A Conversation With.. George Semkiw

Last year I began a series of conversations with recording engineers and some fascinating responses followed. Most, I’ve had some contact or experience with over the years.

Catching up with George Semkiw was a real pleasure. George and I did the Jack Richardson dance at RCA studios together in 1970 with the band Homestead. Jack thought a group of Canadians with this exiled American could penetrate a US market, still in the throes of an unpopular war. In fact, the first album cover design had the band situated dead middle of a burning American flag. We quickly nixed that!

Before Semkiw I did a few sessions with producer Harry Hinds a month or so after arriving in Canada at Sound Canada. I still haven’t got over the experience. George was my saviour. What went down on the floor in the main studio was pretty much what was captured on tape. Back then, it seemed that was as good as it got.

I was adding up all of George’s album engineering and producing credits, and it think it rings in at around 178. Jingles? Who the hell knows? I don’t think even George kept tabs. George grabbed a Juno in 1981 for producer of the year with Fist, Hot Spikes, What Am I to Do? Along the way, there are many citations and friendships.

We recently had that long-awaited conversation. Enjoy!

You’ve moved to Niagara region.

You know I love this area. I love this area. It’s a great place to be and none of that bullshit city traffic.

How long ago did you make the move there?

About two years and a bit. I have to go into Toronto once every three months for a couple of days of tests. I’ll tell you it’s a nightmare driving downtown. Finding parking and getting to the hospital is an ordeal.

What are you being tested for?

The reason I dropped out of the Old Mill gig was I got cancer. So that just took me right out of the game. I’ve had two operations and I’m still alive, yet they are killing me a bit at a time. That just entirely put a stop to everything in my life.

How are you at this point?

Let's say I'm about 85 percent of my former self. I only went through chemo for four months which just nearly killed me. But the chemo didn't work, and that's why they had to remove my bladder.

You’ve taken a big hit.

I used to think I was bulletproof, believe me. When I was working the Old Mill, doing the studio thing and freelancing around, I had energy, the passion and everything. This thing hit me, and I could care less about anything.

And that's where the mind goes. Nothing else matters?

You can imagine what it would be like all you want, but until you go through this, you have no idea.

Early times, you and Richie Knight and the Mid-Knights played the Yonge Street strip and had a number one hit song on CHUM radio.

I don’t know how they slice it, but it was the first Toronto band to hit # 1 on CHUM.

‘Oh, Charlena’, 1963?

That was a real coup because CHUM up until that time would not play Canadian records.

 It seemed Canadians were up against themselves.

The Americans got everything first and with handfuls of money took it over. It was like the Hells Angels taking over a small town.

Things have changed, we’ve been winning the fight throughs sports and artists like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Beiber, and look back through the years, Diana Krall, Celine Dion, Blue Rodeo, Shania Twain and so many others. It's the battle that has been won.

How did the move from Richie Knight and the Mid-Knights into mastering occur? What was it about mastering recordings that attracted you to the process?

Well, that was easy. The first time we went in to record, and I listened to the playback, I said, we don't sound anything like that. This is horrible. And then, on top of it, the guy that was the recording engineer told me I was out of tune and said check my guitar. I picked up the guitar and played a chord, and it was so far out of tune my ears almost bled. So, I knew it was game over there. Then we went in another time. And the same thing. I come in the control room; it sounds like shit. We even got Pete Traynor to record us. He was a good friend of mine. I knew he was into electronics, and he tried his best, but he couldn't get it to sound like Motown, a good sounding record.

So I said, I’ve got to learn how to do this. And that's when I started. I got a job at RCA, and they started me duplicating tapes for radio shows. Running off hundreds of tapes to mail out to radio stations. And then moved me into the lacquer room to learn how to cut lacquers. Really interesting.

Because I realized I had something to base my suspicions on. Like why did American records sound louder than Canadian records? I now had a chance to actually figure that out, and I did figure it out. That was a good experience and then of course what I wanted to do was work in the studio and the rest I guess is history.

 I remember when I arrived in ’69 the first session I did was at Sound Canada?

 I remember the first session I did with you.

I remember working around in a couple of studios and, as you said, there was this problem of recreating what was coming from the performer in the studio on to tape. Then we get to you at RCA, and you're there with Jack Richardson and you guys had it down. And then you got a Neve console.

Oh, Christ what a difference that made.

What were you working on before the Neve recording console?

It was a home-built console our local maintenance department put together. It was a riot.

How much work did Jack and you do together?

Tons. I met Jack first when he was doing jingles, and I was working with Ben McPeek. Ben was doing a lot of jingle work for Jack and, of course, Jack wanted to get into broader strokes because he got a taste of doing that thing with the Guess Who for Coca-Cola. Then he started a record label, Nimbus 9.

He started producing records. I worked on a ton of them but then Jack got kind of bigger than me and got on to bigger and better things and then we drifted apart.

He did a lot of work in Chicago at RCA Studios. I can’t remember the engineer's name right now; a real good engineer. He did a lot of the Guess Who stuff. Jack moved out of my league. I thought I was doing the best I could. You know, I was always pushing myself to figure out better ways of doing shit you know. Hey, that's life, right.

When you were there, you did a recording with Duke Ellington.

The Duke Ellington thing was like a crime mystery.

I get a call during the day. It was on a Saturday or Sunday and I get a call saying, listen we need to do a session at 7 o'clock this evening. Can you be there? He said, ‘set up’ for about 25 pieces. I said give me a rough idea. He says, four trumpets – I say just give me a rough sketch, so I did a rough set up for them. Around a quarter to seven, musicians crept in. I didn’t recognize any of them. I usually know every musician in town. Then Duke Ellington walks in. They are doing this secret session. I remember Ron Rully was there. He was part of that whole thing; the jazz drummer. There were some heavyweight people there and my jaw dropped. I actually went out and talked to the Duke as he was having some problems with his music stand. I helped adjust it for him. He thanked me, broke another pencil and never used the same pencil twice. It was like surreal.

What was the session all about?

I never heard anything more about it.

Did it sound good?

I thought it did. I think the music was something Ron Rully wrote, or a local guy wrote.

Bachman Turner Overdrive. What was that about?

I worked with Randy but never worked with BTO. Sorry, I did. I did one album called Highways or Road Rageor something like that (Freeways 1977). That was at Phase One. I was a small partner; I was like a fifteen percent owner.  That got me out of RCA to have a chance to do a little studio designing on my own which was a great experience and faced the challenge of losing all of my jingle customers to do nothing but records because no jingle people would go up there.

Nobody wanted to leave the downtown core.

That's right, too far to go. I’m not ashamed of that studio at all.

What projects did you work on there you were proud of?

Pagliaro, Bill Amesbury's album Can You Feel It with the song "A Thrill's A Thrill." I don’t know why that doesn’t get any play. I even had Lou Reed come in and do a voiceover tag as a favour. I was working with Lou at the time.

