A Conversation With.. Terry Wilkins

The vibe inside is what you would expect from a British corner pub. There’s a celebratory force at play. Faces in the crowd look oh so familiar as if Saturday afternoons were meant to be a collective gathering of souls firmly planted in place for an afternoon a far distance from the usual business-like commotion of downtown Toronto and lost in the surreal confines of an ageing hotel given over to music and good times.

After packing my piano away at Newstalk 1010, on occasion I try to slip into the Rex Hotel only yards away from Bell Media radio studios and catch the last couple of numbers. This is when the band is cruising to a finale and the crowd, jammed from door to door, is in a receptive celebratory mood. The room is alive and electric!

The band on stage and charged with keeping the energy high and the crowd engaged is led by the man with more activities scheduled in a week than most musician’s over a two-month period, bassist/vocalist Terry Wilkins.

Wilkins turned 70 a few months in the rear, and I made a point of dropping by to congratulate. Seventy is a milestone in any profession and deserves recognition.

I catch the rousing 2:45 p.m. closer and close in on Wilkins who by 3:01 is applying the outer skin to his acoustic bass and clearing the stage. Wilkins looks panicked yet pauses long enough to embrace a moment between two ageing music loyalists before jetting out a side door. Wilkins was on to the next gig.

Through the years, this is how I’ve got to see Terry Wilkins. Not long ago I trapped him early morning for an interview and here’s a portion of that conversation.

We first met in 1971 when you arrived from Australia. Why did you centre on Canada?

Actually, there was a sequence to it in 1970. McKenna Mendelson Mainline went to Australia. We played some shows with them. Personally, I loved McKenna Mendelson Mainline. They were an amazing live act and at one point we were playing in Melbourne and the bass player was a guy named Zeke Shepherd. He was actually a world-class harmonica player, and he was the bass player in Mainline for a little while. He was a very simple player, but fantastic. I thought the guy was amazing. We got to chatting backstage and he started talking about Toronto. At that point I knew nothing about Toronto other than the fact that all our schoolbooks were made by a publisher who published out of London, Toronto and Sydney. When I was at school I’d see the word Toronto which always reminded me of Tonto. He gave me a business card which I gave to our agent.

In 1971, that band, Flying Circus, moved to San Francisco. We were negotiating a deal with Capitol U.S., but couldn't work. We were just chilling and going to the Fillmore West, which was pretty amazing. Interestingly, Toronto band, James and the Good Brothers were living in San Francisco and managed by Bill Graham at the same time.

While in San Francisco our agent from Australia went to New York to do some business. He had a green card and decided to check out Toronto. He met with the Music Factory which was an agency at 80 Scarlett Rd. He saw that people worked a lot. And what people did work a lot at was high school dances. The drinking age was 21. Even when kids left school, they still went back for the school dances because it was the only action there was.

He called us up and said, ‘as long as you're waiting out your deal, why don’t you wait in Toronto,’ and we said great, we'd love to play. We were getting a little Jonesy at that point. The band took a bus to Vancouver, then on by train. We saw a good chunk of Canada right off and spent a few months in Toronto, and we decided that we'd rather be here. We got signed to a management deal with HP & Bell, Lighthouse's management. That was March of 1971. I’ve just had my forty-sixth anniversary of arriving in this country.

We were in the same package deal.  It was me, Bob McBride and Flying Circus, a three-way deal with Capitol Records. Every time I went to visit Paul Hoffert, Scientologists would stop me on the street in front of HP & Bell - harass and ask to evaluate my personality.

What was the name of that restaurant across the street? Plato's Symposium, right? Cool. And that was full of them too. I used to watch them berate each other. That was very interesting.

You got a foothold. Made that record. Got out to play and stayed in place in Toronto.

It did happen organically. I'm not much of a planner. I don't really like plans because they spoil life. We were winging it. It didn't take me long to realize I liked being here. I went from Flying Circus to Lighthouse and then I began feeling like I was deeply involved in the Canadian music scene at that point.

This was with Skip Prokop and Lighthouse, and they certainly did tour a lot.

One thing about touring is we did the first ever beer sponsored tour, with Labatt‘s which was interesting because they sent along a young rep who travelled on the bus with us. Frankly, I think we destroyed his life.

You took care of him, ‘real good’?

