziggy. Says Bunny, "The police would come in, off duty I mean, and just check it out, because at the time the police was trying to recruit more Black people, like [former Winnipeg Police Service chief] Devon Clunis, he's from Jamaica, too. But they would just see there was no trouble and leave, they didn't make a problem of it."

Despite knowing such a wide range of booze cans and after-hours joints (including many not mentioned here due to space), Bunny lets me know he has a blind spot, because like all of us at one point he was too young to be venturing out to such places. "You should talk to this guy Craig James, he was around in the funk era, the funk, soul era in the '70s, he knows lots about different after-hours." With a phone number provided by Bunny in hand, I do just that, looking to learn more about an era of the city’s history that often gets glanced over.

1960s & ‘70s

Less than a week after speaking to Bunny, I connect with Craig on the phone one Sunday afternoon in late March. A former speed skating champion, Craig James' time in Winnipeg's nightlife scene stretches back to the Vietnam War era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Describing the Winnipeg of that era, Craig notes to me that, "Most places were racist, as a Black person you wouldn't go to the white bars because you weren't accepted. There were a few Black people hanging around but mostly we had to find our own places."

As Craig got older and started venturing out into bars, the first he ever went to was the Red Barn (formally called Patterson’s Ranch House) at Logan and Keewatin, describing it as an all Black bar filled with American GIs, many up on leave from the Grand Forks Air Force base. Running through his memory, Craig lists off a large number of places, including many I had heard about from Bunny, such as the Key Girl Discotheque, Muscle Man Dave's, and the Cave, whose owner, nicknamed Speed, Craig knew since his childhood. Many folks from the '90s era will remember fondly the name Wellington's, in the basement of the St. Charles Hotel (which also operated as a hip-hop club called Whispers for a few years in the mid '90s), but Craig tells me that he was DJing at Wellington's back in the early 1970s, saying, "I helped get that place off the ground."

Despite being in and out of the city, also spending time in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, and Vancouver, there are a few critical spots that Craig keeps circling back to in our conversation, especially the City Centre Hotel, later called the Brittany Inn, and now the site of the Quest Inn at Ellice Avenue and Carlton Street. The City Centre was one of the few places that catered to Winnipeg's Black population back in those days, making it a hub for them in the 1970s. Craig tells me about how when he and his friends were underage they would sneak into the City Centre for the five cent draft beers, filling up a whole table with glasses, and occasionally being thrown out of the bar. Just down the street from the City Centre was another bar, the Downtowner (later the site of the Lo Pub), that would also allow Black patrons, making that stretch of Ellice especially popular.

While it's hard to track down exactly, Craig and his crew might also have been the first generation to launch the "funk boat," renting out the River Rouge and partying until 1:00 in the morning while floating down the Red River blasting funk music. But after 1:00 a.m., when the boat would dock and the bars would start shutting down, Craig and his crew would invariably head for a house party, with the site moving around every weekend but always keeping with the long held Winnipeg tradition to keep the party going into the wee hours. I get off the phone with Craig feeling as though another world has been opened up to me, breathing a fresh perspective on buildings I’ve passed by my whole life. It makes me wonder what other stories there are hiding just below the surface of our city.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article coming soon!

Be sure to subscribe so as not to miss any updates.
-NW

“My journalistic range is a catalyst for change” - Black Thought