Category Archives: VanRamblings

Arts Friday (well, sort of) | Radio Ratings | Whither Thou Goest

June 8, 2018A & E, Pop Culture, Radio, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Vancouver Radio Ratings, February 26th to May 27th 2018 One in six people are listening to CBC Radio One in Vancouver at any given time

As I have written previously, in 1957 I received a transistor radio on August 11th, the date of my 7th birthday, which gift not only engendered a love for radio, but changed my life in significant ways.
By the time the mid-1960s rolled around, I had been hired as a rock ‘n roll deejay at the pop radio station of the day, CFUN 141, where I worked the occasional on-air shift, and read the news as directed by the news director, the late Jim Neilsen — who would go on to become British Columbia’s first environment minister, in the Socred government of Bill Bennett — as well as producing the Sunday evening foreground programming.
In 1966, a young upstart pop radio station sprung up in Vancouver — that had adopted a ‘hot clock’ format created by programme director Bill Drake for the lowest-rated radio station in the Los Angeles market, KHJ. Within three months of adopting what was called the ‘Drake format’ — which was also often referred to as Boss Radio — KHJ shot from last place to first in a Los Angeles radio market with over 70 radio stations.
Drake exported his Boss Radio format to hundreds of radio stations across North America, including 730 CKLG Vancouver. Within six months of adopting the BOSS radio Drake format, 730 CKLG shot from last place to second place in the Vancouver market, just behind powerhouse CKNW 98.
Within a year, CFUN was no more, converting to CKVN, the Voice of News.

A 1968 CKLG aircheck of J.B. Shayne, and various Boss radio station jingles. Hint: you’re gonna want to listen to the KRLA jingle (it’s the last one), which I acquired in 1972 from KRLA afternoon announcer, the legendary Shadoe Stevens. The jingle was played at the beginning of each announcer’s show, every three hours, from 6 a.m. til midnight.

All the jocks at CFUN left for CKLG, and LG-FM, including me: Terry David Mulligan, Don Richards, Daryl B., Fred Latremouille, and John Tanner, just to name a few. J.B. Shayne was already employed at the station, as he’d been hired in 1965 to do overnight on Lions Gate radio, playing classical music — which was, as you might imagine, a joy for the inimitable Mr. Shayne (not!). After adopting the Boss Radio format, Shayne remained at the station, continuing on overnights, becoming a Vancouver radio legend.

Courtesy of Ricardo Zborovszky. What has always impressed me about Top 30 music charts from the 1960s is the diversity of the music that was being played on radio, everything from Motown to pop, middle-of-the-road music for parents from Englebert Humperdinck, to trippy local psychedelia from The Collectors and their 1968 hit Lydia Purple to blues rock from the Rolling Stones & Americana folk from Simon & Garfunkel

In time to come, in VanRamblings Stories of a Life feature, I’ll write about my days in radio, including the very public broadcast throughout the entire Kootenay region of the loss of my virginity, a fond memory even to this day.

Believe it or not, there are actually people who listen to radio in this day and age of iPhones and iPods, loaded with 128GB of your favourite music downloaded onto your smartphone device with thousands of songs available at the call of Siri or Google Assistant, bluetooth, and streaming music services like Spotify, Apple Music and SiriuxXM — and, heck, it’s not all old fogeys like the publisher of this blog, either, who listen to radio.

