Transcript
Speaker: Hi, it's Dan here and I wanted to let you know that this is a very special episode of the show. Some glimpses from my chats with four previous guests. You'll hear about 10 minutes of each guest's 60 plus minute conversation, which will give you a small idea of the many topics that we covered. Also, you can listen to the entire conversation at either linernotes .ca or on any podcast platforms. Just search for liner notes revealing chats with Canada's retro music makers. Enjoy.
Speaker: Today I'm very honored to have as my special guest Frank Mills. Frank obviously has a lengthy list of accomplishments as a composer and arranger, keyboardist, producer, and writer, all for which he has won many awards and accolades on his way to becoming an iconic member of the Canadian musical landscape. So really thanks for joining me today, Frank. I appreciate it. How are you? Fine, Dan. Thank you very much. I'm very well.
Speaker: Things are good. At 81, you never know what's going to happen these days. Well, a day at a time, I guess they say. You're happy and healthy as far as that life goes. Yeah, you wake up and say, well, it's great to be alive. Were you chasing the rock star dream? That never really, I guess, excited me too much. I loved rock music. Don't get me wrong. Bill Haley was the biggest thing since we came back when I was a kid.
Speaker: And my music has always been very eclectic. My father loved opera and he liked classical music, so he was the influence there, while my mother liked pop songs and, you know, she was the
Speaker: the more modern influence as a kid, I gravitated more to her style. And as I got older, gravitated to the classical side. And then as I got into involvement with lessons in piano and eventually at McGill, there was no question about it that I was going to be on the road to some classical form, if not necessarily. So it's ironic that I got my first gold record playing piano with the bells back in 1971.
Speaker: Yeah. And a lot of people don't know that. They don't know that I was playing the piano on the hit Stay a While. Yeah. I didn't write it. I did do the arranging for it. Right. I think I played, yeah, I played the harmonica solo. Oh, did you? Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to get out and play the rock stuff. Not necessarily hard rock, but joining the bells, we're a very soft rock group.
Speaker: My new rock at the time was soft. And you guys found your niche, you found your place in the Canadian music scene, right? Exactly. Well, they did. And then I joined them. That was another stroke of luck. I had been in real estate for a little while trying to make some money to put on the table and pay the rent and buy a new piano, which I did. But when I left real estate, I decided, well,
Speaker: What am I going to do? I remember telling my boss that I was leaving real estate to go join a rock band and he looked at me and said I was crazy. And partly was, I suppose. And later, I guess within about three weeks, the phone rang and it was Cliff Edwards from the Bells. And he said to me, would you like to play piano for the group? And I said, this is amazing. You know, I've only been out of sort of out of the picture for two or three weeks and there's
Speaker: Canada's top group at the time. So I couldn't wait to do that. And they were great. We learned a lot about recording, which is a whole other aspect of something I really loved and enjoyed. You were in the bells and then you left them to do it solo career. Is that right? That was after only a few years. Yeah, I left them when stale. I was right up on the top of the charts and everybody in the bells looked at me and said, Hey, you're stupid. You know, we were just getting going here. I suppose I made the decision. I was concerned about their management.
Speaker: I was concerned about how far their talent would take them as opposed to my own to be very selfish. And looking back on it, it was a good decision. The same people at Polydor Records who were also contracted with the Bells to do recordings. I got to know Frank Gould, who was the artist and repertoire director and a nice fellow named Guy Bertrand, who was vice president of the company.
Speaker: I got to know them well. And they always said, if you ever leave the bells, come and see us because we'd like to do something with you. I had only been out of the bells. I left them in March of 1971. Come September, I had the hit with Love Me, Love Me, Love. So it was quick. That nearly almost didn't happen either. That was a fluke. Yeah. What's the fluke about that?
