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John Morstad/The Globe and Mail
Roel Bramer revolutionized Toronto’s nightlife, first by flouting the puritanical drinking laws of 1960s Ontario, then by starting a string of successful bars and nightclubs that fostered some of the top Canadian rock groups.
When he opened the Boiler Room and the Coal Bin on downtown Wellington Street in the late 1960s, the rule in Ontario was that alcohol could only be served with a meal. To get around that, Mr. Bramer served a small plate of food that met the rules but that few people would actually eat.
“I didn’t know much then but I did know this, there was a market waiting to be tapped,” Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography, Golden Roel: Bars, Bathtubs and Broken Rules . “Young men and women just wanted a place to go where they could let their hair down, have a couple of drinks hit the dance floor. And they wanted to do it unhindered by the presence of tablecloths, finger bowls and old aunties.”
Mr. Bramer understood the spirit of the times and drew on these insights as he built a series of successful businesses.
“Roel Bramer was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the early club scene in Toronto,” Michael Bruce Marshman wrote in his book Roel Bramer’s Club History in Toronto . The book lists Mr. Bramer’s clubs, when they opened and the name of every band that ever played there.
Mr. Bramer, who died on May 29 in Toronto at the age of 86, was never much of a rock ‘n’ roll fan, but his club the Gasworks featured some of the best Canadian rock bands. Rush, which performed there 24 times in the early 1970s, went on to national and international stardom.
“In the history of Canadian rock music, there is one club that stands out above the rest, the Gasworks,” said Dominic Farrell, a Toronto rock fan who came of age during the bar’s heyday. “Pretty much every Canadian band came through the Gasworks from when it opened in 1970 until it closed in 1993.”
In the hit film Wayne’s World, Mike Myers says: “This is the Gasworks, an excellent heavy metal bar! And always a babe fest.”
And during the Gasworks years, Mr. Bramer opened other clubs, including the Amsterdam Brasserie and Brewpub, the first establishment of its kind in the city, as well as a full-blown brewery, producing Amsterdam beer.
Roel Bramer was born on April 7, 1940, in Den Ham, a small town in the eastern part of the Netherlands, the youngest of five children. His father was the mayor of the town, however he was fired after the German occupation of Holland not long after Roel was born. His father later joined the Dutch Resistance and Mr. Bramer later remembered his mother denying her husband was at home when the Germans came looking for him. He was hiding in a secret place in their large house.
“I remember staring at their guns and thinking, ‘Which one is going to shoot my father’,” Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography . The Germans didn’t find him.
Roel Bramer came to Canada as a teenager on a family trip from Holland in the summer of 1959. They docked at Quebec City and Roel fell in love with Quebec’s wide-open spaces, and in Montreal he decided he wanted to go to McGill University.
“We toured the McGill campus and I fell head over heels in love with the place,” Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography . He started at McGill in 1960, after begging the dean of Arts and Sciences to admit him in spite of some weak marks from Holland.
Always the bon vivant, he immediately joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, which was party central. After graduating with an economics degree, he went to work at Dupont, selling cellophane over the phone, and shared an apartment with a fraternity brother, Rick Hart.
“Roel was always enterprising. We were working on opening a bar on Crecent Street when Dupont transferred him to Toronto, so that ended that,” said Mr. Hart, a Montreal stockbroker.
Soon after Mr. Bramer arrived in Toronto in 1966, he left Dupont and the corporate world to become a nightclub impresario. His first enterprise was called the The International Swingles Club. He and his new roommate, Rick McGraw, booked venues for parties so young people could meet each other. Men paid $15, women paid $2.50 to join.
“The first party we had was hugely successful, but it got raided for liquor violations, which made it an even bigger success,” said Mr. McGraw, who shared a house in Yorkville with Mr. Bramer in the early years. He was Mr. Bramer’s closest friend for 58 years.
From there, Mr. Bramer went into opening legitimate restaurants and bars. With backing from friends, he opened a tavern called the Boiler Room in a basement on Wellington Street near Bay Street. With the help of investor George Butterfield and his wife, Martha Butterfield, they decorated the place using material they retrieved from an abandoned ship in the Toronto Harbour.
He then rented a place next door, which he called the Coal Bin, and blasted a hole in the wall to join the two establishments. The result was one huge space…
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