Host Stephen Quinn dominates the radio market mornings Monday to Friday in Vancouver, on CBC Radio One’s The Early Edition, having taken over from longtime host Rick Cluff, when after some 20+ years, Mr. Cluff retired to his West Vancouver home during the holiday season that ended 2017, as it did Mr. Cluff’s 40+ year celebrated history in public radio.
If you want to know what’s going on in our city, our region and the province of British Columbia, you tune into Quinn’s The Early Edition, over the lunch hour on BC Today with Michelle Eliot, or Gloria Mackarenko’s re-invented On The Coast afternoon show — any and all issues of interest and concern are addressed on these three locally-produced broadcasts, featuring interviews with the broadest range of political figures, commentators, academics, and activists in our region and our province.
Little wonder that CBC Radio One dominates Vancouver’s radio market.
Although, CKNW comes in second in the Vancouver radio market in this last ratings “book,” the audience for that station is mainly 55+, hardly the demographic the advertisers want to reach, or so we keep being told.
QM/FM, although it’s ratings dropped a bit from the last time ratings were calculated, Vancouver’s oldest and most reliable music station continues to dominate the traditional radio market, as has been the case for more than 30 years, with its playlist of soft rock and classic radio favourites, with the occasional middle-of-the road contemporary song thrown into the mix.
Otherwise, Virgin Radio, Z95.3 and and KiSS Radio continue to compete for the ears of young listeners, a job they’re mostly successful at achieving.

Courtesy of Broadcast Dialogue magazine, David Bray, June 7th 2018
Vancouver: CBC Radio One continues its dominance of the Vancouver radio market, grabbing the #1 spot for A12+ with a 15.3% share of hours tuned (down from 15.7%). Taking the top spot for F25-54, QM-FM, posting a 16.5% share (down from 19.6% last book). FOX grabs the lead for M25-54 listeners, delivering a 13.8% share (up from 11.4%). The FOX is out in front for M18-34 with a 22.0% share of hours tuned (up from 15.8%). Women 18-34, QM-FM dominates, taking top spot with a 16.8 % share.

Even given its low ratings, TSN 1040 dominates the radio market, men aged 25 – 44, and 45 – 64, so for advertisers who want to reach that target market, TSN 1040 is the station that they’ll turn to more often than not.
Well, that’s it for this sort of Arts Friday VanRamblings post. Feels good to take a bit of break from the ever-so-satisfying maelstrom of local politics.

Stories of a Life | My Mother’s Frustrated Dreams | Country Music

June 2, 2018Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Mike, Mark & Jack, New Westminster’s The Rhythm Pals, Canada’s best country group

In the 1950s my mother sang with the The Rhythm Pals, a New Westminster-based country music trio that was all the rage in the late 1940s, 50s and into the 1960s, in 1965, 1967, and 1968 winning the Juno Award as best Canadian country group, a few years after which they were inducted into the Canadian Country Music Hall of Honour, in 1989.
In my household growing up, it was Mike, Marc and Jack this, and Mike, Marc and Jack that, my mother keeping up her friendship with The Pals throughout the entirety of my young life. My mother loved to sing, sang all the time around our home and in the car, loved music of every description — when she was home there was always music in the house, Patti Page and Teresa Brewer her two favourite 1950s singers, later turning to Patsy Cline, all of whose music invested almost my every waking moment for years.
Looking back on it, I suppose my love for female vocalists originated with my own mother’s, if not exactly angelic but still melodic voice, her entire demeanour the very definition of joy when she sang. Driving around with my parents in the family car, the radio was turned up loud, my mother singing along with all of the artists of the day, save Nat King Cole, who she worshipped, and would not as his daughter did years later, ‘duet’ with him.
Above all else, though, my mother loved country and western music, a mix of Americana, folk and roots music that spoke of struggle and love lost, of tragedy and wont and lives not fully realized, the heartfelt music I grew up on and which, later in life, would emerge as my favourite musical genre, coming around to appreciate country music, after having as a teenager and for many years after rejecting the music my mother loved, finally coming around in my early 40s — I’ve loved Iris DeMent, Alison Moorer, Shelby Lynne, Kasey Chambers, Lucinda Williams, Lori McKenna, Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves ever since. whose music has become the melancholy and thoughtful soundtrack that has informed my life this past 30 years.

In the late summer of 1958, my parents moved the family to Edmonton, to be closer to family and to be closer to the soundtrack of my mother’s life, roots and classic country music being far more popular on the Prairies than would ever be the case in the Lotusland Vancouver has always aspired to.

