Transcript
Speaker: Hi it's Dan here for Dusty Discs Radio and this is the podcast Liner Notes revealing chats with Canada's retro music makers.
Speaker: Today, I'm very honored to have as my guest, Jamie Vernon, an author, a Toronto musician since 1978. Jamie has been a performer and recording artist as a solo act, as well as a member of Swindled and Moving Targets, the Swedish Fish, the Hounds, Spare Parts and more. And we'll be talking about that as well as many of his musical adventures. And we'll get some insights into the Canadian music scene from someone who's been there for many decades, been a part of it. So thanks for joining me today, Jamie. How are you?
Speaker: Good. How's it going in Vancouver? Well, it's doing okay. And I see you're back in Ontario. I was born in Guelph, so I'm from that area. Oh, cool. And you were born and raised there and still live there. Yeah. Toronto. Yeah. Exciting time to be involved in the music scene back then. I guess when you started in the late seventies, so things were all abuzz. Yeah. I mean, it was grab a guitar and go kind of thing. So, you know, I, I picked up guitar in 1978 and I was in my first band by 1980.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I could barely string chords together, but I mean, that's all you really needed then. It was punk and new wave time though. There you go. But then you, you also say that you had, you were influenced by the Beatles and kiss and Elton John and David Bowie and all the other stuff. There was so much great music back then too. Oh, for sure. I mean, this is the thing is that, you know, it's back to that old story where what you listened to in a high school was your biggest influences. So I kinda, you know,
Speaker: I was raised 14, 15, 16 years old. Those bands were all huge, you know, mid 70s. So I thought, you know what? I want to be a rock star, too, which kind of actually it came about because I had been playing house league hockey and I wrecked my knees when I was 14. And my parents said, you know, we don't want you sitting around the house doing nothing. So we want you to, you know, pick an activity. I said, buy me a guitar. Biggest mistake they ever made.
Speaker: Well, the funny thing is, you know, back then, I don't know if it's so much the case now, maybe perhaps in some measure, but back then it was the coolest thing in the world to be in a rock and roll band, lots of kids. I mean, how many bands were...
Speaker: formed back then and rehearsing in basements and stuff. It was all over the place. Oh yeah. I mean, I was from, um, uh, an area of Scarborough called Malvern and it was all, you know, it was a brand new subdivision. So we had all been kind of dumped there from other places in Toronto and everybody wanted to be in a band. So I'm going to high school and there had to be four or five bands easy. And members came and went and I was struggling learning how to play guitar. And then a guy that was in my home room,
Speaker: walked in one day and he had blue hair and a mohawk and was wearing safety pins and a leather jacket. And we also had art class together and he said, you know, our guitar player just quit. We're looking for somebody. Would you be interested? And I just looked at him and I went, show me the way. And I wasn't. I mean, I was cardigans and short. I had short hair, but only because my parents frowned on long hair. And I sort of fit in with these guys. And he just said, you know, get a skinny tie and you're in.
Speaker: So there you go. And that was, that was it. I was in a punk band like by 1980, like I said, stringing along three chords at a time. But back then it was one of those situations. You just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and got better at what you did. And by the following year.
Speaker: Um, we went through another drummer, but by the following year we were headlining clubs all over Toronto, which was pretty cool. Yeah. Well, yeah, you make a good point too, because you know, some people had formal training and whatnot, but other people learned by, you know, just by doing it by osmosis, I guess you could say, you just, you just get in the band, you learn a few chords and then you learn a few more and then you polish it up. And that was more your path than, than the formal training. For sure. You know, I, I did take guitar lessons, but it was like, eh, you know, they're teaching me.
Speaker: Neil Young and Eagle songs. And that's not, you know, I appreciated the stuff, but, you know, I wanted to do something a little more aggressive, a little more rock and roll. And this came along. It would just literally dropped in my lap. So we did that.
Speaker: You know, by the time I was 17, I'd made my first record, which was just kind of unheard of at the time. Very cool. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you about the punk scene because, I mean, that was, you know, Johnny Rotten and those guys were in the mid to, I guess, 75, 76 would be around there. So the punk scene was, was there still a scene? Um, by this point, I mean, this is really early eighties. So, um, the first generation of punks, you know, the guys like the clash and the pistols and all that stuff had come and gone.
Speaker: And, uh, we were part of the second generation, which in Canada, that was DOA out of Vancouver. Uh, you had teenage head in Hamilton, you had the diodes in Toronto. They were, they were kind of at the end of that scene. And, uh, we came next, which was the hardcore scene. So we were following bands like, you know, black flag and the dead canadies and, um,
Speaker: people like that. But it's interesting. It was a second scene. It was basically a whole second scene. It was fairly short -lived, but it's funny because you talk about The Beatles and Kiss and Elton John, and then you end up in a punk band, which is sort of antithetical to that. Absolutely. And the irony of the whole thing was that I was still in my bedroom writing love songs.
Speaker: I had a girlfriend and there was this whole other side of me. So I actually started a second band that could play my songs and they were just pop tunes. Once the punk band kind of finally self -destructed, that was 1982, I kind of went that way. So in 83,
Speaker: Another guy that I'd gone to high school with, Simon Bedford -James, him and I put a band together called Moving Targets. And we were that. We were just pop guys. He was into Bowie and Lou Reed and, you know, Roxy Music, that kind of thing. And, you know, we both shared the Beatles in common. I was a big Bowie fan as well. I went to see him at the CNE kind of thing. So we kind of drove that ship and him and I decided we were going to become the next Lennon and McCartney.
Speaker: There you go. Yeah. Well, yeah, the irony is and this will fast forward in the story, I guess him and I, 40 years later are in a band now called Mr. Moray. Him and I went our separate ways. Him and I went our separate ways for decades. And then in 2018, he's like, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm not really in a band right now. And he said, we need a bass player. And I said, OK. And before and moving targets, he was the bass player and I was the guitarist. So we switched roles.
Speaker: And now we're about to head into the recording studio to do our third album. And it's just been nothing but fun. We're all 60 years old now, a bunch of geysers that grew up and went to high school together. And we've been through the wringer, we've been through the war. And now it's like, hey, we just want to have fun now. Yeah, no, good for you. That's a great story.
Speaker: Well, the kids are all grown up and there's no real commitments other than paying for the mortgage and having a roof over our heads. But, you know, so that was one point that I often that often comes up when I when I do interviews and podcast interviews is growing up at that time, the range of musical influences that you have.
Speaker: You know, you talk about the Beatles, but, you know, Kiss, and then the heavier stuff, and then the punk scene, and then even the folk tunes, and even the Ian Thomases and the James Taylors of the world and stuff. You know, you're exposed to all of that, and it all sort of mixes together in your musical sensibility, I guess.
Speaker: Oh, for sure. And that's just it is that, you know, at any time you can draw from any of those influences going. Yeah. I mean, our last record, we did a disco song and it was very reminiscent of Kisses I Was Made For Loving You. And people just kind of went, where did that come from? And we went, well, our drummer bought the groove to the to the rehearsal and we just played with it. And it was like, you know, you kind of got to go with the flow. The idea that you have to be this homogenous sound seems seems rather short sighted.
Speaker: I think variety is what we grew up on. Everybody grew up on Top 40 Radio. And you can hear a country tune and a rock tune and a pop song all within the same playlist. And you can't hear that now. So we do this in the band. This is what we do with the band. And the funny thing is, one thing I've known, we're similar in age and I look back and remember the big anti -disco backlash and they were burning disco albums and all this stuff too wimpy.
Speaker: But you listen to some of it now and it's pretty cool. I mean, some of the bass lines and the fun music. So Disco got a kind of a bad rap and it ended up being a legit scene. Oh, for sure. I mean, and then, you know, somebody like the Bee Gees suffered because of the Disco Sucks thing and it almost destroyed their career. And yet you look back now and you've got guys like the Foo Fighters doing an entire tribute to the Bee Gees. There you go.
