Category Archives: Radio

Stories of a Life | My Days in Radio in the Late 1960s

September 26, 2020Radio, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the 1960s, radio announcers — or “boss jocks”, if you will — were celebrities, afforded the same degree of adoration by young people rock ‘n roll bands were accustomed to, their deep, resonant male voices (because, alas, radio was exclusively a male domain) you heard through your transistor or car radio speakers transporting you to another time and place.

RadioWest dot ca [www.RadioWest.ca] · J.B. Shayne CKLG Vancouver April 11, 1968

vanramblings · CKLG Radio Jingles, 1960s

The late 1960s was when a motley group of young guys took over the radio airwaves in Vancouver, when radio really meant something: lanky John Tanner arriving from Penticton, Daryl B from Winnipeg, Terry David Mulligan from North Vancouver via Red Deer and Regina, the ‘real’ Roy Hennessey, Rick Honey travelling cross-country after working a radio gig in Halifax, the preternaturally young and talented Fred Latremouille, East End boy wonder Don Richards, ex-Edmonton Eskimos football player Jim Hault, and radio screamer, CKLG’s ‘let me on the radio’, 16-year-old ‘little’ Stevie Wonder.

And, of course, the incredibly talented Johann Bruno (JB) Shayne aka Chuck Steak, Lucy Morals Loving Housewife Mother of Five, Captain Midnight, resident gardener Herb Folley, and Uncle Ned Out In the Shed Milking The Cow Right About Now, among a dozen other radio characters who were fixtures on Vancouver’s morning & afternoon drive programmes.

These were the halcyon days of Vancouver radio, never to be heard again.

And lucky me, I got to be a part of it from 1966 until 1970, rarely on the air, although I did have a regular Sunday morning gig on LG-FM playing classical music (ordered by the CRTC that the station play classical music 6 a.m. til noon, Sundays) — which was going to be the focus of today’s post, but I thought I’d get into too much trouble telling the story I’d intended.

Even so, I’ll leave you with this one ‘fit for print’ story about my days at LG-FM. Ordinarily, when sitting in the cavernous LG-FM studio (separated from the AM side of the operation by the production studio), there was a small lamp that lit up the console, casting shadow on the rest of the room.

One Sunday morning I arrived for work only to discover that one of the jocks on the FM side who’d been “promoted” to the AM side — although the jocks loved LG-FM, station management could have cared less, as FM wasn’t a revenue generator, barely an afterthought for Conservative party honcho, General Manager Don Hamilton — had taken the lamp home with him, leaving the FM studio well lit by blindingly bright fluorescent lights.

There was no way I was going to work 6 hours under those conditions.

So, following a spin of the Moody’s Blues’ Nights of White Satin — which I considered to be classical music, and anyway, what were the chances management was listening that early on a Sunday morning, although a woman did phone in to lodge a complaint to management — I opened the microphone, gave listeners the studio telephone number, telling them that I’d take the first person to deliver a desk lamp on a tour of the station. Two minutes later I got a call, and fifteen minutes later a group of hippies, a couple of guys and a girl, pressed the front buzzer, and in one of the guy’s hands was a perfectly gorgeous little, near historical Edwardian lamp.

Walking with the three towards the FM studio, I placed the lamp on the console panel counter, put on Circus Maximus’ Wind (I’ve never been good at following directions), and proceeded to take the three on a tour of the station, from Roy Hennessy’s music room, to the newsroom, into the AM studio where my friend (and best man at my wedding), the late Bren Traff was spinning discs, and then to the basement where all the jocks got together to get stoned (another story I can’t tell — well, maybe one part of it one day, involving Carol-Ann ‘Angel‘ Mulligan — who I was head over heels in love with at the time), and then back towards the entrance to the building, showing them the front offices of 1006 Richards Street, bid them adieu, and made it back to the studio just in time to put on the next record.