12221 81st Street, in northwest Edmonton, my family home from late 1959 through 1961

In 1960, with the help of my tall oak of a grandfather, my parents bought a house in northwest Edmonton, at 12221 81st Street, a working-aspiring-to-middle class neighbourhood, where I attended Eastwood Elementary for Grades 5 & 6, the new school and neighbourhood a step up from inner-city Edmonton, where we had rented for a year, and where I attended Sir John A. McDougall school in Grade 4 befriending all of the tough kids in school, helping them with their in-class & their homework, in exchange keeping me safe — to say it was a rough neighbourhood is to dramatically understate the matter. Still, I made it out in one piece, and was glad for the move.
As I say, my mother loved country roots music, the music of her youth, the music she sang, and the music that most spoke to her, that I believe kept her alive and her mind and spirit active — amidst the three back-breaking jobs she always held down, working at a puff wheat factory overnight for the entirety of our three-year tenure in Edmonton, working at a local bakery during the day, and the Swift Meat Packing Plant in the late afternoon and throughout the evening, ambitious and anxious to get ahead, or at least keep hers, and our heads above water, my father continuing his work at the Post Office, and surprising to everyone stepping up to the plate as our increasingly competent and loving father, to whom I’d help teach the ability to read, and with whom I’d spend endless hours quizzing him on aspects of his employment, in preparation for the quarterly tests of competence imposed by a draconian employer, the Canada Post Office.
Every now and then, though, my mother would get an evening off — she didn’t want to sit around the house “wasting time”, as she put it, she wanted to go out into the evening, be with people, to live and to feel free and to feel a part of the community, and if there was a country music concert at the nearby and walkable Edmonton Fairgrounds, all the better.
My mother loved to walk. One early Tuesday evening, she told my sister and I to put on our coats, that we were going out, saying to my father, “You’re coming along, too, to keep the kids out of mischief, to keep an eye on them so they don’t run away” — not that my sister and I ever did, we were homebodies, most evenings both my father and mother off at work, my sister and I at home watching TV or doing our homework, or visiting with friends in the neighbourhood, but back at home never later than 8pm.
On this particularly chill October 1960 evening, we made our way down to what appeared to us to be a deserted Edmonton Fairgrounds, although once inside the grounds and the closer we got to as our yet unknown destination, the clearer were the sounds of guitars being tuned up, and voices testing microphones — until we found ourselves arriving at a small tent, chairs for about 75 people, over the course of the half hour we waited for the evening’s festivities to begin, much to our mother’s displeasure, kicking around the sawdust on the floor, while looking around at the others who were in attendance, a few ragtag kids, but mostly adults in heavy, working class clothing, most drawn and seemingly weary with life, until …

Classic country music artists extraordinaire, The Wayfaring Stranger, Burl Ives; Montana Slim, otherwise know as Wilf Carter, and the Singing Cowboy himself, Hank Snow.

“Howdy, my name is Burl Ives, and this here to my left is Wilf Carter and standin’ next to him, the singing ranger himself, Hank Snow.”
And with that introduction, the small but fervently enthusiastic crowd came alive, as we were treated to a concert, and musicianship the likes of which I would not hear again till 1998, at a Lucinda Williams concert at The Vogue.
For the first and only time in my life, I saw my mother happy, in her element, dancing off to the side, a look of bliss on her face, her tired and aching bones revitalized with a renewed energy and strength, two and a half hours in my mother’s life that neither she nor I would ever forget, one of the best nights of my life, when I felt safe and loved amidst the music that had long been the soundtrack of my life, as it still remains to this day.