Speaker: Clearly they made their mark and only now I think looking back at what it was legitimately without all the media hype or the, I don't know, the skin that was given to it back then, it's like, no, there were some good songs there.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. You can't take it. You can't take it away from these people. So looking back, we can we can hear it now. I mean, you listen to some of the baselines, especially were super cool. Oh, yeah. So I thought was. But then so I should interject, I guess, here you're also an author and you authored a book about your formative years. It's available on Amazon. Life's a Canadian punk who wants guns. Yeah, which was the swindled story. I mean, we were only around for two years, but it was it was eye opening and we were in the middle of a storm. Like I said, it was the hardcore scene.
Speaker: And it was kind of near the end of that whole thing. There was one Moving Targets formed, there was still a bit of it left. The BFGs, the bunch of effing goofs, they were still around. And a few other bands, Sudden Impact were still kicking and things like that. But it was kind of the end of an era. And it was the whole Queen Street circuit as well. And it was being gentrified and you had
Speaker: clothing boutiques and the Eaton Centre was up and running and this was becoming sort of a tourist trap and it got less about the music and more about fashion and more about the elites moving in and taking over that and turning everything into a yuppiedom as it were.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess. And also the angst driven kind of music, I call it, you know, nowadays the I hate my parents bands, right? And they come out and they're angry and stuff. But once you don't hate your parents anymore, it's kind of the angst kind of goes away and then the music loses a lot of its luster, I guess. Well, for sure. And that's what happened. I mean, Simon and I were beyond that. I was already married by the time Moving Targets came about in 83. So it was like,
Speaker: No, I've got bills to pay in a full time job to worry about. So what are we going to sing about? Like, you know, we can't sing about rallying against mom and dad anymore. That just doesn't fly. We weren't Green Day. We didn't still have that kind of teenage angst going on. We had adult problems to worry about. There you go.
Speaker: Yeah. And then I often ask people, you know, how much of what you did was planned or how much was happenstance. Obviously getting into bands is quite often just a happenstance. You go, Hey, you want to come and play? And that happened to you. But, um, it became really deliberate after that. Once Targets was formed, um, Simon and I pounded away for two years, just me and him. And we went through a million musicians trying to keep his band together. And we wrote a lot of songs.
Speaker: and it was kind of like here's our vision of the band you're either in or you're out and we finally found a bunch of guys that were in so in 85 we released a five song ep and that was the launch of my record label that was bullseye records in 85 and we got management after that and management suggested that we get rid of
Speaker: Simon. And I'm like, this is my business partner or whatever. And Simon's like, you know what? If you want to work with this guy, go ahead. I'm out. So him and the second guitar player in the band, they formed their own group, Swedish Fish. We were still friendly. We were still good. I kept moving targets going. He formed Swedish Fish with Sevario and the two of them decided to release their own record. So I said, let's put that on Bullseye as well. So it became it became an independent community onto its own.
Speaker: And from there, we, we managed to get a few other acts in, though we were getting to the end of the eighties and now the cost of vinyl was going up. So it kind of became a do it yourself cassette kind of world at that point. And then, uh, both targets and, um, Swedish fish kind of self -destructed around the same time, early nineties.
Speaker: But I wanted to keep the record label going and I had, by that point, Targets had evolved into a heavy metal band. It went from a pop act with Simon into a really heavy metal band. We were kind of doing Saxon, Venom, Slayer kind of stuff by the outset. And it became clear.
Speaker: I finally said to the guys, I said, you know what, we can't take this boat any farther because we can't get any faster and we can't get any heavier. So where is there left to go? All the melodies been kind of leached out of this thing. And I'd really like to go back to making pop records. So that was the end of that. But up to that point, we'd created our own newsletter, which then evolved into a magazine.
Speaker: We were putting out our own fanzine every month called Great White Noise. And I thought, you know, I'd rather carry this forward. It's got its own success. I'm getting a lot of great feedback on it. And I partnered with a guy that ran a recording studio. He'd done all of our recordings for us for Bullseye. And he had a partner who was a tape duplicate guy. He did tape duplicating. So the three of us teamed up in a business venture
Speaker: where I ran the magazine, the studio recorded bands, and then we decided to hit up the Ministry of Culture and we got funding to put out six compact discs of nothing but Canadian independent music. Nice.
Speaker: So we put out the call. We, we ran ads and said, Hey, if you want to be on this thing, um, it's $200 just so that you can master the stuff, but there's no other fees. We'll, we'll pay for manufacturing. We'll distribute it to this radio stations. We'll put it in retail. Everybody gets a piece of the pie. So it took off. We got six of them out of the gate by the end of 1993. It was doing really well. Uh, then I had a personal crisis and it all kind of fell apart and I ended up putting a cover band together with my sister -in -law.
Speaker: And, uh, we rode that train for 25 years. And in fact, um, we're doing a reunion show February 17th. Well, and we did the cover band because everybody needed money. It was the nineties. The economy was kind of, um, questionable at that point. And, uh, I was going through a divorce and stuff, so I needed cash and that really worked out well. And then by the end of the nineties, I had gotten a full -time job. I had been working for the city of Scarborough full -time.
Speaker: for 11 years, all through the history of Bullseye Records. That's how I was able to fund the label, actually, with my full -time job. And in 1997, they amalgamated with the city of Toronto, and I got bought out. So in early 1998, they gave me money to go away. I'd already made a deal with the Toronto Sun to write their Canadian music encyclopedia online.
Speaker: So I was already doing that. Then I got bought out by the city. And then out of that from my, from my writing the encyclopedia, they got a call from Sam, the record man saying, Hey, we need a Canadian content guy. We think Jamie's the guy that could help us with our new online record store.
Speaker: So Sam, the record man was going to do basically e -commerce. They had already done the, you know, they'd done physical stores, which was fine, but they wanted to get into the e -commerce business. So they hired me as the Canadian content editor. Yeah. So I left the city with a giant chunk of cash in my hand.
Speaker: And I started the new job at Sam, the record man with no interruption in my cashflow. And I did that for two years. In the meantime, I thought, you know, I've got quite a bit of money from the city. I should launch bullseye full time. I should actually just get off the pot.
Speaker: and actually put my money where my mouth is and run the record label for independent artists full time. So I managed to find a business partner who was an American and him and I had a common interest in a Canadian band called Clattoo. And they're the guys that in 1977 everybody thought were the Beatles. They wrote Calling Occupants, which was the hit for the Carpenters.
Speaker: So I chased after the guys from Clattoo and said, I'm starting up this record label. Do you want to be on my label? And they're like, well, you got no experience kid. And it's like, well, technically I do. The label's been around 15 years. I said, if I get distribution properly in Canada, will you guys sign on?
Speaker: So I managed to get two out of the three members of the band to sign on as solo artists. And then once their stuff had done really well for us, the third guy went, all right, we'll give you CLAT2 outright. I got the back catalog off of them in 2001. And I represented those guys for a decade.
Speaker: Which was great. We basically reissued all their albums. We put out a box set and I got them to reunite in 2005 and to put on a concert. Very nice. Which, you know, and it's one of those, it was a cult thing. This was a group that, you know, Prague fans were really big on them. The internet was a beautiful place. Very well known. Yeah. And very well liked. The internet gave us life.
Speaker: Because Getting Clattoo also landed me the Godot back catalog. I got all of Sagarini's back catalog. Moxie, Honeymoon Suite. I got Randy Bachman to give me Brave Belt, which was a precursor to BTO. And he also gave me a Rarities collection of Guess Who stuff right at the point where the Guess Who reunited, which was in 2000.
