Indie music impresario Abbas Jahangiri peppers his conversation with much talk of love, honesty, charity and especially Mother Teresa -- even showing off a picture of the late nun he carries around in his wallet.
"My mission is to help these artists," the owner of the El Mocambo rock club says of local musicians, not shy about comparing himself to the beatific nun.
But after his recent purchase of on-line message board 20hz.ca -- at the time virtual ground zero of the booming Canadian indie music scene and recently name-dropped by Spin and The New York Times -- the artists he's trying to help have a less saintly impression of him, complaining he killed their cyber hangout.
It's not the first time Mr. Jahangiri has been blamed for the demise of a local, lo-fi music haunt he has acquired. When he bought the El Mo in 2001 and announced it was going to house a dance studio, indie musicians and fans worried it was the end of the historic club, where the Rolling Stones once recorded Love You Live. But about four years later, reports of its death seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
The dance studio runs only occasional workshops, and despite fancy renovations and high-end drink prices, the El Mo lives on as a venue for local and touring bands. The same can't be said for 20hz, which regular users say is now a shell of its former self.
An Iranian immigrant, Mr. Jahangiri, 35, describes himself as a self-made man who came to Canada as a teen with a few bucks in his pocket and a head for business. He made his first real money from software development and real-estate, using that cash to purchase a pre-existing dance studio -- foreshadowing his future business moves.
Although he seems dedicated -- even sleeping at the El Mo in a small messy room upstairs -- Mr. Jahangiri has had considerable difficulty dealing with indie culture. Casually dressed in a blue T-shirt and orange parachute pants, with a hint of stubble, he doesn't look the part of a moneyman but can't shake that stigma.
"Any business you do buy, people are going to crucify you," he said relaxing in the El Mo's surprisingly classy upstairs green room last week, the day before the 20hz mutiny.
It began when Mr. Jahangiri announced his takeover in a posting to the site. "We are simply creating and expanding a market so that bands and musicians can promote themselves and produce bigger shows," the message said. The bands and musicians reacted poorly to his business-speak and began to gripe. It didn't help when he put up ads for Hummers on 20hz, which he says were for charity but nevertheless succeeded in further alienating the indie community.
"A lot of people felt that he was corporatizing 20hz, which pretty much runs against everyone's values on the site -- being treated like a demographic," says Bernard Kadosh, the singer/guitarist of Femme Generation and one of the 20hz moderators who was later banned from the site by Mr. Jahangiri.
"It's not about whether he's a good guy or a bad guy," Mr. Kadosh says, "It's that the community cannot be sold."
Mr. Jahangiri explains that he just wanted to create a website to help artists promote themselves if a proposed anti-postering bylaw is approved. When the opportunity came up to buy 20hz from Ryan Mills, who owns the low-budget Little King Studio and grew tired of running the message board, Mr. Jahangiri put down $10,000 instead of launching his own site.
Though claiming only the best intentions, Mr. Jahangiri is nonetheless seen by many as an interloper rather than a member of the tight-knit community. "He doesn't have to swoop down and give us promotion, we're doing it ourselves," Mr. Kadosh says. "We don't need a knight in shining armour."
As postings to 20hz grew more critical, members complained that Mr. Jahangiri was deleting dissenting posts and discussion threads, locking down entire forums and banning long-time users. In response, the members set up a counter site, stillepost.ca, signing up over 700 people within hours (it has since doubled, despite some technical difficulties).
For a brief time, any reference on 20hz.ca to the new site was auto-censored to appear as "I'm a mindless sheep."
Mr. Jahangiri's staff finally tried to quell the uprising, but it was too late. The key members of 20hz had decamped to stillepost.ca.
"We worked so hard to make it better for musicians and people try to do evil things like this," Mr. Jahangiri says. "They're simply trying to sabotage it, just a very ugly move."
He pledges that 20hz will be built back up and he's planning a relaunch with aims to make it "the biggest music site in Canada," but any real-world value the site had rested in its respected reputation and committed members, both of which appear to have been lost.
