“ I heard an interesting statistic last week,” says Randy Hutchings, one of the founders of a new Calgary music venue called The Train Station. “When you open up a bar, you’ve got an 88% fail rate within the first 5 years and when you add music, you can bring it up to 94%.” With such daunting figures, why would four guys from Calgary decide to get into the business of running a live music venue? Well, for the same reason they started a record label only a few months before – they’re passionate about music. “I will buy records before food,” admits co-founder Dion Zdunic over an afternoon cup of coffee at Brew Brothers pub. Along with Brian Close and Kyle Herron, the four are the team behind Train Records whose accomplishments to date include releasing a Train Records compilation CD as well as opening the doors to the Train Station located just below Brew Brothers Tap House on 11 th Ave. It’s the latest addition to the bar scene on a block that is fast becoming the hot spot for hearing local, original music. Some might see this revived area as a sort of ground zero for the re-birth of the Calgary music scene, but Zdunic stills sees room for improvement.
It was less than a year ago when Zdunic decided he was frustrated with the state of things here in the city. He found himself feeling nostalgic for the days of the Republik nightclub where both musicians and music fans would gather weekly to hear local bands play. “We all had a place then,” says Zdunic, “we all had something to gather around and that doesn’t exist now. There’s bands and there’s venues, but there’s no cohesion anymore.” Hutchings, a singer/songwriter raised in St. John’s Newfoundland, moved to Calgary five years ago unaware of the legacy of the Republik, however it was only a matter of time before he too started to feel like Calgary was missing the ‘unity’ in ‘community’. That’s when he started to reminisce about the days back home in St. John’s. “You could have a band that’s playing reggae and then you could have another band that’s playing Celtic, another band that’s playing punk…and it’s not about my music is better than your music, it’s more about; hey, let’s just play music, let’s have fun here and let’s create a scene.”
It was this common frustration that created a bond between Hutchings and Zdunic on a chilly December day in 2004. Together they felt that the Calgary music scene needed an injection of community spirit and so over a few beers, they tried to conceive of an infrastructure that would help bring musicians together and expose music fans to strong local talent. It was this passion for change and also their mutual interest in record labels that gave them the idea for Train Records. “I was always in love with record labels”, admits Zdunic. “I’d buy into record labels often before the artists, oddly.” Hutchings as well, had taken inspiration from journalist / music fan Tony Wilson who started UK’s Factory Records in 1978 to help promote bands and invigorate the Manchester scene. “We want to be the benevolent society that helps artists in this town get into venues and have an audience in front of them,” declares Hutchings, smiling across the table from me and I’m really starting to believe that his motives are pure. Yes, they’re businessmen who’d rather stay in business than go out of it, but they’re not out to make a million bucks or be the biggest label in town either. They’re simply music lovers who want to help the Calgary musical community in their own small way. “If people buy records and go to bars and watch bands,” says Zdunic, “then we’ve won.”
With the addition of the Train Station, Train Records can now be “event based” allowing artists (on the label or otherwise) a place to showcase their talents, and this room is perfect for listening in an intimate setting. Like the Sidetrack Café in Edmonton or the Horseshoe Club in Toronto, they hope the Train Station will become as much of an attraction for people as the performances themselves. “We don’t want to make the Train Station just another bar that has live music,” says Hutchings, “we want to make it so that when people come down, they feel like they’re part of an event, they’re part of something that’s groundbreaking…We want the Train Station to be part of the whole experience.”