Speaker: So it just exploded and escalated from there to the point where, you know, the label ended up crashing when the mortgage thing happened in 2008. But up to that point, I had gotten Leo Sayer on the label. I put out an Ian Anderson from Jeff Rotel. I put out his orchestral.
Speaker: DVD and album which we ended up sending selling 10 ,000 copies in Quebec alone with nice really cool So things were going really well and then the music industry collapsed up on the back of the mortgage crisis 2008 really kicked a lot of people in the tea. Yeah. Hey, so what happened was my Canadian distributor went bankrupt, which was fusion 3 So I managed to salvage my product from them. I got all that stuff back from Montreal but then shortly after that early 2009 I
Speaker: Um, my American distributor was having problems because tower records went bankrupt. So because tower went under pretty much every little indie label in the United States had nowhere to sell their products, which included me up here in Canada. I had no hope because I was just an import, right?
Speaker: And so that went under and then as 2009 rolled into 2010, HMV declared bankruptcy in Canada. So there was my other retailer gone. So that was it. I, there was nowhere to go. I mean, I worked stuff online. Um, I was still able to manage a few small deals with artists, but I couldn't give them the exposure and stuff that they had before. And you know, that was the end of the class two deal because of that, you know, I just couldn't, I couldn't give them international distribution, which is what they were looking for. Yeah.
Speaker: OK, so I kind of got out of that whole thing and just focused on songwriting and releasing my own music at that point. Though Bullseye still stands as an imprint. Mr. Morey's on there, my own stuff. And I still control a lot of things that we released back in the 2000s. So OK, that's that stuff's had a digital life. And I did read that you revived Bullseye, that you got your tapes back, that you had lost some of your
Speaker: So, second chapter, 2015, I was working as a cemetery cop. I actually worked at five of the biggest cemeteries in Toronto as a security guard. And by the end of 2015, I'd had enough. It was PTSD time. You can only go through so many days of the week with people crying over loved ones before it starts to affect you mentally.
Speaker: And I caught wind that I won't get into the whole story but when I when I close the label back in 2010 2008 through 2010 I was working out of my house and it was a rental and the landlord there I owed money to and she ended up taking basically our master tapes and stuff and holding them for ransom.
Speaker: And I never saw the point in which I was going to have enough money to get them back. So I just forgot about it. And then I got a surreptitious phone call one day from a record store in Toronto. And they said, yeah, are you Jamie Vernon that rambles our records? And I said, yeah. And he goes, were you in a band called Moving Targets? I said, yeah. And he says, we've got your master tapes here. I said, what?
Speaker: And I gave my head a shake. So I phoned up my ex landlord and said, did you sell my tapes? And she said, well, you weren't going to pay me. So I found somebody that would buy them. And I went, oh, my God, hold on that. Just hold on, will you? So I basically put a a crowdfunding go fund me up and said, yes, so I need to get my master tapes back. Anybody willing to help me and
Speaker: Mark Logan from a record store in in Kitchener He came to my rescue and said I'll give you whatever money you need to get that stuff So I paid her off. We got the tapes back because she hadn't sold everything yet. I got my wreck I got my record collection back I had while I had 3 ,000 albums that she was sitting on and she was selling those off too. So I
Speaker: well anyways got everything back so i decided all right i'm gonna quit my job i've got some some cash money from the go fund me here i can do this again for my full time so i shopped around i found an indie label that would distribute my stuff i made some deals i got my hands on strange advances third album
Speaker: Then I got my hands on an album by Ultimota, which was Molly Johnson's first real band before she did the infidels and before she did her jazz thing. So I got my hands on that. And they were through Jerry Young at Current Records. And Current Records, for those that don't know, were the ones that launched Martha and the Muffins and the Parachute Club. They are the ones that made those two acts big.
Speaker: So I got those two albums off of him. I went to a small indie label who was distributed through universal and I said, can you put these out? Yeah, no problem. So we did.
Speaker: and then HMV declared bankruptcy a second time. So there was my, basically Universal just went, well, you've got no retail. So there's no way you're going to be able to pay us back for us manufacturing your CDs. So you're right. And then the indie label I was with, they went bankrupt right after that because they had no revenue coming in at all.
Speaker: so i folded the label a second time i had like six i had six releases on the you know on the the second time around and then it was like i can't keep doing this i gotta find a real i gotta find a real job and just call it a day so bullseye right now is just online it's a yeah okay
Speaker: You can do digital downloads or streaming. Mr. Morey has put out a CD. We decided to press, you know, a disc of our last album. But of course, as it stands, people just aren't buying. Well, fair enough against the streaming thing, but you have. So it's bullseyecanada .bandcamp .com.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. And that's got a bunch of old catalog stuff in there as well. So you can look around and find the moving target stuff there. Yeah. Well, so let me, let me ask you a few questions about all that. I appreciate you gave me a great, great rundown of everything. Um, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is the, is the bullseye records, you know, so you're playing in a band and then a lot of people do sort of ancillary things. You know, I had, I owned a PA company for a while because they were so expensive to rent. I thought, well, I'll just learn how to do that. And I'll, I'll buy that stuff. And I guess you figured.
Speaker: instead of trying to get a full on regular record deal you just make your own record company that part of it. Well it was it was down to how many demo tapes can you send out and get rejection letters yeah exactly and that's for most people it's what we call the pfo letters the please f off record labels.
Speaker: And for two summers in a row, we'd gone to New York City for what used to be called the New Music Seminar. So it's basically like Canada Music Week here or South by Southwest, but they used to have it in New York City and it was called the New Music Seminar. So I'd go down there, we'd rent a hotel in Times Square, and then you just spent an entire week knocking on doors of all the record guys who also had hotel rooms.
Speaker: So you'd make a point literally you made appointments like for eight hours a day to go to these uh meetings And you just hand your tape over and you'd let them listen to it while you were sitting there and you know embarrassing while they're listening to your stuff And trying to pitch them and all kinds of stuff. We got really close We got an offer from famous music publishing who had just signed at that time in 1989 Uh living color had just been signed to their publishing field
Speaker: Cool. So we thought we're kind of in the same elieu. We're playing really hard rock stuff. We're from Canada. It makes us exotic. And they were like, hey, we love your stuff. We love the songwriting. Set up a showcase in Toronto. We'll fly up and come and see you guys. And I get back to Toronto. I tell the band and the drummer's like, what do you mean a record deal? Like, I just thought we were doing this for beer and having shits and giggles. Yeah.
Speaker: And he quit. He quit. And by the time we found another, like, it didn't even occur to me that we could rent a drummer and just do the showcase. But by the time we found a drummer, the publishing company had lost interest. They were like, ah, it's too late. We've already signed a bunch of other acts. You know, keep us in mind. Well, that was the way back then. Plus, again, you're back in the day of gatekeepers and you got certain amount of gatekeepers. And if you can't get past one of them,
Speaker: then you basically have to create your own world or go home. Yeah. So we just, you know, initially with in 85 when I launched the label, it was a joke. We were moving targets. What are we going to call our imprint? Let's call it bullseye, bullseye, moving targets, blah, blah, blah. We thought that was pretty funny. But after we, we pretty much brought this community together with a bunch of other acts on it, it was like, no, we should really run this as an indie label. And I really,
Speaker: thought highly of network records out of Vancouver. I thought Terry McBride and those guys were doing an amazing job and it's like I want to run it like that. I want to run it as a tight ship where it's just a few guys in charge. It's not all this administrative crap. Let's you know let's do it that way and of course that required money and you know it was hard to come by. We were all working full -time jobs so everybody was putting into the pot which was great but
Speaker: You know after a while, you know targets lasted nine years That's a long time to be on the treadmill and not get the the big break Yeah for sure We did we got a lot of great shows like we were opening for some of the biggest bands in Canada trooper the killer dwarfs haywire Lee Aaron like we were playing with everybody that we should have and just nothing was kind of connecting and of course moving into the early 90s and
Speaker: That was the death, first it was the death of basically corporate rock, you know, the Bon Jovi's of the world. And then secondly, it was the death of rock and roll altogether because Nirvana shows up, destroys everything that we had been working at. All the bands like us, everybody with big hair and leather, we were gone.
