| As an event producer, I’ve got a varied past.
I’ve produced theatre, music, concerts, parties and afterhours… I’m probably best known for my afterhours clubs… 321 W. Hastings was where I got my start, Around 1992 I moved into an established “warehouse” that was doing illegal band nights. This was my introduction to the management of underground events, previously I’d done some very “safe” childrens theatre projects and a couple of TV projects…. After about a year, the people that were running it had moved on and I was left driving the ship… 321 featured bands like DOA, the Hard Rock Miners, the Real MacKenzies, Veda Hille, and even Bif Naked… before she was “THE” Bif Naked… It was your basic late night band and beer fest, lots of good hard rockin’ fun…. But that was before I discovered house music… By 1994 I’d been to a few Raves and I knew that was where I wanted to focus my efforts… the “MASSIVES” were a real lure and the first time that I’d considered the possibility that “we” (young people) could do something commercially viable and self run. From there I started doing house parties… First I got Franklin going along with friends Ben Watson, Leandro DeSilva and Byron Lucas and our friend Simon… the crack head… that was the total east side warehouse takeover… we had lots of early parties featuring DJ Lace, HeeBeeGeeBee, T-Bone (Tyler Stadius), Ali and many other locals (I even remember Donald Glaude, gracing our tables once or twice as well). One party called DELUGE comes to mind where we had a dunk tank … lol, bet the cops would have loved to get me in that one. Later, I invented undernet.* a magstrip ticketing system that used Credit card style tickets as a membership system…. Coupled with a non-profit society and we were suddenly doing an end run around the established “public event” bylaws. This led to several years as the “big party guy”. We used our ticketing system to secure the venues and permits required to do a show and then sold the package including the venue, permits, ticketing and marketing assistance, too whatever promoter was chic (and flush) at the time… Thereby teaming up with some of Vancouver’s Top promoters and bringing many a top act into the city… Orb, Orbital, Sven Vath, Talla IIXLC, Mistress Barbara, to many international DJ to name were brought into the city as the whole Vancouver scene grew to new levels… We opened up venues like the Woodwards Building, Robson Place, Thunderbird Arena, Plaza of Nations and the PNE to raves… The Queen Elizabeth theatre even held a rave using our ticketing system to manage it. The scene was expanding so much, that the city passed new by-laws around all night events. This effectively shut us down, as it would only allow events to be held in “major” facilities that included TicketMaster contracts (read… there goes our profit centre) and made the whole thing too expensive to be profitable by taxing it and requiring high police and security ratio’s. Back to the underground… For the next few years I ran the Victory, the Amsterdam and R-House… all afterhours that ran for some time, The Victory being the longest running and probably best known and loved of my projects. Lately the parties I’ve been producing have been smaller, more personal events. We do a regular camping trip in June that involves more gear than most clubs have :) The Last 2 new years eve’s we’ve done parties at the Penthouse of the Wall centre, very fun way to celebrate the new year… and lately I’ve been getting the bug to do another series of events… so stay tuned for that, it’s coming soon. :lol: |
FEATURED WEB TEMPLATE 