I figured the record nuts out there would clue into something like that and play it. Maybe nobody knew about it. I don't have any idea.

Funkadelic?

I did Funkadelic at RCA, and they were so loud they blew out the studio speakers. They were the loudest band I’d ever heard in that studio. I couldn’t get the monitors loud enough because I was listening to them just as loud acoustically through the glass. I finally cranked up the monitors; Altec 604Es, they are excellent speakers, but can’t handle loud volume. We only had two of them. Studios like A&M in LA had four of them. I blew out a set of speakers, stopped the session while maintenance came in and replaced both speakers and continued.

Daniel Lanois?

He worked at Amber.

Amber was the studio that you built yourself exclusively?

Yes, after I left Phase One.

Down on Queen Street?

I could record the drums off the floor with the piano live and not have a ton of drums leaking into the keyboard. The piano was encased. I could do a live band. I wanted that design for Phase 1, but I guess I wasn't quick enough because I had three other people putting their foot in the mix. I didn't get exactly what I wanted up there.

My next move, Amber, was when I wanted to do a live band off the floor and be able to record them live and to fix any problems without it affecting the rest of the sound. You know what it's like. You do a live band, and there's a lot of room leakage. If you punch in something and take out that room leakage it sounds crazy. You have to have extreme isolation.

One of my most fun stories is when I recorded there with you and the late Kenny MacLean. I don't know if you remember this track called, ‘Stranger’ we did?

So, it's Kenny MacLean, Brad Campbell who was with me in Janis Joplin's band on bass - Everton Paul, who's in the Reggae Hall of Fame on drums, Kenny on guitar and I'm on synth and stuff I think. Kenny and I sang it along with Paul Henderson.

I’d just rented the Roland 808 drum machine; the one every rapper cherishes now. None of us knew how to turn it on. Or start or get it to function in any way. So, I have my son Jesse with me; he must be seven or eight years old, and he's there bugging us to get his paws on this. We play along but kind of ignore him. Jesse keeps saying, ‘dad, dad, dad, let me’. Meanwhile, we still can’t get this to function when this small hand mysteriously slips underneath and taps one button and ‘bang’ – it starts playing. It was so damn funny!

One day we had this session at Amber, and one of the musicians brought his kid in who was about nine or ten years old and started playing Space Invaders. He's like killing this thing. I ask him, ‘how are you doing that?’ he says, ‘after you hit the first twenty you let the next one go then you hit the next ones. Anyway, he explained what he did and man, it worked perfectly. I was killing it after that.

What instrument did you play when you began exploring music?

Guitar.

When you put your first band together, was it based on a sound or someone you heard?

The first band I put together was with a friend of mine, Leo Donohue We went to school together. Leo played sax in the school band, I guess. I had just started to play guitar. I mean, I could barely play a B7 chord on guitar. We both talked about trying to start a band. We talked about it through our first year of high school. We decided to find some other guys. Leo found a guy who played drums. I found a guy that played guitar. We had two guitars, drums and saxophone when we first started. It was like rank amateur night. It wasn't till another year pass that we sort of got more proficient ourselves as players and the band got a little better. We had made some changes. I think we had a different bass player at one point. We got a keyboard player and played a few local Catholic church dances and didn't have much of a repertoire. I think we could only fill about half hour set without repeating everything. But that’s how it started.

Our influences at that time were mainly Ray Charles. Believe it or not. And Ike and Tina Turner. Stuff that we’d pick up on the Buffalo stations. We're trying to play funk music, but we also understood we had to play some ‘white ass’ music you know? The kids danced to it, and that was it.

What area of the city did you grow up?

All over the place. By the time I was old enough to start playing I was living in the west end of the city around Weston Road and Lampton Avenue

And school?

York Memorial. I spent the first two years going to De La Salle. That’s where I met Leo. They didn't accept me at De La Salle in grade ten because I refused to wear a tie. I said thank you and moved on to York, and that’s where I met Doug. That's when things started changing. Doug got in the band; we got a new drummer – that’s Doug Chappell I was referring to. We got a new drummer Barry Stein. We got a new keyboard player, Barry Lloyd and then we started playing for real.

We started to sound pretty tight. You know, we did some bar gigs to tighten up. We’d take a gig at the Edison Hotel for a week to tighten up the band then the Arc Records people found us and said, ‘hey we want you to record, and we're going to release it.’ We said sure.

We only played close by. We were home boys. We turned down a chance to go to England before the Beatles broke in Canada. We turned down a chance because we were chickenshit. We didn't trust it. I guess everybody wasn’t really a down to the staunch core musician. We all had day jobs. We loved what we did but we ain’t going to toss the dice and move over to England. The deal was, they would guarantee six weeks of work. We had to pay our way over. They would ensure six weeks of work and the possibility of six more. It's like a stupid deal.

Plenty of those deals are.

 Yeah, but I'm also thinking. I wonder what would happen if we would have done that.

A Conversation With ... Pat Holiday

The first time I met Pat Holiday at MIX 99.9, he says to me, “do you have a copy of “Love & Affection?", a single I ran through Scott Richards at Change Records in 1980. My first thought, I barely remember how it goes. Ask me something about Herbie Hancock or Stevie Wonder. Pat wanted to add it to the MIX playlist. That was cool. From that day on we became friends and music pals. The kind of friend you make who talks music and talks music and talks music. That’s a good thing.

I recently chased Pat down in ‘Mickeyland’ and here’s that conversation.

You rent a room at Wild Kingdom?

Almost across the street. We can literally walk to Disney World from where we are.

Why Orlando?

We're snowbirds. We bought a place down here after the crash of 2008 because everything here was insanely dirt cheap. We usually come down in November and then go back home and then come down here January, February, and March and that’s it. I was just checking the temperature for Toronto last night, and we have a friend who's flying down today who is going to stay with us for a little less than a week. Wow! It’s 27 Fahrenheit or something. Holy crap!

After I retired from regular radio, we lived in South America for a while. We did six months in Argentina and Uruguay, and we went into winter when the seasons are opposite and hot there. It’s summer down there. Now, when it starts getting cold, we get out of town to somewhere warm for a while.

At the Juno Awards coming up this weekend, your old boss Gary Slaight is getting the Humanitarian Award. You have a long history with Gary. Any thoughts?

You know when I first met him it was the MIX thing in the early 90s, I saw it there. He came in one day, and he was really upset. This was a good thing.  He felt we weren't doing enough for the food bank. It was around Thanksgiving or Christmas or something like that. You could see that he was serious. Up until that point, I hadn't seen that depth of commitment from anyone I knew. He was passionate about feeding people who didn't have enough food. You know after that, it ended up being Children’s Hospital and a million different ways that we could work with charities and push. 

You can see there is a super deep streak inside him wanting to help other people. I am not quite sure how he acquired that; you know, that sense that deep-but it was evident early on to me. And this was before Standard was rolling in cash. At that time there were only a few stations and money was tight. He couldn’t just write a big check. It was definitely extra thought and extra work to help out those less fortunate. The award is totally him, for as long as I’ve known him.

