The world famous El Mocambo is the pinnacle of Toronto’s vibrant music club scene. With a ‘tip of the hat’ to the album release of the Rolling Stones ‘Live At The El Mocambo’, Damian Kearns went to find out how the recent restoration of the club has elevated the landmark from a two floor mid level concert hall to a three storey monument to live sound, complete with a high end recording studio and video production suite!

A Recording Studio With A Liquor Licence?

When tech entrepreneur turned TV star Michael Wekerle originally stopped into the El Mocambo, he was only looking to buy the iconic palm-shaped neon sign to add to his memorabilia collection. Four million dollars later, he had the whole building and thus began a five year restoration that has taken the venerable venue, dating from 1948, and placed it atop Toronto’s scene as the Toronto destination club for live music. The 464 Spadina Avenue site itself has had a long history of music events dating back to 1850 and tracing back even farther, the address was a safe haven for victims of slavery. It was also one of the first local institutions to have been granted a liquor licence.

As a massive Rolling Stones fan– ‘Live At The El Mocambo’ is now to be part of my vinyl collection- The ‘El Mo’ was the first music venue I attended when I arrived in Toronto in January of 1995. I’ve been here many times but it’s not the same place it was before 2014 and that’s a good thing.

Much of the credit for the new audio, visual and lighting design goes to Jamie Howieson, the El Mocambo’s Executive Designer and original Production Manager. Michael Wekerle’s early vision for the redesign was as a two-tiered live venue that also served as a high end recording facility for sound and picture. In an April 2022 television interview, Wekerle playfully referred to his club as being “a floating floor sound studio that just so happens to have a liquor licence.” Reductionist humour aside, it’s easy to see Wekerle takes great pride in The El Mo’s transformation, as he rightly should. 

Music Producer, musician, recording engineer and guitarist Clifton David Broadbridge was another key player in the undertaking of the construction and design, providing input and recommending personnel. He was there with Michael Wekerle the day he tried to buy the sign and stayed around for the entire build. Now, Broadbridge has a studio in Crossville, Tennessee, where he’s just finished working on 54-40’s album, ‘Live At The El Mocambo’, to be released this Fall.

Since there were several stages to the redesign, there’s a good deal more credit that needs to go around but in talking to the staff, it’s clear Jamie Howieson is the name mentioned most. Plaudits and praise need also be heaped on General Manager Alicia Hibberd for skillfully and creatively navigating the company through 2020-present by quickly embracing live streaming, through unique merchandising ideas and by other lucrative revenue streams. One really tantalising merchandise strategy was to partner with Fender to create El Mocambo Fender Custom Shop guitars from 300 year old Easters White Pine sourced from the original materials of the building that were replaced during retrofitting. I say ‘tantalising’ because when I told my wife about this the first words out of her mouth were “Damo, you don’t need another guitar”. 

Okay, so no more guitars for me. But what’s the El Mocambo actually like in 2022? On behalf of Production Expert, I contacted veteran Canadian recording engineer, Doug McClement, who invited me to sit in on sound check and watch a night’s performances as he worked the console in the swank recording studio of the newly added third floor.  The following is my accounting of my time at the El Mocambo on Friday, May 6, 2022, one week before the Rolling Stones live album set gets released.

May 6, 2022: Sound Check

Tucked just south of College Street on the west side of Spadina Ave., the club is situated right where Toronto’s Chinatown drifts into Kensington Market. It’s just before 5 pm and I’m sitting on one of several gorgeous (and extremely comfortable) leather couches and benches gracing the third floor control room of the recently renovated El Mocambo, listening to recording engineer Doug McClement run through sound check with tonight’s Floor Two headliners, KC Roberts & The Live Revolution. Two of the studio’s trio of wall-mounted ATC speakers are pumping! Doug is switching between his nearfield ATC’s and the farfields as he briskly sculpts various Shure and Sennheiser stage mic’s and an array of 6 audience microphones (an MKH 416 on either side of the stage pointed at the centre of the audience, a pair of Sennheiser pencil mic’s hanging from the balcony, and an AT 825 stereo mic above FOH position) into a rich, live sounding mix, worthy of direct transfer to vinyl. As with any of the headline gigs here these days, Pro Tools, acting mostly as a tape machine, will be working as hard tonight as Doug and his excellent audio team, Taras Blyzniuk and Edgard Silva, to faithfully capture this moment in time.

