February 24, 2017 – MUSKOKA ON
It’s intermission, and members of the band Pretzel Logic are standing on a patio outside a Gravenhurst concert venue called Peter’s Players. There’s nothing unusual about that, perhaps, but in this case they’re mingling with members of the audience on a perfect late spring night in Muskoka.
A couple band members are drinking from bottles of water. One is nursing a beer. But they’re all chatting with audience members about their favourite songs or about music in general. One of the singers is trying to rustle up a fishing trip for the next day. A few feet away, folks are gathered around a metal fireplace and roasting the free marshmallows that owners Peter and Michelle Swanek have provided.
You don’t get this kind of up close and personal treatment when you catch a band at the Air Canada Centre. But it’s the way things work at Peters’ Players. Mind you, the entire venue seats less than 100 people, all of them gathered on five rows of seating in a small building that looks and feels like the basement of the coolest kid in high school. Peter’s motto for the venue is “A Place Like No Other,” and he’s bang on.
My wife and I had the pleasure of hearing Pretzel Logic, a Toronto-based band that plays fantastic covers of Steely Dan songs. I went in thinking they’d only have four or five members in the band and that they wouldn’t be able to play hits from the monster album “Aja.” Instead, they had a full 11-piece band complete with a three-piece horn section. They were a rocking, fun, volume-pounding, joyful group that put on a tremendous live show. The drummer was sensational, the guitarists played searing solos and the horn section swung with might. The lead singer, Mike Shotton, sounded almost exactly like Steely Dan vocalist Donald Fagen.
Band spokesman Peter Graham and I chatted between sets about Peter’s Players as a venue. “It’s completely unique,” he said. “We love the intimacy and the connection with the audience.” Graham said it was the band’s first time at the hall. “It’s an amazing place. Peter has a great reputation in the biz, and bands love to play places like this.”
Peter and Michelle started Peter’s Players in April 2008 after they took a rundown auto shop on Muskoka Road South in Gravenhurst and turned it into an 88-seat concert venue with rows of bench seats. The Swaneks live in a house out front of the venue. Peter organizes the shows and introduces the band and makes sure things run smoothly on stage while Michelle makes sure things run smoothly on and off stage including behind the bar, selling tall boys of beer for just $6 that you can nestle into a cup holder in front of your seat. The walls are covered with posters advertising previous shows; including such stars as Jesse Cook, Johnny Winter and Jane Siberry.
Swanek, who used to run concerts out of his house in Innisfil, Ontario, told me he started off by concentrating on blues artists as he loved the music and thought he could get a higher level of talent for less money than other types of artists or bands. He and Michelle have since expanded to an eclectic mix of blues, rock and other styles.
Neither Peter nor Michelle are entirely sure why it all works, but they has some ideas. “The audience in my mind are all 18-year-olds,” Peter says. “I think they all revert back. When we had John Sebastian (of the Lovin’ Spoonful) play his manager said he usually only plays an hour, but that he likes small places and might play longer. I think he played 80 or 90 minutes. So the musicians love it. I think you saw how happy they were.”
“Everyone tells me they’ve never experienced a venue like this but to me it just seems normal,” Swanek says.
“Sometimes at the beginning people will say, ‘I don’t want to tell anyone else about this place.’ They feel like they’re part of some exclusive crowd,” Michelle explains with a laugh. “But I say, ‘Tell everyone you can.'”
