Dennis Ruffo From back rows to backstage
By JIM HURCOMB While I may be at the stage of life now
when I can’t remember the last concert I saw, I sure can remember the first one. It was 1967 at the Capitol Theatre in
downtown Ottawa. The Capitol was the last of the great movie palaces, with a balcony, a chandelier and a lobby that walked out of a 30s Broadway musical. It also became one of the best places to see rock bands in the late 60s. The Who performed Tommy there in ‘69, and it hosted Cream and Jimi Hendrix in their only Ottawa appearances. The headliner that night was soul
legend “The Wicked” Wilson Pickett, riding high on “Mustang Sally”,“Funky Broadway”, and other hits. I remember the opening acts as local bands The Five D, 3’s a Crowd, and Bruce Cockburn’s new band The Flying Circus. It was just the first of countless nights
catching bands at the Civic Centre, Barrymore’s, Camp Fortune, Lansdowne Park, The Corel Center and other venues big and small. Nights spent with Springsteen, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Bowie, Queen, Peter Gabriel, Kiss, and on and on and on. And then there was the famous
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Animals riot in 1967, when the band refused to go on without being paid first. Fans tore the place apart and it made international papers. The Stones have played here twice. Elvis, Bill Haley,
Simon and Garfunkel, the Who, U-2 and pretty well everybody in between has visited Ottawa. In fact, if there was a concert in
Ottawa in the late 70s or 80s that you will never forget, chances are Dennis Ruffo was the guy who signed on the dotted line to bring it to town. Dennis Ruffo and his buddies were
probably at all those shows in the 60s and 70s. When the bands wouldn’t come to them, they would hop on the Treble Clef Concert buses for trips to Montreal and Toronto. If there was music, they were there. Ruffo’s journey from the back rows to
backstage started when he was studying journalism at Carleton University. He pitched a musical show called “Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave”, starring his friend Sneezy Waters, to the owner of a sleepy downtown club called the Beacon Arms. While the club did well with civil servants during the day, at night it was dead, so why not? The show was a huge success, and it
gave Dennis and his friends a window to bring in other live acts, mostly American Blues, Folk and Jazz artists. The roster included Blues legends Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and Willie Dixon, and folk artist Steve Forbert. When the Beacon Arms management decided to drop the music format, Dennis
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