Do you tune into radio in your region?

You know at the moment in Orlando we listen to stations around here and I listen to Sirius a lot. In anticipation of your call, I started thinking about radio and stuff that I suppose crosses my mind when I'm writing or listening to stations or listening to Sirius. I still wear my radio PD hat. I’m thinking you could do this better and this and that. I actually think Sirius is one of the more inventive radio stations of any radio stations. They do some pretty cool shit that’s different.

Would you have liked to have had the freedom a Sirius offers in programming?

I think the sky is the limit. For whatever reason, they take risks more. I remember visiting a guy at CKLW named Johnny Williams I used to work for who was working at XM in Washington and he invited me over to see the studios. One of the PD guys there at the time was named Dave Lang and the other, founder of XM Lee Abrams. Lee came up with that philosophy of, “NEVER doing anything regular radio ever did.” They wanted every single rule broken at the time. The more you could do something nobody else did, the better you were, or the more they liked it. That was the germination of Sirius/XM. If it’s been done before, don’t do it and make something up. Even if it’s bad, do it. We’ll sort it out later. I thought that was fascinating and cool and that someone would have enough guts to do it. They do a lot of cool things.

It would be neat to have in Canada and I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t allow someone to start throwing up networks? As a simple example, hire a Randy Bachman, who has an interesting show on CBC, or any of the older artists whose playing career is pretty much over and put them on an oldies channel where all they are playing is oldies. Sirius does it here and there – Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits followed by someone else who does a like-minded show. It would be a fantastic station and I’m sure you would make money with it. It would be interesting because you would want them to talk as opposed to the way it is now which is mostly music. To me, it’s really dumb.

You can get music anywhere and Spotify rules.

A hundred percent. I would sit in meetings in my later days of radio and they’d say we need some social media and let’s have a section on our website. I’d think, what planet are you on? Are you going to try and compete with Facebook? Are you insane? Don’t spend the money.

Just playing music non-stop going up against Spotify and Google and now with Alexa won’t last. Amazon is now in that realm and they are growing super-fast. I have Alexa and Google Home. One was a gift and one we bought. It totally changes my listening habits considerably. I can just walk up to the thing and say, ‘Alexa, play me this or just name a call letter’ and it’s on – boom, instantly.

Any radio stations?

Any radio station that’s streamed. I’ll say, 'Alexa play Capitol Radio London’ and ‘bang’ in three seconds, it’s on clear as a bell. You have a transistor radio there that’s voice-activated and pick up any signal. Just like forty years ago when you were sitting up at night and receiving signals from all over. Chicago or New York, Boston, sitting right here in Toronto. All from this little device where you say, give me this. This is a massive game changer for pulling in radio stations. It’s amazing.

In the past year I’ve made a point of interviewing record producers, label managers, and managers who have been behind the scene for decades. Several express their frustration with getting their records played oncommercial radio in the early years. You suggest that the recording studios here weren’t up to par with the land south of us and beyond.

It was the songwriting too. It’s a craft you must invest a lot of hours in to do really, really well. Some anomalies come out of the gate and hit instantly, of course.

The people in the industry then just didn’t have enough hours in it and then they got there. It’s kind of like that book by Gladwell – you need 10,000 hours to get good at something and they certainly passed that 10,000-hour mark somewhere in the 80s’. There are hundreds of thousands of hours invested now and what an industry. You are hard pressed to look at a Billboard Top Thirty without one or more Canadian artists in there.

My great passion besides music has always been basketball. I equate sports outside of hockey to where we were with music in the late '60s and early '70s in Canada. A good game was hard to find. But now, look around the NBA, look at March Madness – Canadians are everywhere - even the top high school prospect in America is from Toronto. There used to be this big cultural wall, bigger than the one Trump wants to build between Mexico and the U.S.

I came in 1970, not that long after you, and in appearance, there was a lot identical and a lot not so much. Other than the political thinking, I find almost no difference whatsoever. Particularly, the cultural stuff from one side to the other. Most movies are made in Canada now. Whether portrayed being made in the U.S. or not, they are made in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. As far as music, that culture line is totally blurred. The political line is getting wider and wider.

Do you think that difference, especially in large urban Canadian centres, is that we are trying to keep pace with an ever-changing and evolving world?

I fit somewhere in the middle. I look at Trump and see some of his policies; not him. I find a lot of people down here in Florida like him as an ‘over-all.’ What I mean by that is, they like him overall but not particularly him as a person. They like his policies. They separate the two.

I’m sort of a redneck in some ways. Like the subject of steel. Do you put tariffs on everything? Of course not. Even when he first thought of running, I thought he would win. There’s just too many pissed off people down here that would vote anybody in. It just happened to be him that showed up. Anyone roughly running on his platform is going to win. There’s some of that happening in Europe too. I think he lowballed on the tariffs as a negotiating deal.

Think of this: If the U.S, got in trouble, I don’t know how many companies would come to its aid. Say Russia and China team up and the electricity grid in Canada and U.S, goes down, I don’t know if people would help. If you got into a war and didn’t have your own steel factories, I think you’d be in huge trouble. I see this as a national interest thing. I don’t know how you can be a military country without your own steel factories. That would be pretty scary. It’s the same with energy. You'd better have your own gas and oil, or you may be dependent on someone who hates your guts.

I’m concerned about the workplace. Where this goes as we allow robotics to reshape and replace factory jobs. There’s going to be fewer people in the workplace. Shouldn’t we be thinking how to encourage and educate people to use brainpower and their own creativity to map out the future? Promising folks’ labour dependent industries will return from a bygone era seems more of a slogan than practical thought.

I would agree with you, 100 percent. If you are going to invest money into things, then both countries, Canada and the U.S., you’d better put it into education, You don’t want to be, let’s say, in the sciences, the 50th ranking country. You want to be in the top five otherwise down the road you’re going to be in deep shit. There’s never any emphasis on that. Everyone talks about the children, yet they are cutting funding.

The two of us go back to when the Beatles landed in North America. That transition on radio from the Paul Ankas, Annette Funicellos, Perry Comos, Pat Boones, and Elvis Presleys to the day all these British sounding jocks show up.

I remember tuning in radio around Louisville, Kentucky, in my home area, and every commercial station signed up a guy with a British accent, a set of Carnaby Street style clothes and sported a top five with the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, the Beatles, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and Freddie and the Dreamers. That change was radical and profound. Has there been a shift as dramatic in radio since then?

I think there was a bit of that with disco. There was tons of disco all over top forty radio. And it reflected a pretty active lifestyle in a lot of places. Studio 54 in New York, the movies – Staying Alive. After disco, hip-hop was it. And even that I wonder about.

