Venue Stories - Green Room

Ah Green Room. If you’re in Montreal on a Friday or Saturday night and want to dance with stylish young student hipsters to indie rockin tunes, you go to Green Room. This space is ideal in so many ways except the one that counts in a series called Venue Stories..ie; it’s no longer a venue. I saw one of the owners in a local cafe (Olympico) yesterday and we bemoaned the fact together. Indyish was there putting on shows right smack dab in the middle of the troubles with the complaining neighbor(s?) who killed the music, but we, like so many good shows put on by Green Room’s incredibly passionate staff, flew under the radar for a while and squeezed out the last of the live showness along with ‘em.

When Green Room was a venue, it was free for artists. The stage (now a seating area) was large enough for a 9 piece band to all be up there - maybe 8 ft by 10 ft? They have a set of turntables with the soundboard at the back of the bar, facing the stage, which made a good set up for the sound technician to do his/her job right, but the gear was (in my limited experience) finicky and feedbacky perhaps because the sound technician they provided (nice!) was often someone wanting to get experience, willing to work for the bar for cheap, annnd too bloody likely to wander far away from the board during performances.

Also, I don’t know if this is still true, but when we were there for Hip Hop Karaoke (which I’m stoked to gossip we may be bringing back soon!) the soundboard / turntables area was, like sooo many in Montreal, a scary snakepit. Don’t get me wrong, everything turned out fine and groovy, but yeah - snakepit. Sometimes we have the good luck to get stage managers and technical directors who usually work in beautiful large capacity theatres across Canada like Centaur, Neptune or Mirvish, helping out with Indyish shows. The funniest / scariest thing is to see the look of horror on their faces when they check out the tech situation in these DIY club venues we sometimes frequent for the Mess.

Once, not at Green Room but at a similar place on St Laurent, a stage manager walked in for set up and gasped, gnawed her hand and asked with forcible calm “um, is that duck tape holding up those cables AND that light fixture?” Welcome to the world of indie live music venues.. lovely, soulful, held together by duck tape. And, when they work: community. The live music may be gone from Green Room, but the community is still there and kicking and not ready to give up the fight quite yet. Go buy them a drink and sign the petition!

Here’s 2 quick snipits to give you an idea of the goodness that was live events at the Green Room:

Here’s Hip Hop Karaoke

And a beautiful Winks side project called Gutstrings:

Green Room now works for game night, 5 a 7 evenings, drawing parties, meetings of minds and dance dance revolutions. The address is the same as it ever was:

5386 St Laurent
Montreal, QC H2T 1S1
Phone: 514-495-4448