I think he never got over it. It was just too wild for him. I think we did sixty-eight concerts in seventy-five days, with some insane bus rides from Victoria to St. John's.

Were you comfortable driving a great distance between gigs?

I haven’t done much since that.

Leave that to the 20-year olds?

I don't have anything against that and don't try to do it. When I became a parent, which is thirty years ago, instead of being in one band that did a lot of things, I ended up being in a lot of groups doing a few things. Then I could be home all of the time.

I felt the same way when my son was born. I remember being in a club; it must have been in Belleville or somewhere. I'm in a hotel room with a band member and booked for a week. First night away I look around my hotel room and see another musician rolling up a pillow, and thought, ‘damn, that's not my family’. I’ve got to get back home. I realize it’s imperative for young bands, but rarely profitable.

It’s expensive to do. I don’t know of a situation where I would want to be that hardcore and on the road again. But that said, who knows. If anything, it would be with the Sinner’s Choir. I could get into that.

That’s your current project.

Yeah, we made an EP last year. We're currently mixing twelve new tunes; originals etc. The past EP has helped pay for new recording. We sell it off stage. I like that low overhead.

 It sounds like the first days of the record business, doesn't it?

I think that these days aren’t that dissimilar from the early days. In the early days, there was no industry. Right? Especially, for rock ‘n’ roll. I think there was like the ‘bright lights’, the A&R guys who were going out on the street and finding cool people. That was the record business. And then it became what it became, which is a bloated cocaine-filled behemoth.

The music industry in some ways has fallen apart, and it makes young musicians and just in general musicians not want to tailor what they do to the music industry but do what they think.

Subsequently, I think the demise of the music industry has made for better music.

There’s something reassuring about sticking with what you know.

I refer to it as the no alternative music. Just play what you play. How it falls is how it falls.

You’ve been playing the Rex Jazz Bar with Sinners Choir the past two years from noon to three every Saturday afternoon.

That's right. We've been there for a couple of years now. Indeed, the audience has grown.

Playing original music at noon was a little tricky at the beginning because people were a little befuddled. A couple of things happened. We realized that playing rock ‘n’ roll at noon is a little jarring. So, for the first of our three sets, we got ourselves a bluegrass mic and set that up in the middle of the stage. We do the first set with string bass, acoustic guitar, and washboard and three voices around one mic. Which is a nice gentle way to start the day. But it has also opened this up to a whole other way of presenting yourself. Especially, when you're playing what's basically a bluegrass instrumentation and bluegrass approach to playing, and the music isn't bluegrass. It's whatever we play and often we'll be playing in that format and will be counting off a tune and I realize I've never played this actual tune in this format before. I have no idea how I'm going to approach it, but I also have to sing. You know what I mean?

You‘ve said the more time you get in the recording studio, the easier it gets. You used the term ‘red light’ fever. What does that mean?

Well, sweaty palms. Let me just preface this by saying. In the [Toronto blues club] Albert’s Hall days, drummer Bucky Berger and I worked with Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson and became very good friends because he came up here quite a lot of times He took us under his wing and gave us some good advice and all kinds of things. And one of the things he said to us was, ‘you realize it's a 30 -year partnership,’ and I was in year twelve at the time. I thought that seems unreasonable. That's too long, and it only made sense when I got to thirty years.

I think that the ‘red-light fever business’, which is where a musician’s brain starts to seize up when the red light goes on in that recording studio, and he gets overly cautious. The music’s not as flowing. Now I don't care. I just go and play. I don't even think about it because I don't care about mistakes particularly. What's a mistake anyway? Who's to say what a mistake is?

Regarding how we initially viewed the recording studio, going back to let’s say a Sun Records - players showed up and played. They played what they knew and with big emotion. You didn’t overthink. Once music went corporate, it became a factory product. I think that's what kind of stressed everybody out – especially young musicians new to the process. It began limiting the creative process.

I think so. Even though in theory, as we both lived through the 24-track explosion and the thing about that was, …… I did Eddie Schwartz’s first record in the Catskills many years ago. The studio they used was the Record Plant - the remote set-up. They rented a house in the Catskills, a twenty-room mansion and, during the process of making that record, there was a huge kerfuffle with Bruce Springsteen who was recording at the Record Plant. It was with senior management of 3M, because Bruce had overdubbed so many times he wore out the two-inch tape before they got to mix. I think they lost tracks. They wore out the files or whatever the technical thing is.