Doug speaks with the band like a veteran recording engineer should– friendly and deferential- as they work together to perfect the mix balance.  It's not surprising that he’s as charming as he is nimble; McClement has been an internationally respected recording engineer for 44 years; recording every major and minor act to come into or from Canada that you can think of. Notably, he worked the audio for the TV broadcast of Sarsfest at Downsview Park in 2003 (Rolling Stones and AC/DC co-headlined the epic multi act festival attended by an estimated 450,000 people or more), and was part of the audio team for the past five Olympic games, including his recent trip to Beijing for the Winter Olympics. If you ask McClement, there’s never been anything else he’d rather be doing. Doug, the founder of LiveWire Remote Recorders LTD and Harris Institute Vice President tells me as he works the console tonight that he mixed 130 shows at the El Mo from 1980-1990. He’s kept diaries of all his many, many gigs which I hope some day will be shared with the rest of us in book form.

Outside and below the control room, on Floor One and Floor Two, are the two separate stages of the El Mocambo. We see them on the screens at the front of the control room via live video feeds which are integral infrastructure, given the physical distances between recording studio and performers. Fed 64 channels from Floor Two and 32 channels from Floor One, the incredible sounding SSL L550 console in the control room is receiving its audio from SSL converters that receive the MADI from a split snake from DiGiCo front of house consoles, scaled to meet the differing needs of both floors. The stereo mixes are sounding great for both bands. It’s worth noting the El Mocambo’s recording studio is fully surround capable as well which may yet serve broadcasters and live album mixers on future gigs. Tonight, it’s stereo all the way.

Adding further function to form here in the recording area, through a door on the east wall of the control room is a broadcast-capable video recording, editing and switching suite with 5x 4k Capture and Final Cut Pro X editing. When in use, this video control room elevates the venue to the status of mini ‘broadcaster’ and in fact, the webcast capabilities proved to be a vital income stream during the new El Mo’s first two years in operation, during the height of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Getting back to the mix, downstairs on Floor One, another musical act, Andrew Hyatt, is running through sound check and there’s a tasty balance on their mix too, though Doug is focussing on Floor Two’s events tonight. As I mentioned earlier, El Mocambo has gone from 2 floors to three floors above ground, each of them ‘acoustically floating’ to ensure both stages on any given night have an excellent chance of recording something to remember. There really isn’t any crosstalk between the floors and with the control room door shut tight, almost nothing of Floor Two’s band practising loudly outside the door is coming in. Isolation never sounded so good.

While Doug is working away, I take a break to travel downstairs to the basement to chat with Production Manager, Andre Doucette. A recording engineer as well, Andre’s spent time on the road and he showed me a picture of his very cool, impressive home music studio. Doucette tells me, among other things he does to keep the place running smoothly, he performs regular technical maintenance around the El Mocambo and sometimes ends up working FOH when they need him to step in. Andre fills me in on the backstory of the El Mo’s renovation and lets me in on a fun bit of trivia: That original palm tree neon sign which owner Michael Wekerle initially coveted has been split in two, retrofitted with LED’s and now enshrines the stage on Floor Two! That is the level of dedication and inspiration for detail that maximises the visual impact of every corner of the modern El Mocambo.

Andre’s one of the reasons the El Mo is earning its place as Canada’s premier destination live music venue and I think other clubs, hoping to survive, need to get this right as well: Putting people who love music and recording (as he does) in administrative positions is a key survival tactic. This is true for the studios and broadcasters I’ve worked for as well. Companies involved in sound need audio zealots in caretaking positions or they will die a thousand deaths before some soulless accountant pulls the plug. How do I know this? I didn’t go freelance by choice, I’ll just say that.

