Every city needs a Wunderbar, but only Edmonton has it. This venue re-invigorated many of Edmonton’s music scenes – and definitely launched a few – and provided a space and outlet for an entire city’s indie endeavours. There have always been alternative venues in Edmonton, especially when it came to shows organized by Weird Canada (Bonnie Doon Bowling Alley, Steel Wheels Pizza, Edmonton Music Society, the McKernan LRT Tunnel, The End of the World, Castle Awesome, The Wicked Awesomes! basement), and traditional venues that allowed smaller and weirder shows to happen (The Artery, Bohemia, Likwid Lounge and New City). Yet nothing gave Edmontonian bands and promoters everything they needed – a central location, low costs, a good sound system and helpful, accepting, friendly staff – until The New Wunderbar opened its doors.
The New Wunderbar celebrated its second birthday this past summer, and in its short time as an Edmonton venue, it’s come to mean a lot to a lot of people. It’s an easy-to-book bar with owners that are genuine music fans, and it’s got a beer list that beats out every other bar in the city. It’s a small room, but it’s versatile; with an 80-person capacity, you don’t need many people to keep it from looking empty, and when it’s packed, it can be the concert you’ll talk about forever.
Locals (or ex-locals) like The Wicked Awesomes!, Krang, Brazilian Money, Travis Bretzer, TAIWAN, Bonspiel, Fire Next Time, Scenic Route To Alaska, Renny Wilson, Jessica Jalbert, Slates, Sans AIDS, Mac DeMarco, Jom Comyn, Energetic Action, Rhythm of Cruelty, The Group Sound, Mitchmatic, Geister, etc. etc. all play or played the venue regularly, but out-of-town acts like Phil Elvrum, Japanther, Mark Sultan, Nü Sensae and Dog Day have also taken the Wunderbar stage. Wunderbar has also meant a lot to the Weird Canada community, with Aaron Levin having booked many shows there while living in Edmonton (Grimes, Pop Winds, Babysitter, Walter TV, Fist City, DBL Dragon, Feral Children, and many more), and many of these bands play there on their way across the prairies. This summer even saw ‘Weird Canada Day’ – a full day event at Wunderbar featuring Monomyth, Brazilian Money, Rocktimus Crime and 10 others.
One of the main reasons for Wunderbar’s popularity with local and touring bands is that the staff treats artists and promoters with a great deal of respect, freedom and generosity. If you set up a show at Wunderbar, there is a sound system that they will help you use, little to no charge, and bands/promoters get 100% of the door. Co-owner Craig Martell does most of the booking at this point, but the core idea has stayed the same.
Craig could be an imposing guy. Standing at 6’5, he is definitely a presence in the small Wunderbar room. As soon as you talk to him, his affability is immediate. He’s a conversationalist that can speak about anything, shows a genuine interest in the people he’s talking to, and cares about what he says and how he says it. That’s what’s so immediately clear about Craig and the other Wunderbar owners: they care. They care about the bands that come to their bar, they care about the product they put out, and they care about their patrons.
The Wunderbar story is really best told by Craig himself, so I sat down with him for an oral history of the bar. Any sections in italics are additions meant as explanatory asides.
Michael Deane
Totally Disconnected
www.totallydisconnected.com

/////////////// WUNDERBAR: THE BEGINNING ///////////////
Craig moved to Edmonton from Nova Scotia about five years ago. At first, he worked downtown at the Sherlock Holmes pub along with his Wunderbar co-owners before they decided to branch out and start their own bar. Wunderbar was always a mixed bag before Craig and co. took it over. It had a reputation as a skinhead bar, but if you went in on a Saturday night, it might look like a German soccer tavern with Euro club hits being played, or there could be a punk show packed to the gills with 18-year olds.