Didn’t the same thing happen to Fleetwood Mac with Tusk? They spent a million making the record.

That was the first million-dollar recording.

They ran the tapes nearly every-day and overdubbed until the iron oxide had worn down. I’m with you – it’s still about the moment.

Perfection is overrated. And I think that multi-track recording, when it came in, did play to people's desire and ability to be perfect, which of course turned out to be a waste of time.

Are you still a fan of recorded music in its rawest form?

Think about it. Before there was the ability to overdub, the only people who could go into the studio were people who could play freely live. After multitrack, legions of people who couldn't do it were taken into the studio and overdubbed until they got it right.

When Sinners Choir went into the Rex, I sent Tom the boss a YouTube video of us playing live at the Gladstone. As crude and straightforward as you can get. Later, I was talking to him, and he said, ‘Well you know I could see what you guys do, and that was exactly what I was going to get.’ He then said, ‘sometimes people bring me in their recordings, and I put it on, and I think, I wonder if that's take fifty-six?’ That's the advantage and the disadvantage of modern recording. People can fix, so they will.

I like to play Sarah Vaughan for aspiring singers. Vaughan in the studio at nineteen or twenty. She just stands in in front of the band with one mic and sings ‘absolute’ perfection.

It's interesting you should pick Sarah Vaughan because in my run-throughs with young musicians and most especially with young female musicians, I always send them to Sarah Vaughan. Sarah was the perfect melody singer. She knew why those guys or gals, whoever wrote the music, why they chose that sequence of notes. They're lovely and then you realize so many people learn jazz songs that are interpretations of originals without actually learning the notes.

It’s the affectations that murder a song.

I blame Stevie Wonder. I would often say to the youngish about the standard format of jazz tunes, ‘A-A-B-A’ and I remind them the first ‘A-A-B-A’ is by the book. And what you do after the solo is; feel free. The other thing is, I encourage people to make the first line of improvisation about phrasing, rather than about note changing. You can take a perfect rendition of a Duke Ellington melody, and you can phrase it dozens of different ways that define an original approach to the song without ever altering one single note that Duke wrote. Whereas, you know yourself, how many times do you hear jazz singers who have changed a melody by bar three of the song? Not that I'm against improvising, don't get me wrong.

You’ve weathered and aged well with your music.

When we were in our early 30s, we worked at Albert’s Hall a lot and played with ‘Cleanhead’ and Sunnyland Slim and lots of those old guys. The first one we worked with was Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson. Bucky and I spent 6 a.m. until 9 p.m. on a sound stage doing one of the first ever videos,  ‘All Touch and No Contact,’ for Rough Trade. At 9 p.m. we left the set and went to Albert’s Hall to play our first of six nights with ‘Cleanhead’. I don't know what we thought we were going to be doing but, I guess it was something like there was this old man and he needed a rhythm section. We were going to go in there and prop him up because he was a fossil. He was 68 at the time.

‘Cleanhead’ and Sunnyland and all of those old guys we played with were better than anyone we’d ever played with. No fat on the bone. Everything meant something. There was no waste. Amazing, amazing. It cured me of getting ‘old itis’.

A lot of people, especially from our era who grew up playing rock 'n' roll, the first thing was, you can't play rock ‘n’ roll after you're 30 if you recall that. Right? And then it was 40 and 50 and whatever. Those guys, as I say were better than anyone that I’d ever played with, and it changed my perspective on ageing as a musician to a much more tempered one because I was looking forward to a lot of it. That's the truth. After you've played a certain number of notes, things get easier in your brain, and you stop panicking. That may not be for everyone, but it certainly is for me because I'm essentially an autodidactic musician. I never had any lessons. Everything I’ve learned is by the seat of my pants, and I’m frankly still doing it that way. The ageing thing is not as bad as I expected.

Before the Beatles, it’s all about Elvis, and I look at the both of us and how fortunate we were to be at the front end of rock ‘n’ roll. The fifty years that follows is an amazing era of music. Being in the recording studio when it was monaural - the first time we hear stereo played through speakers, then 4 tracks, 8 tracks, 16 tracks, 24 tracks, 32 and to where we are now. You must think to yourself, WTF just happened?

It seems like 100 years. It did go way too fast. But the essence hasn't changed. The bottom line is, if you can do it, you can do it. If you can't do it, you can fix it, and it will never be the same.

