Be sure to check out Part 1 of this article here to get more back story on the Dead Lobster, the era it existed in, and after-hours bars from the 1940s through the 1980s.

2013

2013 and 2014 were the height of my attending local shows, several times a month going to see different friend’s bands, larger out of town acts, and everything in between. So it was only natural that I would start to hear about the Dead Lobster, as they hosted a lot of underground local shows and DJ nights, serving as the venue for album release shows for a number of bands I was already familiar with. The Lobster also played host to a well-known international touring band of the era, Perfect Pussy. Why did a Syracuse, New York punk band play a show in the middle of their incredibly long international tour in a dingy illegal after-hours venue in one of the coldest cities on the planet? Because their management had reached out to promoter/talent buyer extraordinaire David Schellenberg (who also worked at the Lo Pub as a talent buyer for a couple years). I've known David for a long time (it was around this era, in 2012/2013, that I made a short documentary about his life as 21 year old booking agent, at the time working at the Park Theatre) so of course it was no shock to read that he promoted the Perfect Pussy show. Now both in our mid 30s, I've left filmmaking behind for writing, and David's left behind booking for Signal Noise, his music marketing business that works with lots of local acts but also huge bands like Motorhead.

I visited David in his Exchange District offices one frigid January afternoon to discuss what he remembers about Dead Lobster and that era. David laughs when I ask him whether he was the booker for the venue, "I mean, I booked a couple shows there but I wasn't the booker." David reminds me that the venue was born out of the minds of Jay Evaristo and Evan Burgess, who had connected at the Osborne Legion on River Avenue, aka ANAF 60, a tiny venue that nonetheless still threw shows. The initial vision for the Dead Lobster was as something of a rehearsal space, in particular for Burgess and Schellenberg's DJ dance party Magik Trix, which was launching around this time.

Schellenberg remembers Dead Lobster got off the ground sometime in 2013, with the infamous Perfect Pussy show happening March 29, 2014. According to David, it was Perfect Pussy’s booking agent, Timmy Hefner of Ground Control Touring, who requested a show not at Dead Lobster per se but specifically at an all ages, underground venue. The venue hosted a number of other well known indie bands, such as Viet Cong, Freak Heat Waves, and prominent locals such as Vampires and Mahogany Frog. But ultimately Dead Lobster became known as an after-hours spot, somewhere that would really only get going at 1:30 or 2 a.m. when the legal bars closed. Cruise down Sargent at 2:30 in the morning on a Friday or Saturday, especially after a big club night like Grippin' Grain, and the line would be long trying to text or call the "Lobster Phone." Ask around to enough people from that era and you'll get a lot of "I still have the contact in my phone for the Dead Lobster," because it was a number you didn't want to lose back in 2013 and 2014.

1990s

In the early '90s, Abi Torquato was living large in Winnipeg's underground party scene. Now locally well-known for his time behind the espresso machine at defunct spots like Garry Street Coffee and The Good Will, Abi currently slings coffees and pizzas at Public Domain on Portage Avenue (right next door to the shell of The Good Will and just down the street from where Club Morocco operated over half a century ago). These days you'll be hard pressed to catch Abi at PD after dark, but back in his day, the night time was the right time, thriving in the city's small and tight-knit electronic music community, even briefly running the record store Lo-Fi Grit in Osborne Village. He also was a fixture as a drum and bass DJ, performing under the name DJ Rolaid. I headed down to Public Domain late one afternoon in March to ask Abi what he remembered about the '90s era after-hours venues.

After greeting me warmly and placing a Chai tea in front of me, he bounces around between our table, the bar, and outside to have a cigarette with a frenetic energy that belies his 49 years. But his excitement is matched step for step by the vividness of his stories of a bygone age in Winnipeg's downtown and Exchange District. "The '90s were so good. We would throw warehouse parties every weekend," he tells me, "We'd just find some random place and rent it out for a month. There was no listings, no ads, just a number in the window that said, 'Call Jerry,' and they were happy to take the five hundred bucks for a month's rent. It was always five hundred bucks, for some reason."

