Memories of Call the Office
By Dan Brown It’s every Londoner’s birthright to rock out at Call the Office. And now it looks like a new generation of Forest City youth will get to exercise their birthright. According to a report in the London Free Press, the seedy watering hole — where I spent many a night in my teens and early 20s -- is to be reopened after the bigwigs at City Hall sign off on renovation plans. I call that a good-news story. As you may have guessed, I’m a Call the Office fan from way back. It looms large in my memory. I may have seen Iggy Pop at Kipling’s, Meatloaf at Dr. Rockit’s, KoKo Taylor at the Other Side of Five, and Cowboy Junkies at Centennial Hall, but it was Call the Office where I witnessed more live music than at any other joint downtown. The Legend Killers always put on a memorable show. Hopping Penguins raised the roof many a sweaty evening. And the Bourbon Tabernacle Choir was a guaranteed good time. There’s something about dive bars that naturally attracts young men (you will be unsurprised to learn I was reading a lot of Charles Bukowski in those days). Oh, and for the record, the proper nickname is “Call the O,” not “the Office,” even if the latter led to many unintentionally funny exchanges along these lines: Female acquaintance: “Where’s Dan tonight?”Male friend: “He’s at the Office.”Female acquaintance: “Wow, I didn’t even know he had an office job. He’s always working.” If you read the same Norm De Bono article, you’ll have heard the dormant bar’s owner has plans to put in a rehearsal space upstairs, an elevator, maybe even a washroom fit for human use. It won’t be the same. And that’s OK. I’m sure there is enough residual magic still sprinkled around the former York Hotel, which has been shuttered since pandemic times, to light up the stage. What do I see in my memories? There was that one bouncer who looked like John Belushi. He was awesome. And then the other bouncer who had the same haircut as Don Henley on the cover of End of the Innocence. There were street creatures we saw only at Call the Office. One, my drinking buddies and I nicknamed That Drunk Guy because, well, he was perpetually hammered. There was also Tall Alternative Guy and a whole crew of players in a drama playing only in our shared imagination. We saw them nowhere else. And yes, we sweated it out at shows featuring every future Canadian headliner: Crash Test Dummies, the Tragically Hip, Rhetostatics, you name it. I guess that’s what people are referring to as the Cassette Era now. Little did I know, but future friends like Gord Mood were at some of those same concerts. Nor do I know where we got the cash for all those Labatt 50s, which among our group of friends was called “Stinky.” You would put a loonie down on the pool table and if you and your partner had the magic touch, you could ride it all night. We also saw the Phantoms, which was rumoured to be a former Doors cover band. During my reggae phase, we saw Lazo and Satallites multiple times. And when the Gruesomes came through London on their farewell tour, I saw them at the Friday-night show, then came back for the Saturday-night show as well. Their bop I Need You still rings in my ears. One time one of the Ramones was scheduled to play, but the show was cancelled when he couldn’t get over the border. We stewed on the patio, drinking our cold bottles of Stinky. My Strathroy District Collegiate Institute classmate Tom Nesbitt was the lead singer for the Others, and their version of Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown inhabits a special place in one corner of my mind. White Punks on Funk seemed to be the house band, along with mainstays Julia Propeller. Those evenings generally went like this: Me and my buddies would go to GTs for what we called First Call, then stopped at the Wick for cheap draft before heading across York Street to our destination. The fun began in earnest when the band hit the stage. Now a new day is dawning for Call the Office and a younger generation will make memories of their own in the same spot where I came of age. I hope you have fun, kids! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