Speaker: Having left the bells, everybody at Polydor wondered what I was up to and Frank Gould, who was a nice guy. I think he might have been an American pop guy who was hired by Polydor in Montreal to internationalize the company a bit. It was a bit European -based company. Frank Gould said to me, you've got anything kicking around. I said, well, I got this instrumental album that you probably won't like,
Speaker: He said, let me listen to it. Frank being the typical pop guy, he listened the first 10 seconds and he said, I don't like that one. I don't like that one. We got to song number 11. You never put 11 songs on an album back in 1970. It was 10 songs and that was it. You're not going to get the extra two seconds.
Speaker: So knowing all of that, I insisted on putting 11 songs in that album just to be Frank Mills. And Frank Gould said to me, well, I like this last tune there, Music Box Dancer. He said, it's kind of catchy. No, I'm sorry. Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, Love Me. He said, yeah. He said, that's kind of catchy. And he got words to it. And I said, yes. And he put the record on in his office having just listened to it and said, OK, let's do it again. But just time you sing it.
Speaker: And so I stood there. Now listen, Dan, I've never thought of myself as being a vocalist, ever. It was just not in the cards. And there I am in his office, singing my heart out, trying to make it sound as good as I could. And he said, I love it. Here's money, go and record it. Tomorrow, we're going to have a hit with this record. He said, it's a dead hit.
Speaker: Well, because I never thought of you as a singer because you were so well known as an instrumental guy. But then I listened to that. You got the harp on there, you got the drums and the vocals. So it's a band, right? Yeah, but it caused me an immense difficulty. It shouldn't have, but it did. It became very complicated because now the record company wanted a vocal album. And I'm saying, wait a minute. This isn't going to happen.
Speaker: because I just did not have my faith in myself as a singer. I'd been in the church choir and that kind of thing in the high school glee club, but never thought of myself as a soloist. And in hindsight, I'm sorry I didn't do more of it because a recent podcast I did, oh, two years ago, excuse me, not a podcast, an ASMR. I did one of those and it went crazy. We had a couple of hundred thousand listeners and one of the guys phoned in and he said,
Speaker: You know, this is working well for you because of your voice. But I thought, well, there is a unique witness to that voice. And it's a shame I didn't capitalize on it, but I didn't know it at the time. And music was my outlet. So we did the vocal album and it didn't go anywhere, which I predicted. However,
Speaker: The next album after that had music box on it. Well, there you go. But you make a good point overall, because some of the most popular songs aren't by the greatest singers. I mean, I wouldn't consider someone like, say, Willie Nelson a great singer, but he has a flavor that people just relate to. But you touch on it there. I'm a little harder than you are. I think most rock singers are not great singers. There you go. Yeah. But their expression.
Speaker: Gordon Lightfoot, who became a friend of mine, Gordon and I used to say to him all the time, Gordon, how do you do this? He knew that I knew he had taken a lot of vocal lessons and he was always at the vocal trainers guy. He had a vocal trainer and he was always doing it and re -recording lines in the songs. Then these songs that were monumental and historically fabulous songs, everybody wrote with. He was a poet.
Speaker: But it doesn't matter how bad your voice was, his poetry was so good. I listened to the record, the Edmund Fitzgerald, probably daily. And I'm still, I remember asking him, how did you come up with that line? Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours? He said, well, I was stuck between the last line and the line before it.
Speaker: So I had to fill it up with something. I said, you are kidding me. He said, well, maybe a little bit, but he said I worked at it. You worked for, is it right? Do I read here? You worked as a pianist for CBC television for a while. We had a program, it saved my bacon, to be honest with you. We had a program between Love Me, Love Me, Love and Music Box. There were about eight years there that were, I actually got my cab driver's license living in Toronto at that time and never drove the cab.
Speaker: I was just about to show up for work on a Monday morning, and that previous Friday afternoon, Dave Watts in Ottawa phoned me and said, you've got a monstrous hit with this funny little piano song on your hands. That was the end of the taxi driving. Never got into the cab, but there were a lot of things I was doing to try and keep money on the table. I was married with three kids at the time.
