Dan Burke is sitting in the dingy office above the Velvet Underground. It's not his, but Burke will take a roof where he can get one.

"Do you want to see me fight The Hospitals?" Burke asks.

Burke, 51, is a concert booker and promoter. He is also a drug addict with a short fuse.

In 2004, he brought the two-piece San Francisco band The Hospitals into one of his clubs. They showed up late. Then, when their start time was delayed, they set up near a bathroom and began to play over the band on stage.

Burke has lived off the edge for a long time. He's immune to insults. But he cannot bear to see someone else treated shabbily.

"It was so rude, what they did," Burke says, rheumy eyes widening.

So he engaged what he calls "my full-on rock 'n' roll psychopath thing." A fan taped the ensuing melee and posted it on YouTube (warning: contains graphic content).



In the video, Burke first tries to grab a microphone stand. Drummer Adam Stonehouse knocks Burke over. Burke pops back up and starts swinging.

Back in the office, eyes locked on the screen, Burke begins to narrate.

"I'm throwing pretty good. See?"

The pair trade blows. Stonehouse runs out of steam, but Burke wants more. As he lunges forward, the second Hospital smashes Burke over the head with his guitar. Burke reels backward into a crowd.

"I was out on my feet. I didn't go down though. I'm very proud of that."

Burke is grinning absently. Several of his teeth are missing. Other nights. Other fights.

"He kept hitting me. I was thinking, `Is this the bouncer? 'Cause if not, where the f--- is he?'"

Burke recalls that at this point he is being dragged into the bathroom, concussed and bleeding.

"People see stars. I was seeing a f---ing supernova."

The Hospitals are now whooping it up on the video. The sonic backsplash from their instruments cuts out suddenly and the crowd can be heard. Many of them are cheering.

"These people are f---ing cheering and I got hit in the head that hard?"

The fun is draining out of Burke's voice. Stonehouse yells out, "F--- that old crackhead." More cheers and now some laughs.

Maybe he's never seen this part before, but those laughs hit Burke like a slap. His face drops. He turns away from the screen and sways in place.

"That's what life's like today." Burke looks around, stunned. "I'm a lot at fault myself ... (long pause) but you'd think somebody would have stepped in to help me. Maybe just one guy."

Formerly a journalist, Burke's been fighting for more than a decade on the Toronto live-music scene. He is feckless and untrustworthy and an admitted thief. But he is a purist who lives harder than any of the acts he has helped thrust toward stardom. And that makes him untouchable.

"This is a business full of people who feel aggrieved for all sorts of reasons," says former foe and current business partner Michael Hollett, founder of the NXNE festival. "Yet no one feels that way about Dan."

Despite all the drugs and the booze, Burke retains the build of a boxer. A once-handsome face is crumbling, though. His mouth is a mess. His blue eyes have faded to smudges. Only a hint of the lady-killer remains.

He asks to meet at the Oak Leaf bathhouse on Bathurst at Queen West. For $12, he gets a locker and the right to stay for 24 hours. It's 1 p.m. Several customers are asleep on the divans spread around the room. Burke is in the sauna doing sit-ups – his daily workout.

He's still got swagger. He squeezes his shoulders back and jacks out his chest – a brawler's pose. His voice is pebbly and he's a screamer, mainly because he's deaf in his right ear.

"I've gotta stay in shape," Burke says. "Y'know. 'Cause of all the other stuff I'm doing to myself."

Where does he live?

"Downtown," Burke says.

Downtown where?

"No comment."

No comment?

"Uh, I'll tell you later."

Last night, he hung out in a nearby Vietnamese booze can till dawn, did a little Special K (the hallucinogen ketamine). He says he's "under control" right now.

"Maybe next week I'll do better," he says.

Whatever states he's in, he's ready to work. He wanders the streets taping up posters promoting the six showcases he's got coming up at NXNE – the North by Northeast Music & Film Festival – which runs June 17-21.

"It's kind of embarrassing, putting up posters," Burke says. "I'm 51 years old. I've interviewed CEOs, gangsters, cabinet ministers. It's embarrassing here in Toronto, where you are what you do."

Toronto is the most frequent target of Burke's scattershot rage. He hates this city, almost compulsively.

"Toronto is world-class," Burke says. "But there's a word missing there. Third."

The flip side of this animus is the Joycean bond he feels with his hometown, Montreal. He left two decades ago. He rarely goes back. That way Montreal stays perfect.

Burke was raised in the city's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. "He was tough, intensely loyal – classic black Irish," says childhood friend Tony Wilson-Smith.

His father, Tim Burke, was a sports columnist at the Gazette. He has a brother and a sister. He's never married or had children.

At 16, Burke stumbled into the family business as a copy boy. He tried journalism school, then worked his way through a few newspaper jobs. By the mid-'80s, he was a magazine writer, specializing in crime.

"Some cop writers work it from the police angle," says Wilson-Smith, who went on to become the editor of Maclean's. "Dan came at it from the other side. He was very comfortable with the thugs."

Even as he honed his craft, Burke was already drifting away from the stability it promised. He refused a staff job at Maclean's. He was once invited to Ottawa to see if he could work Parliament Hill. Burke spent six weeks in the capital. He slept each night on the office couch.

"He would tell me he worried about becoming too conventional," recalls Wilson-Smith.

Burke's work caught the attention of CBC. In 1991, he was hired as a researcher at the fifth estate.

Using his connections in Montreal's underworld, Burke worked on a landmark 1992 segment that traced corruption from the Irish West End Gang into the RCMP. One of the targets of the investigation, Insp. Claude Savoie, fatally shot himself the day before the piece went to air.