You've taken good care of yourself. Sometimes you do three gigs a day. That's insane.  You say you’ve conditioned yourself to play until four in the morning and then up by noon.

I’m a night owl.

You don’t run low on energy?

I never run out of energy. I think that with ageing, as long as your body doesn't fall apart, touch wood, and the mind is holding up pretty good, your ability to meter your energy becomes way more refined. Even though you don't have as much explosive energy as you had when you were young, messy energy as I call it,  it's reliable and consistent.

Being a bass player, both my instruments are raised for high action and hard to play. I like that. I like the resistance. It means you’ve got to be in top shape all the time or you run out of energy. I've learned to stay below the red line. In other words, don't play too hard or you'll run out of steam. Nudging that line below playing too hard, which means you’re kicking it pretty hard, but you're not wearing yourself out. So that's  how I get through nine sets in a day.

Where did you grow up in Australia, and what was being a kid like?

I grew up in Sydney, Australia, Irish Catholic. I started playing music pretty late compared to most everyone I knew. I think I was seventeen when I first started playing music and everyone I knew had started when they were eleven or thirteen or something like that. So, I was kind of behind the ball, but I made up ground fast and think I turned pro in about a year and a half. As a matter of fact, the third of June of this year is my fiftieth anniversary since I've become a professional musician.

Let’s go back before that. What was the young kid running around the neighbourhood up to?

I lived in the city. Sydney is a big city. Have you ever been there? It's huge. It had a million people in 1948. I was a city boy educated by Irish nuns who grew up on farms. Whose approach to education was similar to their brother’s approach to breaking horses.

Did you get hand-slapped with a ruler?

I think I probably got hit every day from four years till sixteen years of age. I went through a conventional upbringing, and of course, in those days there was the beach. We were surfers. Nobody even thought about not being a surfer. I did own a surfboard.

Were you a smart kid in school?

I did well in school. But I always got into trouble a lot. I guess I was a smart mouth and they never liked that. There was a lot of music in my family, but it was all amateur. My mother was conservatory-trained but could only play with sheet music. My father knew nothing about music but would attempt everything, and he was a good singer.

There was an artist in the 50s’ who was huge in Australia named Winifred Atwell. Do you know who that is? That's very interesting you've never heard of Winifred. She was very big in Australia, and she was very big in England and came from Tunapuna in Trinidad and played boogie-woogie piano. And serious. I went and dug up some of her recordings lately. She was ‘intense’ fantastic. The only thing that my mother could play without sheet music was her rendition of a boogie-woogie by Winifred Atwell, and I loved that. I was five and I used to say, ‘play boogie-woogie’, and I would reach up and grab my mother’s right hand, so she couldn't use it. All I wanted was to hear the left hand and I was five. I think I was born into being a spy.

Did you ever get bit by anything lethal?

Nothing serious, but you know what, that's only luck. There's a spider called the ‘funnel web spider’ - and it's poisonous. The epicentre in Australia for the ‘funnel web spider’ is downtown Sydney. There are a couple of others; red backs that will bite through a leather shoe. There are also snakes.

I often wonder why all these things thrive in Australia. I mean there were other countries they could've picked.

I know. And as well as that, there's the weather. Right now, in Australia, there’s hurricanes and flooding. Australia is either flooding or burning. That's life. That's how it goes. It's no place for white people. It’s way too harsh.

A Conversation With.. Leah Daniels

 

We are around my desk monitor, and I’m pulling up a video of an old music friend and compatriot still in her twenties. The two of us are marvelling at the big talent on the screen, and there’s a three-way connection. Stacey Kay and Leah Daniels have been best friends since age eleven when the two competed in talent contests.

The look in Daniels' eyes is that of a young woman that’s inspired and in awe of her good friend. In many ways, their careers mirror one another. Both are fiercely independent, have a clear vision where they want to go with their careers, and are determined to get it right. Both work outside the walls of a major record label and connect directly with their audiences.

Kay rocked it on America’s Got Talent and Daniels took home the Canadian Radio Music Award as the FACTOR 2016 Breakthrough Artist of the Year, earned four CCMA nominations, and has a new recording set to arrive in May 2018. There’s also something else that binds the two. I keep in mind what Warner Canada Music Steve Kane CEO said to me a few years back after I posed this question about evaluating talent.

BK: Is there a checklist?

