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
