It’s Sunday night at the Cameron House in Toronto, where a packed room grooves to the Doghouse Orchestra. The eight-piece parti-gras band is doing ebullient, unexpected things to bluesy material such as Sitting on Top of the World, St. James Infirmary and deep-cut Elvis Presley gospel. And if there were 50 ways to do a Paul Simon hit from the 1970s before, there are 51 now.
As the first set closes with a brassy take on Otis Redding’s Hard to Handle, the singer walks around the tiny bar with a jug the patrons stuff with money.
“Thank you,” bassist Matt Caldwell says from the stage. “We appreciate you supporting live music.”
Local band Doghouse Orchestra perform at the Cameron House on Aug. 4.
Jessica Leibgott and her son Kai Kunder-Leibgott, 9, watch Kai’s father Ben Kunder perform at the Cameron House.
The Cameron House, a long-standing boozery and funky cultural venue on fast-gentrifying Queen Street West, has supported live music for as long as anyone can remember. The Ferraro family has had some ownership stake for more than 40 years, and now runs the place completely.
Annalise Ferraro, 34, manages and keeps the books; her younger brother, Tally, books the bands. Both are bartending tonight. They’ve been around the Cameron since their mother, Anne-Marie Ferraro, became part owner in 1981. Sometimes she would drag her young children there from their home at Bayview and Eglinton avenues.
“We all hated it as kids,” says Annalise, laughing at the irony. “We’d tell our mom, ‘It’s just a bunch of drunks.’”
It wasn’t that. In addition to the front bar and small stage, the four-storey building has a second music space in the back of the ground floor. There’s a female-run barbershop above and a number of rooms for rent – typically to musicians, actors and artists. Beloved thespian Bob Nasmith called the place home off and on for four decades before he died in 2019.
“People come and say they just need something for a few months, and then they end up staying for five years,” Annalise says.
The heart and soul of the place is the front room, with its giant day-of-the-dead mural, curved bar and, always, the bank machine. Strictly cash transactions at the Cameron.
Bassist and Doghouse Orchestra bandleader Caldwell, originally from Calgary, was welcomed into the Cameron community in 2019, when he came here to study music at the University of Toronto. He bartends on occasion – the Ferraros help out struggling musicians by giving them shifts pouring drinks – and the Doghouse Orchestra has held its Sunday night residency for more than two years now.
Last Christmas Eve fell on Sunday, and instead of closing for the holidays, the Ferraro family held a candle-lit dinner for the band before they played that night. On another occasion, at a fundraiser for the group’s Canadian tour, one of the Ferraros, an uncle, threw in a tank of gas for the band.
“They’re some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Caldwell says. “They’ve helped us out in so many ways, and I can’t say enough good things.”
The Doghouse Orchestra, like all the musicians who play the Cameron front room, keep the money from the pay-what-you-can jar. They also get a small percentage of the bar take for the night.
“It’s not necessarily the best paying gig in town,” Annalise admits. “But the musicians want to be here. They want to be on stage. They want to have fun, and they want to be around friends.”