Craig
::
I had been to Wunderbar a few times beforehand, and contrary to popular belief it had the same owners for seven years. People tend to think that it had a pile of different owners, because it had a bunch of faces, but it was the same owners the whole time. The owners didn’t spend a lot of time here because they had other business endeavours that they were involved with. They had one manager, Chris, who was a really nice guy and a good manager, but they had no intention of ever being a live music venue. They wanted to have a hangout spot for them and their friends, kind of a mod club European soccer bar, and that involves by nature a lot of skinheads. It got the reputation as a Nazi bar, but it was never that; it was almost all non-racist skinheads. So that crowd kept them in business for a number of years, but when things started dying out and their friends aged a bit, they kind of panicked and figured they needed people in there. A few bands came and asked to play, so they allowed shows to happen. They kind of begrudgingly became a live music venue. Chris did his best to allow bands to play and be good, but he wasn’t really involved in the local music scene. He wasn’t seeking out development of local talent, but he’s an amazing guy.
Chris now works on the railroad, and also worked at the scooter shop that the former Wunderbar owners also ran.

Craig
::
They had a manager who took over before we did and he tried to turn it into a dance club, and that’s when everything self-destructed as a venue. Bands would be asked to play, but they’d be asked to play 40% cover songs. Or they’d book a punk show and on the same night they’d book a birthday party for one of the Edmonton Eskimos – it just led to a lot of chaos. Then they decided to sell the business and they actually did sell it to a guy about a month or two before we bought it. The guy who bought it was a guy we’d known for years from the service industry – he was a fine dining server with an amazing resume, but he eventually got into doing a lot of crack. He went to rehab and came out, and presented the owners with a great business plan about how he wanted to turn it into a bistro. He wanted to take over but he had no money, so he wanted to run the place and pay them back with his profits. They really wanted to get rid of the place so they agreed to it. And then within a month they realized the place had changed completely. He would get people to work on it and send the owners the bill and everyone who was working here were street people and crackheads, and the owners were just like, “this isn’t what we agreed to.”The owners then installed Cameron Noyes, who is a local music legend. He played in a bunch of punk bands back in the day, used to book European tours for Canadian punk bands, managed SNFU, and was involved with The Smalls. He had run the place for about a month before we took over, and when we started he became our booker. We had no intention of ever owning a live music venue; it’s the exact business I never wanted to get into. It’s the hardest bar to make money with because you are automatically saying “we’re not going to have regulars” – you’re not going to have guys who come in every night and spend $100, which every other bar has. If you go to a neighbourhood pub, you’re going to have a guy who comes in every day and drops $50-75, and we don’t have anyone that comes in here five nights per week. We had a business plan for something that wasn’t going to be a music venue, but the two things we didn’t have were money and any sense of making it a real thing.

/////////////// TAKING OVER WUNDERBAR ///////////////
Craig
::
We were going to be a beer bar, we were going to have food, and we were going to be arts-related, but not in a pretentious way. Wunderbar came up for sale and we had all been there, and Chris – my business partner – had been in a band that played here quite a bit. He knew the old owners, and it was affordable. Even for us on a small level – in the bar industry – money works on level you can’t fathom. As someone who never has more than a thousand dollars, the idea of ordering $3,000 of liquor every week is so foreign. So, the bar came up for sale, and we made the down payment – we had enough for a down payment, but we had no other money. We had $4,000 between us and borrowed the rest from friends and family and bought the place – we bought it on a Wednesday and took over on the following Saturday. Very little was here, and they’d been doing a lot of local draught anyway, but we had to deal with challenges like having the worst reputation with every liquor store and brewery in town from when the crackhead owned it, so nobody wanted to deal with us. On the Saturday when we took over we had $500. We bought the booze from the previous owners, but there wasn’t much there because the owners had a blowout party the night before. So, we loaded up a Honda Civic full of beer, filled the fridge, sold it, and then the next day went to fill the Civic with beer again. We had no employees, so Levi ran it by himself for the first month, and we would cover his shifts at Sherlock Holmes, and then we would work at Wunderbar on our nights off. We were putting in 18 hours a day every day for the first three months. I only knew two local bands in Edmonton at the time, so Cameron’s booking and our friends making special trips across the river to drink at out bar kept us alive for the first three or six months.

