If you wander through Dundas Square this weekend, and see the Hard Rock Café on the southeast corner of Yonge, you might not immediately realize that you’re looking at the site of what Time magazine once called “the most decisive moment in rock history.” But it’s true, they did call what happened there that, and that building has hosted an encyclopedia’s worth of music legends.

It might not also be obvious that you’re looking at a site that will soon be home to a drugstore. But that’s true, too.

The Hard Rock Café is closing on holiday Monday, never to reopen in that location. It will be the end to a legacy of live music that stretches back to the previous tenants of that building, Friar’s nightclub downstairs and the Nickelodeon upstairs in the 1960s and ’70s. A Shopper’s Drug Mart is scheduled to open there before the end of the year.

Read more:

Hard Rock Café closing its doors at Yonge-Dundas Square location

The Brunny gets corporate facelift, but Rexall vows to maintain building’s charm

Yonge-Dundas Square is Toronto’s last stand for public space: Micallef

As the cover of NOW magazine this week reminds us, this is becoming a bit of a trend: the Brunswick House in the Annex, longtime beer hall and one-time musical stage to greats such as Cab Calloway, Gordon Lightfoot, Oscar Peterson and Stevie Ray Vaughan, has been converted into a Rexall pharmacy.

Chalk it up to demographics, I guess. The places a generation saw their pivotal concerts in the early 1970s are now places for the same folks to buy their arthritis medications.

The times, they are a-changing, as the Nobel laureate said.

Speaking of Bob Dylan, he was the source of that bit of Time magazine historical hyperbole. The moment they labelled “most decisive” occurred on September 16, 1965. Dylan had flown in to Toronto at the suggestion of a Toronto friend of his manager’s, to check out a band called Levon and the Hawks, who were playing a long-running residency at Friar’s. After hearing them play, he rehearsed with them after hours for the next two nights running, according to local music historian Nicholas Jennings. Two weeks later, Dylan introduced his hard-edged electric world tour at Carnegie Hall in New York, with the Hawks playing with him. They would go on to call themselves the Band, and become Woodstock-era musical legends in their own right.

Years before that, they’d formed as the backing band for Ronnie Hawkins, who served a long residency at the Nickelodeon, upstairs. Lots of other slices of musical history took place on the stages at Friar’s and the Nickelodeon, too: Bill Haley and the Comets, Dizzy Gillespie, Susie Quatro, Edwin Starr and Oscar Peterson, for example. Jennings posted a photo online this week of Frank Zappa and David Clayton-Thomas of Blood, Sweat and Tears performing together on stage at the Nickelodeon. After its transformation into the Hard Rock Café, it housed music memorabilia, of course, but still had room for concerts on the stage upstairs, including performances by Jeff Healey — though perhaps its worth noting that like the Brunswick House, its days as a force in the live music scene have long passed.

And so yeah, now it’s going to be a drugstore. At least it won’t be torn down, like so many other legendary Yonge landmarks have been. But it does seem sort of odd that recently, cultural landmarks that get preserved seem to become drug stores: the Rexall at the Brunny, the Shoppers Drug Mart at the old Runnymede Theatre, this place. Maybe it’s in a line of historical repurposing that saw the home of the Leafs and the Toronto stage for the Beatles, Duran Duran and Nirvana become a landmark Loblaw’s.

The buildings are nice, for sure. But the purpose seems so different.

In his story about the Brunswick House, Richard Longley writes, “lovers of the cultural heritage of ‘Ye Olde Brunswick House’ are shattered by its conversion. Some of them wondered for years if it could save itself by becoming the Drake or the Gladstone on Bloor” — that is, a boutique hotel. A destination, still home to carousing and celebrating, maybe music. Still somewhere to visit, to experience something, rather than to stop in for mundane necessities.

I have similar thoughts about the hard Rock building, especially at Yonge-Dundas Square, on an anchor corner of a grand tourist site. No offence to Shopper’s — a fine chain I visit frequently — it’s just that it’s not really a retail use that screams “tourist attraction.” Nor one that suggests continuity with one Toronto’s grandest musical legacies.

So many of Toronto’s music venues are shutting down — Hoxton, Harlem, Hideout and Hard Rock Café, just to name a few that start with “H” that have shut within the past year.

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“Everything passes, everything changes,” the same Nobel laureate wrote in “To Ramona.”

If the wheel of history’s spin makes you ache, consider the bright side. We may have less music to soothe us, but at least we’ll have lots of places to buy pain killers.