Dale Morningstar: Toronto's Gas Station Recording
When a notice of eviction arrived at Toronto's Gas Station Recording Studio in 2000, it could have easily spelled the end of a local indie-rock institution. Studio partners Dale Morningstar and Don Kerr had spent the past seven years presiding over a recording space that had become an affordable destination for a long list of Canadian bands including, The Inbreds, Thrush Hermit and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. But suddenly their prized warehouse location in the city's Parkdale neighbourhood was slated to become an office and retail complex. Though Morningstar had zero legal recourse against the gentrification, he still made noise. He put up posters and held a musical protest in his landlord's office. He generated coverage in print and on television. And not long after — while recording the solo debut of Gordon Downie, the Tragically Hip frontman whose Coke Machine Glow album [2001] would become the warehouse space's final project — Morningstar got a call from a local not-for-profit arts group. They'd seen his poster and had a solution to his problem, so long as he didn't mind setting up shop in an abandoned portable school building steps from Lake Ontario on Toronto Island. A decade later, and after an amicable parting of ways with Kerr, Morningstar runs the Gas Station Recording Camp in an exotic urban locale that's accessible by ferry and not open to private cars. It seems like a pretty good life. Morningstar has recorded the likes of Rock Plaza Central, Julie Doiron, and Tangiers, not to mention Tuvan throat singers from Mongolia. He also plays his 1976 Telecaster in Downie's backing band, the Country of Miracles. He also meditates while adrift in a canoe, hauls gear in a bike cart, and sometimes ends sessions with a swim off the nearby beach.