SK: Yes, there’s a mental checklist.  I’ve got to tell you at the top of this checklist – “Does this artist know who they are?” Do they have a sense of self? Do they have a sense of where they want their career to go?

The answer?  A resounding yes! Here’s that conversation.

Coming out of Sheridan College’s arts program how focused on country music were you back then?

Country was not on my mind at that time.

I guess in high school it was more about musicals and pop and rock music and after Sheridan I wanted to create my own music. I wanted to write. After Sheridan I went to Humber College for music because I wanted to do my own thing and they had a new program that was a degree program that focused on songwriting specifically. I was like, that sounds perfect. I completed first year but was anxious. I wanted to create music instead of being in school for another four years.

I got a bunch of books on the music industry and spoked to anyone I could about music and started a band with people that I met at Humber and started writing. At that point I was still kind of into pop music. I loved Maroon 5 and Alicia Keys and that sort of thing. Once I started writing more and performing, it was through songwriting I got into country music. I grew up with country music. I'm from Uxbridge, Ontario, a small town.

There’s country music all around your area. Festivals, etc.

My grandpa is a musician. He's traditional and into Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. He plays guitar, accordion and harmonica and he yodels. I feel like when I was a kid, country music was kind of like, not cool. My grandfather was doing it, and it was so old-fashioned or something.

I suspect you were following the music you heard on the radio. Country music is a specific listening experience.

It's funny how I’ve come full circle. It was because I started writing and a friend of mine said that  I wrote a song that sounded like it could be a country song and I was like, really, you think so? I seriously thought about it and realized this is where my heart is. That’s totally where I fit in. The storytelling thing is kind of back to my roots.

Did you take classes in songwriting?

Not really. I just started doing it. I’ve composed ever since I was little. I met up with some people in Toronto. Karen Kosowski was one of the first people I wrote with and my friend Sam Ellis. They're both now in Nashville and prominent writers and producers. I started writing with these people and learning from that, and suddenly I was thrown in these situations with more prominent songwriters, like when I met Dan Hill for the first time. I was like, oh, my goodness. This guy is a legend, but you just do it.

Did he help you put the songs together or did he just coach you through it?

It was kind of a collaborative thing you do together; you come up with some great ideas. That's the thing with songwriting. I get so nervous at songwriting sessions. You're so vulnerable, and you can't censor yourself because if you have an idea, you’ve got to say it because otherwise, the song can't grow. You must be able to put yourself out there even if the concept is awful. You’ve just gotta’ say it so you can move forward. It’s tricky getting out of your head and allowing yourself the freedom to say what’s needed to be said. Life and relationships. A lot of that can be opposite of the song.

What’s most comfortable for you to write about?

Relationships. A lot about that.

Can you allow yourself to be open up enough to say things that sometimes go unspoken?

Yes. I think that's one of the things that’s complicated. When you're writing with someone for the first time, it's hard to open up your diary to them. That's the challenge. I feel like I've gotten better with that over time. It’s just sharing that.

As a songwriter you want the songs to be personal, and for me as an artist singing, I want to have a piece of me in the songs and want the stories that we're telling to be something that I've experienced as much as I can. I mean, there's sometimes when you write a song it may be the other songwriter's experience, and I'm not in the room that day, but I try to put a piece of me in it too. That can be a challenge sometimes. I've just met this person, and I'm going to tell them about my life story? Here we go.

When you first went out as a country artist, how did that feel?

I had a band, so I guess I started writing and recording my first album at that point. I started doing shows all the time and entering competitions and all that stuff. But it's funny. When I was younger though, the first competition I ever did was a country competition. I was nine or something, and the CNE had a Canadian open country singing competition, and I remember doing that.

I was a fan of Shania Twain and LeAnn Rimes when I was growing up. When I was a kid, I didn't picture myself doing country music. I was thinking about being a pop star.

Country crossed over to pop long ago.

It has crossed way over. The lines are so blurred, yet it's an exciting time for country music. I think it's bigger now than it ever has been.

If you go back twenty-five or thirty years ago certain instruments were forbidden in country.

It's just opened right up, and now it seems like you can take any song, and if you add a little bit banjo, it's a country song, suddenly.

In your teens, were you open to the Dixie Chicks?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think about how strong and powerful they were in live performance and such excellent instrumentalists.

They've got some great songs, and yeah, the harmonies are amazing.

