My Story- (Prologue to book) – Ian Howarth

A boy and his radio

My first radio was a rocket-shaped crystal with one slippery, plastic ear bud and a cord with a claw-like attachment that I hooked up to the nearest metallic object – usually at night while lying in bed when the signals were strongest. Any station that was surging the night’s airwaves won my attention until the signal faded. I was in charge, not spinning the records, but the next best thing: the dial.

I was a natural-born dial spinner. It was the early sixties, and finding something good on the radio was a crap shoot, the airwaves clogged with a lot of adult talk and sanitized middle-of-the-road music. But every once in a while I’d hit on a station playing something that struck a chord in me. In 1961, a group called The Marcels had a number-one hit called “Blue Moon,” a doo-wop version of a Rodgers and Hart song written in 1934, covered by Frank Sinatra then re-worked by Elvis in 1956. I had no idea The Marcels were black or that this was a doo-wop-styled song. I was ten years old and it sounded great. I was hooked on radio.

Our parents’ music

Most Baby Boomers know who Perry Como is or can maybe even hum a few bars of “Catch a Falling Star.” Released in 1957, it was the first single to be certified Gold by Billboard Magazine, which became the pop music bible for rankings (Billboard’s Hot 100 lists are still the industry standard today.) Como, much to his surprise, was making musical history.

My father was a big Perry Como fan and, like thousands of other white North American men in their mid-thirties for whom Como’s signature long-sleeved, buttoned-up cardigan and white shirt was the wardrobe du jour that went perfectly with a post-workday martini, he would sing along at every opportunity. I was six years old when “Catch a Falling Star” came out, and I can still sing the first verse and chorus six decades later. I’m not sure how this happened (brain research calls this phenomenon “reminisce bumps”), the power of music to make memories.

Como and other pop singers like Pat Boone, Patti Page and Andy Williams played major roles in the soundtrack of the mid-fifties. Page’s “How Much is That Doggie in the Window” was so ubiquitous on the radio and TV, it was impossible to ignore. The new post-WWII demographic was not quite consumer-qualified, but when we did come into some money – our allowance – we weren’t buying Perry Como singles. That was what our parents listened to. Sure, our parents’ music seeped into our consciousness and stayed there like the first two lines of a popular Christmas carol, but it wasn’t by choice. As children, we weren’t in charge of the music we listened to. It was delivered by the radio stations older people listened to and by the records in the modest collections of our middle-class parents, which in any case we weren’t allowed to put on a turntable without supervision. Nevertheless, we were little young sponges.

My parents’ record collection was mostly a motley assortment of 78 rpm records probably passed on to them by their parents. They broke easily, my three brothers and I discovered. The home collection was occasionally updated, however, some records bought by my mother in a valiant effort to educate her four sons. I was the third, born in 1951. I remember being quite taken by one particular record my mother introduced me to, “Peter and the Wolf,” a narration of the famous story told using various musical instruments, each representing a different character. I have warm memories of listening to it in front of our heavy wood-encased radio and turntable unit, typical of those days. I played it over and over again. Only later in life would I realize that my mother must’ve liked it particularly for the twenty-five minutes it kept me out of her hair. It was the equivalent of sticking a young child in front of the TV today – with PBS on, of course.

Discovering my love for radio

While the family turntable may have been off-limits, the radio was not, since it wasn’t nearly as delicate as those 78s. My generation was very radio-centric, though the TV would eventually become radio’s entertainment companion and competitor. The radio, like a campfire, drew families together. The dials were nice and big for little hands, and I fired that red needle from one end of the dial to the other and back again, trying to find something that held my attention.

With four kids and two adults crammed into a small suburban Toronto bungalow, I didn’t get much alone time. Though I did have the radio to myself for brief moments, it was located in the living room, a heavy traffic area, so it was hit or miss for my burgeoning love affair. I finally asked my parents for one of my own, so I could do my dial spinning uninterrupted in the privacy of the room I shared with my younger brother.

My little rocket-shaped crystal was my connection to the outside world. Late at night, I would lie in my bed, manoeuvring the dial tuner with the precision of a surgeon, except my best work was done in total darkness, lying on one side so the ear plug wouldn’t slip out.

As I fiddled with the station dial, the strongest signal always won out, of course, but nevertheless I turned it back and forth repeatedly to see what I could bring in. Some U.S. stations with strong signals faded in and out as if on the whim of the wind. If conditions were right, I heard WABC in New York City, which on a good night could be picked up in thirty-eight states and Canadian border towns, WKBW in Buffalo, WBZ in Boston, WJR in Detroit, CHUM-AM in Toronto and CKLW in Windsor, Ontario.

Unfortunately, the AM stations with the strongest signals played mostly easy listening late at night. It seemed they actually wanted their listeners to fall asleep. Still, every once in a while, I would get a radio station that had more of the Blue Moon–type music I loved. At night, I was in my own private radio world.