Speaker: Yeah. And let me see. Well, there was a taxi. I was also a secretary -treasurer of a small municipality in Quebec where I lived for a short time up in La Tromblanc. And then there was this program called Sunday Brunch, which, thank God, saved my bacon. It was a weekly show on CBC for two years. And I played piano on Sunday and Wayne Grigsby, who's a wonderful
Speaker: journalist. And he invited me to, he said, look, so we just want somebody to come on and play these intros and ex shows off the, you know, when we go to commercial and that type of thing. And I said, well, let's give it a whirl. I'll do my best. And they loved it. So I got my first one year contract with them. And that was a gift from Evan. Today, I'm very happy to have as my special guest, David Rashid, best known as keyboardist and songwriter for the popular 80s band Haywire.
Speaker: My first love was Elvis Presley, and then soon after that was Kiss and Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith. And I was more of the rock instead of folky background. When you're involved with rock music, you kind of tend to flock to those type of people that are like -minded.
Speaker: Yeah, fair enough. And of course, growing up in the neighborhoods, I mean, everybody and their dog was starting a band or had a band, or that was my experience. We're similar in age. So we grew up at a time, but we listened to Led Zeppelin, but we listened to James Taylor and Cat Stevens too. You listened to everybody, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Which was a nice time. It was a great time to grow up because the music was so rich. It was such a golden age. You know, my earliest memory was
Speaker: is getting one of the albums, whether it was Kiss Destroy or Kiss Alive or Elvis, and just looking at the album while it's playing and maybe shaking it or looking at the liner notes and reading everything and looking at every picture. It was quite a special thing. And I miss those days. And I think that people today, they're missing that time to really sit with music and to really dive into it.
Speaker: Yeah, no, good point. And I've often said on the podcast how much AM radio played and then eventually FM, but I mean, AM radio was huge back then and you were waiting for the new songs to come out and there's all these fantastic songs coming out and you're going, this is so great. It was such a magical time. Oh yeah. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker: So I'm always curious with people too that that eventually go on to bigger and better things because everybody in their dog had a sort of a rough kind of band or you get a bunch of musicians together and hack out a few tunes. But then did you have a defining moment where you thought, you know, I might be able to make something out of this or this is really what I want to do?
Speaker: Well, I knew early on that this is what I wanted to do. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Right. So just because I like doing it, you know, my first band, it's I didn't want to do anything else. So it wasn't it wasn't an option of I'm going to do this for a year or so and give it a shot and see what happens. It was like, this is what I love to do. So that's what I love to do. My first band was like that. My second band was like that. And my third band was like that.
Speaker: And when Haywire formed, it was the same kind of thing. It was, we did it because it was the love of the music. That was really all it was about. Yeah. Well, interesting. Cause I often ask people, you know, did you have a plan or how much was planned and how much just happened? But, you know, for myself too, I've been able to make a living for many decades playing music, but I never really overthought it. I just kind of did it. I didn't overthink it. I just kind of was doing it.
Speaker: When I look back, our main objective when we formed Haywire was to form a band with members that didn't have ties that could leave the island and tour Atlantic Canada. That was really our main objective. So we didn't really look past that. I remember we had a jam session early on.
Speaker: before the band was formed and a few different bands and we hand selected the members that could actually go away and that was the criteria. So if you met that criteria, we just moved forward from there.
Speaker: Yeah, no fair point. And because I always often ask people to when you look back at the timelines, I mean, there was a lot of shuffling of the seats and a lot of shuffling of players. And, you know, part of that was probably just finding the right combination of players and songwriters. But the other part is, as you say, being willing to travel, being willing to invest the time and make it a priority, which some guys just didn't want to do.
Speaker: Yeah, I think everybody in the band was on board. It was just the drummers seemed to be the missing link. And when we finally got Sean in the band,
Speaker: He's been with us ever since 1985. We found the right guy. We just had to keep looking for him that was into the same mindset that we were in. Cool. And then you guys, I mean, you paid your dues. You played clubs. You played covers. You broke your originals out of that. You traveled lots. You did lots of six -nighters, I'm assuming.