Have you toured across the country?

I've been out west but not down east yet.

Will that come with the new recording?

The single is called, ‘First’ and then the album title is to be determined and then the tour.

What label is this on?

I'm independent, and it’s an EP with seven songs.

Were you able to get funding to do this?

Yes, I've built this up and feel like I've got a great team around me. I've got management now and a great booking agent and publicist and everything. It’s kind of what I had to do. I mean, when I was younger I wanted to be with a label so bad. But now, I have built it up on my own, and I feel like, I'm almost so attached to everything and so much a part of the process and it would be hard to give it up.

You know you are following in the footsteps of Canadian icons Loreena McKennitt and Emilie-Claire Barlow – one’s Celtic/folk the other jazz. They both manage their own affairs. It's kind of the world we live in now.

I feel like that's the way it's going. It just makes sense, and I get excited about it now. I get excited at the fact that I get to choose who I get to work with and surround myself with people who inspire me and that are like minded and that's exciting. I would love to build that up and one day have my record label help other artists.

In 2016 you captured a CRMA award.

I was female artist of the year. I had a good year. And radio was good.

I had my single ‘Go Back’, and it was my first song ever to go top 20 at Canadian country radio which was huge and exciting. Because of that, I got a couple of different awards. I got the Canadian Radio Music Award for the 2016 FACTOR Breakthrough Artist of the Year as well, which was huge because that wasn't just for country artists, it was for all genres across Canada. That was pretty cool.

It's the Radio Awards, so yeah, everybody was there, it was pretty cool. That's probably the award I'm most proud of up to this point. Radio is tough.

A song must turn a certain way before it’s accepted for radio play. I would imagine country radio is much more receptive than pop radio. Once you’re in the good graces of country audiences, you're there to stay.

Yes, I agree. I agree they're faithful, but it's still a challenge. I've released quite a few songs to radio even before ‘Go Back’ and it's tough. You're going to these stations and trying to prove yourself and show them you are here to stay. This isn't just the flavour of the month, and I’m actually doing this as a career.

You need to duet with a Brett Kissel or Johnny Reid.

Johnny would be amazing, and he's someone I really look up to, especially the way he's built his career. He’s amazing.

He puts together the tour, the recordings and does the work. He also knows what he's up against. It’s tough out there especially if you believe the American market is the place to crack. He’s a solid Canadian touring artist.

He can sell out shows here, which I think is amazing.

Where did you record the new EP?

The single ‘First” was done in LA, and that was my first writing trip there. It was a unique situation. I was there for a week writing with Brian Howes and JVP (Jason Van Poederooyen), who is his writing partner /co-producer. I had a week with them, so we weren't rushed.

In Nashville, it seems like everything is, you have three hours, write a song, and that's it. Bye, I’ll see you, and you might not see them ever again. Which I'm not a huge fan of. It's just too stressful. I feel like we need time to get into it and to come back to it and have that ability to come together the next day and be like, OK, what do we think, what do we need to change to make this better? That's what was really cool about writing this song. We came up with a melody and chords, and they said, you figure out the lyrics. Go home tonight and spend some time and I was like, oh, OK. It was like I better come up with something good by tomorrow.

I was able to dive into it on my own and not feel the pressure of the session and then come in the next day. We looked at these lyrics I came up with and then worked on that and then did it all again.

Recording in Hollywood is relaxing.

I loved it. Where we were, it's like the windows were all open. I could see the palm trees, So laid back.

How did you fall into this situation? Was this through management?

Jordyn Elliot (HJ MGMT) is my management, and she's a local girl from the Toronto area. She connected me with Brian, and I'm glad she did. It was a really neat experience.

What’s coming up for you?

We’ve got the album coming out, and right now we're kind of in planning mode for everything and getting ready for that. Final tweaks and I'm excited to do shows. That’s my favourite part. The album will be out the end of May.

You’ve played Boots and Hearts festival?

Boots and Hearts was awesome also because it's close to my hometown. It’s this big festival within an hour from Uxbridge. It was really cool because I saw all these familiar faces.

Is your hometown behind you?

I love my town. I would not be doing what I'm doing without them and all the opportunities that I had growing up there. Uxbridge is really rich in the arts. There are musicals all the time, and there are choirs you can join and open mics everywhere. So many wonderful volunteers that make it all happen. I'm very fortunate.

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!