It was built the Imperial, at a time when that name had sinister overtones, as anti-Imperialist forces in Russia prepared for armed overthrow of the throne, and Imperialist armies in Austria invaded Belgium to signal the outbreak of World War I. But it came by the name honestly, being of somewhat royal lineage; the Imperial Theatre largely owed its existance to the building it faced across Bank Street, the Royal Alexandria hotel, one of this city's premier accomodation in the first decades of the century, host to visiting dignitaries of all kind, and, yes, royalty.

Not that the Imperial was the only class act in town; the thousand-seat Russell at Queen and Elgin was the NAC of its day and had been around since the turn-of-the-century, the similar-sized Family theatre on Queen at Bank had a seven-piece orchestra, and then there was the Casino, the Princess, the Clary (later Rialto), the Rex, the Flower... The competition was lively; the Flower, for example, had a sliding roof for summer screenings, and at one point installed waterfalls on either side of the stage; the Casino was the happening nightspot, with a multimedia mix of vaudeville, movies, and "girlie shows".

But the Imperial held its own, an elegantly appointed structure decorated in black and gold and dark polished woodwork, with candelabra in the balcony boxes, bas-reliefs on the walls, columns framing the stage, and a spectacular proscenium arch topped by the Canadian coat of arms and a royal crown. In reference to a major installed piece of instrumentation, and an interesting foreshadowing of the building's subsequent history of raunch and roll, it advertised itself as "the house with the organ".

But, of course, the competition continued. In 1920 Loew's Capitol took all the theatre thunder. In time the cachet of its royal brother the Alex dimmed, and so did the fortunes of the Imperial.

Sonny Thomson, former co-owner of Barrymore's, used to relish pointing out that television was the killing blow that put the Imperial under, and it subsequently became a furniture store, ultimately storing televisions. Though meant as simple irony, this fact is also telling in how it anticipated the club's later relationship with the video medium, as both screening room and recording studio.

Sam Rothman was the man who ran the furniture store, and he was the first to alter the original space. According to Pat Adenakis, who with husband Dino purchased the building from Rothman in 1972, this refitting turned some of the main room into storage, some into showroom, and reportedly left a theatre intact, probably showing films in the balcony area alone with a wall to separate it from the main space; a precursor of the micro-cinemas of the modern mall. Given the cloistered second-story atmosphere of such a cinema, and the building's subsequent history, one might well wonder what kind of movies Sam was showing upstairs.

By the time of the sale to the Adenakis', however, the building had seen an infusion of interested investors that included Bass Clef motivator Harold Levin, who in one blistering explosion of misfired insight envisioned the building as a rock palace, Fillmore North. They called it The Opera, and they opened at the dawn of the post-Woodstock Era, with drug-dream frescos on the walls and Canada's pre-eminent counterculture pop-band, Lighthouse on the stage. Lighthouse or no, this enterprise foundered soon after launch from a combination of conflicts internal and external, financial and legal..

Enter Bob Werba. This ex-New Yorker took one look at this rococo rock heaven and immediately bought into the dream; but he also saw that to do it right would take a lot of money. And he figured nothing makes money faster than sex. He decided it would make good business sense to model a club on the succesful, if controversial, all-nude strip clubs that were at that time becoming established in the major urban centres, like Toronto's Starvin' Marvin's, and which had discovered the legal loophole created by the fact that the Liquor Control Board apparently only cared about moral standards in their licenced establishments, and nobody seemed to be paying much attention to anybody else. They called it Pandora's Box, which audacious crudity earned it instant worldwide notoriety including passing mention in Playboy magazine.

This dramatic turn away from the roll to the raunch may have been meant as a temporary capitalizing measure, but the capital came so fast and furious that giving it up became unthinkable. According to Werba, he made back his investment in seven weeks. It was almost seven years before the lid on the box was closed, mostly due to legal costs incurred in a number of unseemly suits related to the increasingly-unseemly reputation of the club and its attendant massage parlour, combined with deadly competition from licenced Quebec establishments with longer hours. The final straw for Werba was Toronto's infamous shoeshine boy murder, which built an unbreakable public association of strip clubs with heinous crime.

The year was 1977, and Werba dreamed of a disco. It was Werba came up with the name, harkening back to imperial/theatrical roots by honouring artistic royalty, "the first family of the theatre", significantly choosing to ignore the shifting fortunes of the Barrymore family and some of their member's proclivity for substance abuse.