I pulled the chain on the lamp to turn it on, and then proceeded to turn off the overhead fluorescents. Seated back in my chair in front of the console, the room now properly lit, I noticed the lamp had dark blotches on the inside of the shade. Curious as to what those “blotches” were, I reached under the lamp and came across a very small bag that had been taped to the inside of the lamp shade. Removing the little baggie and placing it on the counter in front of me, I saw that it was a small bag of marijuana.

Hmmm, I thought to myself, as I reached under the lamp shade, and removed another baggie, this one filled with small pieces of hash. Lifting out another baggie and placing it on the counter, I saw that it contained several tabs of LSD. Eight bags in total, filled with marijuana, hashish, LSD, cocaine, and psychedelics, ranging from mescaline and magic mushrooms to LSD & peyote, a veritable pharmacological array of common 60s drugs.

And, no, I didn’t do any of those drugs during the course of my six-hour shift — although many jocks did their entire shifts high on one psychedelic or another. There’s a routinization to radio: you open the microphone, and the patter begins, the practiced way of presenting yourself on the airways, such a part of you that no matter how stoned you are, how much the room seems to be floating around you, once that microphone opens, you end up doing what you do best, the experience of the drugs serving to enhance your wit, your humour, your on air insight and your warm welcoming patter.

For years — until Cathy came along and said, “There’s no way you’re going to stay in radio hanging out with those guys. You’re going to university and that’s all there is to it” — radio played a pivotal role in my maturation, surrounded by great people, unbelievably bright and gregarious guys like Bill Reiter and Terry David Mulligan … both among the most generous, sane, and talented men I have ever met, who had my back always, as was the case with Jim Hault and Daryl B, and Douglas Miller, too — although I am sorry to report that I was not near as generous to Doug in our days at SFU, and earlier in our days in radio, as he was to me in the ten years we were close … it took me a long time to mature, and an even longer time to develop kindness and compassion as a way of bringing myself to the world.

Music Sundays | Billie Eilish | The Beatles for a New Generation

September 13, 2020Music, Pop Culture, Radio, Web & TechRaymond Tomlin

On March 29th of last year, 17-year-old Billie Eilish entered the public consciousness, and the Billboard charts, with her self-produced début album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the 2nd-biggest album of 2019, and the third-largest streaming week for an album by a woman, with six Billboard Hot 100 top 40 songs: When the Party’s Over, Bury a Friend, Wish You Were Gay, Xanny and Bad Guy, the last of which became her first number one single stateside, in the U.K., Mexico, and Australia.
The rest, as they say, is utterly unique, groundbreaking rock ‘n roll history.
Billie Eilish’s accolades include 5 Grammy Awards, 2 American Music Awards, 2 Guinness World Records, 3 MTV Video Music Awards, and one Brit Award. Eilish is the youngest person and second person ever to win the four main Grammy categories — Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year — in the same year. No mean feat that.
The daughter of teacher, actress, and screenwriter Maggie Baird, and construction worker and part-time actor, Billie Eilish and her older brother / producer and co-songwriter, Finneas O’Connell hail from decidedly working class roots. Both parents encouraged the siblings — who were homeschooled — to express themselves and explore whatever they wanted, including music, art, dancing and acting.

In October 2015, at age fourteen, Billie recorded the song Ocean Eyes, co-written and produced with Finneas, after his sister’s dance teacher asked them to record a song for a dance routine. In 2015, releasing the song on SoundCloud, and the next year on YouTube (at present, Ocean Eyes has 293,733,254 views), coinciding with a deal Finneas had made to sign Billie with Apple Music, Billie’s budding music career began to kick into high gear.

In March 2017, Billie recorded songs for the soundtrack to the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why — one song, Lovely, recorded with Khalid, was certified platinum in North America — and that same month, Billie was showcased at the South by Southwest music festival. In February 2018, Billie, Finneas and their parents embarked on the Where’s My Mind World Tour, where they débuted the songs constituting the tracks on Billie’s first album. By January 2019, Billie reached an unprecedented one billion Spotify streams.