Speaker: Oh yeah, we never played so much as when we were a comfort band. When we started the band in 1981 was the conception of the band and we got signed in late 85. So for those four plus years, we were playing 300 and some days a year. It was just keep going. It was like, okay, you're here for a week, here for a week. And we had a great agent at Halifax and he kept us busy and that's all we wanted to do.
Speaker: but there's no circuit like that today. I mean, you got to cut your teeth, you got that experience, you got your 10 ,000 hours in, as they say. Yeah, I feel, again, I really feel bad for the people trying to make it today because there is no, you know, back then, not that there was an industry, but there was, at least you could play.
Speaker: I play lots. You just want to play. That's it. And that's where you get better as a band. For sure, because there's nights when you're not so great. And then the next night you go, you know what, I'm going to play better tonight. And I'm going to improve. And you can build on that and build on that. And like I'm saying, we're playing 300 some days. It's like you can really fine tune your set like after you play week after week after week.
Speaker: That's cool. I always appreciate it when you think some bands are overnight success or whatever, but you guys went through the contest too. It's funny because Battle of the Bands was a big thing back in that day. I went in one, I think, and I thought music for me isn't a contest. I shunned that. I did sound for some and I participated in some as an overseer, but I didn't want to go in them anymore. Yet you guys took that and made something from that.
Speaker: Well, there's, there's two of them that we participated in and we won both of them. One was Q1 0 4 homegrown contest, right? And Halifax, which was 84. Yes. Yeah, that was that was a big thing. Like, you know, there's a little band from PEI coming over and who do you think you guys are? Well, you know, it was just like, let's put it in, see what happens. And it's, you know, it's not going to
Speaker: really change anything what we're doing. So we're going to do that. And then we're going to continue on. We were looking at the long game, right? Yeah, fair enough. And we ended up winning that, which was amazing. And then in St. John, New Brunswick, they had a battle of bands here as well. And we ended up winning that. And the neat story about the one in New Brunswick is that we were the only band that did all the original music.
Speaker: So I remember some of the other bands were doing the biggest hits of the time. And, you know, it was it was a no brainer. They were they had the audience in their in their hands. Right. Yeah. And then we came on and we just did our original music. And it was like, I remember hearing the judges comments afterwards. They were saying, if you believed enough in yourself to do original music at a show like this, there's there's got to be something there. So and they were right.
Speaker: And then I watched your CBC interview from 1985, that that was right before you got your Attic record deal, I assume, where they're asking you about where you're going and stuff. And you seemed fairly mature back then, like your response is you were cerebral enough to sort of engage with what they were saying. And you didn't seem like you were too caught up in your own ego, I suppose. Is that fair? I know the interview you're talking about. Heywire was a very serious, we took our job serious.
Speaker: Like Mervyn and I were the main writers and Ronnie and I were the main kind of, not ran the band, but kind of the co -managers and just kind of, we just, everybody had their roles. And I think everybody took that responsibility seriously. I think that's what made it happen, right? Everybody knew their place and knew what they needed to do.
Speaker: The other thing that always strikes me, obviously you got a record deal, but then categorizing the bands, like I've seen descriptions of you guys, Hard Rock and Glam Metal and Heavy, or I don't know, just when I listened to it, it seems to me it was more, you had the keyboard, you had the synth pads, it's very 80s, but I didn't think it was Heavy Metal.
Speaker: We were all about the songs. We were songwriters first. I think the record company needed to know what genre, where we fit in. Where are you? Because we're, you know, their job is to, when the single comes out, where are we going to invest our money to make this work? That's what they, that's their motivation, right? Yeah. So
Speaker: know, with the exception of our, I think our third album, Nut House, that was a heavy rock album. But the first two albums were very pop rock oriented. So the first album, you got your record deal, obviously, from all the work that you'd done and you had self -produced an EP, I guess, before that too. So you guys were really doing your own due diligence, I guess, or your own work.
Speaker: Well, even back then, I remember record companies were looking to see what you can do. So they wanted to see, you know, okay, they invested their money, they, they believe in themselves, they, you know, promoted market in themselves. You know, they want, they're not stupid, they want a piece of it. See if that can happen. If you can move, you know, thousands of copies, you know, in your, your territory, how can this work for, for them?