Arts Friday | An Indie Film Preview for the Month of June

June 1, 2018A & E, Cinema, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

A Multi-Billion Dollar Blockbuster Movie Summer
And, the 2018 Must-See Summer Indie Film Alternatives
With the summer movie season already well underway, starting earlier than ever this year, with the release of Avengers: Infinity War on April 28th, the film racing towards the two billion dollar mark worldwide, faster than any movie ever released, you are about to be brow-beaten with one big Hollywood blockbuster spectacle after another over the next three months.
Hollywood is thrilled, needless to say and Disney in particular as the releasing studio, with the record-breaking success of Avengers: Infinity War, a great start to Hollywood’s summer 2018 movie season, the movie studio heads can be heard murmuring, and a sign of good things to come.
Prospects for warm-weather moviegoing in 2018 are significantly better than they were in 2017, a year most studios and cinema chains like Cineplex would like to forget, with one box office blockbuster after another tanking with patrons, the cavalcade of failures foisted upon us last summer including The Mummy, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Dark Tower, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Baywatch, and The Emoji Movie.
Quite simply, summer 2017 was overburdened with testosterone cinema.
In 2018, though, the situation is looking better, says the president and CEO of Cineplex Entertainment, Ellis Jacob, who in a recent conference call told Canada’s film journalists …

“This summer’s film slate looks particularly strong, offering something for everyone.”

After a 2017 that saw a 9.3% drop off at Cineplex’s box office, a financial circumstance that has yet to abate thus far in 2018, box office tragedy for Cineplex is partially mitigated by the success earlier this year of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther and Jake Kasdan’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Still, Jacob has more than the usual reason for wanting his prediction of a 2018 big summer box office to come true.
The eight Hollywood titles Jacob predicts will do well this summer …

Ocean’s 8 (June 8), the all-female take on the caper comedy;
Incredibles 2 (June 15), one of Pixar’s best creations makes its way back into the cinema;
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (June 22), the long-awaited re-invention of the franchise;
Ant-Man and the Wasp (July 6), a reprise of the Paul Rudd starring surprise summer 2016 hit;
Skyscraper (July 13), yet another Dwayne Johnson chest-pounder, this one filmed in Vancouver;
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (July 20). Yes, the girls are back, and so are the boys;
Mission: Impossible — Fallout (July 27), another Tom Cruise stunt fest (early reviews are good).

While movie-goers have a tendency to overindulge in popcorn movies during the summer movie season, there are alternatives for adults.

What under-the-radar, low-budget films are set to break out in the month of June, films that will demand your attention, and your box office dollars?

On Chesil Beach (June 1). Opening today at Fifth Avenue Cinema, there couldn’t be a better way to kick off indie June than with Saoirse Ronan’s latest knock-out, On Chesil Beach, an entrancing adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella about a young British couple on their honeymoon in 1962. A lyrical and exquisite film — a repressed passion play, funny, delicate and heartbreaking, the film and the story possess an intoxicating quality of emotional wonder, just the sort of indie film that you want to have lead off your summer of worthy and rapturous indie cinema

Hereditary (June 8). The most anticipated indie film to be released in June, a film that took Sundance by storm, and a film that seems poised to conquer the summer horror box office, a fitting follow-up to John Krasinski’s low-budget breakout A Quiet Place as one of the year’s best horror films. Filled with chilling images, a powerhouse performance by Toni Collette, and one eerie young girl, Hereditary is sure to terrify audiences, and emerge as an unforgettable and scarifying experience at the movies.

Won’t You Be My Neighbour? (June 8). Morgan Neville’s new documentary about children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, a breakout doc at Sundance 2018, offers sanity in an insane world, one of the most hotly-anticipated films of the summer. And there’s more to come: a Tom Hanks-led biopic called You Are My Friend, that will follow this documentary from Oscar recipient and recent Cannes casualty Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom).
More, from Matt Goldberg, writing for Collider …

I did not expect to cry as much as I did during Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville’s documentary chronicling the life and career of Fred Rogers. As a cretinous youth who preferred the colourful Sesame Street to the staid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it’s only now as an adult that I can fully appreciate what Rogers was doing with his unique TV programme. And yet as Won’t You Be My Neighbor? shows, Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister with a background working alongside child psychologists, lived his values and created something special and enduring as a result. Although the documentary derives a large part of its strength simply from watching Rogers in action, it’s still a moving tribute not only to the individual, but to the kindness and compassion he and his programme embodied.