Speaker: So it was like, you know what, I'm going to pack this in. I'm going to focus on the label mostly and the music magazine, which did really, really well. And I got to see a lot of concerts and I met my wife. I met my second wife through the, the magazine and we're still together. So it worked out. We're both rock and roll heads. So nice.
Speaker: Well, so then that leads into my next question about you compiled the Canadian pop music encyclopedia. So tell me about that. Like, so those are available on Amazon as well. Jamie Vernon, the Canadian pop music encyclopedia. So tell me how that came about in a music historian of sorts.
Speaker: So I was always fascinated by music history, period. I mean, following the Beatles and kiss, cheap, tricky, yellow, all that kind of stuff. It's like, oh, you know, and just following their stories and the revolution and all that kind of thing. And then when I got the label up and running, I ran ads in.
Speaker: Canadian musician magazine used to have this annual, and it was basically a phone book of all the industry people. And it was like, you know, I'd really like to, I've seen books like Heart of Gold and stuff talking about the, you know, Canadian music, but what about all the indie acts like us? What about guys that are just pounding the beat and playing bars every weekend and driving around in vans and
Speaker: you know, getting low pay and, you know, breaking down in the middle of the prairies kind of stuff. What about those acts? There's way more than that story in my life. That's it. There's way more of them and nobody's telling, nobody's telling their story. I couldn't find any books about any of that stuff. So that I'm going to write my own.
Speaker: So I put an ad in this music annual and then because all the other indie acts and the indie labels are listed in there, I just started sending out letters. I said, hey, can you send me bios and demos and any vinyl you've got? I want to compile this independent music book called Absolutely Indie.
Speaker: And basically, it was a header that I used in the music magazine. You know, we covered all the independent music under Absolutely Indie. And I thought, I'm just gonna write a book about it. So I'll take stuff that I've already researched for the music magazine and anything else people send to me and we'll go. And then I realized real quick,
Speaker: There was too much stuff. And this is, of course, this is pre -internet. So here I am on a Sherwood typewriter at home. I don't even have a computer yet. Like this is, this is mid eighties. So, you know, I don't even have a computer yet and I'm just typing stuff out long form, you know, mailing stuff out to people, typing up letters and sending back stuff. And it's like, I can't do this. And then life got busy. You know, I was running the record label and it's like,
Speaker: You know, the music magazine is just kind of a dream. And then after I'd done the magazine for four years and it folded and it's like, I've got all this research. I've got, I've got all these bios and stuff. Now, what am I going to do with it? And.
Speaker: By the time I got let go at the city, which was my full -time gig in 97, the Toronto Sun had already launched an encyclopedia. And I'm thinking, I'm reading it and it's like, it's not very good. Like whoever wrote this is just missing so much info. I know more than this. And the guy that was the editor at the Toronto Sun for the jam music pages was John Sakamoto, who is a well -known music producer
Speaker: Reviewer a music critic in Toronto and I ran into my record show I'm standing there buying a clattoo record and he said it beside me going Oh, you like clattoo and I'm like, yeah, you know and then I pulled out a bunch of five -man electrical band and stuff He goes that's my childhood. You're looking at there. And I said I said you're John Sakamoto, right? He goes Yeah, and I said I said you're online encyclopedia isn't very good. He just kind of
Speaker: double looked at me going, who the hell are you? Like, who is this guy? Right. And I said, I can write a better encyclopedia period. Like I just had whatever I had the balls that day. And I just said, I can write a better one. And he said, really? So he gave me his info and I gave him mine. And he said, put a proposal together and tell me how much it would cost to update the one that we've got online because that author doesn't want to update it. He hasn't got time.
Speaker: I said, okay. And it was called something different back then because it was based on that guy. He, that guy had a book out and it was called something else. So I wrote to John and I said, for 10 grand, I'll write you a thousand biographies and discographies and I'll have it to you by the end of the year. And he went, you got a deal. They sent me a check and I said, sorry, it was 10, it was $10 ,000, but it was a thousand bucks to get started. So, and then a thousand dollars every year for five years to update it.
Speaker: So basically they gave me the they gave me access to the back end of their website and I just started plugging information in and it was that basically that leaping point that got me the job at Sam the record man because they saw what I was doing on the Sam's guys saw what I was doing on the
Speaker: the canoe website. Who's this guy that's writing your encyclopedia now because it's great stuff, right? So the two kind of things went in hand in hand. So ultimately, the whole idea right from the word go was to release them as books. But of course, you know, it's early Internet days and there was no real self -publishing kind of thing. I couldn't get anybody interested in actually taking it on as a book.
Speaker: They're like, ah, encyclopedias don't sell very well. They're kind of a limited audience, blah, blah, blah. So once again, just like with the record label, uh, in 2011, I was out of work. The record label had collapsed and I was doing part -time jobs and stuff. I thought, well, if there's a.
Speaker: time to do this, it's now. So through all of 2011, I spent almost that whole year, 18 hours a day with two liter bottles of Pepsi beside me. Wow. For an entire year, I worked on the encyclopedia to update it, bring it up to speed, get all newer acts in there, not just the old stuff. And 2012, I launched volume one, which was the letters A through L. Yeah, I did see that. Yeah. And then the second volume was M through Zed.
Speaker: And I've since revised, I've revised those three times now. So the current edition that's up online is called the 2019 Deluxe Edition.
Speaker: And that's pre -pandemic. It's still pretty up to date. There's still lots of stuff in there, but it's now the 25th anniversary of me doing the website. And I now have 4 ,000 artists and the books have to be updated. They have to be reoriented with all the new updates. So that'll happen at the end and probably beginning of next year. And where can people access that if they want to go and have a look at that?
Speaker: The online one is canpopencyclopedia .home .blog. Correct. And that's basically the Toronto Sun Canoe website was basically bought out and they
Speaker: they canned it. They basically got rid of the whole thing. And because of that, and because it was bought out by a number of different mega corporations, they didn't realize that if they took it offline, it was a breach of my contract and I immediately retained the rights.
Speaker: Okay, the whole thing came back to me nice and clear Yeah, and then so you people can buy hard copies as well. Yeah, and that those are on Amazon Yeah, but there's a link that there's actually a link from the website if you go to read it online There's actually a link to the website now Like I said, it's it needs to be updated because the last version was 2019 Yeah, which is still I mean, it's well the single edition of the book is still 550 pages long. Yes. There you go There's a lot of info in there
Speaker: Yeah. So that's cool because you get involved in that and then you become sort of a walking encyclopedia yourself through the process, right? Cause a lot of that stuff's going through your head. But I'm also a target. Everybody wants to play stump the chump with me. It's like, Oh, I know a Canadian, a piece of Canadian trivia that you don't know. I had a guy I was doing, I was doing podcasts with for about a month and he'd have me on once a week and he'd try and stump me and it's like,
Speaker: Dude, I don't want to play Stump the Chump anymore. This is silly because at a certain point, I can't remember everything I've written because there's too many names or whatever. I know a lot about the artists that I've worked with directly and the involvement that they've had. You know, I'm never going to be able to remember some obscure band from Saskatoon that put out a seven inch single in 1980. The Northern Pikes, by the way. But for me, it's more of.
Speaker: Here's information that I know come to my site Educate yourself stump your friends during trivia night at some Bar that you're in or what have you? Um, but one of the coolest things that happened in the middle of the pandemic I got a note from a professor of musicology at the University of Columbia Columbia University and
Speaker: She is part of a bigger network worldwide where they actually have an online database of music related research that's available through every university and college in the world and it's all it's all run out of France.