Craig Martell (at the bar) of The Wunderbar Hofbrauhaus
When you buy a bar in Edmonton, especially on Whyte Ave., you don’t usually buy the bar or any real estate, you get the liquor licence and the lease. In the area where Wunderbar is located (off Whyte Ave.), licences are pretty limited and there’s a hard cap on how many are allowed to be issued.

/////////////// BECOMING A LIVE MUSIC VENUE ///////////////
Craig
::
At the beginning, we didn’t know enough bands to book seven nights a week. We knew right away that we had to be a live venue; when you look at the room, I can’t imagine anything but that. At first we flirted with the idea of playing both sides – during the week we’d just be a neighbourhood pub and keep the old regulars and on weekends we’d do live shows and pack the place. And neither of those things happened, because it turns out there weren’t really any old regulars by that time. And our shows weren’t packing the place. We thought they were, but we didn’t know any better. It’s like if you go to buy something you’ve never considered buying – I went to buy a window last week, and if the guy said “that’s $20” I’d be like “OK,” and if he said, “that’ll be $2,000” I’d be like “OK.” I don’t know what that costs. We’d have a show and 20 people would come, and we’d be like, “Oh man, 20 people in the bar, that’s great.”We’ve become more in tune with what we can get out of our crowd. Like, there are certain scenes and certain shows in Edmonton where we know we could have a packed crowd that aren’t going to drink hard, where there are other crowds where you can have a half-full room and make two or three times the money – but that took a long time to figure out. We definitely just scraped by at the beginning, because we had a different model back then. Cameron and us came up with this terrible idea where we’d never charge cover so we could get walk-by traffic. It would be free cover and we’d pay the bands guarantees. Not huge guarantees, nobody was getting rich, but I know that some nights we’d shell out $300 to bands and lose our profits and more. I also realized that cover’s not a bad thing – people will pay it. I also realized that if bands are making $300 anyway, why would they want to push the show? Why would they care about filling the place if they’re always going to make $300? After the first three months, we started playing with that a bit more – charging cover some nights – and that’s the time when I took over the booking.Very few of the people that would play a weekend show at the beginning could get a weekend show now. It was very much the old guard at that time, like folk stuff, North Country Fair stuff, and anything that would fall into our laps. We were open to too much at the time – we were like ‘regardless of genre, regardless of quality, we’ll be a room that you can play’ and we quickly realized that that’s not a good idea. It’s a great utopian dream that’s completely unrealistic in application. We then started picking and choosing a little better. We wanted to be a music hub, but we didn’t know how to go about that. We knew so few people, so we didn’t know who was a popular band and who wasn’t a popular band, we didn’t know each scene. I can almost pinpoint the moment when I met each scene, when I met each crowd, and the leader of that crowd. We tried a few things –open mics, DJ nights – and some of that worked and some of it didn’t, but now booking seven nights a week is a breeze.
The first band I can remember that started playing here regularly was Almanac, which was Donald Fenniak and Jon Mick’s old band. They played a show and were one of the first bands we got to know a bit, and we were like ‘guys, come back.’ Jom Comyn also did a few of the first shows here; I remember his first show was him with The Joe and Fuck The Tundra. Then Joe started putting on a couple of shows, and quickly you just adapt to that. I also knew Mattie from Clean Up Your Act productions, just from mutual friends, and he was like ‘I don’t book at Wunderbar anymore, but since you guys are running it now I will.’ He put on a couple of cool shows and we started seeing what can happen when you get clever with your booking and know how to run a show. Because we had no idea; our gear was terrible, we had no understanding of anything and we were just going with the flow. We could’ve been really easy to manipulate if people wanted to.

The fist two local bands that I recall seeing in Edmonton that I remember being excited about were an indie-pop band called Yes, Nice and Audio/Rocketry. I saw Audio/Rocketry open for Greg MacPherson at the Haven, and I remember contacting Audio/Rocketry to play here. I thought they were so good and that it was a pipe dream getting them to play here – which is interesting because Matt now works here. I remember contacting Audio/Rocketry about shows and being like, ‘hey, take it any day you want,’ and they played and the show was just massive. Huge successes like that made me realize what this bar could be if we booked a little more carefully and stuck to our guns a little more.