I think right now we are in a cycle. I look at the numbers when they come out. I wrote an article for Billboard probably between 1981-1983, somewhere in there, that there were two of them and now perhaps five or even six of these cycles. Top forty radio seems to do the same thing. Let me start with a hypothesis of a science experience.

If you were to take the most prominent format that exists – that would be the format that would have the greatest number of listeners of any age living and breathing, top forty, CHR would be it. It always has been and always will be. By definition, you are doing the best of the best of the best of all formats. You look at country and say, those three top songs I grab from country and move on to top forty will work. Take the best rock, the best country, the best alternative ones. You are playing the best of the best of the best. Therefore, you have the broadest appeal, and someone is going to like you.

What ends up happening and I think they are in that now, it ends up looming one way or another instead of straight up the middle. You can be so far to the right you can’t pick up a rocking song or country song because it’s going to clash. You can’t pick up, “Have You Ever Been Mellow?” by an Olivia Newton-John or a Carpenters song, anything that might be really pretty, even if it’s a great song because it’s too far out of the realm of the others. This is why one has to stay in the middle or a station will start going down the tubes and find itself sort off in the pack. Three or four years later somebody pulls it back to the middle again and the cycle starts all over again. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.

Where were you born?

I was born in upstate New York. Right by where Jimmy Fallon grew up in Saugerties. I was born in Kingston, right by Woodstock. I spent a lot of time right in the town of Woodstock. Every weekend in high school we’d go up and watch Dylan. He’d come down and play in a couple of clubs, then just leave. There were a ton of guys who lived there at the time. It was really cool.

It was also a cool time for me with Grossinger’s Hotel and the Concord in the Catskills. I was in a band and actually played keyboards. I could only play the lead. Say, if we were playing ‘Good Lovin.’ I could only play the lead on a Farfisa organ. Beyond that, I was self-taught. I did that while going to college. We did it to meet the girls basically!

Mervon Mehta & Canada’s Global Orchestra Kuné

Mervon Mehta – Kuné - Canada’s Global Orchestra

We as a nation have become adventurous in our tastes for music, cuisine, fashion and long for a cosmopolitan lifestyle. The faces that pass us on the street, or in transit, look new to us. Children come in many colours and sound the same high-pitch joy through moments of play and delight. We are the world and are slowly embracing it.

At the centre of much of this activity is Koerner Hall executive director of performing arts at the Hall and the Royal Conservatory of Music, Mervon Mehta.

The programming is about as eclectic and accomplished as any major metropolitan centre where investment in the arts is a vital strategy and measure of the intellectual and physical well-being of its populace. I dropped in on Mehta at the Royal Conservatory for an update on a personal project he’s been touting a good decade or more – Canada’s Global Orchestra. Here’s that conversation.

I’ve got the CD in hand. Canada's Global Orchestra. What was the inspiration for putting together a band of so many universally talented young players?

It started to rumble around my head ten years ago when I first came back to Toronto after twenty years in the U.S., and I began to understand what the diversity of this city really means. Because we all talk about it, but what does it really say?

And then I started meeting musicians and being asked to provide an Indian tabla player for some group, or a Latin American sax player for another group, or put together a band. I thought, there are so many incredible musicians in this town that come from elsewhere and bring their talent with them and are massively trained or conservatory trained or in the trenches trained or street trained - beautiful players. I then started to think - what if we put them all together and form a band that kind of looks and sounds like Toronto or looks and sounds like Canada? The sesquicentennial year seemed to be the opportune time to do it.

We had a new kind of energy in Ottawa and there was a moment during one of the debates between Harper and Mulcair and Trudeau where Trudeau said something vaguely left-wing, vaguely socialist. Harper looked down his nose and said, “Well Justin, that may work for your people, but it would never work for old stock Canadians’. I’m watching on TV wondering what is ‘old stock Canadians’? What does that even mean?

Is that a dog whistle politics kind of thing? And then I start thinking, well I'm an immigrant, and I've been here in Canada for 56 years, and I’m now 58. Am I old stock or am I new stock? Am I a new Canadian or am I old?

My mother's third generation Canadian but my father's born in Bombay. So, what does that make me? It's just troubling to think about and why should we pigeonhole each other, so I thought about putting a band together that's made up of all these people from everywhere that are beautiful musicians. We started auditioning and had a plan for a one-night stand. It's now grown and grown and grown.

Everybody is drawn from this area?

Everyone is drawn from Toronto. I mean, it would have been ideal to have it drawn from all over Canada, but we had to rehearse, so we rehearsed here over a year. We started auditioning in October of 2016. The band was together by December of 2016 and the first gig was June 2017. So, for those six months we had to get to know each other. We had to understand each other's genres and instruments and how to play modal music and how to play African rhythms and how to play Iranian modes and how to play Cuban modes and somehow put that into something that sounds like it's not a train wreck. And that took a long time.

Essentially, when you put all these parts together, you must find a compatible music in all of that.

It could be a lovely thing on paper, but music doesn't work like that. It was very important to find a way to work together and to put the music together and that's when I hired David Buchbinder to be our artistic director. He was in from the ‘get go’ of this project. Not only is he good at putting multicultural music together but he's also very good at putting multicultural people and kind of laying the table, if you will.

The first time we all get together as a band, the first quote, unquote rehearsal dinner was at Lula Lounge. And we just talked, and we told some stories and not everyone speaks English. I remember everyone went around the table and had a glass of wine and toasted each other and their tradition with their language and we just started to know each other. The second rehearsal I think or the third we still hadn’t taken our instruments out of the cases and we went up to a farm near Kleinberg somewhere and hiked in the woods in January and it was 10 or 20 below zero. We stood around a fire and told more stories and eventually we took the instruments out. The bamboo flute player from China was showing her flute to the Ukrainian sopilka player and how did these two instruments work and what's the dynamic range of them and how could they match if they play around harmonically. One flute on top and one above and how would they actually work together, and we figured out which one works, and which ones didn’t. It developed from there.

Does everyone have input in the arrangements?

Everyone brought at least one tune to the table and some were proficient in arranging their tune for the full ensemble. Some don't read music. Some don't do Sibelius or Fidelio notation software or any of the music composition tools. We had to bring some people to that. David Buchbinder arranged probably about half of the tunes. Some of the musicians arranged their own. Cuban pianist/composer Hilario Duran arranged two of them and a couple of other people came in when we needed help.

One of the things that really was central to the way we put the music together was; we have twelve people from twelve different countries, but we couldn't say everyone’s going to play an African tune now and we're going to play it as well as any African band. No. We only have one African guy who really gets that music in his bones and we couldn't similarly say OK, now we're going to play a Peruvian tune because we have a great Peruvian musician because no one really knows that Peruvian music. We had to figure out how to play the African tune. At the core of a tune would be the African rhythm of the African melody. But then how do we add a sitar to that and how do we add a Cuban sax to that or how do we add a bass to that? How do we add Brazilian percussion to that and match the African percussion so that it becomes not an African tune anymore? It starts as an African tune and blossoms into, if you will, a Toronto tune or a Canadian or something that speaks of this orchestra.

