Blues Pub History
This article is no longer being maintained, and only exists for archival purposes. Reason for archival: Depreciated due to redundancies between both Blues Pub main page and Blues Pub Facebook page; may be reinstated if desired.
Founded: 1992
Founders: Tony Manolikakis, Andrew Leccese, Mike Prichett and Matthew Mathers
Capacity: 100
Organization: EUS
Location: Common Room - McGill Engineering Building
When: Every Friday 4PM-9PM
Happy Hour: 4PM-6PM
Fall 2019, First Blues Pub . . .
Blues Pub was created/introduced by Tony Manolikakis, Andrew Leccese, Mike Prichett and Matthew Mathers. Tony and Andrew (aka O'Boogie & Cheese) were the common room managers in the 92’-93’ academic year. Part of the mandate for the common room was to provide a space for various engineering groups to hold fundraising events and social gatherings. A lot of the gatherings created a bit of segregation among the various departments (ex: Chemical engineering wine and cheese or Mechanical mixer).
One day a U1 named Mike Prichett approached Andrew and Tony and suggested the idea of having a party in the common room (they suspected Matthew Mathers put him up to this). So they chose a day that was not already booked for fundraising and decided that they would have cheap beer, pizza, live music and a relaxing atmosphere. The first song for every party was “Little Bones” by Tragically Hip. Aside from being a pretty chill song, the song also repeatedly says “Happy hour is here” and thus is a pretty appropriate song choice. They couldn’t figure out what to name the event but right before the first party, Tony said that they needed to figure something out and write it on the LED sign they had in the common room. Mike walked in, and with time running out he said “let’s just call it Blues Pub, for now, and we’ll figure something out later.” They never thought of another name, and so the name stuck and pretty soon every Friday was Blues Pub.
Why Blues Pub? In contrast to PubNite they wanted to offer a low-key environment for the engineers to relax after a long week, the blues being the no-nonsense predecessor to much contemporary popular music conjures up that type of atmosphere.
The name of the band that would play at Blues was “The Band That Killed Elvis.” This band was led by the go-to guy for anything music related in engineering, Paul Robichaud, who would play drums. They would play all sorts of music (grunge, blues and soul and even metal) with the aid of various instruments. Sometimes the band as well as the crowd would get so into the music, that some of the band members would actually go crowd surfing.
Source : The Evolution of the McGill Engineer: How we became known as the rowdiest, craziest, drunkest and overall best faculty on campus