/////////////// THE WUNDERBAR STRATEGY ///////////////
Craig
::
Even recently we’ve changed strategies a lot in terms of the amount of money we’re putting out versus what’s coming in. At the end of the day it’s a business, and though we have a pretty altruistic approach to it, we’ve embraced that a bit more. At first, we were very quick to do things that would lose us money. But we’ve now created the standard for how I think things should work – our ideals have never changed, but our strategy has.To some degree we’re all timid guys. We almost had a socialist approach to things. Like we had one person booking, but we’d just give people shows. There have been many lessons learned, like we can’t do a noise show on the weekend. I don’t want to book anything where someone would walk in and say “this is bad quality.” We want to stay underground to some degree, but I don’t want anyone to ever come and say ‘this band doesn’t put any effort into being creative.’ So we avoid really radio stuff. My worry was always pigeonholing ourselves. I always want to stay in touch with younger acts, so even if the band isn’t great, when they get older they might have good bands and still come to Wunderbar. And that’s still a line I’m afraid that I don’t walk well.
Wunderbar does not really cater to a single scene or sound. Folk, punk, pop, hip hop, noise, indie and experimental bands will all play at Wunderbar in the same week. This actually grows the scene around Wunderbar, rather than having it as a bar that limits itself by catering to just one genre. Craig does all of the booking at this point, and though he has an advanced and broad musical palette, they can’t all be bands that he enjoys hearing.

Craig
::
I’ll make concessions for bands I don’t like. For example, I have a pop-punk rule. I’m not a huge pop-punk fan myself. That said, the pop-punk crowd are some of our best customers – they’re our most loyal customers, they’re the sweetest guys, and they’re incredibly talented. But I have a rule that if a pop-punk band wants to play here and I don’t know them, and another pop-punk band [that we know] won’t vouch for them, I won’t book them. There are other venues that will do it. DV8 will do it, New City will do it; there’s no lack of places to play. So, basically, it’s my own judgment; it comes down to me being me. But I’m fairly open-minded. I used to be hesitant to say no, but what I’ve quickly realized is that there’s a crowd of 800 people that come to Wunderbar, and if I have a show and those people won’t be into it, and the band has no way of bringing their own crowd, why would I book it? So, if some modern-rock radio band wants to play and I say no, I’m not being a dick; realistically there are promoters in town that could kill with that, so why would you play a bad show here when you could play a good show somewhere else? I’m really aware of that these days. I used to get kind of angry when I’d see other venues that didn’t do things as well as us get shows that I thought we should be getting. And now I don’t care because we get a lot of quality shows. The only time I care is when I think I’m the only person in town who could possibly promote it right.

Over the two years it’s been open, Wunderbar has served as a venue for all sorts of local and touring bands. Many bands that have or have gone on to a lot of national and international attention have played the Wunderbar stage. Craig has definitely been someone that has given many local acts their first gig, and I wanted to know what bands most surprised him, or most impressed him when they were a band that he had never heard of previously.