At Sundance, a standing ovation at the end seemed more for Rogers himself than the film. The image that lingers is a shot of Rogers hunched and cold in a tall field, a lone figure fighting the wind. He couldn’t control life’s storms. But he’d show people how to endure them.

Leave No Trace (June 29). The new film from director Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone) means something unexpected and thoughtfully crafted that you won’t want to miss. With quietly wrenching performances from Ben Foster, as a PTSD-afflicted vet, and newcomer Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, as his estranged daughter, this one’s a keeper. The last time Granik found a teenage actress to anchor her film it was Jennifer Lawrence. Early reviews indicate she’s found another potential breakout talent with the New Zealand-born McKenzie, the director’s latest a mesmerizing tale of life on the margins, a stunner, poignant, delicate, grim and captivating.
If you haven’t seen two other knockout indie films playing this week at Tinselown, get thee on down to Cineplex International Village now, to see …

Disobedience (Grade: B+). A gorgeously well-wrought film, with outstanding performances from Academy Award winner Rachel Weisz, with Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola giving the performances of their lives, Disobedience marks the North American English language début of Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, who picked up the Best Foreign Language Oscar just three months ago for his breakout transgender tale, A Fantastic Woman. A melancholy story involving an often surprising yet deeply felt romantic triangle, from beginning to end Disobedience exerts a powerful grip on the viewer, offering a love story, as beautiful as it is devastating.

RBG (Grade: A+). Must, must, must viewing — if you have a daughter age nine or older, if you’re a young woman with agency attending secondary school, college, university or striking out on your own, if you’re a woman who during the course of her life has lived as a feminist, whether quietly or as a community activist, run right out to the theatre right now, don’t wait, because RBG is essential viewing, a certain nominee for a Best Documentary Oscar, and a film that will see you leaving the theatre on a high, the likes of which you won’t have experienced in years! Go, now.
At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a breathtaking legal legacy while in recent years becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But without a definitive Ginsburg biography, the unique personal journey of this diminutive, quiet warrior’s rise to the highest court in the United States has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans — until now.
Funny, sweet-natured, offering a love story for the ages, a women’s movement history lesson that will reside in you for years to come, RBG offers an unapologetic valentine to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but a sharp and spiky one too, in a fist-pumping, crowd-pleasing documentary that will have you talking with your friends and family for hours afterwards, as I witnessed at a screening last night, when groups of animated filmgoers looked for the nearest coffee shop to continue their passionate discussion of the feminist movement and women’s history and the monumental formal written legacy of a clear-eyed force of nature, the badass but even-tempered Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a figure of immense power in bringing about all that we now seem to take for granted in how women lead their lives, when only 40 short years ago, when many women, far, far too many women, were viewed and lived their lives merely as chattel, the powerless appendages of unremarkable, unforgiving men.
RBG excavates the truth buried below the surface in the late 20th century women’s movement: Ginsburg isn’t just an 85-year-old cultural icon, she’s also an 85-year-old cultural icon who spent a lifetime opting for litigating over protest, for painstaking incremental legal work that took years to bear fruit, who still feels more comfortable in the world of words and text than in the world of fame and notoriety. RBG captures that paradox beautifully.

Vancouver Votes 2018 | Trump’s Impact On Our Election Outcome

May 28, 2018BC Politics, Pop Culture, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The Grounds the 2018 Vancouver Civic Election May be Fought On Part 1, Backlash: Rightist Vancouver Residents Rise Up to Fight City Hall
The 2018 Vancouver civic election is less than five months away, with election results available late in the evening of Saturday, October 20th.
As the six main Vancouver political parties ramp up their election strategy, the issues emerging are affordable & social housing, transit, property taxes, street cleanliness and service to the public, renewal of our community centre system, and civic government expenditure. But are these the issues, the ground that 2018’s Vancouver civic election will actually be fought on?
VanRamblings would suggest to you the core issue for some residents in the coming Vancouver civic election only tangentially relate to the platform issues on which Vancouver’s six civic parties will run their 2018 campaigns.
Rather, VanRamblings would present to you that the core issue of the coming civic election is … heart, or the lack thereof, and the willingness of Vancouver voters to place self-interest second to that of poverty reduction, and the construction of transitional, social and affordable housing in neighbourhoods across our city, over the course of the next four years.