Speaker: Earl Johnson, an exceptional guitar player, notably with the band Moxie in the 1970s, along with various other projects throughout his career. You made your mark. I guess it's been over 50 years, maybe in the music scene now, over half a century. How does that feel? Well, you know, it's interesting because
Speaker: I'm almost restarting at this point with the new band Tribes, and Tribes is all about, without getting into too much detail, okay? During COVID, I found out my birth father was a Indian out of Brantford's Six Nations, okay? Wow, okay. And that ended up going back all the way down to, you have to do a, to get an Indian card in Canada, they have to do a geological search, I mean, or whatever it's called. It's a family tree search, okay?
Speaker: So they did a family tree search and the tribe I was in was called Tuscarora, which went down to North Carolina in the 1700s.
Speaker: They actually came up to Canada during some of the English American wars and they ended up, somehow ended up at the end of the day over in Brantford under the six stations. Umbrella. Wow. And my mom used to tell me this stuff years ago. Anyways, during this whole thing during COVID, then I pushed it further and it's a thing called quantum blood. Now, if you have a high percentage of pure Indian blood in your family tree, you can become an American citizen as well. You were actually deemed a,
Speaker: American Indian living in Canada. Right. Interesting. That's my current status. When I was 18, I quit school and walked out the door and went on tour with them and became a disability boy for three years. Interesting. It was a very magical time. This is around the time of Woodstock and Kent State. We actually drove through Columbus, Ohio the day after the shootings in Kent State. Which was in October of 70, right? Yeah. We were on our way down to the Midwest to do a tour.
Speaker: And we're driving through Columbus and I'm seeing all these tanks coming down the street.
Speaker: And I'm sitting in the back seats to drive, take the first side road, will you please? Okay. So we got off and we got on the car watch and all these tanks were rolling down the street. They're going, these are university kids they're dealing with. Yeah. That was a, that was a negative situation. I hope it never gets repeated. I mean, for, for sharpshooters and military guys to be sitting up on, you know, pick up college students. Exactly. It was beyond. It was defenseless as well. Defenseless. Of course.
Speaker: And when I was 20, I think it was 70, it was 71, the Zeppelin played in Toronto at the place called the Sonic Temple. And a buddy of mine said, you got to come see these guys. I just heard their stuff. And I hadn't heard of them at all. And we drove over and we were up in the balcony. I'm looking down at Pais and going, holy fuck.
Speaker: My world just changed totally. That's what I want to do. And I've been playing blues nonstop for three years. And then I got the Buzz to start writing songs and wanted to do that thing. And I heard them and said, it was so creative what they were doing. What happened with Moxie's? I joined a band called The Ashford, I think in 72 with Buzz, who was a singer. Me and him had become friends to another friend of mine.
Speaker: And we talked about putting something original together. Anyways, we started writing some songs and we started getting some really good reaction. And then, you know, but the problem was we were playing, we were playing the sixth night of a week thing then as well. Okay. Well, it was quite a well -known band around Southern Ontario, right? Yeah, exactly. But the thing was, um, they had been through it. The hit was gone.
Speaker: you know
Speaker: with bar owners when they wanted to fly around Tuesday night, you know? So anyways, we did a year of trying to write stuff and it went nowhere. And we got discouraged and we broke it up, right? I put a band together for about a year out of Hamilton, went back to Hamilton. I called Buzz and said, I said, Buzz, I've been writing some new songs. I knew one was Sailor and Sail Away, another one was fantasy. I said, I got some pretty cool stuff happening.
Speaker: So we said, let's get together. So I brought my buddy, Kim, on bass from Hamilton with me. We hooked up with Buzz and with Bill Wade, the original drummer. And we started putting the first album together, right? And it was like, and Buzz was going, wow, this stuff is really good. And Bill was saying, yeah, this is great. And it showcased him all over the place. He could, it was a three piece band. He could do whatever he wanted, right? Yeah.