From New York's famous Sardi's he borrowed the coiling tail on the Barrymore's B and the tragedy/comedy masks which adorned the Barrymore's logo and ultimately came to symbolize its erratic fortunes. From a New York auction he purchased a portion of the dancefloor originally used in the film "Saturday Night Fever". Movie posters replaced the grotesque fantasy murals that remained from The Opera days, and they put up one of the red curtains from the now-demolished Capitol which had last been raised at a rock show when Jimi Hendrix played in that room six months before his death. The concrete pan that is the present dancefloor was poured, the tiered wooden levels that gave the club its impressive sightline seating were raised. The ornamentation was returned to its original gold. To fulfill licence requirements for food sales, and expand into daytime business, they hired a chef from the NAC and served fine cuisine lunches, at one time turning over 150 meals a day.

Partners in this new venture were manager Gord Rhodes, a bearded firebrand with the commonsense of a seasoned car dealer and the passionate heart of a musician, and his father-in-law, Carl "Sonny" Thomson.

Sonny Thomson bears significant mention here. A remarkable competition-level body-builder, acquitted bank robbery suspect, social philosopher, and black sheep nephew of Lord Thomson of Fleet, Sonny came to sit at the helm of this rocky craft, and like every good captain came to symbolize, took responsibility for, and ultimately went down with - his ship.

And this launch did not take much longer to founder than its progenitors. Once the curiosity business had died people started staying away from the markedly downscale Bank street scene in which Pandora's had seemed to fit better than this experiment in swank. Before much more than a year was through, Gord finally convinced his partners to let him start booking rock acts... and with little more fanfare than that, the legendary landmark was born.

Much has been written about the glory years of Barrymore's, the Thousand Shining Acts, the decade's music given character and focus in a way that was never achieved by any other venue no matter size or pedigree.

I'd like to say something about what it did for me.

Having established a career in radio and music journalism I was a regular patron and promoter of the club from early in its career. One look and listen was all it took to tell you that no better space existed in the region for live music. The acoustics were theatrical, the view superb, the decor at once camp and grand, the freedom of movement and casual rulebook lending an atmosphere of carnival abandon to every major event. In the late-70s and early-80s the management was kind enough to give me the opportunity to stage in the club a series of multimedia Hallowe'en parties ("Ne'ewollahs") that are amongst the most pleasant of my creative memories.

Thus it was that when Sonny Thomson decided to invest in the region's first large-screen projection equipment and bring some of that movie theatre history alive again, he asked me if I knew anybody interested in setting it up. I certainly did, and ended up spending from 1982-84 gathering and playing what ended up as an eight hundred tape collection with thousands of hours of material, in freeform mixes that preceded the bands and played between sets. These were the days before MuchMusic, when MTV was a rumour viewed only in bars with satellite dishes and only when the sports was bad. Many people came just for the video, and I came to know them by their requests. Ex-MuchMusic v.j. Erica Ehm was often at the booth. At some of the early video nights there were as many people as attended many a sold-out live show.

And as if it wasn't enough having this ridiculously fun job I also had the opportunity to experience in amazing proximity some fantastic musical talent, to hang out with a succession of inspirational artists in the relaxed atmosphere of mutual work and intense play. To an individual as in love with music as am I this was a gift of immeasureable magnitude and of which I suspect many would be understandably envious. It was a period of fantastic creativity and sensory delight and I wish something like it upon everyone. It was where I met the beautiful mother of my two wonderful children.

And dammit I've been in a few clubs in this world, and Barrymore's was my favourite. Maybe it was the fact that I could go from the very back to a few feet from the musician in less than the length of the drum solo even on soldout nights, dancing with people I knew along the way. Maybe it was those fabulous mirrors that Sonny put in that spectacularly qaudrupled the sightlines. Maybe it was firing up that golden bowl lightfixture that hung from the claw of the eagle that had been painted on the dome of the hall - the one that had been adapted to house the Aquastar video projection system - and filling the wall-sized screen with amazing sights and the concert sound system with all my favourite music from every contemporary era. Some nights that place really rocked.

