The Rock Files: Happy Birthday Much Music…You deserve a party Part 2

99 Queen St. East – It Was (Always) All About the Music

You want me to do what? When I asked John what a television producer did I expected an answer. You know, words strung together in such a fashion as to deliver pertinent information explaining what it was a person had to do that would result in television being produced in a timely and acceptable manner. “You’ll find out”, was not an acceptable answer.

I said, “Seriously, what does a television producer do.”

John let out a cloud of cigarette smoke, leaned across the table and, looking a lot like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, said, “Seriously, you’ll find out” and leaned back into his chair, his grin now so large I didn’t think his face could contain it. If you’ve ever sat with John, you will remember that smile, a cross between Prince Charles, Mr. Ed, and a white picket fence.

He then told me his plans. His eyes lit up as he spoke, arms flailing about in the air, cigarette ash flying and beer spilling from the Blue he was waving around. He was excited. Laughing as he talked, clearly, passionately, unable to contain himself. His enthusiasm was infectious, and within minutes, I was as exited as he was.

John could do that to you. He was a force of nature.

I had to choose between staying at Q107, or stumbling blindly into the unknown. I asked Gary, (Slaight), if I could stay on at Q doing a different shift, and work at John’s music station during the day, and he said no.

In the end, the attraction of the unknown, and the opportunity to once again be at ground zero was too appealing to pass up.

For the third time in my life, I was going to let the seat of my pants do the flying.

A little history lesson…

Much Music wasn’t always at 299 Queen Street West. It had its beginnings way down the street on the ‘wrong’ side of town. If you stood on the sidewalk out in front of 99 Queen Street East and threw a rock towards the rising sun, you could hit a hooker on the Jarvis Track. Or a drunk. Or a bum. We didn’t have sex workers, alcoholics, or homeless people yet, we just had hookers, drunks, and bums.

The seeds of what was to become Much Music started in this little 4 story building, first with the advent of John Martin’s The New Music in 1979, which was the absolutely first newsmagazine styled show that focused on contemporary music in North America, exposing local Toronto artists to a television audience across the country as well as major, (and not so major), touring bands from Canada and all over the world, and introduced a popular radio personality to TV viewers, J.D Roberts, seen here in 1981, a full two months before MTV launched, with a nice piece on Iron Maiden, and, a few years later, with a wonderful no-holds-barred experiment that ran on Friday and Saturday nights from midnight to 6 in the morning. It was called City Limits, and was hosted by one Christopher Ward. How wild and different was it? Here’s Chris with an incredibly young Bon Jovi doing a bit in what would become Much Music’s space at 99 Queen.

Have a look!

So now you have the introspective reportage and informative interview style of The New Music, and the humour and edginess of City Limits, and two very likable personalities with totally different approaches. That, combined with Warren Cosford and CHUM’s music savvy and early acceptance of music videos, and Moses Znaimer’s intuitive and incredible knack of pushing the envelope and trusting people’s passion and vision, would come together in a heretofore unimaginable stew.

It was just a matter of time.

One room…that’s all?

A month or two before we went to air, John started to assemble his family in our new home. The first time I walked into the space, it was full of people painting walls, laying cable, moving furniture, and bumping into one another.

“Where’s the rest of the studios and offices”, I asked.

“This is it”, said John, cigarette dangling from the picket fence and a box of video tapes in his hands.

“This is it?” I looked around.

Much Music was a single room that would eventually contain about 20 desks, a little glass walled audio control room, 2 big old school television cameras on dollies, a couple of editing bays, and, at the far end of the room, the entire brain of the whole operation. The VCR’s, tape ops, director, G5 effects operator, a wall of monitors, and various other wizards and electronics would sit at what looked like the lunch counter at Woolworths and somehow translate the mayhem that went on in this room into television entertainment for the whole of Canada.

It did not seem possible. A bunch of 20-somethings and a handful of 30-somethings being allowed to create a television network based on music and pop culture.

What on earth was Moses smoking?

There were three of us designated as producers. Michael Haydon, Anne Howard, and me. We worked like firemen. 4 days on, 3 days off, 2 of the days you wrote shows, created the playlists, and chatted with whoever was VJ’ing those days, and the other 2 days, you were on the floor, wearing a headset and giving the 3, 2, 1, visual signals to your VJ so he knew when to talk. We had two camera men, and two directors,

Dennis Saunders and Jim Shutsa, a finer pair of professional yet fun loving guys you would be hard pressed to duplicate. Michael handled Chris Ward’s segments almost all of the time, and became the leader of the Booze Mothers, Much’s house band, who eventually got their own TV special.