Speaker: So then Buzz brought in a guy named Rolly Paquin who had been the road manager for James Gang. And anyways, Roland said, I gotta sell this. And so he got us a production deal that we're in New York field records at the time and a head records ever called. Anyways, the next thing I know, they send us to LA to do the album.
Speaker: And we're down in L .A. at Van Nuys, which became way famous after we recorded ours, okay? So we finished the album. As far as all the bed tracks, I go and do the solos, and it's going well. I go into Moonrider, and me and this guy named Mark Smith is producing it, get into a fight. He said, I don't like the way you got solos being played. I want to hear. I said, no, it's my song, and this is the solo, and this is what I hear. This is how it's going to get played. Well, I lost that battle.
Speaker: And then the next thing I know, I'm ushered out of the studio, Tommy Baldwin goes in and does six of the songs in the song. And two days later, I'm flying home on my own. And I'm going, okay, I wrote all the songs. It's my own music. It's my own band. What the F is going on. And I still, to this day, I kind of have a bad feeling that that was kind of pre -planned to take advantage of Rully's connection with
Speaker: Boland and Boland Spain Boland's level of fame and that it would it would be a willing to the good mark and it was it was a good marketing plan to sell that first album right and the only Personal satisfaction I got it was one I wrote all the song to I did the guitar solos on the songs I got the most airplay in Canada it was it was cancer see the star in the US it was sale on you know and
Speaker: It's interesting because I've been in lots of studio situations and there's a little bit of tension sometimes, but normally it's based out of the passion that the people have for the music. So the producer's job is to harness that passion and shovel it back into the song. Yeah. Oh no, it was like, I just started on the solo and it was like, boom. No, we're not going that way. Hang on. You haven't even heard the whole song.
Speaker: I just went, okay, whatever. Anyway. Well, that's it. I was going to ask you a couple of questions related to that. It seems like back in the day, there was a real buzz around music, but players switched around a lot. Don't you notice looking back at the timelines and stuff, some of these bands were really short -lived and people like musical chairs in the bands and stuff. Why do you think that was? Just looking for the right combination maybe?
Speaker: The record companies had too much control, okay? The record companies did have too much control.
Speaker: Well, I mean, I guess that you're just trying to get the end product. I mean, if you watch the wrecking crew, the movie, the wrecking crew, right? I mean, the classic monkeys, when the monkeys went to record, right? They show up at the studio and go, oh, that's all done. You know, we're good. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But that wasn't your case. I mean, we came from the school that you get a bunch of guys together, you're competent players, you go in there, you got passion, you wrote the songs, you're recording those songs. You can add some bells and whistles and maybe bring in a couple of studios. Everybody does that.
Speaker: Yeah, but you're the boy, you know that you play the songs. Yeah, and the other thing is when you Write the song you hear a certain thing in your head happening, you know, so I mean, yeah I mean but that's from an artistic perspective, right?
Speaker: Well, I guess, but I mean, I've talked to some guys who, you know, go down to LA and you're assigned a producer, right? That might've been your case. He's your producer. Well, we don't, we're not on the same wavelength. This guy's trying to change my tunes. He doesn't like what we're doing. Like there's been those situations where it's just nose to nose in the studio. Well, for us, for the Moxley history was very chaotic. Then the first album, we sat on it for a year. It didn't get, we didn't get a seller or label for a year until Polydor picked it up.
Speaker: the promo man himself, Ray Mann Ramsey, the subject of the book, Promo Monkey. And he worked for decades as a promo man at Quality Records and RCA BMG Canada out of Vancouver. So he's got lots to share and we'll get some insights about the Canadian music scene from someone who's worked with many of the major recording acts, been around for a long time. So thanks for joining me. Ray, how are you, my friend? I'm doing well and how about yourself?
Speaker: Well, I'm doing okay. I get to talk to you and I just finished. I read your first book. Now we'll let the people know we're going to do this in two parts. So part one is book one. And I've read that cover to cover and man, oh man, is there a lot to talk about. Holy guacamole. You've been around.