Speaker: And they wanted the encyclopedia as part of that project. And I said, how much does it pay? And they said, well, it's a subscription service. So you get X percentage of every person that subscribes. So I make money biannually from these guys. And it's been wonderful.
Speaker: Now that's the thing. I've got to send them an update of this whole thing too. And it's so unbelievably annotated. Their version of my encyclopedia is actually better than my online version because they had interns go in and cross -reference every name in every entry. It's unbelievably cross -referenced. It's being real.
Speaker: If you want to know about Ian Thomas, it's like going to discogs .com where you punch in his name in my encyclopedia and they've cross referenced Ian in every page that he shows up on. And I haven't got the time or the energy to do that on my own. I put a link of an artist. If I have Ian Thomas's.
Speaker: bio up there and he was in the band Tranquility Base. I'll put a link to Tranquility Base's entry and that's as far as I go. But the RILM, which is this international database, they have it cross -referenced, like it's unbelievable because people use that for research for their thesis and things. Yeah, rightfully so. Yeah. And that put me in touch with somebody that was actually writing a, their thesis was about class two of all things, was able to help her on two fronts, one with the encyclopedia.
Speaker: with all the reference points. And then secondly, because I had worked with the band so closely. Yeah. So it's primary source for them. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And she ended up with that thesis, ended up in England and she's now been, she's writing an official biography of one of the members of Rush. Nice. So this has helped her out. And of course she's using my, my information as reference points as well. So it's been very satisfying. Yeah, I bet. It's a life work.
Speaker: So a couple things. One is your previous point was a good one about how you've got your big stars and everything, but just below that there's this whole sort of band of people who make a good living in the music business. They're kind of yeoman. They're doing their thing and get almost no recognition except that they're very well known sometimes in local areas or I would be considered that out in Vancouver. People know who you are. You make a good living for many years.
Speaker: And those people are legitimate contributors to the music business, even though they're not sort of big name recording artists. Oh, for sure. All of this came out of the... Really, if you think about it, it all stems back to...
Speaker: the implementation of the Maple Rules of Can Con because before 1971, there was, I mean, there's so many stories. I'm working with Keith Hampshire right now, who had three big hits in the 70s, including Cat Stevens, First Cut is the Deepest. So I'm working on his biography right now. We're going to release that as a book this year. He talks about
Speaker: you know, growing up in Calgary with his bands, and the only place you could record back then, especially in the Prairies, was at a radio station or at a TV station. There were no actual recording studios. And part of what came... CBC had some, right? The CBC had one, I guess. And you come to Toronto and you could... RCA Studios had a studio in Montreal and one in Toronto, but of course there was a lineup around the block because the major labels had those tied up.
Speaker: But part of what can con did and people don't look at this. They only look at the old Oh, well, you know, we we kind of you know gave them a pass on radio because they were Canadian It's like yeah, but it did more than that it built studios it built production companies it built managers and do you know before like 1971 72 you couldn't get an entertainment lawyer. There was no such thing
Speaker: I did the Skip Procop book, and he was telling me about the nightmare they went through when Lighthouse signed in RCA Records in 1969. They didn't have a lawyer. It was basically him and Paul Hoffert going, oh, I guess we're signing a good deal. We don't know.
Speaker: That's right. I had Paul on the podcast actually. I had a good conversation with him. Oh, that's great. Paul is a great guy. Him and Brenda were so helpful in writing Skip's book. I usually ask people about CanCon, especially people like yourself who are involved in it. And most people were in favor of it. The odd person says they weren't because they were restricted from playing US music and some of the other stuff they would have preferred to play. But almost everybody to a person that I've talked to was in favor of CanCon, and I assume you were too, obviously.
Speaker: Yeah, for the longest time. Now there's a caveat to that because when I was running Bullseye Records, I had signed a bunch of indie acts that we were trying to get on the radio. We had a band that Terry Brown had helped produce.
Speaker: who produce Rush and Max Webster and a bunch of really big names Cutting Crew and Terry produced the record and it's like we got to get this on the radio and we were sending singles out to the radio guys and they were ignoring them because what happens is with CanCon is that the music programmers have a stack of CDs on their desk
Speaker: for all the Canadian stuff that's come in so that's one stack and then they have another stack of records that comes in from everybody else all the international acts and basically it's one CD from the Canadian pile per week and then five CDs
Speaker: from the international pile. And that's what gets rotated on the radio stations. We were getting nowhere. So we're competing against every other Canadian act trying to get that one little spot on the radio. So we thought better of it. So on the next album, we decided that this band was no longer from Toronto. They were from Chicago. And that the album was recorded in the United States, even though it wasn't. It was recorded here in Toronto by Terry Brown.
Speaker: And we started getting airplay because we didn't put the Maple logo on it. And we told them that they were American. So they went from the pile of 3000 can con CDs on the music director's desk to the smaller pile of 30 or 40 CDs from the international acts because they weren't putting out as many at the time. Whereas all the Canadian indie acts, they were putting out stuff every week.
Speaker: Interesting though, because with the Canadian can con is there's four it's MAPL and you have to have two of them to be considered can con. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. But we decided, you know what, we're going to play the odds. We're going to, we're trying to shoot for the smaller pile of CDs on that music director's desk. And we got airplay with them. We managed to get them on the air after that. And we shouldn't have to lie to get Canadian airplay.
Speaker: Right. You know, so that's the only thing that can can con is kind of there's kind of a stranglehold that if you know how to work around it, great. If you've got a really great tune, of course it's going to get on the air, you know, but we kind of had to play a game. Other Canadian stuff we got on the air. No problem. You know, we had Jeff Jones from red rider on our label and he got airplay right away now because, you know, because he had a name already. He had been an ocean. He was the original bass player for rush, by the way. Oh, well, a lot of people, which a lot of people don't know. I didn't know that.
Speaker: Yeah. So, but yeah. So when, when you're putting that music out there, though, obviously the, the signed, the label bands, the can con label bands would be first in line and then the indie guys would come in sort of underneath that, right? Correct. Yeah. And I mean, we were, we were fighting the odds just because we were an indie label, but we acted like a major label, you know, because I had so many former major label acts.
Speaker: You know, we had the Kings who did Switch and the Glide. We had them on the label. We had Gotto, Moxie, as I was mentioning before. So we were kind of building this roster and then slipping in these brand new acts on the back of that. And it made some of our artists jealous. They're like, oh, you're putting all this money into these new acts. Why don't you give it to us? And it's like, well, you record a brand new album for me and we will. You know, because a lot of these, what I call evergreen, they're basically evergreen bands.
Speaker: They will always be a great act. They'll sell out places because they've got a fan following, but other record labels don't want to sign them. They're like, well, you know, we're looking for current music, but I did. It was like, you know what? Let me put out your back catalog and then give me a new record so that we can springboard off of that. And we did it with Gatto, which was great. Gatto gave me a new record.
Speaker: Technically clattoo did when they did the reunions the reunion show they We recorded a bunch of the live tracks and we put that stuff out. So that was nice of them The Kings very cool. They gave the Kings gave me a new album We had harem scarum honeymoon suite give us a new record and we did really well at that stuff. Hell I had wild tea Tony so near who Tony Springer who played guitar for David Bowie I I released one of his records, which was great. Well tea in the spirit wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely. That's that's what it was. Yeah, and
Speaker: So a general question, just, uh, you know, when you started out, you're playing guitar, you're in a punk band, you got lots of different musical influences and you want to be a musician. And then of course you get into the, the, the record business part of it. Then you start doing the music trivia. So when you first started, like if, if I had talked to you, if this was 40 years ago and I said, well, what, what do you want to be like, what was it that your goal when you first started out, did you end up there or did you just sort of follow it as it went?