Michael and Anne knew what they were doing at all times. I, on the other hand, was very much like Homer Simpson, wondering when I was going to accidentally blow the place up.

We usually started around 10 in the morning. At noon, we would go live and shoot 6 hours of the live broadcast, which would then be repeated an additional 3 times until noon the next day, when we would do it all over again. A lot of work, but even though it was exhausting to do, people would stay after 6, and sometimes work until 6 the next morning, doing bits and drop ins, experimenting, and creating.

No one seemed to mind.

There were no memos telling us not to do that. There were no rules at all. It was heaven…and led to stuff like this.

Joining J.D and Chris were Michael Williams, a Cleveland native that was knee deep in soul music and had a voice like Barry White’s, and Catherine McClenahan, a drop dead beautiful woman who was great at everything she did. She didn’t stay long, for whatever reason, and she ended up marrying the guy that played Dauber on Coach. Catherine was Much’s first female presenter. Erica Ehm was the receptionist who moved up later on, and no, she is not Moses’ Goddaughter or niece or anything. Jeanne Beker was on board doing Rock News and interview pieces. Marv was our sound man, and among the other hard working kids, Simon and Tony, a tape op, would eventually become hosts, Simon Evans and Master T.

Jamaican Patties, coffee, and Zen Chili…

10:00 am was like 5:00 am to me. I would get coffee at this little stand at the corner of Church and Queen. I would also get a couple of meat patties to eat until lunch.

They were hotter that hell. It got to the point when you could always find me in the can around 11:00, cursing Jamaica.

We had a deal with a place called The Groaning Board that provided all of us with lunch every day. The only problem was it was healthy food. The Chili was vegetable unless you begged for meat. There were more grains in the bread than sand on a beach. Once, I asked for a ham sandwich on white bread with mayo, iceberg lettuce, and dill pickles. I got a dry slab of pork on pumpernickel with romaine lettuce, miracle whip, and cucumbers.

Eventually most of us brought lunch or sent somebody to Mickey D’s or KFC.

Because of the crowded conditions some pretty funny shit happened once in a while. One of the women that worked there had to flip through the pages of the new Billboard to get some info, which was on my desk, at the same time that Michael Williams was doing a throw to a video. He was standing at Chris’s desk which was buttressed up against mine. Unable to stop her, (we were live), she barrelled into the shot, and bent over my desk in front of Michael, and began flipping through the Billboard, which was below frame and not visible on camera, her head bobbing up and down with each turn of the page. As everyone in the room saw what was happening on the monitors it was all we could do not to break into gales of laughter. When the shot was done, we all lost it, the woman in question asked what was so funny, and somebody told her.

A lot of us almost got fired that day.

Chris keeping a straight face during an interview while the lead singer of Frankie Goes To Hollywood tried to pick him up.

Julian Lennon’s manager smoking my entire pack of Camel Lights in about an hour, and not even saying thanks.

Going to Fillmore’s, a strip joint, to meet a friend of mine and having J.D along with me for an after work drink. We weren’t at the bar for more than three minutes when every girl that wasn’t wrapped around a pole gravitated to John and started presenting themselves. J.D, always a gentleman and professional to a fault, made it out alive without hurting anybody’s feelings, and with all his clothes still zipped and buttoned.

Little Richard being Little Richard.

Drinking and having wings at Hart’s all the time with most of the staff. We were a jolly bunch.

Filling in on camera occasionally, Tina Hart decided one afternoon that I needed some makeup and a hair style. I went on camera one layer of rouge short of looking like I should be working at Ringling Brothers. Very funny, Tina…

Moses popping in occasionally and inspecting the troops. It was like Mr. Burns checking to see if the place was on fire yet.

Chasing Mike Williams down the hall when he would go into the vault and come out with 25 videos, all by black artists. I would have to explain to him that we weren’t Soul Train.

Dinner and drinks at Emilio’s, which was right next door to us. John would hold court, sometimes with Moses, and we would all exchange ideas, stories, and suggestions while having a great meal and a few pints.

There wasn’t one person there that wasn’t into the music. Everyone would make suggestions. When we had our weekly music meetings and looked at the new releases, there was plenty of chatter about what to play and how often to play it. The result was a mix of everything from James Brown to Flock of Seagulls to Rush, Liona Boyd, Earth Wind and Fire, and everything in between.

If you were in the building, working as an intern, or getting coffee, or anything, you had an opportunity to be on-air, and some rose to the occasion and still have careers to this day.