Speaker: to say nothing of the things I forgot to put in. Well, there you go. So you were a guy, you say in here you were born in the Queen Charlotte Islands, which is now Haida Gwaii. So you're just a guy from rural BC, and how the heck did you end up in the center of the music scene?
Speaker: Well, I was actually in the commercial fishing business before that, and I was looking around to buy a boat, but I've always had this overwhelming interest in music. And I made a couple of calls, and the guy at Heart and Soul Records down on first in commercial, Russell Marr, he said, oh, here, try this. And I phoned in after several phone calls and threats to have me arrested if I kept it up.
Speaker: They gave me a job. They stopped me from phoning. Yeah, you just harassed your way in the door. Well you played a bit of music too, right? A bit of drums and a bit of guitar. Yeah, I played drums particularly so I wouldn't get an electric shock.
Speaker: Guitar I played later, but I never played guitar on stage. I just play guitar enough to write songs. So you started in the 60s in the late 60s. So you're actually first 1968. I was the April Fool boy. There you go. So, but the interesting thing about that, you were what? A warehouse hump.
Speaker: Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah. And then two years later, they promoted me to sales and promo. Oh, very cool. So you're kind of a living historian in a sense, just de facto, because you went through all those experiences. I mean, the music business, I often ask people at the end of my podcast, how the music business has changed. But when you started in the sixties, I mean, this is a completely different universe now. Absolutely.
Speaker: And well, good for you. And then so you wrote the book, your first book, Chroma Monkey and my life as a bellhop in the Waldorf hysteria, friends and enemas. I love it. So, so the first thing that struck me, of course, and, and, you know, meeting with you and stuff and knowing you, um, is that you're well -developed sense of humor. I'm assuming that carried you through a lot of situations. Oh my goodness. Yes. You got to be able to laugh at yourself as well as other things.
Speaker: Yeah, but you were able to be humorous without becoming cynical. How did you manage that? Well, after a while I became jaded, but I don't think I ever hit the cynic button. Well, because reading your book, I mean, the ups and downs, it's like a roller coaster, right? You know, the people you meet, the situations and stuff that goes wrong. Good Lord, like the gong shows. Goodness sake, yeah.
Speaker: Like that was surprising, that jumped out at me. I thought, man, oh man, like so many things with the bands and the artists, it's like herding cats to start with. And then you added egos and drugs and all the rest of the crap that goes along with the screaming girls and, you know.
Speaker: So the other thing that struck me, you know, again, reading through this, just certain things jump out at me, but back in speaking of back in the industry in the early sixties, early seventies and that very labor intensive, very different. There's no online social media. You're doing posters. You're doing hand posters to advertise in radio stations. You talk a little bit about that in the long distance calls and how expensive they are. And advertising was costly. Tell me a bit about that.
Speaker: Well, quality records had a policy on phone calls, long distance calls. Don't make them, don't take them. Wow. But I got around that because a lot of stations I dealt with, like Vancouver is not the center of the universe, like Toronto may seem to be. But I had people in other areas of the province where there was radio stations and they needed product and information. So I would step outside of my bailiwick here in YVR.
Speaker: and approach all those people and develop relationships with them because the thing about the music business back then was it's a relationship driven business and people in um, um, Bushwhack BC might be the next program director or music director in Vancouver. And if you have a relationship, then you're already ahead of the game.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good point because a lot of people emerge from seemingly nowhere to become fairly prominent. And if you can hang with them and have a good relationship with them, you're in, right? Yep. That's for sure. Interesting. So you made lots of long distance phone calls. Did you do a lot of sort of hand postering and a lot of the labor intensive stuff when you were promoting as well?