Teenaged Abi wasn't alone in these endeavours, he had the assistance of his pals, including Dennis Gots, Adam Hannibal, Louis Cardona, Gabriel Cote, and a whole host of others. Abi details for me a laundry list of spaces that he and his friends used, notably the old rowhouse buildings that eventually would become the Red River College Princess Street campus, and an old warehouse on Market Avenue that's now an office space housing an architecture firm. With absentee landlords and a neighbourhood devoid of human activity in the evenings and on weekends, they were allowed more or less free rein over the fiefdom of their parties. It all started with the music and the crowd it would attract: "We weren't the rave scene; we would always have two rooms, one with more down tempo or hip-hop, and then a drum and bass room. We always had the best shit, the hottest shit that no one else had." In short, these weren't glowstick, peace and love type raves: it was about good music you couldn't hear anywhere else.

This is the '90s, so these massive warehouses would fill up with the pungent odours of both cigarette and weed smoke. And, of course, alcohol. "We would sell beer," Abi laughs, "A lot of beer. But people would bring in their own and we'd look the other way." The beer sales, plus a modest cover charge for the hundreds of attendees, meant they would make back their five hundred dollars of rent money easily. "None of us had jobs back then, not really," Abi notes. But to fill the weeks between the Fridays and Saturdays at their warehouse parties, Abi and his crew were active at some of the city's more storied legal bars of the time: Wellington's, The Royal Albert, and Die Maschine. Die Maschine in Osborne Village gave them Tuesday nights; Wellington's gave them Thursdays, much to the ire of the venue's neighbour, The Albert's famously crusty owner Wayne Towns, whose Thursday draft night was a beacon for the city's thirsty music lovers. Abi says that after some persuading, they came to a détente, "We told Wayne that it was good for The Albert; most people would bounce back and forth between the two anyways.”

The good times lasted through much of the '90s, as Abi obtained gainful employment at the Record Baron downtown and brought in much of their drum and bass and electronic music selection (hearing previews of unreleased records over the phone and deciding on the spot how many to buy). A few other underground places came and went: Lithium, at the corner of King and McDermot (now a fur store); the Blue Agave, in the haunted Masonic Temple building at the corner of Ellice and Donald; and the Horseshoe, now the Giant Tiger directly across the street from the Masonic building. But after Wellington's closed in 1997, the crew involved in most of these parties slowly began to age out of the scene, with it having largely dissipated altogether by 2000, shifted to new hands. Abi, however, would find a second wind over fifteen years later, throwing late night shows (many of which I was at) in his tiny coffee shop, Garry Street Coffee, with even more underground events happening just downstairs in the basement of 333 Garry Street. But even those days died with an aggressive landlord and the ravages of a global pandemic.

2009

Seated at Public Domain with Abi in early March, having sipped my Chai and eaten half of my greasy bar pizza, he exclaims, "You know, if you want to know about after-hours spots, you should talk to Talia." He gets up and beckons over from the bar Talia Syrie, former owner of the Tallest Poppy, one of the best restaurants Winnipeg has ever seen. "Talia used to run the Orphanage," Abi states excitedly. "Yeah," says Talia wistfully, "Those were the days." For approximately four years, starting in 2009, the Orphanage operated every Friday night out of the basement of Talia's Point Douglas home, serving oysters, meatloaf, and cocktails to those in the know. "We never really had any problems," Talia remarks, "But we never knew what was going to happen." Decorated with red velvet curtains to look like the White Lodge from the classic TV show "Twin Peaks", the Orphanage was an “if you know, you know” venue, with friends bringing friends and friends of friends, and usually staying until dawn.

Through coded Facebook posts, Talia and her team would "advertise" the night's attractions, with DJs and even bands squishing into the sixty person capacity basement to entertain both locals and the odd well-known visitor. Talia, Abi, and their friend Mike tell me hilarious stories about the times when actor Liev Schreiber, in town to film the movie "Goon", stopped by; or when actress Christina Ricci came but insisted that she was, in fact, not Christina Ricci; or when rowdy stoner metal band Bison came by after a show at the Albert. It was a wild time, made even more wild by the fact that Talia and some of her bar staff had a quick turnaround from their very late Friday nights/Saturday mornings at the Orphanage to cooking and serving brunch at the Tallest Poppy (then on Main Street) on Saturdays. Her baker at the Tallest Poppy, also a bartender at the Orphanage, would simply take a shower and head from one job to the next. "I met some of my best friends [at the Orphanage]," says Talia, "It was the best time." But running a bar in your house can't last forever, and the Orphanage stopped around 2013, leaving a void for the thirsty night owls of our fair city. Not for long, though, as it turned out, since it wasn't long before the Dead Lobster would come along to provide a home for those left out of the Orphanage.