Speaker: as it was that, you know, it was two goals. It was me chicks become a rock star. That was it. That was the, that was the two goals. Now, my issue in all of that was that I wasn't a drinker and I didn't take drugs. So I, I was the only guy that was sober through all of this stuff. So of course that brings us back to the historian end of things because my old bandmates come back to me going, did we do a gig at like,
Speaker: Such and such a place. And it's like, yeah, I've got it written down here. I kept diaries of everything. This is how I was able to, you know, I actually, there's actually a, there's a bullseye records book. Like aside from the swindled one that I wrote, I actually wrote the history of bullseye when the label went under. I thought, you know what? I better write this down because you know, Wikipedia won't let me create a page. So I got to write down this history somewhere. So I, I basically.
Speaker: The goal had initially been to become a rock star. And then once moving targets kind of collapsed in 1991, 92, I thought, okay, well, I'm not going to be a rock star. I'm going to be an adult. And what will an adult do? Let's run business. And I had, there was a guitar player in my band and he actually said that to me. He goes, Jamie, you're a really good bass player and stuff. He said, but you're much better at the business end of things.
Speaker: So that's why I ended up getting into the record label business. Then that had its setbacks too. I mean, you end up babysitting egos 24 hours a day. You know, we're getting a getting a call from some drummer at four o 'clock in the morning in Winnipeg going, oh man, we've run out of money. Can you send some dough for the hotel room? And it's like, oh boy, here we go. Right. So I don't miss any of that. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. But, you know, now,
Speaker: post pandemic and the fact my kids are all grown up and you know like I said we only have the mortgage to worry about I have a full -time job which has nothing to do with the music industry which is great which is great so I can focus on music full -time with Mr. Moray you know this is my band with Simon you know and we're back to
Speaker: You know, being London to McCartney again, I guess. And we're all free and clear. It's like, well, what are you going to do with your disposable income now? You could go on vacation or we could go in the recording studio and record an album. I don't know that anybody's going to buy it, but we have listeners, we have fans, people are bugging us to play live again. And we're really kind of on the fence about that. We do one or two shows a year.
Speaker: just to showcase the material and go, hey, here's the stuff. You want to buy our old CD and everybody has a good time. And then we go home and go back to writing songs. Well, that's cool. And when I went through all your stuff, I mean, you've re -released a whole ton of stuff. You've basically got your whole discography on there from the very first recordings all the way through, right? You've kept track of it and you've got it on there. And so I was going to ask you, what's the current state of the music business now? I guess at this point in life, you're sort of good with whatever.
Speaker: There's a lot of gnashing of teeth and hatred towards the streaming situation. I have to look at it a bit differently, the same as I looked at the can con situation, because I've seen it from both sides. I've been the musician. I've been the record label guy.
Speaker: I've got all this solo material. I put out three solo albums while the label was up and running, but I had stuff sitting in the can. I had all the stuff from my bands and it's like, I'm putting it all up on the streaming services and rather than spending
Speaker: Tens of thousands of dollars getting into a recording studio and recording everything. I've set up a DAW here at home. I can record my stuff, you know, in the comfort of my home and release it at will anytime I want. And I thought.
Speaker: This is free money. This is me sending the stuff out to the world. I don't have to battle radio anymore for the six to eight week honeymoon period where they're actually playing your stuff and then you fall off the face of the earth. Yeah, shelf life. So, you know, on Spotify, I have over 700 followers and I put stuff up and the numbers go up and oh look, quarterly I get checks. So contrary to everybody's belief about Spotify ripping people off,
Speaker: Yeah, you're not going to make a living out of it, but I've got mailbox money coming in and I've got a full time job. I'm not crying over the fact that I now make money where I never did.
Speaker: You know, 40 years ago, Simon and I never made a dime off of anything we released on Bulls. I reckon it's the beginning, right? Nothing. And we put a lot of dough into it. So I'm looking at that now and it's like, well, we can ride the nostalgia train here. We can put out this stuff, all this old stuff again. And everybody's like, Oh, this is great. I remember you guys. And we can basically springboard off of that with our new stuff. And it's, I think it's helped.
Speaker: You know, we've got we've got a really good perspective on it, too, because we've got 40 years of wow, we've been through the entire music industry. We've seen it from the ground up until it collapsed kind of thing. Yeah, fair enough. And your overriding point is a good one where you just adjust to the business. I mean, if the if the business shifts and changes in a way that you have no control over, you can either quit and take your take your toys and go home or you can just adjust to it. And streaming is part of the adjustment, right?
Speaker: Yeah, but make no mistake. I mean, I feel really bad about the artists that who were making a living off of it. But I can't cry tears for a lot of people if they didn't shift with the times. I mean, when I was with Bullseye, we actually got on the MP3 downloading train in 2003. That's five years before iTunes showed up in Canada. I already knew
Speaker: You got to watch the trends you got to watch where things are going and it's like I know what's going on streaming I didn't see coming that was a whole other thing But I immediately got on that bandwagon too. That was in 2008 right when you know, it started launching Yeah, it was like you've got to follow what's going on and you got to figure out how to monetize it Yeah, it makes more money if you're out there playing live and selling swag, but I'll tell you something I didn't get into the music business so I could become a t -shirt salesman
Speaker: Yeah. Fair point. And did you like touring? Did you, did you, I mean, you did lots of gigs over the years, maybe not now. We did. And now I don't, you know, playing live is a real hassle because you're, you are looking at it from an adult perspective. I mean, when I was in my twenties, it was like,
Speaker: Woo hoo. Get in a van. Four guys. Let's go. All we've got is 50 bucks and half a tank of gas. Let's do this. Right. And you hope and you hope at the end of the trip you get paid by the club owner. Right. That was the whole adventure. And you make some fans and you sell some, some merch while you're out there. That was the whole point of the thing.
Speaker: And then over time, it was kind of like, you know, the whole luxury to this, or the, the luster on this thing is gone now. It's like, I don't want to put the mileage on my vehicle. I don't want to look for parking. I don't want somebody stealing gear out of my car. You know what I mean? So it just becomes a whole thing. And, you know, Simon and I talked the other day, cause the other guitar player was like, Oh, you know, they're bugging us to play a gig again. And Simon, I just looked at each other and go,
Speaker: Yeah, when winter's over, we'll do something in the spring and then we'll do something once again in the fall before the snow falls again. That's it. That's all you're getting from us. Well, that's cool. I mean, as you get older, the world looks different now than it did back then. You're a little bit older that the music business has shifted and changed and that's okay. I mean, that's the way the world works, right? So you can either whine about it or just deal with it. So it sounds like you've taken the ladder.
Speaker: Well, it's the why of the whole thing. Like before there was a goal, right? It's like, well, we got to tour Canada and we got to put these records and we got to do the media and press the flash and, you know, do interviews and blah, blah, blah. So that we can become rock stars. Well, that's not the goal anymore. Like that, that ship has sailed. It's like, we're now in the twilight years where, you know,
Speaker: We're just a few years younger than you know, the guys that I had signed to my label to reissue their stuff It's like we're just right behind them and it's like I just want to make music I want people to hear the songs that we've written I want to make the music that I want to listen to and hopefully other people do as well, you know Yeah, well, yeah, and so the interesting thing about that now is that you've got The new stuff you've got out to mr. Moray stuff lady lady rock and roll. Yeah and bankers and young
Speaker: Young and then then and now that's it's not it's mainstream. It's not heavy or light. It's kind of right down the middle I think yeah. Yep. Well lady rock and roll. It was a joke It was like Simon just came to rehearsal and said look I've got this really stupid song and it's it's a throwback to t -rex What do you think so he played it for us? And it's like this is as good as any other stupid rock and roll song that's ever come out, you know, I
Speaker: Cool. You know, Georgia Satellites, you know, kind of stuff. And it was just, yeah, there's kind of a throwback to the 70s glam thing going here. Let's do this. And of course, back to what we were talking about before, it's so different from the next tune on the EP, which is Bankers of Young. Yeah. Like it's hard to say that these are this is the same band except Simon singing both songs. And I like the idea that we've got that diversity in the material because there's nothing worse than getting bored with your own sound.
