Global news reported that demolition of the club begins on tuesday!
Richard's on Richards R.I.P. It's last call for the legendary Vancouver nightclub
VANCOUVER - Richard’s on Richards is toast. The long-standing Vancouver nightclub will stage its last show Sunday, and will be knocked down for a new condo development by the end of the month.
The club is supposed to be resurrected in new digs on the old A&B Sound site on Seymour, but it won’t be the same. There’s something about old nightclubs that defies a transfer to a new location, and Richard’s was a cool old building that was perfect for live music. Brick walls, a high ceiling, wood floor — they really don’t make ’em that way anymore.
It joins a storied list of Vancouver nightclubs that have closed, changed their format or fallen to the wrecker’s ball in recent years. The Starfish Room, the Town Pump, the Marine Club, the Luv-a-Fair, Graceland, the Smilin’ Buddha, the Savoy, the Cave, the Marco Polo, O’Hara’s, Oil Can Harry’s, the Spinning Wheel, Rohan’s — they’re all long gone and fading into memory.
“🞵🞵🞵🞵’s on Dicks” wasn’t always held in high esteem by the live music community, of course. In the ’80s it was a beautiful-people bar with Top 40 cover bands, the kind of place some people adored and others despised. It reminded me of a short-lived pickup bar in Gastown called Amnesia, which a female friend noted was an apt name, ’cause you didn’t want to remember who you went home with.
The decor was still a little too glitzy for a live music club, even in recent years. Frankly, live music just seems to have a little more je ne sait quoi in a dump like the Marine Club, which looked like a ’50s rec room gone to seed and still smelled like an ashtray years after smoking was banned in bars.
But hey, Richard’s on Richards did have its share of great shows. The last one I can recall was Art Bergmann’s triumphant return to the stage after years of suffering from arthritis. The Zombies were incredible at Richard’s a couple of years back, as was Nick Lowe. Before it was Richard’s on Richards it was an all-ages punk club called The Laundromat, where Subhumans singer Wimpy Roy was once hauled off the stage by his crazed fans, who literally ripped his clothes off and deposited him back onstage, naked.
Ah, youth.
The notorious Courtney Love bared her 🞵🞵🞵🞵🞵 onstage at Richard’s, although she wasn’t actually performing — it was a Lemonheads gig. To the liquor board, though, the most notorious Richard’s show was a Black-Eyed Peas gig in 2004 where the masses were crammed in like sardines.
“I would say we were well over 700,” recalled Bob Burrows, who booked Richard’s for years.
“The legal capacity at the time was 375, which was absurd. They don’t do that anymore, they raised [capacity] to the fire code. I paid a huge fine for that, I think it was $28,000. They threw the book at us.”
Burrows said the Richard’s building was originally a garage, and that it was actually two buildings that were joined.
“The side where you went in, the lobby, was a separate building from the actual club,” he explained.
“When David Kim bought the property (in the late ’90s) he bought the club first, then sent me to negotiate with the old guy that owned the lobby. It was really weird, we owned half the club but not the other half. He ran an auto electrical-repair thing out of that side. I remember when I first went there, the whole building opened up like a garage door on that side.”
Nightclub fixtures Roger Gibson and Bruce Allen opened Richard’s in the early ’80s, but never owned the building, “much to Bruce’s chagrin.” Burrows booked the club for Kim, and continued to book it after the current owner, 0742823 B.C. Ltd. (which lists Alam Karim as director) bought it in 2005.
The new Richard’s will be nothing like the old one, and won’t be called Richard’s on Richards, because it’s on Seymour street. Vince Alvaro — who used to run Graceland — has partnered with Karim on the club, which promises to be quite the deal. Renovations have cost $3.7 million to date, and the club is supposed to open in mid-to-late October.
The new space is huge — 30,000 square feet. Alvaro says it will feature four lounges on three floors, some quiet, some not, as well as art galleries run by the Belkin Gallery and Presentation House. There will be some live music during the week, but it will be a dance club on the weekend. Capacity will be 449.
“It’s a very art-oriented nightclub, if that makes any sense,” Alvaro said.
“A lot like Graceland was. A lot of the clientele will be people involved in the arts, visual arts, music, film, fashion, photography.”
The main dance floor will be on A&B’s old main floor. But the basement sounds like the most interesting space.
“Downstairs there’s a 6,000-square-foot basement with 12-foot-high ceilings,” Alvaro said.
“It’s a big unisex bathroom, [and] the bathroom has its own dance floor and bar in it. It’s going to be totally wild, pushing all sorts of buttons. Nothing like it in the city.”
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Richard...y+Vancouver+nightclub/1802274/story.html
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