Summers on the 501 East Circa 2008: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

I saw Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie this past week, an insane time travel story that pays homage to a million things, but first and foremost, Back to the Future. There is no Delorean, no Doc, no Marty, but there is a time-travelling trailer, magical Orbitz, a what-could-have-been story, and a love letter to Toronto.

Matt Johnson and Jay McCaroll have been doing this bit for years. They had a webshow, Nirvanna the Band the Show, in the mid-aughts filled with hijinks and the quest to get the ever-distant show at the Rivoli, an iconic music venue on West Queen West. The movie picks up where we left Matt and Jay, living together with some ridiculous plan to get a show booked at the still present Rivoli, this time involving a skydive into the Skydome from the CN Tower's Edgewalk, a plan so insane that it just might work. They walk into the Canadian Tire at Yonge and Dundas, accost a poor retail associate for rope cutters (a Chekovian moment that comes back in Act 3) and continue on their way to the CN Tower.

What's crazy is that they do it, and for a moment, the insanity of the plan means nothing. Your suspension of disbelief is wrapped up in the magic moments of 2008 as Matt and Jay make their way through Toronto, and it's almost disorienting. They spot their younger selves outside of Mexx and Steve's, stores now replaced by For Lease signs on Queen West. The storefronts, the fashion, all of it, for a brief moment, feels real.

I had a pang of despair watching this at the Carlton Cinema. I watched the web series for the first time in almost 20 years to prepare, watching young Matt and Jay get exponentially weirder with every 15-minute episode. I watched them traipse up and down Queen Street, then the coolest neighbourhood in Toronto, ride the streetcar, hang out in iconic storefronts and cause chaos wherever they went, not a single passerby batting an eye because this is just what it was back then. No one had a phone glued to their hand, filming the nonsense. They were armed with a digicamcorder and a bootstrapped team, documenting Jackass-style hijinks.

At the heart of the show, Jay plays his music, Matt improvs insanity, and the two of them together believe in each other so much. The sincerity and honesty, even when their friendship is challenged, are what keep you watching. Jay, 20 years later, is still listening to the schemes that Matt has cooked up, and even when things look grim, and Matt gets in his own way, even when Jay does something catastrophic that challenges the friendship, the two of them realize that they need each other. There's something almost radical about that: two people who have known each other long enough to have seriously considered walking away, choosing not to. Choosing the band and choosing each other again.

What makes the show and the movie work is that Matt and Jay were never really trying to make it in any conventional sense. They weren't pitching to labels or shopping a pilot. They were just trying to play the Rivoli.The same venue, over and over, for years. Considering the timeline and the culture of 2008 - Broken Social Scene, Feist, Metric, Tokyo Police Club, and dozens of other acts playing small rooms just for the people that matter the most, Matt and Jay long for the same thing. Not the dream of being huge, but the dream of being recognized by the room that matters to you. The Rivoli was a metaphor to be seen by your peers in a place that means the most. Everything else, all the chaos and the hijinks and the increasingly unhinged plans, was just the shape that their love for each other and for this city took.

I think of being 16, tearing up West Queen West, gawking at celebrities at Much Music at Queen and John, staring in the windows and giggling at the Condom Shack, finding weird shit at Black Market, eating as much as you could at Little India restaurant. That stretch of Queen Street between Spadina and John was so important to a whole generation of kids. The music and culture was ingrained in those blocks. Seeing young Jay and Matt sitting in the back of the old 501 streetcars with the windows open made my heart pang.

There's something about a city at a specific moment in time that stays in your DNA. Not the landmarks, not the skyline, but the weird specific texture of it. The record store where the guy behind the counter was kind of a dick, but clearly knew everything. The venue where you'd show up, not knowing the band and leave feeling like your brain had been rearranged. The diner booth you'd pile into at 1 am because nowhere else would have you. West Toronto in the early aughts was made of that. It wasn't curated or branded, it was dirty and grimy. If you were young and paying attention, it shaped you in ways you wouldn't fully understand until much later.

The music was everywhere and it was serious without taking itself too seriously. You could walk into Lee's Palace on a Wednesday and see something that genuinely changed what you thought music was allowed to do. You could flip through the NOW Magazine listings and feel overwhelmed by how much was happening in places you hadn't found yet. The Horseshoe, the El Mocambo, the Rivoli, these were microcosms where bands were figuring it out in front of fifty people, where the line between the audience and the performers was basically nothing because everyone was broke and barely eighteen and in it together. The city had a generosity and kindness, no one was filming on 4K cameras catching the aesthetic bullshit of a place. Your shoes stuck to the ground and you sweat through your zip-up in a pit of your peers, no idea was too wild. 

That's what the Nirvanna the Band the Show captured. Matt and Jay weren't documenting a scene so much as they were just inside it, thrashing around, making noise. West Toronto didn’t just hold these places you went, they kind of shaped who you hung out with, what music you listened to, what you wore, who you became. You'd see a band that cracked something open in you and then walk home along Queen at midnight, past the 24 hour pho spot and the vintage shop with the hand-lettered signs, and feel like the city was at your feet. 

Watching old and young Matt and Jay collide on screen does something strange to you. You're watching two versions of the same people, and the gap between them is where all the life happened. The young versions are all hunger and chaos and forward motion. They have that particular energy of people who have not yet been told no enough times to slow down. The older versions carry that same love for each other and the same stupid belief that the bit will work out, but you can see the weight of time in it, too. Not defeat exactly, but the particular tenderness that comes from having wanted the same thing for a very long time and still not having it. They still need each other the same way. That part hasn't changed. If anything it's become more true.

The moment where the two timelines fold into each other is when the movie becomes something more than a stunt. Because what you're really watching is two guys reckon with who they were before life got complicated, before the city changed around them, before the venues they loved became condos or dispensaries. And they don't flinch from it. 

What gets me is that I'm not sure kids now get to have any of this. And I don't mean that in the cranky get-off-my-lawn way. I mean it genuinely and with some sadness. When you're 16 and bored and a little bit lost and you stumble into a record store or a weird show in a basement venue, there's no documentation of the experience, no content being made, no version of yourself performing the discovery for an audience. You're just there. You're just having it. The city is teaching you something and you don't even know you're being taught. That slow, unwitnessed accumulation of experience, the shows you saw, the streets you wandered, the conversations you had with strangers at 2am outside a venue, all tessilate into a residue of a thousand moments that no one recorded and no one needs to see.

The kids growing up now are living inside a machine that was specifically designed to monetize the moment of discovery before the discovery even lands. The cool thing isn't experienced first and then shared later. It's found, flagged, posted, and algorithmically redistributed before you've had ten minutes alone with it. The feeling hasn't settled before it's already been performed. And once you perform a feeling, you're not quite having it anymore. 

The Rivoli has become a location tag. Queen West isn't a neighbourhood that shaped you over years of directionless afternoons, it’s now vacant storefronts alongside dispensaries and cafes. What’s left of it is an aesthetic. The tragedy is now that the infrastructure for caring slowly and privately and without an audience has been almost completely dismantled around them.

Matt and Jay spent years, genuinely years, trying to play one venue because it mattered to them in a way that was entirely their own. Nobody validated it. Nobody boosted it. The want was just theirs, stubbornly and completely. That's the movie. That's the show. That's the whole bit. And sitting in the Carlton watching it, I felt genuinely lucky to have grown up in a city at a time when a street could still mean something that was yours to keep. When you could be young and broke and in love with a place and have it love you back in ways that were too strange and specific to explain to anyone who wasn't there.