Speaker: which is what happened with moving targets was the problem. You know, I couldn't go any further with that band because every song we did sounded exactly the same. It's like, oh, you know, thrash, thrash, thrash, lots of hi -hat, lots of lots of drumming, lots of drum rolls, lots of screaming into a microphone and lots of blistering, um, Inve Malmsteen guitar solos. It's like, where do you go from there? Nowhere. Well, and you know yourself too, that, you know, it's really a singles driven world now, right? If somebody likes one of your songs, they,
Speaker: They don't even might not even know any of your other songs. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the last time did really well because
Speaker: We got trapped in the pandemic. We were halfway through the album when the pandemic hit. So we had to wait two years before we could get back into the studio to finish it. So we were able to release songs as singles. So Nightmare at 20 ,000 Watts. What was that from that? That's older. That's, that's way older, right? Yeah. That's, that's one of my solo albums. This one's called What's the Story, Mr. Morey. Okay.
Speaker: That's on the Bullseye Canada page. Okay. Yeah. Yellow cover. Yeah. I saw it. I went through it all, but I made some notes just on songs that struck me and then it was radio killed the radio star. I thought that was kind of cool, but again, the genre is kind of, it's almost new wave -ish, a little bit heavier, but it's again, I think you're all of your genres that you've been through are all sort of come together now and you just kind of go down
Speaker: the middle I think. Well funny enough, Nightmare at 20 ,000 Watts was my comment on the death of radio of Top 40 and specifically about the fact that basically the radio format is now homogenized. It's basically here's rap, here's R &B.
Speaker: Here's, you know, whatever, um, bass and drum, whatever the genre happens to be, that's the playlist and there's no deviation. So nightmare 20 ,000 Watts was about, it's the fictional story about the last top 40 radio station in North America going under. And I basically wrote the song specifically to sound like 20 different artists. So it's all the different styles, but it also tells a story as you go along. So that's cool. I liked it. The opening.
Speaker: radio killed the radio star was basically this is this is the declaration radio is dead and here's why and then the rest of the songs explain why yeah that's done really well for me because um i did a couple cover tunes on there including uh the hudson brothers so you are a star yeah
Speaker: The Hudson brothers were an act from the 70s. They were signed to Casablanca like KISS were. They had their own television show and they were... Yeah, I remember. They were a comedy troupe. They were basically the three Stooges, but they could sing like No Tomorrow. They had a very... Mark Hudson, who was the lead singer, was very hooked on the Beals. So he had a John Lennon kind of voice and I always loved that tune. So I put it on the album and
Speaker: Lo and behold, years later, because I'd worked with Randy Bachman on Bullseye, he had his own vinyl vault radio show on the CBC for a while. And he, for whatever reason, one day he did a whole thing about artists that sound like the Beatles.
Speaker: And he played my version of so you are a star. Oh, well it blew up I'd already had it up on spotify And because so you are a star is actually in the soundtrack to the first guardians of the galaxy movie It's not actually it's in the film It's not on the official soundtrack album because they couldn't get the rights Mine is the only version of the song available on spotify
Speaker: So it exploded. I ended up, well, I've got two versions that up on Spotify and one of them is that 70 ,000 streams now.
Speaker: Wow, nice. People have added them to all their Guardians of the Galaxy playlists and things. So it's like, wow, out of nowhere, suddenly I've got this, now I've got followers. Now I've got people all over the world listening to stuff. So I've just been feeding them new music, hopefully that some of it will take off. And I'm still doing cover tunes. I just, I grew up on Top 40 Radio. It's my shtick. Yeah, you do quite a few actually. I noticed when I went through your catalog, there's quite a few of them.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm now working currently. I'm assembling five. It's five cover tune albums called 22 Hits, 22 Stars. So it's 22 hits from each of five decades, the sixties through the 2000s. And I'm about to release the one for the 1960s soon. And then the seventies will come next, et cetera, et cetera. So very cool. Meanwhile, that's, that's, that's bought me time to work on my new original album.
Speaker: But you know what, I went through all your stuff and you've been active for a lot of years and you still got something going on and it speaks well of you and your commitment to the music and all the other things that you've done too. It's really, really interesting. And, you know, I had heard your name before, but I, you know, when I do these interviews, I get to go through the catalog and sort of read a bunch and see what you're doing. And yeah, very impressive. Like you've been doing some cool stuff. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. Well, and I'm an advocate for other people as well. And that's always been mindful, right?
Speaker: Yeah, which is you know collaboration is great. Yeah. So one last question if I may looking back is there anything you do differently in your career than any decisions you made or choices you made that you do differently? During the record label phase I had two different business partners and I think
Speaker: My business partner bailed out during the mortgage crisis only because he was American and they were looking at where the money was going. So, um, he said, you know, I can't keep doing this because, you know, the IRS is going to start asking questions why I'm shuffling money off to Canada every month. So I should have found another business partner and gone after a major label distribution deal. And I'd always, I would always shun the major labels because.
Speaker: You get buried in their catalog of stuff. And I was kind of annoyed, actually, because just before Fusion 3 went under, they were my distributor here in Canada. They made a back group deal with EMI and didn't tell us about it until the catalog came out. And it's like, wait a minute, why is EMI's logo all over this catalog?
Speaker: And I basically had a fit because I knew right then and there we were at the back of the catalog. We weren't going to be EMI's priority, which means that my stuff gets back shelved at retail and their salesmen aren't going to push my stuff. So I was reluctant about dealing with the majors and I think I might have been more lenient and
Speaker: Basically, I probably should have leaned into it more as opposed to pulling back. But it was the old, no, you're stealing my independence away from me. That was kind of always my fear, right? And I think I should have leaned into it a lot sooner. And I think we would have been able to weather out that transition when the economy collapsed. It would have been less releases, but I probably still would have been able to make some money.
Speaker: I see what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, obviously you never see the path you don't take, but you know, kind of think, okay, I might've pulled that one and played that one a little differently, but that's how I think that's life too. Right. Well, and the only, the, the biggest regret, the biggest regret I ever had was when we were releasing those, when bullseye first started releasing those, uh, independent compilation CDs with the, uh, money from the, uh, the ministry, um,
Speaker: One of the people that came in to demo her stuff at the little recording studio that I'd partnered with was Shania Twain.
Speaker: And he came to me after the session and went, you know, this, this girl's pretty good. She's from Sudbury and you know, she's got a great voice and stuff. And she, he played me the stuff and I just outright, I said, it's country, man. I said, we're trying to get pop radio. We're trying to get adult contemporary radio to play this stuff. We're trying to get the hip hop stations to play this stuff. We need to focus on those acts. I don't want any country on these CDs. Right.
Speaker: I regret that to this day because it would have been the only thing that was released with her real name on it. It would have been Eileen Twain and not Shania. Right.
Speaker: Huh. Cause it was before she, it was, it was literally six months before she went to Nashville to get her deal. There you go. Yeah. And then she ended up being on all the pop radio stations anyways. What do I know? I'm just, you know, I, and our guy probably wasn't my best, my best job. If you could predict the future, if you were the great cardiac or something, you could have done that, but.
