End of an era

By Peter Paylor

It wasn't that long ago that I would have been able to write that every small town has a Tweedsmuir. An old hotel tavern with a small group of regulars you’ll find there every weeknight and live music on Friday nights and Saturdays when the place really starts coming to life. Local bands. Cover bands. Tribute bands. Open mics. A bit of a bad reputation not always deserved. Almost every band who has ever really made it has started out playing places like that. Places like the Tweedsmuir are getting harder to find and now you won’t find the Tweedsmuir at all. It burned to the ground on March 10, 2021.

“There’s no place left like it between Peterborough and Perth,” says musician Billy Piton who made his first visit to the Tweedsmuir 40 years ago. Piton and partner Lynn Marriot (pictured) had the Tweed Video Centre across the road. “There were always newbies to Tweed…in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. We were the Come From Aways of the 80s,” says Piton. “The tavern was a place where we met and kind of got to know each other. For me and a lot of other people – poets and musicians – it was a place for us to play.”

Piton started taking pictures of the bands in exchange for a free beer or two. The pictures were later framed and displayed around the bar. “It was always a treat when Peter Spratt hired a band. I knew that getting him on stage to pose with them afterwards was going to be a trip. He was such a big guy. They all looked like kindergarten kids next to him.”

I asked Piton for a favourite memory. “Valdy,” he says without stopping to think. The tribute bands were fun… you know…the guys who cover AC/ DC and The Hip…bands like that… but I remember the night that Valdy was there and Carlos del Junco came to sit in with him. That was a special evening. Listening to those guys.”

Luke Hendry

The open mics at the Tweedsmuir were legendary. Outdoors on the patio on Saturdays in the summer. Indoors on Thursdays when the weather got colder. The Elvis Open Mic during the Tweed Elvis Festival. For a while there was an acoustic open mic every third Tuesday hosted by Marriot, the other half of Tweed’s Lynn & Billy. Billy plays harmonica; Lynn plays guitar and sings like she knows how you’re feeling. Piton recalls a Tuesday night five years ago when he went in for a beer and hardly anyone was there. He asked Peter Spratt, who was the owner at the time, if he’d be interested in having a poetry night on Tuesdays. “At first it was just a way of drinking for free once a month,” Piton tells me. “When I came up with the idea, I knew there was one person on the planet to run it past, and he’s never said no.” That person was his friend Peter Snell.

First Tuesday Muse was and still is a genuine phenomenon. Dozens of people flocked to the Tweedsmuir on a weekday night to read and to listen to poetry with a few regulars huddled in the back, patiently, waiting for the light to go back on over the pool table. Hosted by Snell, First Tuesday Muse attracted many of the region’s finest poets and spoken word artists. It’s an established institution now. It’s going to live on. In fact, two months after the Tweedsmuir was reduced to ash, First Tuesday Muse hosted their first online performance on Zoom supported by the Quinte Arts Council.

And yet if there’s a lesson to be found in this story, it’s this: If you have a place like the Tweedsmuir in your town, treasure it. If you have a venue for live music or poetry or theatre or comedy or dance, support it. “I go past it every day,” says Piton. “It’s really such a shame that it’s gone.”