Colin James- Into the Mystic Van is the Man, but Colin does a great job on this version (imho)

Van Morrison likes Montreal, and played there in one of the theatres on Saint Catherine way back when.

Bob when you said a theatre on Saint Catherine I wondered if it was maybe the Capitol ,and so a quick search found this following excerpt form a Montreal article:
“I first saw Van Morrison in the late 60’s at the Capitol Theatre on Ste-Catherine Street. He performed two shows that evening – and he was in full flight by the time the second show was underway.” I’m in conversation with Rubin Fogel, a lifelong fan of Van Morrison’s music, and the promoter for Morrison’s October 1st performance at Salle Wilfred Pelletier in Place des Arts.

   =the whole article can be read here at this link: Hope it brings back some memories for you Bob. (sorry but you will have to copy and paste or hi-light the link and right click for google to find it)
     https://themontrealeronline.com/2009/09/van-morrison-celebrating-five-decades-of-music/
 

The Imperial Theatre

We already have a post on the site way back re: Montreal Movie Theatres,including old pics of most of them,including the Savoy of course.but in today;s Gazette is a short article on the old Imperial ,it is still around today being used as an art festival or something. Man we had some cool old buildings in our day,too bad they were not all saved. The following is the article from todays Gazette.

       The Imperial Cinema is one of Montreal’s last surviving movie palaces.

Opulent theatres like the Imperial proliferated in the city starting in the early 1900s and were designed to present vaudeville acts at affordable prices — the plush 2,000-seat facility on Bleury north of Ste-Catherine was billed as “The People’s Pleasure Palace at Popular Prices.”

But by the 1990s, many of the original movie palaces had been torn down or turned into multiplexes. That’s why it made headlines in the Montreal Gazette on Feb. 1, 1995, when Famous Players cinemas donated the Imperial to the Montreal International Film Festival.

At the time, Famous Players president Joe Peixoto said the gift marked the centenary of the movie industry and the 75th anniversary of Famous Players.

It also reflected the fact that the Imperial had become a white elephant, closed for weeks on end. The hope was that the festival would return the facility to regular use. The Imperial would become a showcase for vintage movies and gala premieres, film fest head Serge Losique told our reporter.

Unfortunately, since then the film festival itself has fallen on hard times. In August 2017, creditors were about to foreclose on the heavily mortgaged cinema when Québecor mogul Pierre Karl Péladeau stepped in, investing $5 million to take over most of the Imperial’s debt and ensure the continued existence of the film festival.

This photograph by John Mahoney shows the Imperial in its splendour around the time of the Famous Players gift.