Speaker: Yeah, but some of the mistakes i've i've made has been from my stubbornness based on ideology It was like I hate country music. I don't want any country on my cd, which was a stupid thing to do Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, I guess looking back gives you a bit a different perspective. So well, it's funny. Um, I turned down I turned down david clayton thomas johnny winter
Speaker: One other act. Oh, uh, Mark Farner from, they all had come to me on at separate times, uh, with jazz albums. And my, my reason for, I mean, I would have loved to have had those premium names on my label. It would have looked great on my resume and on the labels, you know, resume as it was, but I knew deep down that we were a classic rock label.
Speaker: at heart, this is what we were doing primarily and New Rock and to bring some jazz to the label, we would have never been able to promote them properly. You know, and last thing I would have wanted was to piss David Clayton Thomas off because, you know, and from the demographic profile of where jazz sits, it's below 1%, probably, you know, sure. These were niche records, right? And it was like,
Speaker: Yeah, you guys are kind of trying to expand your own kind of musical voice and stuff. But the label is kind of hard pressed on that. I mean, I had one guy like we had a hard rock. We had centers on the label. And one of the members of the band came to me with a jazz fusion record that he'd made.
Speaker: and then bitched me out because he goes, well, you know, you're just turning this down. How do you know this is going to be the next Beatles? And I said, oh, this is definitely not the next Beatles. So I offended. I seriously offended him and Gary McCracken, Gary McCracken, the same from Max Webster. He had this phenomenal experimental ambient drum album he came to me with. And it's like, yeah, I could probably sell some of these to the Max Webster fans, but
Speaker: Then it leaves me with product. I can't move at the end of it. I'm going to be stuck with inventory because I'm not going to be able to move at all. And I would have invested in that. Like there was better places to invest our, our money into acts that I knew that we're doing really well and could take the stuff on the road and play the stuff live and, and have an audience kind of thing.
Speaker: Well, that's right. And the whole sort of snooty musician thing where I'm an artist. Well, yeah, but you're trying to monetize that man. Like you have to sell these units, you know, so sorry, but that's the reality. If you want to just make art for your friends, go ahead, knock yourself out. It was really hard for the longest time for me to take off my musician hat.
Speaker: and become the business guy hat. It's like, no, no, no, I got to pay bills at the end of this thing. Like I have to, I have to be able to show my business partner the spreadsheet at the end of the month showing here's how many CDs we sold. Yeah. Right. And if your name isn't at the top of that list from your CD selling, I've just wasted my money and my time.
Speaker: You have to understand that. We weren't into pet projects. We did one. We did one pet project for a friend of ours. It was only by his association to some other artists that we had on the label, we were able to sell some. We did a lot of crossover marketing.
Speaker: Yeah for it going. Oh, well, you know this artist from this band Well, this was the keyboard player that played on his solo records. Yeah. So well interesting to a friend of mine years ago told me something I didn't realize but you would know that he said most of the bands that are signed to a record label Don't actually make money for the record label. It's only the few that sell enough To get faster recoupable money and actually make us some money. Yeah, correct well in the part of the way I was able to get my
Speaker: business partner on board when I fired up Bullseye full time in 1998 was that one of the artists that I was looking at from Klaatu said, I want to do a new solo album. Here's the budget that I need to do this because I need to buy new gear. I need to do my home studio, buy some guitars and blah, blah, blah. So this
Speaker: fan of the band said, you know, how much money do you need? And I said, well, he wants, you know, 40 grand. And I said, I don't think we can recoup that. I said, however, if you invested in my record label,
Speaker: and gave me X number of dollars. And I gave him a business plan and I said, and we signed six artists. We can recoup this amount. Even if we lose money on that first guy who wanted $40 ,000. And this comes back to what you're saying is that the major labels, they're a factory. They're cranking out music. Some of it will stick. Some of it won't, but everything that they put out is basically feeding into the machine to promote the bigger act.
Speaker: So if junior B band is only selling 10 ,000 copies, at least the cash that's coming in from that can be fed back into the marketing machine of the Shania Twain's of the Beyonce of the whatever, you know, and unfortunately the artists get.
Speaker: crapped on, you know, and are assigning these acts with no hope of them ever, you know, spontaneously, um, you know, becoming famous. Well, yeah. And that's the disconnect, I guess. Cause I had a friend that got signed to a major label and they were, they did the tour and everything else, and they needed to sell half a million albums to break even. It was a break even point where they said 50 ,000. So they were at 10 % of what they needed to pay back. There were Koopa, so they could even make any money. And then they got dropped.
Speaker: Well, it's a long story, too, that musicians don't understand. I mean, I had the killer dwarfs on my label and their deal, their last deal in the 80s was with Sony Music with CBS at the time, Epic Records. And they'd been given an advance of a million dollars, which the band spent. They bought it. They bought houses. They did the Motley Crue thing, right? Everything went up their nose or into their pants. Coke and strippers.
Speaker: Basically, it was up your nose or into your pants. One of the two things, right? But they did, but they were smart. They bought houses and cars and stuff like that. So they had something physical to show for it. And then when they came to me for the deal, it's like, well, I can give you this advance on a new album if you want to do a live record for me. And they're like, oh, that's great. And then they were saying that Sony had ripped them off. And it's like, but they hadn't.
Speaker: You made a deal with them that everything that you did was to be recouped So they gave they trusted to hand you a million dollars And if you blew it all right at the beginning and you had no money left in your pocket by album three You're going to be living on your girlfriend's couch Yeah while you make the next like you're making the next major label record and you're going to go on tour and play at stadiums And you're living on your girlfriend's couch because you went and spent the advance. Yeah, there you go. Don't do that
Speaker: I got to hand it to guys like my friends in harem scarum harry has some pete lesperons They got their advance from warner brothers and what they did was built a recording studio So they offset their recording costs immediately by recording their albums themselves, right? So there's that expense gone. So that doesn't get put against their unrecoot and then they basically Owned the rights to their own albums and licensed them back to the label and own the master tapes
Speaker: Yeah. And over time, the unrecooped got chiseled down by all the elms. The release eventually Warner said, well, we're not going to release your stuff anymore. They said, well, we don't, we're not really worried about it because we've got licensing deals with your parent companies in Japan, in Europe, and they're going to license the stuff from us independent of you in North America. So basically they were running with two or three different licensing deals where they could recoup all that money. And they've been doing this for.
Speaker: Well they're on album number fifteen or sixteen now i think for them yeah they're still together they play they play the fire fest once a year in sweden and they they do a couple of local shows and then they go back to their gigs also in celery jobs in the music industry but
Speaker: You know, when they write a bunch of tunes, put it on another album, they do this once a year and it's a whole cycle because their fan base has never gone away. And this is the things the labels don't understand. They're like, Oh, well, you know, you're not selling a million copies anymore. No, but we are consistently selling 25 ,000 copies annually. You cannot put a price on that, especially in this day and age when nobody's selling anything. Well, that's right. You could count on one hand, probably two hands, the amount of bands that would even sell
Speaker: anywhere near that number these days. I mean, there's just almost nobody. Yeah. Well, good. Well, that's great. Well, thanks for that inside information. I know some of our listeners are quite discerning and like to, you know, we like to have an extended conversation so we can talk about some of the deeper stuff rather than just the fluff and the stuff you can get online. So I'm sure you'll get some pushback from some of the things I've said.
Speaker: Many thanks to my guest Jamie Vernon for being part of the Line of Nodes podcast and sharing some insights from his many musical adventures and accomplishments. For more information, we have facebook .com. It's jamievernonmusic. There's lots of information on there. jamievernon .bandcamp .com. And then, as we said earlier, bullseyecanada .bandcamp .com. There's lots of stuff on there as well. So it's easy to find. We hope you enjoyed the podcast and invite you to subscribe to it and share it on social media so others can enjoy it as well.
Speaker: We also invite you to listen to Dusty Discs Radio Tuesdays and Thursdays to hear music from the Canadian artists you're hearing on this show. So until next time, I'm Dan Hare.