Billie kicked off her When We All Fall Asleep World Tour at the Coachella Festival in Indio, California in April 2019, travelling across the U.S. and Canada, and then the globe, before returning to the Americas and concluding her world tour on November 17, 2019 in Mexico City.

Why does VanRamblings write in the headline that Billie Eilish (and her brother Finneas) constitute the new Beatles? Watch the videos directly above, and feel the emotional reactions of Billie’s fans, how those in attendance know the lyrics to the songs, and are clearly moved. In more than 50 years writing about music, aside from the reaction to the Beatles that could be observed in the mid-1960s, no other artist or group has come along with stronger album sales, and a larger, more devoted fan base. Although radio doesn’t quite know what to do with her, Billie Eilish is making her own career, and together with Finneas, making decisions about her career. And, fortunate for all of us, in the summer and fall of 2020, that means Billie’s full-throated support for the Democratic Party in the United States, and the candidacy of Joe Biden, no matter the impact on her career. Woebetide the right-wing, Trump-supporting political candidates and QAnon-supporting conspiracy theorist journalists who take Billie Eilish on.

And, finally for today, we’ll leave you with a bit of human-scale Finneas and Billie, and all the painstaking work the two of them put into recording the first track for the When We All Fall Asleep album release. When you watch the video below, you’ll also come to realize that Billie and Finneas are, very much, the 21st century John Lennon and Paul McCartney for our new age.

The Music of One’s Life | Rhianna, and the ReMixes

December 16, 2018A & E, Diversions, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Pop Culture, Radio, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

My musical tastes run the gamut: progressive and old-timey country, folk, Americana, lounge, progressive dance, klezmer, world beat, Celtic folk, Japanese pop, trip-hop, orchestral, urban pop, hip hop soul, rhythm and blues, acoustic, dirty bass south, avant-garde, europop, gospel, house music, dream pop, trance, ambient and downtempo, acid jazz, rock ballads, post-Britpop — and with all that, I’m only scratching the surface of the types, styles and genres of music I love which constitute the soundtrack of my life, the various genres of music which you’ll come to hear through this screen in the days, weeks, months and years to come.
Where I am a listener and an appreciator of music, with some background in piano and guitar — long forgotten, alas — my son Jude, a recording engineer and D.J. creates his own complex, layered, multi-dimensional music, electronica for wont of a better word. Jude records under the name Dj Nameless, as has been the case for well more than a decade now.

I love well-produced, textured music, and remixes, of which you’ll be hearing a great deal more in the time to come. Today, a remix by New York-based D.J. Branchez of Rihanna’s 2012 chart topper, Stay. When this song pops up on my iTunes playlist, through my bluetooth headphones, when I’m heading downtown to a movie, the bus crowded, rain pelting down on the bus, the wetness of the day permeating not just the clothing but the very souls of the people around me, the Branchez bootleg remix of Stay simply raises my mood — see if it does the same thing for you.

Stories of a Life | CFUN & CKLG | The Hits Just Keep on Comin’

November 17, 2018A & E, Radio, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the autumn of 1966, C-FUN — long the A.M. rock’n roll radio giant of Vancouver — put out a call to listeners requesting applications to take on the task of organizing fan clubs for rock groups getting airplay on the radio. All you had to do was turn up one Saturday morning at 10am, meet with C-FUN’s Program Director Red Robinson — who would assign you a group to organize a fan club for, and once the fan club had been established, you’d turn up on subsequent Saturdays for an hour to secure memberships.

With Douglas Miller, recently arrived from Kelowna, working the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift, I arrived each Saturday morning just before 11 a.m. to take phone calls in the studio next to the main control room. Doug Miller would give out the phone number, Doug Pearson — a friend of mine — and I would take calls for an hour, and after each call-in session, we’d take a break for an hour, before heading out to a local venue — more often than not a local department store — to listen to the group play a few songs, and sign up new fan club members. The group I was assigned to: The Chessmen, consisting of Terry Jacks, Susan Pesklevits, and Craig McCaw.