And let me get one thing straight. I was there as personal witness for hundreds of shows, observed the behaviour of every staff member and got to know most of them fairly well, and I can state without reservation that the ubiquitous and fashionable myth of the hair trigger neanderthal bouncers is unequivocally false. For a space that was devoted on most occasions to the staging of a near-pagan ritual of group excitation fuelled by mind-altering chemicals, high decibel rhythms and sexual innuendo, and that by its nature attracted a certain subset of the population for whom this combination is an excuse for potentially destructive behaviour, it is nothing short of a miracle that more damage was not done. In fact any incidents I witnessed were extremely rare, and quickly contained, and represented countless other untold moments where a bouncer cooled off a belligerent drunk, saved a careless reveller from serious injury, or in any of hundreds of ways used common sense to keep trouble at bay and let the music play. Sonny was in many ways the ultimate bouncer, and there are stories of his unbelievable negotiations with the more physical spectrum of this society's power players that would fill a very entertaining volume. If we're lucky he'll write that book.

But there were other demons plaguing this venture than the mundane problems faced by every proprietor of a rock club. Something in the comedy/tragedy masks, some fatal flaw that always balanced the joyful laughter with pain. Commentators can make of the failure of that Barrymore's what they will, balancing factors from money to mindsets, but I felt the force that held it back like a thick fog that permeated the room at all times except when it was blown away by the music and a crowd. Maybe it was just the scale, the high-ceilinged vacancy of it whenever there were fewer than a couple hundred warm bodies radiating life; maybe it was the walls themselves, exuding more than eighty years of entertainment in an exhausting psychic cacophony that could only be harnessed and channeled by the spiritual energy of a transporting musical event.

Of the recent history of Barrymore's, up to its 'final' closure almost four years ago, many recent articles have been written, but none have given due to the spirit of the few who made it happen for as long as they did and to so many of our cultural benefit. Shari Rhodes first, Sonny's daughter, manager, accountant, spiritual anchor, cornerstone that held the shaky structure together through many an economic earthquake. Gord next, who really truly believed in the music, sometimes I think more than the musicians themselves, and still demonstrates that enthusiasm in his post-Barrymore's life through occasional bookings at the Penguin and other venues. Sonny, most of all, who like a classical figure in a Greek play has worn both masks, lived the seemingly limitless life of ego and pleasure, and been borne down by epic despair. The waning of the Barrymore's flame saw more than economic setback for Lord Thomson's wayward nephew, it saw him lose his second wife in a strange accident outside his own home. It sees him now losing a fight with cancer that he unhesitatingly blames on the years of chemical and moral abuse. He refuses painkillers, preferring painful clarity to painless stopor, and his razor-sharp mind whiles the bed-ridden hours contemplating esoteric lore in his relentless pursuit of the meaning of life. It's the same quest we're all on. He may get farther than most.

Sides can be drawn in the battle that brought Barrymore's down, and the most obvious villain would be the landlords who pulled the plug, Pat Adenakis surviving her husband and son Louis. But Barrymore's was a problem in need of a solution and a decisive act by the building owners was not inappropriate. Their faith in the spirit of the building turned out to be the guiding light that has brought about the possibility of the renaissance before us. After having entertained several abortive or unfounded proposals from both private and public sector to turn the place into club or theatre, the Adenakis' finally took the initiative and began investing personally in the future of their property, concentrating on first satisfying building codes that had been ignored for twenty-five years. This involved complete rebuilding of the interior superstructure to replace plywood and two-by-four with fireproof materials on a steel frame. The entire kitchen was moved downstairs, the intervening wall removed that had been previous stage back, and finally a protective wall removed that had maintained the original plaster proscenium decoration perfectly preserved. This single renovation has done more than any other to reach past the darkness that has haunted this noble building and draw on its glorious imperial past, but in combination with the new curving floor level bar, increased dancefloor, wider stairs and spanking new bathrooms it brings this room into the present era as well, maybe into the future. Passing past the new densely cool street level bar on your way to the great tiered and mirrored glory of the refurbished hall you might well imagine you are entering the kind of club that Zaphod would really frequent.

Which brings us of course to Eugene, famed impresario, who brought that colourful slice of Douglas Adams into the daily club listings, and who now embarks on this quest, in collusion with longtime partner Randy Lanctot, to bring respect back to the Barrymore's name. More than enough has been written about Eugene. I happen to love him very much but the whole thing may start going to his head very soon. Suffice it to say that if anybody deserves to get a shot at resurrecting this marvel and once again striving to capture the musical essence of an era then it's these two, and I see no reason why this time it can't go for the long haul.

You see I have a vision. I see a Barrymore's in a state of total restoration, returned to its original elegance in mezzanine and matching staircases, updated and improved, main floor and balcony, balcony boxes. And projection equipment tied in to a hi tech digital video/audio studio that could record shows and turn out cd masters, handle interactive programs, feed broadcasters, the whole thing on the web and networked with other media.....