The veteran singer writes about the place that played host to Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen on her new album Matador.
By Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Who remembers the Matador?
Lori Yates does — and she’s put it to song.
The legendary after-hours country music watering hole at 466 Dovercourt Rd. is long gone — only the marquee remains — but Toronto singer-songwriter Yates has rekindled some of its charms through the title track of her excellent new nine-song album of Canadiana, Matador, now available on Bandcamp.
Although it isn’t mentioned in her tune, Yates, 63 — a veteran of the Queen Street West scene — recalls that one of her first visits there was somewhat acrimonious.
“I went with a really drunk boyfriend, got up onstage — I didn’t know anybody — but I got up to sing,” Yates recalled during a phone interview. “I turned around and my boyfriend was fighting this gigantic bouncer and was getting thrown down the stairs. They threw us out.”
When Yates returned a year or so later to attend a k.d. lang video shoot, club owner Ann Dunn took one look at her and exclaimed, “I know you! We threw you out a few years ago!”
By that time, Yates had established herself as a firm fixture on the Toronto scene and Dunn — whose after-hours establishment drew everyone from Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen in its heyday — took a shine to her.
“She was really generous with me,” said Yates. “She let me rehearse there for free. I was kind of introduced to the place through Bazil Donovan of Blue Rodeo. He was an adopted son of Ann’s. It was just a really great, homey place for musicians. She loved musicians.”
The club closed in 2007 but, for three minutes and 49 seconds, Yates vividly resurrects the Matador’s glory days, lyrically name-dropping regulars like Toronto rocker Johnnie Lovesin and fixtures like the Kitty Galore Boutique.
“If you remember being there, you weren’t really there, because you’d leave at 6 a.m.,” noted Yates. “Most people were definitely not sober.”
Her song’s wistful refrain of “Tear it down/Don’t tear it down” draws on more recent history: the frustrations of the brothers McCaughey — particularly Paul — who bought the property from Ann Dunn in 2010 and attempted to salvage the 3,400-square-foot ballroom, only to be stymied by nine years of municipal red tape.
In 2019, a discouraged McCaughey sold the venue to developers, but at least the Matador’s legacy remains.
It’s not the only site portrayed in song by Yates, who was part of such buzzworthy bands as punkish the Last Resorts, twangy Rang Tango and, lately, the rootsy Hey Stella. On album The Book of Minerva, she wrote about the Cameron House — another Toronto venue where she often performs — and composed the number “Corktown” for her album Sweetheart of the Valley.
It’s about an enduring tavern in Hamilton, where she lived for 20 years before returning to the Six in 2023.
“These places lend themselves to story songs,” Yates said. “And when I write, all the songs are pictures: I can see them.
“With the Cameron, I was sort of late to the whole cowpunk scene with my band Rang Tango, but it was just a mythical place to me … especially for a kid from Downsview, Dufferin and Wilson. We didn’t have that kind of culture up there, I’ll tell you. It was exciting to be a part of.”
Her tenure with Rang Tango in the mid-’80s led to a golden opportunity: Sony Music in New York signed her as a solo act to Columbia Records in Nashville. But it wasn’t a fit.
“It was just assumed in country music that Nashville was Mecca,” Yates said. “But I was from a big city, Toronto, and Nashville — a mid-sized, mid-Southern city — was very conservative and segregated. Culturally, it was a real shocker to me.”
While she was somewhat artistically fulfilled as a tunesmith — her label arranged writing appointments with Grammy-winning A-list songwriters Don Schlitz and Guy Clark, and her 1988 album Can’t Stop the Girl was produced by another Grammy winner, Steve Buckingham — privately she felt like an outsider.
“Socially, I was pretty isolated,” she said. “Nashville just didn’t jive with me.”
However, she treasured her time in the studio with Buckingham.
Two of her songs — “Scene of the Crime” and “Promises, Promises” — peaked in the Top 70 of Billboard’s Country Singles chart, but Columbia Nashville abandoned ship, unwilling to put further money into Can’t Stop the Girl.
But even that rejection didn’t prepare Yates for what awaited when she returned to Toronto.
“Nobody would talk to me,” she recalled. “I had no friends and I felt like the pariah of the century.”
Only a few people reached out, including guitarist Colin Linden and Bazil Donovan, who would eventually join her in Hey Stella, but the majority of Queen Street Westers snubbed her.
Yates castigated herself for decades for her album’s failure and said she only recently saw the Nashville label experience for what it was.
“I thought I did something wrong: I guess I’m not a good enough singer, not a good enough writer, not pretty enough. And it’s only been in the last few years that I started to go, ‘Wait a second, I think I was a tax writeoff!’”
Since that awful time, Yates has rebounded with five albums, including Matador, her first in eight years.
Co-produced by the Rheostatics’ Tim Vesely, the nine-song record is ethereal and melancholic, with songs like “Alive,” “Cowboy” and “Magdalena” reflective of a recent tough spell in Yates’ life, but also optimistic.
“It’s coming out of a really hard time of grief for me,” Yates said. “I lost my mom, my stepdad.”
Two guitarists she worked with also died: Brian Griffith and Hey Stella’s David Gavan Baxter, who was “like a big brother to me and a trusted friend.”
On the positive side, Yates performed via streaming during the COVID-19 lockdowns and discovered an online community she’d like to further explore. She’s also writing a memoir and developing a one-woman show.
“It’s so different and it’s a challenge. That’s what I’m trying to do at this point.”
Most of all, Yates, who performs the last Thursday of every month at Motel at Queen and Dufferin, and will open for John Otway May 10 and 11 at bookstore Sellers & Newel, is intent on keeping her livelihood.
“I hope to make more albums, but I’ve spent my life only looking to sing and play with better musicians. That’s always been my salvation and, luckily, I’ve always been able to do that.”