I know you love this city and your role in the arts and have really taking the lead here. At the helm of Koener Hall you bring people together in the music you support and have a keen eye for talent.  You must think that at this time with all the places in the world that you could be, this may be the best place to do what you're doing.

I absolutely 100 percent agree. I mean, I remember when I came back to Toronto now ten years ago. Some people, not many but some people said, like I was living in Philadelphia and before that I was living in Chicago, ‘why would you come back to Toronto,’ with some disdain in their voice. And I said, ‘are you kidding me? Look around what this city has to offer’. Not to mention the fact that I have a wife and a teenage son who wanted to go to school without guns and everything else that goes along with living in Canada. Look at the richness we have, not only in music, in film and theater and cuisine in neighborhoods. You know, the staff in this building comes from all over the world and shares whatever they have to share. It's not lost on me that I'm I still feel like an immigrant. I've been here for so long. I still feel like an outsider.

I think you will always sense that. I've been here 48 years and am very much Canadian. But I never lose touch from where I was born and where it started. Every evolving cultural centre finds it’s time and place in history.

David Buchbinder and I often talk about Toronto being a place not so unlike Andalucía in the 14th and 15th century where you had a huge Muslim influence; Arabic influence. You had a huge Catholic influence clearly and you also had a very big Jewish influence.

You go to Seville or Granada in Spain and you see the buildings that look Arabic with Arabic architecture and you taste the food which is fairly spicy - still kind of Western European but with more spices added - more than the jambalaya they do. And then you look at flamenco.

The vocal part of flamenco is absolutely Arabic. The dance part is absolutely taken from Kathak dance in India and the music and the guitar is taking from Western guitar players from Bach's age on and that all mixed into Andalucía. That’s the kind of a situation that we're living with in Toronto now. I see that not only in world music, quote unquote, but you know an artist like the Weeknd who is, very Toronto but also very much from Africa in his background. Drake's Jamaican. Half of his family absolutely influences the kind of music that he's doing which is now you know, number one in the world. But it's a very Toronto sound.

It’s Scarborough too, another region in our broad community.

It is because of him and The Weeknd and others that this has now blossomed. You have some of the best producers in hip hop living in Toronto and similarly with Kune. I think it sounds like the sound of Toronto or the sound of Canada. It's not nearly as commercial, I wish.

But would you want it to be commercial at this point?

If it became the next Buena Vista Social Club, no one would complain. That's not why we did the project.

To find these artists, was this David’s challenge?

We all did. Some of them we didn't know at all. The ‘tar’ player from Iran, no one had heard of her. She had only been in town for a couple of months. She emigrated after seven years of waiting for visas etc. and came with her family.

We had a lot of Syrian immigrants come and audition for us. Some of them are known. I mean, there are some people in the band that have been here for ten or fifteen years and we knew them. But everyone auditioned. No one was given a spot. We had about 150 people audition from I think they said, 47 different countries and we had a lot of people around the table.

Dave and I were certainly there but we also had some of our partners from Batuki Music. Nadine McNulty and Ann Mackeigan from CBC and Alan Davis from Small World Music. They were all part of the committee that listened to people.

The most important thing clearly was that people had to be able to play at a certain level but maybe even more important than that they had to be able to have an openness to playing with other genres, other cultures so that their voice wasn't going to stick out, but it was going to blend.

It was more difficult trying to find people who could do that as well as play at a high level. There was the certain very, very high level playing people that we didn't accept into the band because they were not as adventurous in their thinking.

The concert is April 7^th?

 It's also now part of a new festival in Toronto called Global Toronto which will go from April 4 to 7 with concerts at Lula Lounge, Hugh's Room Live, Aga Khan Museum, Small World Music Centre, The Rivoli and here in Koerner Hall. I think there are sixteen different Toronto based global music artists that have collaborated to put this festival together and quite a few concert programmers with bookers from across the US and one from France coming in for the week to see all the strong talent and hopefully book them.

An American in Paris

The average North American views France as a hub of artifacts and illustrious history, sometimes contrary and combatant when it comes to world affairs yet portrayed on film as a country of and for lovers, unlike any other. I thought about that as I tapped the icon displaying classic in-flight movies on the back seat in front of me and brought up the film, An American in Paris, clocking in at 113 minutes, for the first stage of an eight-hour flight home late September 2014.

Listening to George Gershwin’s rhapsodic crescendos and traffic-jam dissonance played deftly by pianist and literary wit Oscar Levant, who also plays the role of Adam Cook, a struggling concert pianist in the film alongside French ballet dancer Leslie Caron as Lise Dassin, ballerina and choreographer, and actor, and dancer Gene Kelly as Jerry Mulligan hints more to the urban chaos of New York City during the ‘jazz age’, than Paris, and yet still resonates six-plus decades later.

Parisian music of the day was more sweet-tempered and less blue noted; accordion, acoustic guitar, violin; Piaf, Charles Trenet, Yves Montand, Jacques Brel – French chanson, tangos and gypsy music influences.

An American in Paris staging captures the essence of Paris in impressionistic terms along the lines of the pastoral and surreal landscape paintings of the 18^th century, Alfred Sisley. Even Kelly’s character, Jerry Mulligan, feigns being an artist living in tempera coloured surroundings.

Kelly and Caron dazzle and dance their way through one of the finest musicals of all times. One experiences the sympathetic chemistry between two polished dancers through Gershwin originals, “Our Love is Here to Stay” and “Embraceable You.” It’s the fluid body movement, up on the toes, smooth glide across the floor, soft embraces, and charming interaction that arouse emotions.

Kelly wisely chose Caron and cast her for this role. He also choreographed the closing scene which is estimated to have cost $500,000 to shoot the seventeen-minute dance sequence to Gershwin’s American in Paris. Remember, this was 1951.

Throughout, Kelly plays the part of a starving artist, yet so athletic and masculine he could be mistaken for a high-priced fitness instructor at a posh Beverly Hills fitness club. In fact, lack of funds doesn’t seem to impede his undiminished confidence or iron-will pursuit of the most desirable female in Paris, Lise Dassin (Caron).

To further my appetite and anticipation for more Gershwin, I resurrected recordings of rare piano rolls that surfaced in 2004 – Gershwin Plays Rhapsody in Blue, ‘An American in Paris,' 'Oh, Lady Be Good,' 'Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,' ‘S Wonderful', 'Promenade,’ and others on Shout! Factory/Biograph.

To imagine all this translating to a stage musical was more than the head and heart could envisage.

The stage adaptation is much different from the sunny ways of the Academy Award celebrated movie. This is Paris, 1945 during liberation and at the end of the Second World War - struggling with its darkest decade. The remnants of war are still visible in the surrounding buildings and wounds still festering between those who were collaborators with the Nazi regime and the resistance. That tension spells out in the opening dance number with full company and Gershwin’s 'Concerto in F.'

