He helped bring the Ramones, the Police and the B-52’s to Toronto for the first time. Nearly 50 years later, he’s being celebrated in a new book

In a career that has lasted nearly five decades and involved thousands of concerts, eminent Toronto promoter Gary Topp has but a few regrets.
One of his biggest involved an act he and partner Gary Cormier (known collectively as the Garys) tried to book for their inaugural Police Picnic in 1981 at the Grove in Oakville, an all-day festival showcasing some of the best bands of rock’s new wave, headlined by the trio comprised of Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland.
Topp had been reading about a guy performing at New York clubs clad in a G-string with a couple of back up singers.
“I was thinking, he’d be great for the Police Picnic because he’s so good,” Topp said. So he reached out to the artist’s manager, who agreed.
Unfortunately, the booking agency for the Police Picnic — headed by Copeland’s brother Ian — had approval over the acts on the bill, such as the Specials and Iggy Pop, and put the kibosh on the idea.
“They wouldn’t let me do it,” lamented Topp, 78, before adding with a chuckle, “Can you imagine Prince at the Police Picnic? (The audience) probably would have hated him.”
Topp’s extraordinary career is documented in the new book “He Hijacked My Brain: Gary Topp’s Toronto,” a 320-page illustrated oral history (limited to 1,200 copies) that will be launched Sunday afternoon at a sold-out event at the Concert Hall.
Written by Derek Emerson, Stephen Perry, Fran Grasso, Shawn Chirrey and Simon Harvey, the book focuses on the impact Topp made both as an independent promoter and Cormier’s partner, when the duo commandeered such venues as the New Yorker, the Edge and the Horseshoe Tavern and introduced to the city such musical visionaries as the Ramones, Tom Waits, the Police, Talking Heads, the B-52’s, the Stranglers and local innovators Nash the Slash, Rough Trade and the Viletones.
More impressively, the Garys treated their acts so well that they inspired artist loyalty during an era when the Michael Cohl-led Concert Productions International was the corporate behemoth in the event promotion business.
“We fed the opening acts, the local acts,” Topp recalled. “One time I was sitting there eating and a U.K. band said, ‘You’re feeding the support act? They usually pay to play to open for us.’ We strove to be good hosts because we loved the people we were presenting.”
And when it came to chasing talent, the Garys had one golden rule.
“We tried not to book artists that we didn’t like,” said Topp, who also brought comedian Jerry Seinfeld, Metallica and — on his own — the Dixie Chicks to Toronto for their first shows.
“We weren’t your normal promoters. We weren’t walking around with attaché cases handcuffed to our wrists or anything. We were as much the audience as we were promoters.
“Gary and I were booking out of our record collections.”
As Elliott Lefko, vice-president of global touring for AEG/Goldenvoice, who got his start in Toronto, told the Star, if it weren’t for the Garys’ presence in Toronto’s concert promotion mix, the city’s scene may not have been nearly as varied.
“They invented a lot of places,” Lefko said. “For example, they created a space for new wave music in Toronto with the Edge. So many great bands, like Ultravox and X, played there.”
Lefko noted, however, that the Garys also booked other genres, including the big-band jazz of Carla Bley, the avant-garde jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Tex-Mex of Joe “King” Carrasco, as well as Mexican wrestling and the Jim Rose Circus.
“They weren’t just bringing in the flavour of the month,” Lefko said. “A larger promoter would just bring in stuff that sells. The Garys would lose money on shows, but they would just do it because they really loved the music.”
While he participated in David Collier’s 2020 graphic novel, “Topp: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World,” when it came to writing his own book about his exploits, Topp said he tried, “but I wasn’t into it.”
Then, two-and-a-half years ago, he was approached by Derek Emerson, who co-wrote the 2019 Heritage Toronto Book Award winner “Tomorrow Is Too Late: Toronto Hardcore Punk in the 1980s” and “Eve of Darkness: Toronto Heavy Metal in the 1980s.”
“For both of those books, we interviewed Gary because he had interactions with both of those scenes,” Emerson said. “And through that process, we thought, there has to be a book on Gary. We were intending to do a book about the Garys, but Cormier is working on his own. He participated with this one to a degree but wanted to save some content for his own book.”
Topp, who split from Cormier in 1993, agreed to the authors’ request on one condition.
“I wanted it to be about the community that I was in the middle of — which started around ‘72 or ‘73, when I was at the Roxy,” Topp said, of the east end repertory cinema he programmed. “These kids were unhappy. They had no culture, and they found something at the Roxy. It was a subculture.
“When we got to the New Yorker, bands were starting to form, and for about 1,000 people — bands and fans — this was their life, live or die. They were getting influenced by DIY culture and they were doing something. It was giving purpose to their lives.”
Designed by Toronto graphics firm typotherapy, “He Hijacked My Brain” offers a fascinating history of that era: almost 100 key players, including performers, scenesters and other promoters are interviewed, including the Viletones’ Steven Leckie, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo and Rough Trade’s Carole Pope.
Emerson said that while Collier’s “Topp” is a great book, “there’s only so much you can put in there. My interest was to go a little further and look at some of the ephemera and learn some of the back story from people that were Gary’s inside crew.”
Packed with photos and handmade promotional flyers from Topp’s personal archive, the book also contains the contract breakdown of the first money-losing Police Picnic, a Garys concert timeline poster, trading cards, and a reproduction ticket stub bookmark, among other goodies.
Some of the books will randomly include original memorabilia provided by Topp himself, such as buttons, flyers and ticket stubs.
“I brought up the concept of maybe sharing some of it, sort of like a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket,” said Emerson. “Gary was up for it, and it sounded like he would donate a half-dozen things.
“There’s probably closer to 100 items overall,” added Emerson, who will be screening a 30-minute documentary he made about Topp at Sunday’s book launch.
For Topp, who grew up loving Broadway musicals, folk, bluegrass, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, the interest in making a career of staging events stemmed from his days at the Roxy, where he would play his own favourite music between films and bands to broaden his audiences’ horizons.
“People loved it,” said Topp. “I deejayed every movie I ever showed. I deejayed every concert we ever did. It was aimed at the audience and at the artist who was playing.
“I think we kind of countered culture. My whole incentive was to get people to do what you wanted to do. If somebody says, ‘You can’t do that’ — why not?”
Topp, who keeps his hand in promotion these days with frequent events at the specialty bookshop Sellers & Newel in Little Italy, says greed was never a consideration when it came his career.
“You’ve got to make money to live and pay your expenses, but I wasn’t money driven,” he said. “It was in my soul, you know?”