Legendary El Mocambo roars back to life after multi-million dollar renovation

The neon palms are lit up once again as the legendary El Mocambo on Spadina has reopened to live music.

It’s been a long road for “Dragon’s Den” alum Michael Wekerle, who undertook an extensive renovation to repair the aging building located near the corner of Spadina Avenue and College Street. The venue has hosted global superstars, the Rolling Stones, the Police and Blondie among them, as well as some of Canada’s greatest musical talents, including the Tragically Hip and the Guess Who.

In 2014, when it seemed the El Mocambo was closing for good, Wekerle knew he wanted to save the sign. As the story goes, he contacted the building’s owners who told him he could have it for free, if he bought the whole property.

At the time, Wekerle said he was paying $3.8 million for the space, but the neglected 73-year-old building was in need of a massive overhaul to get it back into shape.

But Wekerle weathered unexpectedly huge costs – renovations reportedly cost upwards of $35 million – and numerous delays as he effectively gutted the building and rebuilt the insides from the ground up. And then there was the COVID-19 pandemic which put the damper on his planned for an April Fool’s Day opening party last year.

A series of pop-up concerts were staged in September before Our Lady Peace brought the beloved venue back to life, headlining the first live show experience in more than five years on Saturday night.

“Most people get a puppy or a car, this guy buys one of the most famous venues in the world,” the band’s frontman Raine Maida half joked shortly into the band’s nearly two-hour set.

“Mike has saved the El Mocambo literally by himself. He’s a Toronto hero.”

The concert coincides with the alt-rock bands new album, Spiritual Machines 2, which was released as a digital asset known as a non-fungible token (NFT). The release is limited to 500 copies. Fans who don’t – or can’t – get their hands on the blockchain technology will have to wait until January 2022 for the album’s traditional release.

A massive lineup of people, some coming from as far away as New York, waited outside in the rain since the early morning to secure their entry for the historic reopening.

“That is serious dedication – serious dedication,” Wekerle told the crowd prior to cutting the symbolic red tape and usher in a new era for the El Mocambo.

“The really difficult thing in putting this together was the timing and then of course, the pandemic, which was literally a month before we were to reopen,” he told CityNews.

The 10,000-square-foot historic venue will be unrecognizable to concertgoers who held a fondness for its dingy floors and tattered decor. All of that has been stripped out and replaced with a neon-light hue that evokes the Las Vegas Strip more than that it does a Toronto dive club.

On the second floor, the original sign once outside now adorns the wall, split into two and framing both sides of the main stage. The one outside the venue is a replica that Wekerle calls the “2.0 sign,” ready to survive many Canadian winters.

The building is a multimedia monster filled with state-of-the-art equipment capable of recording and live streaming concerts, and shooting videos. There’s also a production studio on its top floor where performers can lay down an album.