Where MTV was scripted, stationary, and fairly ‘whitebread’, we were shooting throws all over the building, out on the fire escape, the roof, and even the john. Like CITY-TV…we were Everywhere!

Christopher brought people like Mike Myers into the mix, with sketches and set ups that existed nowhere else on television at the time. And it was always…always, about the music.

Later, of course, people like Steve Anthony and Erica Ehm would continue the traditions started by our little band of musos, and now, 25 years later, Much is still on the air.

Its beginnings, its foundation, deserves a party. A big party.

No, it is not what it used to be, but it wouldn’t ‘be’ at all without those first few years of experimenting and joy, and the legacy of Much Music deserves more than one press release, and a couple of interviews on its new, affiliate network.

From Greg Quill’s article in the Toronto Star, Brad Schwartz, the current Lord of the Realm at Much had this to say.

“We will be doing absolutely nothing for the 25th anniversary. Our core audience (the millennial demographic, with a skew to 18-year-olds) doesn’t care that we’re 25. It’s not news to them, only to the press and people who are no longer our audience.”

Of course your ‘core’ audience doesn’t care. How could they? They know nothing of the station’s roots.

I spoke to roughly a hundred people between the ages of 19 and 24 over the weekend about Much Music. Here’s what I learned.

None of them watch it now, although almost all of them did between the ages of 11 and 16.

The majority of them listen to Q107 and The Edge when they listen to the radio, which is not very often.

The music and videos they like are almost all local bands, or touring Canadian bands, or Classic Rock videos.

They also said that Much Music is just like MTV, and couldn’t site a difference between the two.

That breaks my heart.

It also breaks my heart that everyone who did grow up watching Much and do remember what it was like, are very disappointed to see it ignored when it should be celebrated. Think of the millions of people across Canada that would have tuned in to see a celebration of their youth.

Much music wasn’t just the videos they showed. It was the personalities on screen. It was the honesty and good humour. It was the love of the music that was infectious, and entertaining. Add to that the nostalgia for those days and the great music that was being played, and you’ve got a HUGE audience for that celebration that Much’s core audience, who Mr. Schwartz declares, “doesn’t care that we’re 25”, probably would have loved…and so would their older brothers and sisters, and their parents.

The ironic thing is the fact that Much has a pay cable station called Much More Retro. I had no idea this service existed. If it was on regular cable and featured actual clips of the VJ’s and sketches, etc, from the first few years, instead of just the music videos, if it ran The New Music from 1979 until the mid ‘90’s, if it showed all the great Big Ticket, Simulcasts, and In House Performances, if it showed old, and made new Pop Up Videos for old clips, If they did a Retro Video on Trial, I’m willing to bet it would be very popular.

Did Much keep all that wonderful stuff…or has it been replaced, or lost, or recorded over?

Just curious.

At any rate, I think Much has underestimated the interest of their ‘core’ audience. I believe that if these kids are into music, they would have been fascinated by what it was like back then. I think they would have loved being part of a quarter century of pop culture; after all, kids want to belong to something that is special. And Much Music was special.

I guess you had to be there…and millions of us were.

So some time this week, I’m going to tip a few to the old gal, maybe get together with Dennis and Steve, or just some of my friends who used to watch Much, and do that thing you do when you hear music from your youth and see old familiar faces. Remember the good times, the laughs, and all the great memories, and if Much Music was part of your life back then, I suggest you do the same. It’s 25 years later, and Much’s core audience from 1984 still cares very much. Something that was so profound to so many of us deserves a party and some recognition on its birthday.

I just hope the kids watching it now, and the young people working there now don’t have someone tell them in 25 years that the 50^th Birthday won’t be celebrated because their “core audience doesn’t care”.

Happy Honkin’ Birthday Much…and God Bless you, John Martin. You created a wonderful thing.

The Rock Files: The Segarini Band continues on Friday.

That’s enough for now. Email me at segarini@fyimusic.ca with your comments, complaints, and thoughts…and remember…don’t believe a word I say.

Bob “The Iceman” Segarini was in the bands The Family Tree, Roxy, The Wackers, The Dudes, and The Segarini Band and nominated for a Juno for production in 1978. He also hosted “Late Great Movies” on CITY TV, was a producer of Much Music, and an on-air personality on CHUM FM, Q107, SIRIUS Sat/Rad’s Iceberg 95, (now 85), and now provides content for radiothatdoesntsuck.com with RadioZombie, The Iceage, and PsychShack. Along with the love of his life, Jade (Pie) Dunlop, (who hosts and writes “I’ve Heard That Song Before” on RTDS), continues to write, make music, and record.