The Monday Morning Mailbag: Another CMW has come and gone and it will take a week to recover from the hours, the food and drink, and the traipsing from venue to venue through 30 mile an hour winds and rain.

Totally worth it.

Hats off to Neill Dixon, Greg Simpson, Joanne Smale and the hundreds of hard working staffers that make this weekend one of the best of all the music and media get togethers in this, or any other country. I can’t think of another event where the panels are so stimulating and well attended, the music so diverse and of worth, and the dialogue between those in attendance so positive and energizing, sometimes fueling change for the better in an industry that has to make changes in order to survive. I must urge you to try your best to be there next year, but in the meantime, there are some comments below that address the weekend, and here are some personal highlights from me…

The Monday Morning Mailbag for February 22^nd 2010

There is a pantload of mail this week, so I’m not going to go on and on about some obscure little personal obsession like I normally do before we get to it. I do want to mention how much I enjoy these Monday morning beer runs with all of you, and am constantly amazed at the information that continues to pour out of your emails and onto my desktop. The power, the love of music is an insanely wonderful thing, and the fact that so many people share collective memories of the people, places and things we talk about here is a celebration of that power and that love. To quote the estimable and totally whacked out Sly Stone, We Are Family…and that is a great comfort these days. Let us Rock On, my friends…

The Weekend Roundup:

Happy belated birthday to Don’t believe a word I say

Happy belated birthday to Don’t believe a word I say

Happy belated birthday dear Don’t believe a word I say-ay  Happy belated birthday toooo me

I happened to look at an old calendar today and noticed that my first blog/column here at FYIMusic was posted on February 9^th, 2009. It doesn’t seem like it’s been a year, but there ya go.  To celebrate, I thought it might be fun to dig the first, puny, DBAWIS out of the archives and see where we were back then. My comments will be italicized….

The Monday Morning Mailbag for February 8th 2010

Usually when I leave the house, it is either work related or going to the Grace Meat Market, Golden Wheat Bakery, or the Metro. We live in a neighbourhood where pretty much everything we need is within a 2 block radius, so we count ourselves lucky with the convenience of our location. I did get out to see Chris Hart at the Horseshoe last week, and Pie gets out to see various members of her family every week, but it’s been a while since the two of us went out together, and longer still since we had an actual date.

The Pie and I rarely get to go out on ‘date nights’ these days, but things have been starting to look up for us and Saturday, we decided to go out and celebrate. We figured we’d have an inexpensive dinner and then see if we couldn’t find some good music and have a beer or two afterward. After all, this is Toronto…how hard could it be to tuck into a reasonably priced meal and find some great music?

As it turns out, not hard at all…

The Weekend Roundup for Friday February 5^th

Random Thoughts, Questions, and Musings of Great Importance:

Would a song sung simultaneously by Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Lady Ga Ga and Bjork cause a rift in the Space Time Continuum?

Yesterday, I left a half-smoked cigarette on the window sill of a Convenience Store. Today, it was still there. Are there no homeless people out of smokes anymore?

The Rock Files: When Radio and Records Ruled the World

Part 5 – Do the Mashed Watusi Jerk Swim Twist, and The Great Folk Scare of 1962.

You can find Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 using the links.

It’s 1959. While Elvis afforded photo ops for military big shots in Germany, peeled his share of potatoes, and started to fall in love with a 14 year old girl, radio was being overrun by Bobbies, Jimmies, Johnnies, and an occasional Annette, Shelly, or Donna. Rock and Roll had been usurped by savvy record company and radio visionaries who understood that this music was at the core of a new cultural explosion that had captured the hearts, souls, and wallets of every person on the planet under the age of 25.

What had begun mid-decade as a feral, undeniably hormone driven phenomenon, was being watered down and cutesified to reach more people, and lessen its threat to civilization. It would take an R&B singer in his early 30’s who had been influenced by country and western star Gene Autry, to add something new to the mix and drag the rest of society into rock and roll’s inviting maw…

The Monday Morning Mailbag for January 11^th 2010

We open another mailbag full of your comments and anecdotes and I can’t thank you enough for your correspondence. It is always a pleasure to see how many of us had similar experiences regardless of where we grew up or where we live now. Keep ‘em coming!

And how about hearing more from you industry types? The stories of your early days and why you pursued a career in entertainment would be of interest to all who read this blog, and so would your take on what’s going on today. Hearing the reality of what is going on out there from those on the front lines cannot be beat. So take some time if something you see here strikes a chord. We know you’re all busy riding around in limousines drinking mimosas and chatting with supermodels and Bono, but it would really be appreciated if you could take a little time out from lighting your Monte Christo cigars with hundred dollar bills and dictate a missive to us once in a while. Seriously…we’d really love to hear from more of you. Really.

The Rock Files: When Radio and Records Ruled the World

One night when I was 2 years old, one set of my grandparents, (Grandma Kay and Grandpa Bobo) babysat me while my parents went out to dinner and dancing at the Moose Lodge. I know this because years later, my mother told me how it came to be that I always went to sleep listening to the radio.

It was an old blue green Emerson table model radio with a handle on the top. My Grandfather, Al “Bobo” Walters, plugged it in next to me one night in a frustrated, last ditch effort to get me to shut up and go to sleep.

Bobo was a character. He worked construction when he was younger, helping to build, among other things, the Stockton Memorial Civic Auditorium, and when he got older, became the late shift manager of the Stockton Waste Disposal and Water Treatment Plant, occasionally fishing wallets, car keys, and jewelry out of the soup to present to my Grandma Kay, who graciously accepted his offerings with her nose turned slightly upward and a resigned look on her face.

The Rock Files for December 30^th 2009

The Rock Files: The Wack and Roll Circus Hits the Road – Epilogue

Montreal. Finally. After a week of intense ups and downs, both emotional and physical, we had reached our goal. The weather, however, continued to be the worst on record. The snow in Montreal was unbelievable. I thought we had seen some pretty big drifts and sloppy roads on our trip here, but it turned out to be nothing compared to downtown Montreal. You couldn’t tell where the sidewalks stopped and the streets started. There were people on skis going down some of the downtown streets, and I saw a cop on a ski-doo. There was a reason for that…Montreal’s snow removal crews had just gone on strike…and they remained on strike for almost the entire duration of our stay.