Sign of the Times Venerable local music venue celebrates 25 years with changes that stay true to its roots By: Ben Waldman Posted: 5:49 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 13, 2026

In the weeks since the trusty old bartop was dismantled and a longer one was built in the backroom at the Times Change(d) High & Lonesome Club, the venue’s self-appointed president and janitor John Scoles has heard one piece of consistent, admittedly inaccurate, feedback from a handful of the downtown honky-tonk’s faithful clientele.

“People keep saying to me, ‘Wow. It’s the Times Change(d) 2.0,’” says Scoles, who officially took the helm in 2001, adding the parenthetical D to the name to demarcate the dawn of a new era. “I say, ‘2.0? We’re at 4.5 A-1.’”

Situated in the Fortune Block, a building named in 1882 for a Winnipeg businessman who would later perish in the sinking of the Titanic, the Times Change(d) — which cheekily celebrates its birthday on April 15, the day the historic ocean liner went down — is a constantly evolving entity that has achieved renown for repeatedly, scrappily surviving attempts on its life.

On Thursday, the venue’s current iteration will mark a quarter-century of roots music, blues jams, housecoats and rubber chicken memories with a sold-out concert by Saskatoon rockers the Sheepdogs with Winnipeg’s Irvin Miller Band opening up.

Sheepdogs bassist Ryan Gullen says it was the band’s pleasure to tack on an extra local date one day ahead of their concert at the Burton Cummings Theatre.

“Very few places in this country can say they’re even close to touching what the Times Change(d) can offer,” says Gullen, whose band has been touring since 2004. “We wanted to help raise awareness for what a gem that venue continues to be.”

An eternal tinkerer, Scoles and his staff were still in the process of installing updated lighting, PA systems and speakers last week. After climbing down from a 12-foot-tall ladder, the 60-year-old Scoles reflected on his time as the steward of a venue so deeply intertwined with local and western Canadian music history.

Though he’s only been officially authorized to make updates to the interiors since taking over proprietorship in 2001, Scoles has been designing his dream version of the Times in his head for nearly 40 years.

“Very few places in this country can say they’re even close to touching what the Times Change(d) can offer.”

His earliest memories of the Main Street concert hall date back to the late 1980s, when the venue was still known as the Times Changed Café.

Located in a room that had earlier housed an automotive shop and the pioneering lesbian bar Ms. Purdy’s, the cafe had seating for 50, with some mismatched chairs and tables spread throughout the room on “a carpet the colour of your lawn in springtime,” Scoles recalled. (Big Dave McLean, the host of the Times’ legendary Sunday night blues jam, was playing that room, too.)

The building’s lovely bones — designed by architects C. Mancel Willmot and George W. Stewart — were hidden by an ungainly drop ceiling. “At night we’d lift up the ceiling tiles to look up at this beautiful old tin-tiled ceiling,” recalls Scoles. “Pieces of the plaster walls would break off and you could see the brick.”

In 1990, the Morden-raised Scoles headed to Austin, Texas, with his then-girlfriend, blues guitarist Sue Foley, and his high school friend, a bassist named John Penner.

In Austin, Scoles got a first-rate education in blues-bar ownership from Clifford Antone, whose eponymous club was a regular stop for artists across genres and generations, from the Tex-Mex stylings of Doug Sahm to the country-rock of Bonnie Raitt. Working under Antone, Scoles took notes, seeing that the venue’s strength wasn’t only in its promotion of up-and-comers, but in its heraldry of forgotten or underappreciated bluesmen.

“The Eddie Taylors and the Jimmy Rogers. Junior Brown was playing on Tuesday nights,” recalls Scoles, who was awarded with the Kevin Walters Industry Builder Award at last year’s Western Canadian Music Awards. “He couldn’t necessarily afford to have B.B. King playing, so he realized you can elevate these people who are just as good.”

When Scoles returned to Winnipeg in 1992, he got a job as a bartender at the old café. The carpet still bugged him.

“I asked the manager if we could get rid of the carpet, but he said the liquor commission required one in a place like that,” recalls Scoles, who balked at what he perceived as bureaucratic overreach. “Once I ripped out the carpet, a new liquor inspector came in. What do you think the first thing he said was? ‘You got rid of that carpet. Hey, that was a good idea.’”

While he updated the interiors, and as the walls began to be pasted with a museum-worthy collection of handbills, gig posters and inexplicable ephemera, Scoles took a page out of Antone’s book by “creating a cavalcade of stars” to serve as elder statespeople and establish a credible stable of local talent.

That group included McLean, bandleader the Rev. Percy Tuesday and Stew Clayton, a world-renowned country yodeller.

“I’m not a churchgoer, but that’s the kind of church I’d go to.”

“Stew won the international yodelling championship 11 times,” says Scoles, who says the venue picked up the slack once the fabled Blue Note Café closed in 1998. “The amazing thing about that was you couldn’t win two years in a row.”

Those early Times Change(d) legends were quickly joined on the schedule in the early 2000s by bands like the D-Rangers, the Perpetrators, Chic Gamine and Nathan, a Juno-winning alt-country group featuring Damon Mitchell, Shelley Marshall, and Keri and Devin Latimer, now of Leaf Rapids.

In 2001, when Nathan released its first record, Stranger, with a gig at the Times, reps from Vancouver’s Nettwerk Records were in the audience and signed the quartet right after; Leaf Rapids celebrated its most recent album release in the same room in 2024.

“The Times had that small-town feel that I loved,” says Keri Latimer, who grew up in Lethbridge, Alta. “It made me feel at home. I’m not a churchgoer, but that’s the kind of church I’d go to.

“It also feels like you’re stepping into a museum when you walk through the doors,” she adds. “And you kind of are.”

But that history is still unfolding, with the venue playing host each week to a cross-generational mix of folk, blues, country and roots acts, consistently boasting the top players in the province and the region.

In the decade since local philanthropist John Pollard purchased the Heritage-designated Fortune Block in 2016, Scoles and company have continued to build the Times Change(d) into a local icon.

While 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of the venue’s current management, it also marks five years since its sister venue, the neighbouring Blue Note Park, opened its gates for the first time.

“Blue Note Park was the key,” says Scoles, who aims to open the outdoor venue in late May. “Because we took that leap of faith, we were able to translate that success into this,” he says, gesturing toward the reconfigured honky-tonk.

In his head, he’s already plotting out Times Change(d) 4.5 A-2.

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