Speaker: Yeah, I created posters. Um, I think the first successful one I did was for the hair by the cow sales. Right. And I created that and, uh, quality loved it and I had it reproduced across Canada as a handout to stimulate sales. And, uh, I've, I've always been drawing things and, uh, my then passion being music, I would, uh,
Speaker: turned my hand to the personalities, the caricatures, those kinds of things. The CCR poster, that's one of the things you mentioned in your book and then you got it signed. That was a highlight of my life. I loved CCR slash John Fogerty from the minute I heard the first record. And I couldn't wait to hear all the others. In fact, when they came to town,
Speaker: I would figure I got 10 friends, so I'd buy seats in the first five rows for them, not to overcharge them, but then they would buy the tickets and we'd be there front and center. I just loved it. I then turned my hand to caricature of them. And that was the result. The post was a result of quite a few tries. And I took it to the show at the AgriDome and the label rep
Speaker: Said er, let's go backstage and meet the band. So, you know, my heart almost stopped at that point so we went backstage and I met the drummer and the bass player and I couldn't see John Because he was in tuning up with his brother But they did sign it as you could see and I was just like over the top very cool What year would that have been?
Speaker: 1969 perhaps. Well very cool and then and so you got obviously your advertising was multifaceted and back then it was radio was a big deal like you mentioned that many many times through your book you're talking about the music directors and the radio bits and you you were writing your own radio bits I guess to advertise new releases as well. Yep I wrote a copy for radio and TV spots.
Speaker: So were you stepping on somebody's toes doing that or did you just have a vision of how you wanted to do that? Well, I hope I stepped on somebody's toes because to me it was a bit of a, uh, guys.
Speaker: let's get with today and forget about the forties and talk like it's interesting, not have people fall asleep. And then, I mean, you're obviously on the corporate side of it too. So there is a, an expectation, I suppose, you know, you're, you're checking the numbers every day or every week and going through your, your sales and trying to figure out how to, how to get what you need. So you have to have the right radio spots. You have to have a relationship with the music directors, which you talk about again, quite a bit through the book.
Speaker: Yeah, if you are working with the media, you better understand the media. If you go into a radio station and you see one person you recognize, that's not good enough. If you don't know every
Speaker: third or fourth person or second person by their first names, not the real ones. Um, you're not doing your job. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of, well, I mean, you've got the flagship stations, but you've also got the satellite stations that are important as well. Right. To get your plan. Absolutely. That's why I went out of town. Yeah. And how much traveling did you do? Well, I didn't travel, uh, physically so much as I did communicationally, like over the phone or telex or whatever came along.
Speaker: The big station in Vancouver knew those stations knew. Yeah. And you did, uh, you talked lots in the book about being on shows with bands and stuff. Did you ever do any touring with any of the bands or any, any. That's pretty exhausting stuff. Oh yeah. Uh, the first band I went on the road was, was Stan Peters. Oh, there you go. Yeah. But I didn't do a lot of that. Uh, it's just, it's a lot of time taken and
Speaker: The time isn't all that well spent. If you're just hanging around with a band waiting for something to happen.
Speaker: You know, you should have made something happen before he went on the road and not say you deal with it. Yeah. Well, you do mention in the book a number of times about how, you know, you could stay up late and, you know, three, four or five in the morning, but you still have to be to work the next day, right? There's no mercy. No. So you did lots, I mean, it's a lot of work, right? You did lots of 15, 20 hour days, I'm sure, over the course of your career. Yeah, I did a couple of 21 hour days.
Speaker: So then the other thing that struck me is there's, you know, you talk about many artists and you've met, you know, practically everybody, but lots of them and some of them get honorable mention and some of them get dishonorable mention. So Christine Aguilera gets a dishonorable mention in your book. Yeah, well, sorry, but stuff happens and that was a very unpleasant thing for me to have to live with as it was for the company. And it should not have happened that way.
Speaker: I like all kinds of music, including some jazz, but they don't pay you to like them. They pay to make them sell. If you like them, that's a bonus. I just like most formats and you accept it for what it is.
Speaker: Thanks for checking out these short bits from my much longer conversations with previous liner notes guests. Don't forget you can listen to each full interview at either linernotes .ca or on any podcast platforms. Just search for liner notes revealing chats with Canada's retro music makers. Until next time, I'm Dan Hare.