2013

Finally, just before the Easter weekend in mid-April, I’m able to connect on the phone with Evan Burgess, one of the operators of the Dead Lobster, who’s now lived in Toronto for almost a decade. Excitedly, Evan tells me about connecting with Jay Evaristo at ANAF 60 and how they felt they could afford both financially and time-wise to run a venue on their own. Describing the initial vision as, “a hangout space, a chill spot for friends,” Evan and the rest of the crew spent the spring and summer of 2013 touching up the former clothing store. “We did some minor renos here and there, patched some holes. We drywalled over the front door and the windows,” Burgess says with a laugh, remembering how some people called the venue, “the coolest death trap,” due to the fire safety issues.

They decided that the best way to avoid attention was to not have patrons entering through the front door but instead through a long, narrow exterior corridor that connected to a side door near the back of the building. But they also couldn’t either leave the front gate to that corridor unlocked, or have people knocking upon it for entry, which through necessity led to the brilliant invention of the infamous Lobster Phone. Says Burgess, “We just got a cheap pay-as-you-go phone and gave it to the person at the door and then the phone number just got around; we actually had to change the number a few times to keep it low key.”

One burning question answered, I had ask about another hazy memory I had, supported by some social media digging I had done. “Did you have booths from an old Red Lobster in there?” I ask. Laughing, Evan replies, “Yeah, that’s actually where we got the name from. We found those at a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, there was one on display and we mentioned we might want to buy it and [the store employees] said they had, like, a whole set. It took a few trips to get them there but we got a few of those booths, and yeah, that’s where we got the name Dead Lobster from; we just thought it was funny.”

During our conversation, Evan makes sure to point out that the Lobster was about the local music and arts community; they made sure to keep prices for shows down, and gave space to up and coming artists and bands that might not have had another place to perform, especially at that time. But Evan’s also quick to remind me that they weren’t exactly reacting to the larger dearth of venues in the city, “We could feel the lack of options but it was more about just doing our part for the DIY scene in Winnipeg, and people wanted to participate in that.”

Evan describes the venue’s peak as the March 2014 Perfect Pussy show that David Schellenberg booked at the venue. From there, Burgess notes, the Lobster started to get too prominent and was straying too far from the core group that would come for the music, instead featuring more people simply coming for the experience of being in a such venue without as much consideration for its long-term sustainability. But surprisingly, the Dead Lobster flew under the radar pretty much the entire time it was in operation, even though it would regularly go until five or six a.m. Saying they never got a visit from the cops, with the bar/pool hall next door, “helping shade the suspicion,” Evan does tell me a funny story about the bar staff heading to a nearby convenience store in the midst of a party for ice and other supplies and overhearing chatter about, “Oh, I think there’s a big party happening around here somewhere,” while just smiling and acting none the wiser. 

In the end, the venue started to fizzle out in the summer of 2014, having lasted about a year. While their landlord for most of that duration was largely absent and not asking questions as long as the rent came on time, towards the end a new property management company took over and Evan says, “They kinda figured out what we were doing and didn’t want to deal with us, but we were ready to walk away by then.” Also, by then co-owner Evaristo was deep into the process of opening The Handsome Daughter, with Burgess also helping with some of the initial renos and eventually doing some bartending there. While Burgess points out that the goal of the Dead Lobster wasn’t simply to learn the ropes and then go legit with the Daughter, it did help build the necessary skills, with much of the Lobster’s community moving down to south Sherbrook Street by the fall of 2014. As Evan says to me to end our conversation, “Nothing lasts forever.”

2025

It’s been over a decade since the Dead Lobster shut its doors, and even longer for places like the Orphanage, Arbin’s, Lithium, and the City Centre Hotel, and a whole host of other places forgotten to history; because history is not what happened, it is what is written. That has always been my goal, both in this two-part article and in my book, “Gritty City,” to put into writing histories that might never have been told otherwise, illuminating the dark but fascinating corners of Winnipeg’s past.

After-hours bars, I’m sure, continue to exist in Winnipeg, but I would not know about them as I have long since given up the night owl lifestyle. And besides, I follow the motto of the great non-fiction author Robert Caro, “Truth takes time,” so anything in operation now would not yet be ripe for true discovery. But perhaps in another ten years time, more ink can be spilled on the halcyon days of another generation of nocturnal thrill seekers in the great river city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Until then, I’ll be sure to have the Lobster Phone on speed dial, just in case.

Subscribe for more original, non-fiction writing, exploring the depths of Winnipeg culture past and present, plus occasional other fun stuff, from author Nigel Webber. 

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