Craig
::
One of the inspiring moments I had was watching Energetic Action. I think they’d played a few shows, like, I’d seen their name around town. Mattie had set up a weird-billed show, with them, a punk band, and a proggy stoner rock band. Energetic Action came in and they were new to it with that band. The beef that night was that everyone was sharing a backline, but Energetic Action didn’t want to, they wanted to use their own gear. Due to technical difficulties, their set-up took like 35-40 minutes, and they started playing and couple of songs in their amp blows, and Mattie was like, ‘you’re done, get off the stage, you should’ve borrowed gear.’ And they came up to me outside and said ‘we can do better than this, we’d love another shot.’ And I thought about it and I was like, ‘that’s the best four minutes of music I’ve seen in a really long time. I want you to headline next month.’ That was the first time when I realized we don’t just have to act as a medium, we can control things to some degree; if we think a band is worthwhile, we can push them, we can make sure they play to the right people. If I see a young band who has a big crowd of friends, and those friends won’t be coming to their shows in a year, I’ll be straight up and say ‘I’m going to wear out that draw.’ It’s going to happen anyway, so what I’m going to do is give you guys a place where you can play to new crowds and hopefully make fans, and I’m going to put you on shows with touring bands and I am counting on you to bring your friends out until they don’t care any more. And it usually works out. I’ll get a touring band who wants to play with a certain band, and I’ll say ‘they don’t draw,’ and it’s not being rude, it’s saying you’re coming to a town where you want to play with a band that will draw zero people, which means at the end of the night you’ll all have zero dollars. So, scratch that, tell that band they can’t play and I’ll get a band that will draw and I’ll get that band a show where they get to play for some people. Let’s not create ‘everyone loses’ situations. Spreading the word about these bands is very important.There are so many bands that have blown me away with their selflessness, which is something that a lot of promoters don’t pay attention to. They’ll use a band and think they’re doing the band a favour by giving them a show. There was a show where a bunch of friends of mine from Cape Breton were playing, and they have some draw out here. I played them for Fire Next Time, and they loved it and wanted to play. We packed the show out at $10 cover and made a lot of money, and I was able to give this band their guarantee and a half, and was left with several hundred dollars, which I tried to give to Fire Next Time. And Fire Next Time said ‘we don’t want it. Give it to the touring band. We’ve been on tour and we know what it’s like, give it to them.’ I had to force it on them. It was like your aunt trying to pay you for babysitting when you’re a kid. Having an appreciation for the bands is so important.I won’t book bands if they’re not good people. I’m pretty good with seeing the good in everyone, but there are a few bands that have left a bad taste in my mouth. Promoters talk, so if a band is playing here, I will have heard if they’ve screwed around in other venues – I’ll hear about it. People tell me not to book them. That’s one thing that I think will help Edmonton long-term. Myself and other venue operators in town have great relationships, and I want them to succeed. We’re really good at working together – and I can develop bands and send them to bigger venues. There are a lot of bands in Edmonton that shouldn’t be playing a CD release show at Wunderbar with 40 people waiting in line. When a band comes to me and I know it can’t work, I can say “Hey Phil, put this on at The Artery if you like it.”

/////////////// WUNDERBAR’S GROWING IMPORTANCE ///////////////
Craig
::
I think Wunderbar has become important and I didn’t expect us to become this important. And we’re not important to everybody – for lots of people we’re just a room to play, and they have no loyalty to it, and that’s cool, I don’t care. I think there are enough people who really care about us genuinely, and would do anything for us, and that’s so cool. I don’t think there are many venues like that in Canada. What’s shocking to me is the amount of bands that are touring that will come through and say ‘I’ve heard nothing but good things from my friends.’ And that’s what venues forget: bands talk too. If you start screwing over bands, they will tell people not to play there. And I’m sure there are 10 bands in Edmonton that tell everyone not to play Wunderbar because they hate me. For touring bands, I’d say in the history of Wunderbar there’s been a couple that have only had an OK time, but the vast majority have an incredible time and tell everybody, and there’s only been one situation where the person hated it. Lack of a sound guy can be a beef for some people, but if we had a sound guy we wouldn’t be able to do what we do every night. We don’t get too much criticism – overall, it’s a very positive thing. There aren’t too many bands that would choose to play another venue over here, and when it does happen, I get confused.Occasionally, my one worry is that I think we get taken for granted. Sometimes, because we occasionally have no-risk deals, there’s no money on the line for the bands. If zero people come out, they don’t have to pay us anything – and we’re one of the only rooms in town where you can have a weekend show and not have money you have to pay the venue. I’ve seen some shows where I’ve gotten kind of mad because I know the band didn’t push it very hard. I know that they were like ‘oh well, we let this one slip away. I guess we have a night where we don’t make a bunch of money,’ but I have a night where I make NO money, and that sucks.

/////////////// THE FINANCIAL STRUGGLE ///////////////
Craig, Levi and Chris have yet to take a pay cheque from Wunderbar. They live almost exclusively off tips. After two years of running a fairly successful venue, and one that has a lot of importance for Edmonton and other bands around Canada, this is probably puzzling to many people. Somehow, however, it hasn’t dampened the Wunderbar owners’ enthusiasm.

