Back in the Stone Age before the internet took everything over, the flyer was your passport to musical Coolsville in this city.

Our depleted forests and legions of street-cleaning personnel might not have looked too kindly upon them, no, but those little handbills passed out by the fistful at club and concert exits and stacked for the taking in the corners of strategic locations about town were, for a long time, one of the primary means a music fan could stay plugged into the multitudinous live shows and DJ nights happening all over Toronto. Especially if you were into music happening at the underground level, where a typical “advertising budget” didn’t provide for much else beyond maybe papering the downtown with posters and putting in a few calls to what were once known as “listings editors” at the local print publications.

Daniel Tate was one of the people who used to hand you those flyers when you staggered out of the club at 4 a.m. during the mid-1990s. He put himself through a political-science degree at York University by working a whole lot of teenage nights on the street team for Toronto hip-hop/ promoters REMG — eventually becoming the company’s director of promotions before moving on — and very early on recognized the flyer’s lasting value as both undervalued objet d’art and trigger for countless nostalgic memories. So he started saving flyers. Enough of them, in fact, to fill an entire trunk at his parents’ house that he forgot about until he was cleaning out their garage a few years ago and realized what a treasure trove he’d been sitting on.

“Flyers were always considered ephemera. You’d chuck ’em, right?” says Tate. “ ‘OK, here’s the details of the jam.’ Then you throw the flyer on the ground and you move on with your life. But it’s a visual reference point to a time in your life or an experience that profoundly affected you. And everyone’s had live-music experiences that impacted them on an emotional level and on a spiritual level, even.”

So Tate started an Instagram feed called the Flyer Vault in 2015, posting choice items he accumulated between roughly 1995 and 2005. He was so astonished at the response the enterprise received as a kind of “communal time capsule” that he started digging deeper, routinely hitting places like the Toronto Archives and the Toronto Reference Library to turn up further flyers, posters, newspaper ads and whatever other printed relics from the city’s musical past he could find to broaden the Flyer Vault’s scope beyond his own “narrow slice” of the whole just to get more awesome stories out of the people whose memories and personal histories were encoded in those pieces of paper.

Eventually Tate’s obsessively geeky tendencies led him to ring up esteemed York musicologist, author and Grammy-winning liner-notist Rob Bowman on the hunt for some very Toronto-specific trivia involving George Clinton and a match was made. After innumerable shared trips down various research “rabbit holes” — they both use that phrase a lot — inspired by Tate’s storehouse of 8,000 images from Toronto’s musical past, the two new friends realized they had a book on their hands.

Hence the pair’s “The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History,” a must-have read for any fellow Toronto music geek out on Oct. 25 via Dundurn Press that hones in on the fascinating stories arisen from just 170 of those 8,000 fascinating visual documents. Which is quite enough for one book, as you’ll see when we let the equally garrulous Tate and Bowman run wild with just a bare handful of their favourites below.

Jenny Lind, St. Lawrence Hall, Oct. 22, 1851

“Before Beatlemania, before Bieber-mania, before all that, there was Lindmania in the mid-1800s,” says Tate. “She was a Swedish soprano promoted by P.T. Barnum … this was, from my research, the first pop-music concert in the city, only a few years after Toronto was incorporated. People were going nuts about her voice in 1851 even though there were no record players, so how did you actually hear her music unless it was word-of-mouth? (There) was so much hysteria that she was coming to Toronto to perform that not only did the tickets sell out in, like, minutes, but they eventually got auctioned. So it was like the StubHub of the 1800s.”

Mamie Smith, Loew’s, Oct. 22, 1922

“I would mention to Daniel that the first blues record recorded by a Black artist was Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’ in 1920, wondering if she ever played here,” marvels Bowman. “Daniel would come back with an ad from 1922 when Mamie Smith played the Loew’s Theatre on Yonge Street. This blew my mind. In the early 1920s, there was no radio to speak of. That record was marketed primarily through Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender to African-Americans. How the hell did enough Torontonians know about her to bring her to town for a week?”

