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England was basking in an unseasonably warm and bright afternoon one play last week. Paul McCartney, however, was spending it enveloped by darkness and fog, as he had done for most of the preceding month. Yet the famous ex-Beatle’s mood could hardly have been sunnier. On Soundstage 6 at the Goldcrest Elstree Studio complex north of London, shrouded...

A fabulous new documentary on Jackie Shane, Any Other Way, unspools at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival on April 27th. It's a brilliant portrait of the late transgendered soul singer, who took Toronto by storm in the 1960s. The film matches extensive recordings of Jackie conversing and singing with recreations of a younger Jackie (played by Makayla Walk...

There are seminal events in music history, seismic shifts that occur when forces of personality, timing and circumstance collide to create something truly monumental. Sometimes, they are individual moments, like when Chuck Berry wrote his genre-defining “Maybelline,” John Lennon met his future collaborator Paul McCartney or Bob Dylan plugged in and...

He was such a good ol’ boy, a teller of such tall tales and the master of so many self-deprecating one-liners it was often easy not to take Ronnie Hawkins too seriously. “I’m a legend in my spare time,” he liked to quip. Calling himself the “Geritol Gypsy,” he claimed to have been playing rockabilly “since the Dead Sea was only sick.” But when the ...

He’s one of the most famous musicians of the 20th century and a rock guitarist of unparalleled talent. Although his mainstream career lasted only four years before his death on Sept. 18, 1970 of an apparent drug overdose, Jimi Hendrix shone so brightly that today his albums and concert appearances are the stuff of legend. The official Hendrix ...

Most people know Ian and Sylvia by their signature songs—his “Four Strong Winds” and her “You Were On My Mind”—and think of them as the iconic Canadian folk duo of the early 1960s. But few beyond fans or aficionados are familiar with their fine subsequent solo work, or Sylvia’s with the wondrous Quartette. And fewer still are aware that the talente...

Gordon Lightfoot got his start on Yonge Street, not in Yorkville. Although the bard of Canadian song is often associated with Yorkville’s Riverboat coffeehouse, where he first became a star while performing weeklong stints in the mid-1960s, his first real home as a solo artist was Steele’s Tavern, at 349 Yonge. A two-storey operation run by Greek r...

Neil Young returned to the city of his birth in 1965, determined to break into Toronto’s flourishing music scene. He’d arrived with his Winnipeg group, the Squires, but their new folk-rock sound fell on deaf ears. Even changing their name to Four to Go failed to make a difference. So Young parted ways with his bandmates and launched himself as a so...

 Murray McLauchlan moved downtown and never looked back. Armed with a guitar and a backpack, he ran away from home at the age of 17 and headed straight to Yorkville. He wound up crashing at the Village Corner coffeehouse, sleeping on a mattress in the basement and soaking up the sounds of guitarists like Amos Garrett and Jim McCarthy and folks...

When Ian Tyson arrived in Toronto in September 1958, the folk music scene didn’t exist. The coffeehouses hadn’t yet appeared in Yorkville. The city’s bohemian district consisted of a few ramshackle cafés and galleries along a tiny stretch of Gerrard Street, near Bay, that attracted colorful personalities and painters like Harold Town. All of that w...