I go back upstairs after my enlightening conversation with Andre and Doug’s through with the sound checks and test recordings. Time for a quick bite.

Show Time At The El Mocambo

Over dinner at a local deli, Doug and I swap stories and slowly figure out who our mutual friends are. I’ve said this about other recording engineers but Doug, being the archetype and industry leader he is, really validates my heartfelt belief that truly brilliant audio engineers are people who balance technical skills, interpersonal skills and humility to make the job look easier than we all know it isn’t. He teaches at Harris Institute, the local, renowned recording school, and really cares about his friends in the business. He’s a recording engineer down to the ‘atomic level’.

We settle the bill, leave, walk back around the corner, climb the stairs to Floor Three and moments later the crowd that hadn’t been there earlier erupts as the opening act takes the stage. The mix sounds amazing and thicker and fuller than before, now the audience is adding their energy to the night’s events. As we listen to the 2 mix, quizzical drink-holding patrons are peering into the studio through the window on the west side of the control room, from the glitzy mezzanine that rings the mainstage from above, agog, since no other place in town has anything like this. 

Wondering how it’s sounding for them, I head out into the mezzanine crowd to have a listen. This glamorous perch is a slender but groovy addition that anyone familiar with the Toronto real estate market will tell you, maximizes the use of very valuable downtown property.

The opening act is a funk group, ‘The Free Label’ and they are funkifying the house, aided by the El Mo’s wicked PA system. An L-Acoustics Kara II is main PA, which is buttressed by a side hang Kiva II, an SB18-2 single 18” flown and four KS28 dual 18” subwoofers. The front fill is an X8 and the digital amplifiers are LA12X. This is the cleanest, biggest wall of sound I’ve ever heard in a club this size and it sounds better than many of the PA’s at the stadium shows I’ve attended. The fans are going absolutely wild. The venue lighting is world class too but as I now know their secret, I am mesmerised momentarily by the two halves of the original sign hanging on the sides of the stage around the glowing video screen.

Though I’m absolutely enjoying myself, I wish I wasn’t here to work tonight but I now have an excellent idea where I’ll be taking my wife and friends next. After two years of restrictions and a recent personal bout with Covid, this has been a night of joy for me and this joy is reflected in the faces in the crowd of people, who, like me, haven’t had an experience like this before. The El Mocambo really is the best place to see and hear a band. El Mo is music therapy and it’s splendour and it’s casually cool and it’s the best place ever to put a recording studio. Damn, I want one of those guitars.

Afterglow

Saturday morning, as I continued typing up this article, I sat in my studio and cranked up Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble’s ‘A Legend In the Making: Live at the El Mocambo’ to get me going. The original show aired as a live CHUM/CITY simulcast in the summer of 1983 and the bits I’m listening to are up on YouTube. Doug McClement had told me about a time he put this film up on the Floor Two stage screen and blasted it from the PA. His opinion is the mix still holds up after nearly 40 years. He’s right of course. He knows substantially more than a little something about mixing at the El Mo. 

There’s a deep connection to the past at the El Mocambo, as evidenced in the neon palm trees and those forged into the mezzanine railing, the pictures of famous bands playing there silk-screened onto the walls (atop various acoustic materials to help manage the overall sonic excellence of the place), and maybe most importantly, the fact that Floors One and Two have been meticulously crafted to serve modern patrons of the Digital Age but haven’t lost any of their former ‘analogue’ charm. 

The single LED-lighted palm of the sign hanging out front evokes images of an oasis, which is what this site has always been. From safe haven, to music pilgrimage destination and now as well, an audio visual production house to help tell its stories, The El Mocambo is all about quenching the thirst for freedom, if only for a night, at the very best club in town. 

If you’re in Toronto, do yourself a favour and come to the El Mocambo for a set. As much as I’ve tried to capture the feeling of being there in this article, there’s really nothing like being at a live event.

Check out their website for more info and pictures at elmocambo.com