Craig
::
Sometimes we get scared. Occasionally, me and Levi will have a conversation where it hits us that we’ve been doing this for two years, and in two years we’ve made less money than we’ve ever made, ever. Wunderbar is in a way better financial spot than we used to be in many ways, and the amount of money that comes in is dramatically better than it used to be, but I don’t think we’ll ever be in a place where it can support me, Chris and Levi. Maybe one of us. But I’ve decided that I always want this to be a thing. Wunderbar always has to be a thing, and we’ll make money from other business ventures. We always have other pots on the stove, and some of them are getting to be potentially real. One of them is another bar, and one is another restaurant. In a dream world, we’ve always wanted a bit of an empire, but an empire of businesses that we actually believe in and care about, which most ownership groups don’t. We’re never detached – I see people now that have fancy beer in their bar because they see us doing it, and I see people booking bands because they see us doing it – so who knows? Maybe in two years we won’t be hot any more because some other venue will open with the same door deal and a better room. This is why, at the end of the day, we try to be nice to people so people want us to succeed. It takes a lot of work to keep up, but when it clicks it clicks, and right now it’s clicking more often than not. This summer has blown me away – so many amazing bands coming through. I very rarely now have a show where I’m like, ‘I hated that, that sucks.’
For those in Edmonton, a place like Wunderbar has become such a staple that it’s hard to imagine what the city would be like without it. And for many bands that have toured through Edmonton, Wunderbar is a welcome surprise.

Craig
::
I think this can happen in every place – I think every place is dying for it. I’ve talked to a bunch of people – and not just bands wistfully thinking ‘I wish we had this’ – people who genuinely know the industry, people who book at other bars, and they realize that what most cities have just isn’t good enough. You can find other bars that are as flexible and easygoing as us, but usually the show will be pretty slack, everything about it, the promotion and all that. Because it does take a lot of work. You can find bars that are staying in touch with the local music scene, but occasionally they have egos and it’s hard to get a show there. It’s hard to find a promoter that will reply to your emails. There are a lot of things that we do that people really appreciate, and I think that every major centre should have a Wunderbar. Every major centre should have an 80-person room where you can have 20 people in on a Monday night and it doesn’t feel like a disaster, and that you can pack and have it be fun and still have bands make money. Having bands fill our room and say they filled a 250-person room last time they were town but made as much money with us is so great. I don’t know if it’ll ever happen, but I’d love to start one up in Halifax and one in Winnipeg, to start. It’s strange to me to hear bands say that with all these huge venues with great sound gear and a cool feel to the room that they like Wunderbar the most, but it’s really cool.

Craig Martell’s Top 5 Shows at Wunderbar

1. Mount Eerie – “It was like a hero that played here, and I thought the show was perfect.”

2. Fire Next Time and Audio/Rocketry tour kick-off – “It was everything we ever wanted a night to be.”

3. Found Festival Fund Raiser – “There was a performance that night by one guy from Calgary called Distance Bullock, who to my mind is the most talented performer in Alberta. He had a performance that did things I’ve never seen done. I’ve never seen a loud room hushed like it was there, and there were 60 people sitting on the floor around him while he was in our back room playing through an amp, and no one was even whispering. Every person there – there were the Scenic Route To Alaska boys, Ryan from Fire Next Time, Will and Tyler from The Wicked Awesomes!, Ben Sir from E-Town Beatdown – and everyone was mesmerized. All these people with no musical taste in common were all gobsmacked, blown away, and I’ve never seen that happen before.”

4. Rural Alberta Advantage – “Second time we ever went all ages.”

5. Sans AIDS goodbye show – “It’s a crowd I’ve never particularly warmed to; they’re the biggest pain in the ass of any crowd. But Peter’s a guy I genuinely cared about, and one of the dozens of people that have moved away from Edmonton where I genuinely felt it. I think I want to fly him out for a show – I think he’s a genius, I think his music is genius, I love it so much, and I think he’s a really good person. So that show was great just because I was happy we could do it for him.”