Steve Lindsay built Lindsay Music, a cavernous Port Coquitlam rock and roll palace, from the ground up with his own two hands.
"There was just nothing here when I bought it," he said. "I put in the windows, the walls, everything."
And while those hands are more accustomed to pounding drum skins than pounding nails, the six-year work-in-progress near the corner of Kingsway Avenue and Mary Hill Bypass now houses some of the finest rehearsal and recording space in the Tri-Cities.
"It's very personal for me. I built every piece of this place and poured $400,000 of my own money into it," Lindsay told The Tri-City News over the muffled din of a lone drummer playing along with The Eagles' "Hotel California" behind a door off the main hall.
With full-band jam spaces, a digital- and analog-equipped recording studio and a rock school for voice, guitar, bass, piano and drums, Lindsay and his partner Georgie "Bones" Halpern, run Lindsay Music as a full-on music mentoring program, putting Tri-Cities bands on the map and pointing the way for new generations of musicians.
And for Lindsay and Halpern, much of that guidance means helping up-and-comers avoid the pitfalls and rock and roll baggage that they admit nearly derailed their own musical careers like it did many of their peers.
Which is another feature that sets Lindsay's business apart; aside from being an accomplished drummer, recording engineer, carpenter, and business owner, he's also a certified addictions counselor. And Lindsay Music is one of the few rehearsal spaces in the Lower Mainland with a clear zero-tolerance policy for alcohol and drug use on the premises.
"I built the school with that philosophy because there's so many musicians in the world who get captured in all that," Lindsay said. "Watching our friends die from addictions, watching brilliant musicians die - I've seen lot of hardship because of it and if you're going to make it in this industry today, you have to really work in a healthy way and that's what we try to pass on to the kids."
And while their focus is on teenagers, it's not just the young who are coming to study and play at Lindsay Music.
"We get three-year-olds to 70-year-olds," Lindsay said, laughing as recalled giving drum lessons to a 70-year-old grandmother who needed to learn how to play Ramones songs to join her granddaughter's punk band.
"The daughter couldn't find a drummer who was reliable and wasn't a 'diva' as she called it, so she got her grandmother, who'd never ever played before."
Drop-in lessons or hourly equipment and room rentals are always welcome for soloists or bands, but Lindsay Music's main push right now is on mentoring young players and bands one-on-one, Halpern said.
"Right now we get about 40 kids a week coming in through the doors and most have been coming for a few years," Halpern said. "We mentor them to become a performer. It's little things like how to walk onto a stage and how to introduce yourself and your song. These are things you're not going to learn in most music schools."
And with more than 60 years of experience as session players and touring performers between them, who better to teach the next generation of musicians?
"All of my years of learning bad habits, I teach them how to avoid," the self-taught Lindsay said.
And that goes for on-stage as well as off.
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