Cab Calloway, Shea’s, Dec. 3-8, 1934

“It’s just a beautiful piece of art — hand-drawn — and it really brings the Harlem Renaissance from Harlem right into Toronto and, for me, it conveys how exciting the jazz era was, especially the swing era in the 1930s,” says Tate. “It also really gives off a sort of Vaudeville vibe, where you didn’t just get a show, but you got a live show and a moving picture, which was standard in the early parts of the 20th century. And Cab Calloway came here and did five shows … it’s a beautiful ad to look at and again, I think, it also conveys how all of North America was just captivated by jazz and swing.”

Bill Haley and the Comets, the Platters, Chuck Berry et al., Maple Leaf Gardens, Sept. 29, 1956

“It’s crazy to see Chuck Berry here on the underbill,” says Tate. “This also was the third of three massive rock ‘n’ roll package shows that came to Toronto in 1956, which were essentially the first sort of mass-consumption, arena-packaged tours … So if you were a kid in the summer of 1956 in Toronto, your life was amazing. You were probably either begging your parents to buy you a ticket or to let you go or you just went anyways because you didn’t give a sh-- and this rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon had just hit Toronto like a wave this summer.”

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James Brown, Mimacombo Roller Rink, Nov. 8-9, 1965

“That (Nov. 9) was the night of the blackout that took out Boston, New York, Toronto. I got the story of teens who left Scarborough to drive to Etobicoke for the show,” says Bowman. “The blackout happens and there are no street lights or traffic lights but they make their way to the show anyway and, lo and behold, there is power at the roller rink. Brown put on a stunning show and when they left the rest of the city was still in a blackout. I corroborated this story with a couple of other people. Either the Mimacombo had an amazing generator or some weird glitch in the power grid allowed a little bit of Etobicoke to have electricity while the eastern seaboard was blacked out.”

Nirvana, Lee’s Palace, April 16, 1990

“Nirvana’s first show in Toronto (and) it was promoted by Elliott Lefko, who has left a really lasting legacy in this city in terms of the shows that he’s produced,” says Tate. “Nirvana was making a minor buzz — I think this was when they’d just been first signed to Sub Pop — and they still had Chad Channing as their drummer before Dave Grohl came on — and they were slumming it across the country in some dingy van, probably doing all kinds of substances. It was a very typical, reserved, kinda-snotty Toronto crowd that didn’t really know much about Nirvana and it was a random Monday in April of 1990. Kurt (Cobain) wasn’t pleased with that at all … so he tried to liven it up a little bit by trying to mimic the crowd and their behaviour. So he grabbed a table from the floor and continued to perform sitting at a table as a ‘f--k you’ and near the tail-end of the show, as the lore goes, he threw a bottle into the crowd and a bottle-throwing fest happened. Not many people were there. So if you were there, you were part of history. I’m sure a lot of people say they were there but they weren’t.”

Notorious B.I.G., Appollo, Jan. 31, 1995

“Nobody even really knows who promoted this show — I’d love to find out — and it was done in this dank basement cafeteria underneath the Big Slice at Yonge and Gerrard. I guess there was a performing space downstairs,” says Tate. “There’s some grainy video of this show where he’s just mobbed. He’s on the floor, rapping, and there’s maybe 100 people surrounding him and he’s like the eye of the tornado … and just to see Biggie in his real, rawest form performing his art for a Toronto crowd in mid-1995, which was the centrepoint of the ’90s New York rap renaissance, to my mind, is really significant. Granted, it wasn’t a long show. It ended up getting out of hand and some sh- went down … ”

Jimi Hendrix, Maple Leaf Gardens, May 3, 1969

“There are so many things that are beautiful about this. The art, the ’60s psychedelic esthetic of this poster is amazing and Jimi’s look but also just the whole drama surrounding this show because he got arrested when he landed. This is not just Toronto music history, this is world music history. They searched his plane they found a little bit of heroin and he was supposed to play that night but they took him to central bookings downtown and did that famous mug shot and it made world headlines and he was pleading ignorance and then he performed the show at the Gardens because, as the lore goes, the judge’s daughter had tickets to the show.”