The opening scene finds Adam Hochberg (Matthew Scott), a composer, situated at an ornate grand piano with drink in hand and the silhouette of the Arc de Triomphe far in the background. Hochberg sets the stage and begins retelling the life story of his old friend Jerry Mulligan and narrates throughout.

The story remains much the same. Mulligan, an American serviceman and aspiring painter, decides to spend more time in Paris and pursue his art and falls in love with ballerina Lise Dassin. Mulligan dances, prances and sweet talks Dassin into a date even with Dassin committed to marrying song-and-dance hopeful Henri Baurel (Ben Michael.) Hochberg makes it a three-man struggle to win over the hand of Dassin. It becomes apparent that romance, music and art medicate and addresses the city’s long-suffering afflictions.

The stage adaptation of Craig Lewis’s book brings the full ensemble front and centre. Kelly was the focal point of the grand movie and tap dance, the story. Set designer Bob Crowley illuminates the stage in ravishing colours all perfectly synched. From the flickering lights of buildings in near ruin to that many moveable parts and projections. This is eye-popping wizardry.

Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon captured a Tony award for his ballet-to-Broadway treatment. The stage adaptation is light and  is absent the snap and dazzle of Gene Kelly’s footwork. This An American in Paris is more akin to Bernstein’s West Side Story, with it’s smooth, eloquent lifts and soft landings.

Canadian McGee Maddox, a principal dancer with the National Ballet of Canada, assumes the role of Jerry Mulligan. Maddox plays Mulligan from a ballet stance. All parts are executed with grace and athleticism, yet as an actor and singer, he is less convincing. Both the Broadway version with Robert Fairchild in the lead role and screen version with Kelly easily transmit real affection and the passion of that first encounter. You readily embrace the tension of the moment and play for the new girl.

This is still one compelling and accomplished cast from Allison Walsh’s Lise Dassin, to Kirsten Scott as American philanthropist Milo Davenport, who takes more than a patron’s interest in Mulligan’s paintings and virile presence, to both Ben Michael as Henri Baurel and Matthew Scott as Adam Hochberg.

An American in Paris won Tony awards for Best Choreography, Best Lighting Design of a Musical, Best Orchestrations and Best Scenic Design of a Musical in 2015 and is playing at Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto until April 29, 2018.

A Conversation With .. Mike Bendixen (Newstalk 1010)

For Ted Woloshyn and me, it’s season number eight of Saturday’s with Ted at Newstalk 1010.

When I got the invite from Ted to be music director in 2010, I had not a clue how this would roll along. The opportunity to give music artists a solid shot at talking about new releases and concerts on a prime-time Toronto radio station appealed to me.

A good six years we filled four hours every Saturday afternoon. What a blessing for a news junkie pianist like me. Dignitaries, politicians, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, authors, and comics all made the rounds. John Byner, Ron James, Kenny Robinson, Sandra Shamas, Jamie Farr, Eric Peterson. Singers and players such as Arturo Sandoval, Roberta Gambarini, Marc Jordan, Ian Thomas, Jimmy Webb. On-site with sports icons like Cito Gaston, Sandy Hawley, George Chuvalo, Johnny Bower, Russ Jackson. The list is endless.

On the frontline for all of this is program director Mike Bendixen. Often I'm asked, 'Who or where in the world does a piano player besides yourself get to play for three hours live on air every Saturday afternoon?' I truly don’t know – but I thought it was imperative to sit down and have a chat with the boss and see what makes him tick. Enjoy!

So why radio?

Do you want the honest answer?

I've talked to some who say they were five years old and got a Mr. Microphone as a gift and started yelling at family.

That was not me. I never had a passion for it as a kid. I was never one of those guys that was out buying the latest albums and checking out the newest music. All my friends were into music in a big way.

My earliest kind of recollection of being around a radio quite honestly would be as many kids my age would have done as you know, recording your favourite song on like a Casey Kasem Top 40 and hitting pause and record and hoping to get the song and then make a mixtape. But quite frankly, the way that I got into radio was, I didn't do well in school.

Essentially, if we didn't go into some sort of formal education after high school, my parents would lose all this money. And so I had to go to college or university. I wasn't smart enough to get into university, and I remember sitting in my kitchen at home at my parent's place and looking through this course calendar at different colleges and then looking into this radio program I had no idea existed. I thought, well that can be fine. That doesn't sound like work. So I applied. I applied to all of these programs, and I couldn't get into any of them. And then thankfully, I eventually got into the radio program at Humber. It was more of a desperation type move for me than anything else. That was kind of my first footstep into trying to find out what radio was all about.

When you signed up for the radio program were you thinking 'I want to be on air,  in management or somewhere else' in radio?

One thing that I found interesting was - we had to do a documentary. I enjoyed doing this kind of radio doc I did on homelessness in Toronto, and I did enjoy walking around the streets of Toronto talking to homeless people and trying to figure out their story; where they came from, why they were on the streets, etc. That was interesting to me. Getting stories out there if you will. But I was fuckin lost. And part of it was being born and raised in Scarborough.

Humber College is on the other end of town. So while a lot of the students stayed out in the west end at the school, I was doing this commuting thing back and forth and working and doing all these other things. I was a part-time student there. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong. Humber was great for me. But it wasn't until I got into that building at Yonge and St. Clair that I figured it out.

How did you get in there?

I got in because I had some time and I needed to get an internship. I spent an evening one night at my then girlfriend's dorm room, she was at university, and I wrote e-mails to every radio station in the city saying I need an internship.

I heard back from the promotions director at CFRB who said, 'listen I just started as the new promotions director and I need a clean slate of interns, so why don't you come here.' Of course, I did.

I hadn't listened to CFRB, to be honest with you; it wasn't my thing. I walked in and sat down with the promotions director and got an internship in the promotions department.

And that felt good?

It felt good enough that I was pursuing what I was supposed to be doing from a college perspective. I don't know what the right word is, but I decided that I wasn’t going the announcer route or news route. I was going to go the sales and promotions route because I was always told, if you want to make money you go into sales.

I sold some airtime for Humber College and made some decent money doing it. So that's where I was like, OK I'm going to go into promotions. That was what I thought I was going to do -become a promotions director.

I remember speaking to my girlfriend and saying, ‘Hey! Listen, you know what? There's this promotions director gig at CFRB, and I think he makes 60,000 bucks a year. If I can get his job, I'm set for life’. That was my goal. I was like' I'm going to become the promotions director somewhere' and 'I'm going to make sixty grand,' and 'I'm going to be living the high life.' But it didn't take me long to figure out that that was not something I was passionate about.

If you look at sales guys and one of the great staffs in Toronto, go no farther than CHUM and Jack Addis and Gord Kidder. Those guys lived the life. I mean they lived the hard life and did incredibly well.