Funded by the province and being built in the City of Vancouver, by this time next year 680 transitional modular housing units will have opened on ten or more supervised sites across the city, located in as many Vancouver neighbourhoods, the modular housing meant to house Vancouver’s most vulnerable population. The experience of the City following an announcement of modular housing construction has found that each and every time a new modular housing project site is announced, be it at …

Little Mountain, at 37th and Main;
650 West 67th Avenue, at Heather Street;
595 and 599 West 2nd Avenue, near the Vancouver Police Department headquarters, and nearby the Olympic Village Canada Line station;
4480 Kaslo Street, just south of the 29th Avenue Skytrain station;
1131 Franklin Street, over by the B.C. Sugar Refinery, just off Powell Street; and
525 Powell Street, at Jackson Street.

Fearful, socially regressive neighbours driven by self-interest, safety and the potential for lower property values come out in droves, well-organized and sometimes numbering in the hundreds, carrying signs and yelling at passersby, while vehemently protesting modular housing construction in their neighbourhood, each time the City announces a new construction site.

Vancouver Coastal Health has proposed an affordable housing facility and detox treatment centre on East 1st Avenue at Clark Drive, the project a divisive one for some Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood residents. One group of locals, though, worries such divisive behaviour will teach their children to be afraid of those who most need assistance and empathy, this latter group coming out in favour of the project.

OneCity Vancouver candidate for City Council, Christine Boyle, had an unhappy experience at a May 2nd Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood — the neighbourhood where her family and friends live — information session on a proposed affordable housing facility and treatment centre to be located on East 1st Avenue at Clark Drive, with the treatment centre controversially, for some residents, taking over the duties for the current, smaller detox centre located on East 2nd Avenue, near Main.
Ms. Boyle said such opposition to the treatment centre was disappointing.

“I don’t want my kids to learn that they should be fearful of people who are homeless or struggling,” Boyle told StarMetro Vancouver reporter, Perrin Grauer. “I worry that’s the lesson coming out of this.”

And there you have it: NIMBY residents opposing modular housing construction in their neighbourhood, or construction of an under lock and key detox and treatment centre — and even the provision of affordable housing in their neighbourhood, that might lower their property values.
Heart, social conscience, empathy for our most vulnerable citizens vs naked, socially maladroit, near-heartless self-interest. That my friends, is the battle ground on which 2018’s Vancouver civic election may be fought.
The 2018 Vancouver civic election is a “throw the bums out” election, and by that many Vancouver residents mean — we’ll see how many, come the evening of Saturday, October 20th — that they’re “sick-and-tired” of the social engineering that has gone on at City Hall”, the focus on reconciliation with our indigenous peoples, promoting the interests of women in the workplace, making our city a racism-free zone, a nuclear-free zone, catering to the interests of our LGBTQ and gender variant communities, Vancouver as a non-gendered bathroom zone, a catering to the interests of vulnerable citizens zone — all at the expense of “tax paying” NIMBY citizens — a city where progressivism has been the order of the day, all much to the chagrin of Vancouver’s meaner, more socially regressive “hey, it’s all about me, my interests, maintaining the value of my property” citizens.
In the 2016 U.S. presidential election, progressives were convinced that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had a presidential win and four years in the White House in the bag, that under no circumstance would a sexist and misogynist, barely literate and totally uninformed man-child buffoon go on to win the White House. Well, you know how that one turned out.
In the 2018 Vancouver election, a lowest common denominator Mayoral candidate, and candidates for Council will emerge — the Wai Young Coalition Party and Hector Bremner campaigns — will emerge from the primordial muck quite soon, well-financed and hungry for power, and ready to turn the clock back to a meaner time, a “people’s movement” that could snatch victory from both the progressive party coalition, and the socially progressive, nominally right-of-centre Vancouver Non-Partisan Association.