"I still remember hearing that he'd done it," Burke says. "I started to shiver with excitement. People ask if I felt bad. F--- no, that was the game."

At this point, Burke's demons were varied. He wanted to get it right, and couldn't let it go until he did. One former colleague says he was "a swashbuckling perfectionist. There was an enormous capacity for frustration."

Burke was also using drugs. He went to work, but the daily seesaw was beginning to tilt toward his habit. By 1994, he was smoking crack and out of control. In December, he stopped going to work. His colleagues pulled him out of his apartment and checked him into a Toronto rehab clinic. Burke left. He was told that he would have to clean up if he wanted to keep his job.

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"After that, I became a 24/7 crackhead, thief, criminal," Burke says.

He drifted for two years, working at odd jobs, living rough and doing things "I'd rather no longer discuss."

By early 1997, he'd returned to Toronto. He was running a scheme involving wholesale flowers. While looking for a place to store his stock, he stumbled into a third-floor space in Chinatown.

The building's owners were operating a pool hall overrun by hoodlums and were looking for a change. A friend had told them that booking bands was lucrative. They asked Burke, who had never before evinced any special interest in music, if he knew anything about the business. And Club Shanghai was born.

Burke applied journalism principles to the new venture. He began by calling pop critics and scouring the weeklies. From every contact, he got two more. Soon, he put together a show.

"I planned it for a long weekend. I mean, long weekend, sounds great, right? Wrong. Everybody leaves on a long weekend. Disaster. Rookie mistake."

But he had found a new compulsion. Whatever his troubles, Burke's work ethic has never been anything less than Herculean. That and his uncanny nose have made him a phenomenon.

Over 12 years, Burke has been among the first to see talent in the White Stripes, Death from Above, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, Sum 41, The Dears and Peaches, among many other major local and international acts.

"The tragic part is that he doesn't have his shit together enough to take it to the next level," says Daniel Seligman, creative director of The Pop Montreal Music Festival. "The bands end up at Massey Hall. But Dan isn't following their development."

One of the first groups Burke latched on to – his first musical crush – was a bunch of local kids called The Deadly Snakes.

Despite a 20-year age difference, the band's keyboardist, Max McCabe, bonded with Burke. McCabe fed him, scolded him, tried to keep him straight. For several months, Burke slept on a couch in McCabe's backyard.

"He did that for a while," says Snakes front man Andre Ethier. "It went deep into the fall."

At other points he slept on sofas, in a garage, in whatever workspace he could lay claim to.

A year after starting Shanghai, Burke moved up Spadina Ave. to the El Mocambo, a fading colossus leaning heavily on past glories.

"I won't say it was a nothing venue, but Dan turned it into a happening venue," says Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene.

Many of the nights Burke booked became legendary. But Burke himself was the El Mo's in-house attraction. He was at the centre of it every night – euphoric, high and heading over the edge. He can't remember all the fights. He does recall that one of them put him in a two-day coma.

Burke was always short of cash, mainly because a lot of it went up his nose. He once tried to pay an act with stolen blue jeans. Some got drugs. Many got nothing at all.

"Bands of character will see that this is for a greater cause," Burke says of payment in general.

The Deadly Snakes' Ethier remembers watching Burke argue in the streets with several bandmates about how big a cut of the door they were owed following a show. In frustration, Burke tore up all his cash and tossed it in the air.

"Getting paid is a byproduct of what Dan's doing," Ethier says. "And he expects the same from bands."

Burke's professional idyll didn't last. The El Mo was bought out and shuttered in November 2001. On the last night, Burke organized a blowout show. Then he flicked his sunglasses at the new owner, was arrested and tried to kick off a brawl outside the club as he wrestled with the cops. "You couldn't close the El Mo without Dan Burke being led off in cuffs," says record exec Richard Switzer.

Once the El Mo went down, Burke followed. The next seven years were a narcotic blur. He continued to work, but the rooms weren't the same. He bounced from club to club. "I extended myself into the outer limits of nightlife," says Burke. "I went on the worst losing streak."

And he continued to pick fights. The most successful was with NXNE. Burke began counter-programming his own shows to compete with festival nights. At a 2005 Christmas party, NXNE boss Hollett approached Burke and asked him "to stop working against us and start working with us."

As quick as he is to raise his fists, Burke greeted the rapprochement with childish eagerness. His eyes redden as he recalls Hollett's olive branch.

"He really went out on a limb for me," Burke says. "I won't forget that."

He means it. Burke's elephantine memory for small acts of kindness is as well known as his disposition to brawl.

He worked his way back up through a series of lesser venues. Today, he's booking four or five nights a week at the Silver Dollar Room, on Spadina, and the Velvet Underground, on Queen W. He says he shrugged off the worst of his drug habit last year. He's been sober for as long as two months at a time.

The compulsive work ethic is still there. Burke sits mesmerized behind a screen in the office, researching bands on MySpace.

"They got a lotta 18-year-old friends," Burke says worriedly of one act. As a booker, he makes his money off a percentage of the bar take.

He also seems enormously weary. Now that the buzz is wearing off, the years are setting in.

"I'm tired of doing interesting things – all the risk, and the fear," Burke says. "I've never been able to coast. Partly due to circumstances. Partly due to myself."

On a nearby table is a page torn from a loose-leaf binder. Burke has been scribbling on it – poetic observations mainly, about life and Montreal. The line written in the largest looping letters is a quote from Pelagius.

"There is no worse death than the end of hope." It's signed, Dan Burke.