I know, and am friends with, Craig McCaw, to this very day.

A couple of weeks into this volunteer gig, after the call-in session, Red Robinson called me into his office and said, “You’re a good lookin’ kid. I bet you’d do well in radio.” I remember thinking to myself, “But this is radio — listeners can’t see you.” Nonetheless, each Saturday from noon til 12:30pm, Red Robinson proceeded to teach me everything he knew about radio, most particularly how to read copy for a commercial.

In addition, he signed me up for voice lessons with a woman voice coach who lived in the West End, who had trained every voice on radio in Vancouver. Within a year, I sounded like a radio announcer. I had also, much to my surprise, developed a deep bass, mellifluous voice. I’d play back tapes of me on the radio, and say to myself, “Who is that guy?”

Weekend, midday, radio aircheck of Daryl B. (Burlingham) on 14 C-FUN

During that period I became friends with John Tanner, Fred Latremouille, Al Jordan, Tom Peacock, Neil Soper, Daryl B., and Roff Johannsen, among other radio luminaries. Although I worked the occasional relief overnight weekend shift, my main job was to produce the six hours of foreground programming each Sunday evening, that was required by the CRTC. All of this work was done for free — but I was given ready access to the radio station, could “practice” being a radio announcer in the production studio, attend concerts at no charge, meet all of the traveling rock ‘n roll groups that stopped off in Vancouver as part of a North American tour of gigs to support the group’s latest hit release. All and all, I had a blast.

The Boss Radio, ‘Drake format’, upbeat radio package exported out of Los Angeles

But radio was changing in 1966, particularly when classical music Lion’s Gate radio, CKLG Vancouver, adopted the hit Drake format that had catapulted KHJ Los Angeles from a last place radio station in the market to #1 in a matter of months: CKLG adopted the Drake format, the jingles, the 17-song-an-hour ‘hot clock’, talking over the intro, upbeat radio format, by early 1967 stealing away C-FUN’s listenership, and catapulting CKLG to #2 in the Vancouver radio market, just behind powerhouse Top Dog radio, CKNW 98. One announcer after another left C-FUN for CKLG.

In early 1967, in a last ditch effort to save C-FUN (which to that point had refused to play The Rolling Stones, and any Motown music — which CKLG just thrived on) — Red Robinson hired a deejay out of Regina by the name of Terry David Mulligan, giving him the 7pm to midnight show. I sat with Terry, and his wife, CarolAnn (who everyone called Angel, and with whom I fell head over heels in love) in the studio on his first night on 1410 C-FUN. But it was too late. Within three months, Terry moved over to do noon to three on CKLG, CFUN folding to become CKVN, The Voice of News.

Soon enough, I was over at CKLG, as well — working on the FM side (CKLG-FM), six to noon Sundays on both CKLG-FM & A.M., as well as operating throughout the week in the evenings, for Bill Reiter and his Groovin’ Blue program 6pm to 8pm, as well as operating for Tim Burge. Occasionally — because absolutely no one listened to FM in those days, CKLG-FM Program Director John Runge would give me a midday shift, requiring me to skip school — my voice all hushed baritone, playing whole album sides during any given shift. I was in radio heaven — working daily with radio legends Roy Hennessey, Daryl B., J.B. Shayne, Stevie Wonder, Michael Morgan, Don Richards, John Tanner, Bob Ness, Rick Honey, Stirling Faux, Terry David Mulligan, and a raft of others. I had found my family.

Aircheck, J.B. Shayne, overnight, 1am til 2am on 73 CKLG Vancouver, April 11, 1968

Working in radio, going to concerts, being on air, hosting various public events for CKLG, hanging out with J.B., Fred, John, Terry, Rick, Stirling, Jim Hault, Daryl B., John Runge, Bill Reiter and more was the gift of a lifetime, a gift I will cherish forever, a gift which keeps me young to this day.

There are a great many stories to tell, all of which I’ll leave for another day.