Not Dead Yet: the Fight for Montreal’s Nightlife

I needed to feel like a child of Montreal again.

To stand next to a puddle of vomit and be nestled in the glow of some sainted street. To pluck French fries out of a greasy paper bag and burn the roof of my mouth. To take a handful of magic mushrooms and be reborn in the light of our neon cross.

I found redemption in a basement bar on Saint-Denis St., hunched over a comically large bottle of Labatt 50. Une grosse.

Just hours earlier, Instagram alerted me that Sarah Shook and the Disarmers were playing l’Escogriffe that night. No buying your tickets online and no fancy debit cards, just hop on the metro, get off at Mont Royal and pull up to the broken glass door with $22 in cash.

This sort of thing used to happen all the time in Montreal.
One minute you’re depressed about the state of the world, and the next you’re watching a band that just got profiled by The New York Times in a venue the size of a kitchen. New Noise called the Disarmers’ latest album Revelations “an Americana rock and roll masterpiece.”

But with so much new money pouring into Montreal and so many wealthy property owners calling the cops because the city’s music district is too musical, this is exactly the kind of show we’ll see less of.

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Venues in and around Saint-Denis are in a fight for their lives.

Places like Divan Orange, Coop le Cagibi, La Vitrola, The Diving Bell Social Club — stages that fueled Montreal’s indie revival in the early 2000s — are shuttering because of noise complaints and a runaway rental market.

There are still holdouts like l’Escogriffe, Rockette and Turbohaüs, but each owner will tell you they’re just a bad month or two away from insolvency.

They’re not dead yet. And after Wednesday night at l’Esco, I can tell you they’re something worth fighting for.

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I like country music because it’s about getting your ass kicked by life. While it’s true that most of what you hear on the radio is some version of “boy meets pickup truck,” the Disarmers write about poverty, addiction, abuse, self-sabotage and living with old wounds.

The track “Fuck Up” sums up the band’s vibe nicely:

With the cards that I’ve been dealt
I can’t win to save my life
I’m lousy in a fistfight even if I have a knife
Ain’t a thing that I can change to get my luck up
God don’t make mistakes he just makes fuck ups

There were about 40 people swaying under the red lights at l’Esco that night; old and young, settler and Indigenous, sporting cowboy hats and Converse flats, hailing from the spiral staircases of Mile End to the mountains just north of Sherbrooke. At one point during the show, a man wandered in from the street with his hat in hand, wading through the crowd for a few dollars to get him through the night.

He stuck around and listened to a couple of songs too.
I wrangled my friend Katia — a metalhead, photojournalist and kickboxer — to the show because I have a debilitating fear of going places alone.

Of course, I should have remembered that, in Montreal, you’re never alone. We ran into Wayne Robinson, a street worker with a dream of unionizing the workers on the frontlines of our city’s homelessness crisis. And he brought along songwriter Kurt “the Johnny Cash Machine” Chaboyer, a fine performer who once wrote a jingle for the Royal Bank of Canada.

We stood together just a few feet from lead singer River Shook, swaying and hollering throughout the set.

Depending on the song, the Disarmers either sound like a wild night out or someone coming to terms with a life of wild nights out. Some are exploding with the energy of outlaw country: guitar solos, a driving drum beat and lyrics about poor life choices. Others are painfully relatable, anchored by Shook’s sultry voice and the haunting wail of Phil Sullivan’s steel lap.

The work is punctuated by Shook’s humour. In “The Nail,” they write about a relationship on its last legs with razor-sharp wit.

When I think about the end and, boy, I think about it often
I can’t decide which one of us will be the nail in this here coffin

Shook’s songs are both steeped in the storytelling tradition of country music while turning the genre on its head. River Shook, who is nonbinary and bisexual, says they’ve had to deal with homophobia in a musical scene dominated by conservative radio stations.

“Most people, especially rural people, have not met a nonbinary person and they’ve never met a trans person,” Shook said, in a 2022 interview with NPR Music. “And so their only perception of that is what they’re hearing in the media and seeing on the news. And I think it’s important to just be a person doing a job.”

This relatability is crucial to the Disarmers’ success. Yes, their singer uses they/them pronouns and has a funny haircut but the music depicts the struggles of working people in an intensely relatable way. Not merely the “take this job and shove it” ethos of outlaw country but also the kind of introspection that leads people to quit drinking — as Shook did five years ago — and start to realize why they needed the bottle in the first place.

I hadn’t planned on seeing the Disarmers last week just as I hadn’t planned on writing this piece. But just a few days ago, I got to share this tiny space with one of my songwriting heroes, one of my dearest friends, and the finest troublemakers in this city.

These past six years have seen the island besieged by a provincial government hell-bent on chipping away at everything that makes us Montrealers. Through legislation and using their proxies in the media, Premier François Legault’s government has declared open season on affordable housing, immigrants, public schools, gender minorities and everyone whose ideology doesn’t align with their goal of making us rich as Ontarians.

But some nights, you remember what you’re fighting for. And I’m grateful River Shook and the gang reminded us.