Those days are long gone.

I caught a glimpse of it when I first started in the business. Ron Hewitt, who I think we both know was a phenomenal salesman and just a great guy. Fun loving. And one of those, in my opinion - the ‘last’ of a dying breed of that era of sales guys. You could say to Ron at nine o'clock in the morning, not me, but someone else of higher importance, ‘Hey Ron, my car broke down. I need to get to the Muskokas this weekend. Can you hook me up?’ And within an hour - a new BMW would be sitting outside for you to drive up to Muskoka for the weekend. That was the kind of thing that today is totally different.

How does a sales team function differently today?

I don't know that much about the way it was before. There are stories I've heard.

Back in the day, you would sit in your office, the phone would ring, and someone would say, 'hey I want to make a buy on radio.' And it was like 'OK, I'll take your money,' and then you spend the afternoon out drinking.

Nowadays, you're chasing every nickel and dime there is because you're competing with so many more media outlets and there are so many more options.

Let's not even talk about the Internet and how much that has changed advertising. You know the shiny little object that becomes the flavour of the week, where all of a sudden all these ad agencies are like, ‘oh, we've got to be on whatever it is? Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, all these and Snapchat. All these are shiny objects.
For radio guys, you gotta fight tooth and nail to get a slice of that dollar that before was a no-brainer. Oh yeah, for sure we're gonna buy radio, for sure we're gonna buy television and print. So, you were always guaranteed a portion of the pie. Of course, you had to be on the radio. Now, it's like you have to be on digital.  You have to be on social media, and then it's like, 'oh well, do we have any money left over? Let's think about radio and television and all the traditional mediums that are out there.' These sales guys today, I tell you, I would not want to do their job.

It is a fight, and the other thing that's changed the landscape so much is this little term we've become more familiar with called, ‘value added’ which basically means like OK, you know Bill, you've got a hundred bucks to buy airtime. Great. But then you want an additional hundred dollars-worth of ‘value added’ stuff which is essentially, 'I've got to give you free exposure on the air. And if I don't give you that value-added, the guy down the street definitely will.

Back in the day, we used to be able to say OK, for your hundred dollars I'll give you another twenty dollars-worth of value. Got it? And you would go, oh my god that's fantastic. Thank you so much, I'll be loyal to you. Now, it's like everyone has to give you something. And it's so bizarre to me because it's kind of as if I was to walk into a store and want to buy a pair of shoes and I said, ‘how much are those shoes?’ They're like 100 bucks, and you say, ‘great and by the way, can you throw in the T-shirt and socks?’ Because that's the ‘value added.’ It doesn't work on any other platform when it comes to selling things. I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice where over the years we've started adding in these ‘value-added’ things and now it's no longer’ Value-Added.' It's just expected and mandatory.

Was the next step, show producer?

Yes, I mean I continued as an intern and one day I wandered around the station and asked 'are there other jobs I can do other than promotions?' And I ran into Nick Maiorano who was the board op for the Ted Woloshyn Show at the time, and he said listen, 'we don't have a full-time morning show producer. We have interns that come in and help put the show together.'

Ted had probably been there for two or three years, and there was no full-time producer. The job didn't exist, ironically. And so I started interning a couple of days a week and then that turned into five days a week of me coming in and helping Ted. And I knew fuck all about producing radio. Nothing! I learned by saying, ‘Hey Ted, what do you need, what do you want?

As Ted's show evolved we'd open up more airtime and did more interviews and then we would come up with new ideas like, let's take the show on the road, let's do this, let's do that. Eventually, that internship turned into a full-time position where they said OK, you know what, we need a producer on the morning show. It's an important show obviously. And so, I got hired as the first producer of the morning show at CFRB.

Did Wally Crouter have a morning show producer all of those decades?

Wally had a technical producer, but he didn't have a producer in the way that Ted’s’ show did. It was so much different than Wally’s. Ted’s show evolved into very much a news magazine if you will show, similar to what our morning show is today. A lot of interviews, a lot of guests. You know the premier pops by. The police chief pops by. There are other guests that you know, like celebrities coming to town. Can we get them on the show?

9/11 happens and that changes the dynamic of everything. That allowed me to get my foot further in the door and a full-time job. Then from there, thankfully, management, and other people in the building allowed me to do different things. I did some reporting. I did a talk show for a little while.

The big break for me as I see it and as I've said many times the story is, when the tsunami happened in 2004 I was asked to go to Sri Lanka and produce for Taylor Parnaby, who was being sent over there. I went along and stayed in one part of Sri Lanka and then went to another part of Sri Lanka. I was reporting essentially for our radio stations in Canada from the devastated parts of Sri Lanka and learned a lot and saw a lot of unbelievable things.

When I came back from that trip that's basically when Gary Slaight probably thought, 'there's more to this kid than we're allowing him to do. He did some really interesting things when we sent him to Sri Lanka.' Through the blessing of Gary, I would imagine, I got a job as a news director and program director for our sister station in Montreal, CJAD.

How long was the stay?

I was 26 when I went there. Here's what I tell a lot of people. People who reported to me - I was the program director there; a lot of the staff there had worked at the radio station longer than I'd been alive. So, it was a unique dynamic for a young guy from Toronto to go into Montreal and start telling people what to do. You know what I mean? You can imagine that it wasn't the easiest of transitions. Over time I got to love working with the people there. I had great experiences and as you said, what a great town. CJAD is like an amazing radio station along with working down the hallway from folks at CHOM and Terry DiMonte and all these guys and Rob Braide and just some phenomenal people. It was a blast.

Did you get out much with Rob and the folks?

Listen, this is the difference between working in Montreal for Standard Broadcasting and what it's like today.

Rob Braide would announce over the P.A. in the building, ‘Hey it's Friday everyone: at 3:00, I expect to see you over at Ziggy's on Crescent Street. You know, Gary's in town and the bar's open' kind of thing. That would be a regular occurrence. Here again another difference between then and now.

I had an expense account at Ziggy's, at a pub where I was encouraged to take people and write off expenses for a night out drinking. That doesn't exist anymore today. Those were the fun times. A lot of learning. And then when Astral bought us things changed a little bit and then of course when I came back to Toronto things changed a lot more and now its Bell, things have changed even more.

It goes without saying for me that the days of working for Standard Broadcasting were phenomenal because you could do and try so many different things. Not to suggest that I can't today, but back then you know, if Gary and others thought this is a good idea, let's give it a shot, you could go and do it. It was so much fun being able to work for a real family. And that's how it felt. When I went to Montreal, it felt like a small family that you worked for, and whenever ‘Big Daddy’ came into town, it was even more fun.

For me, as a guy that started out as an intern and being able to sit around a table and I do remember sitting around a table having dinner with Gary Slaight, Terry DiMonte and Rob Braide in Montreal, I was like, oh my god like how the hell did I end up here? I still have those moments in this business where I'll be in a meeting, and I'll be like, 'what the fuck am I doing in this room right now?'

Do you have those moments?

Oh yeah, I literally had one two days ago while I was sitting in the biggest boardroom that this facility has, overlooking the parking lot on 299 Queen Street. I'm sitting in a room with Randy Lennox, the president of Bell Media and a bunch of other VIPs of the company, and I'm just like,’ what am I doing here?'

I remember taking a day off school to come to 299 Queen when City TV used to do an ‘open house’ once a year where you could come in and do a tour. I took a day off school and did this nerdy tour of the City Pulse newsroom, and there are moments when I walk in those front doors off Queen Street, and I'm like, 'I can't believe that I work in this building'. I have those moments all the time.

Not that long ago I was in my office, and I was sitting talking to Gordon Martineau, and Marilyn Dennis walked in, and the three of us are sitting in my office shooting the shit about stuff. And at one moment I said, ‘guys you have to understand I'm having an out of body experience because the two of you are sitting in my office and we're chatting as high school friends, so to speak, and my mind is going somewhere else.’

To have a boss like Randy Lennox, who actually has a music background, can bridge those divergent worlds. Music and entertainment and media.

I think a lot of that goes to what you see through Randy's influence on the company overall in terms of producing musicals like Bat Out of Hell as an example. Obviously, the television show, The Launch.  You know you see these integrations of how to promote talent and how to promote music.

Just the other night we had a live music performance at Young-Dundas Square with Arkells. There are influences of Randy throughout. But the fascinating thing for me, is I’ve worked under a couple of heads of Bell Media since I've been here, but the exciting thing with Randy is more often than not he will turn to others in the room and say, ‘what do you think?'

For someone like me, it’s too cool. I mean it's just cool to have someone turn to someone that you look at with high regard and someone that's done a lot of great things in this business, and so enjoy it. And for someone like that to turn to you and ask, 'what do you think?' And not only say it but listen and give a shit about your opinion. To me, it's another one of those mind-blowing moments when you're like OK thanks - you know I mean, I don't know how to describe it, but it's like, yeah!

Talk radio. We're coming up to Ontario provincial elections, and we’ve seen what happened with Sinclair network south of us and how they manipulated local news. How do you try and deliver balance knowing this will be a volatile election? You've got a premier whose approval rating is running at a low 12 percent and a candidate that's far to the right and someone we know who thrives on chaos and bullies.

The answer to that question goes back almost eight or nine years. Since I've come back to CFRB, and the one thing that I wanted to do when I came back here was get away as much as we can from one guy on the air with one opinion. And what we've tried to do is - yeah ok, you can have a guy on the air that has a view, but I also want to hear from the guy that has the opposite opinion. And then the guy that has the whatever bizarre other opinions as well. And I think we've done a good job of that on the radio station. That's why we've instituted some roundtable discussions, so there are other opinions allowed to become part of the conversation. That's why we have a variety of views on the air between the morning show and evening show.

We’ve done things intentionally so that the radio station has a broader appeal to it; so I don't have to worry so much about if we are going to be considered the Doug Ford supporting radio station or the Kathleen Wynne supporting radio station or whatever. I think if you listen to us over the course of the entire day, you'll get a balance.

Do you miss John Tory?

 Oh yeah!

He was remarkable on air. I’d listen to John Tory and outside of being our mayor, I thought I've never heard anybody recite from their head two pages in length without breaking a thought or bumbling a word. What a rare gift!

Here's the other rare gift that John Tory has. He loves to learn.

I did air checks with John every two weeks, right. And if you ask him to this day, he'll tell you the story that still pops up in his calendar and his BlackBerry that he's got a calendar reminder that says you know, Mike Bendixen aircheck and he keeps it in there as a reminder and laughs every two weeks.

But John would be the guy that would be at the mic check five minutes in advance. He was taking copious amounts of notes and wanted the feedback. At times there were heated exchanges about what I thought he should be doing and what he thought he should be doing. But he loved to learn. He was engaged in the craft of how to become a better talk show host. The other thing that John has that nobody else in this market had was that he's got unique life experience.

There’s no one else in like him on Toronto radio. When Ronald Reagan died, I sent John a text saying, ‘hey John, have you ever met Ron Reagan?’ He said 'yes, I’ve been in the Oval Office three times.' Name me one other personality that's on the air that can say they've been in the oval office three times? It just doesn't happen. That was a unique skill set that he had because of his life experiences. And what made him unique was that he was able to translate those experiences onto the air.

When Ronald Reagan dies, who would you rather listen to, a guy on the dial that's just telling anecdotes or a guy that's like – ‘you know the first time I walked into the Oval Office and set eyes on Ronald. OK. That guy wins.’  It's much like sports in my opinion. I'd rather hear from a guy that used to play professional baseball than a guy that just watches it sitting on the couch.

Which brings me to sports and how much sports broadcasting has changed. Athletes are in the broadcasting pre-game seats and in between segments that used to be filled by pundits. It’s now the residence of jocks. I find it fascinating: Charles Barkley sitting next to Kenny Smith sitting next to Shaq. Great players with first-hand insights into the game.

That's why you know John Tory works - we're in the same business right. Former politicians are now doing radio. John Tory is a good example of that. Tim Hudak who does work with us now is growing into a great talk show host and again learning a lot of things.

We’ve got former communications directors that work with us. Rob Ford's former chief of staff works for us. There's a lot of that transition as well. And for me, that's where I often will go to when I'm looking for some talent for the radio station. I don't go necessarily to colleges or down that route. I'm looking for who's got experiences, whether they be a former politician or former communications director or whatever, that can translate that experience onto the radio. Right. I'd rather hear from someone that says no no no, I've been there. And this is what's happening as opposed to someone that just goes, 'I think this is what's happening'.

By 2019, ‘millennials’ will be the driving force in the country. Do you keep that in mind?

No! Here’s what I do keep in mind. We can get dragged so many different ways. What I try to keep in mind is at the end of the day - we are still a very vibrant radio station.

The numbers are great.

Yes, but we can't start being all these other things and then you lose focus of – ‘no we're still a fucking radio station.’ You’ve seen numerous businesses that try to dabble in all these other things, and then eventually they fall apart. And I think that's what we focus most on is the day to day, are we delivering compelling content? Most days, I think we probably have a good sixty to seventy when we hit it out of the park seventy percent of the time.

We're still far off from being 100 percent.

I think eventually you come to a stage in your life where you realize you need to be more engaged in what's going on in the world and that is what we try and do here. And we try and do it compellingly and entertainingly if you will.

And I think much like I've grown up in this business and others have. I think all of a sudden you go, enough of the kind of pop culture music stuff.

That's great, and there's a part of that, that will exist in my life but at the same time, I also need to realize what does my future look like?

Where are my taxes going?

What are the politicians doing?

What's the environment?

All that stuff.

I don't worry about that. I worry more about whether we are delivering the right content at the right moment.