Then my parents sprung for a transistor radio for me, which opened up even more possibilities. That transistor had its own cachet, much superior to my little rocket radio, and in addition to spinning the dial, my nightly bedtime activity included turning the radio itself every which way to capture the signal of a good station. I fell asleep every night to my radio, after I grew weary of switching stations. In the morning, the radio still on, I’d awaken to find I’d pushed my transistor batteries to their limit. I left it to resuscitate itself during the day, though I discovered worn-out batteries did not fully recover with rest. After school and on weekends, that transistor went everywhere with me, including on my bike, where I locked it to my handlebars with my thumb. Each turn of the bike required a radio-position adjustment so I could listen while I pedaled. Neighbours could hear me coming from blocks away. I was my own mobile DJ.

New city, new frequencies

My family life (and my radio-listening habits) took a sudden turn to the east in the summer of 1962 when my father was transferred to Montreal. It was not an easy exit since my parents’ roots were in Ontario and my two older brothers had an established network of friends they didn’t want to leave behind. When the movers came, my older brother tied himself to his lower bunk bed, refusing to go. My parents tried quiet persuasion at first, but after a few too many refusals they cut him loose and he sulked all the way to Montreal. I thought of it as an adventure. I’ll be damned if I even knew where Montreal was, but I was a co-operating family hostage, sitting beside my sulking brother for the drive to a bigger house and bigger money for my father.

We moved into a brand new two-storey house in what looked like a construction frontier town, the second family to move into a suburban work-in-progress. It was the beginning of the early-sixties movement towards the suburbs that came about as post-WWII families outgrew the humble, cramped bungalows, their income increased and the burgeoning Canadian middle class explored the suburbs as a better place to bring up their families. I had brought my portable friend with me and a whole new world of dial-turning opened up. New frequencies to discover, new voices and music to take in.

A city in transition

Though I was marooned in the ‘burbs, the radio kept me in touch with other places and worlds. Montreal was putting itself on the map as a vibrant, happening city, with a larger population than Toronto. The city was on the precipice of a renaissance, a building boom. You could see it reflected in the transformation of the cityscape and the ubiquitous construction cranes.

In 1962, the forty-five-storey Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (now CIBC) building opened as the tallest in Canada. This is where my father would start his new job with Allied Chemical Canada. The first time I was allowed a downtown visit, I was impressed by the view from my father’s twenty-second-floor office. (Not so enthusiastic, however, were the employees on the higher floors who were reluctant to go anywhere near the windows. A brave soul who was apparently tagged to show employees that they were in no danger went from floor to floor hurling himself at the windows to pacify paranoid office staff.) As for my father, he was probably feeling the vibe of the times, which was that the taller the building, the more bragging rights the city had.

Only a few months later the CIBC building lost its tallest-in-town tag – by one storey – to Place Ville Marie. In just one year Montreal had opened the two tallest buildings in Canada. The province, meanwhile, led by a new Liberal premier, Jean Lesage, was also flexing its new sense of identity and pride with the opening of a twenty-seven-storey head office building for Hydro Quebec in Montreal. This was part of some preliminary political moves labelled the “Quiet Revolution.”  The Champlain Bridge, Montreal’s connection to its south shore, opened in 1963, the same year the city built a brand new concert hall, Place des arts. Montreal was on a roll.

Montreal’s three important early radio stations

CFCF-AM laid claim to being the first radio station in Canada to have gone on the air. With the call letters XWA, its owners, The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, went on the air in 1920 with a whopping 500 watts of power at their disposal. Eventually, the station settled in at 600 on the AM dial in 1933 with 2,000 watts of power. These would be the call letters that thousands of English-speaking Montrealers would become familiar with as more and more people bought their own crystal sets for the home. But CFCF had plenty of time before it would eventually play its first rock ‘n’ roll record.

In December 1959, Newfoundland-born entrepreneur Geoff Stirling, under the Maisonneuve Broadcasting Ltd. banner, started CKGM-AM a little further up the dial at 980 AM, with 10,000 watts day and night. With this launch, Stirling, a self-made millionaire and free spirit with uncanny business acumen, was tapping into Montreal’s early growth. Four years later, he launched a sister station, CKGM-FM, which Stirling would take a particularly personal interest in towards the end of that decade; his FM station would eventually change the whole radio landscape.

Way out on the right end of the AM dial was CFOX 1470, which came on the scene in 1960 with 1,000 watts, ostensibly to serve the budding West Island of Montreal population that in the summer of ‘62 added six more people, the Howarth family, to the census. Owned by Gord Sinclair Jr., the son of Toronto TV and radio personality Gord Sinclair, the station started out playing down-home country music. Though it came in loud and clear for my nightly dial-spinning ritual, country was not what I was looking for.

All three of these stations would soon find themselves fighting tooth and nail for the young listening audience of Top 40 rock ‘n’ roll music, which was about to explode their conservative programming formats into one of the most exciting eras in Montreal AM radio.

Alan Freed and the U.S. rock ‘n’ roll market

U.S. radio stations broke rock ‘n’ roll ahead of the Canadian market by a significant margin of time. It took longer for the R&B/rock ‘n’ roll sound to trickle across the 49th parallel. Announcers in the states had become “disc jockeys,” a term coined in 1935 by American radio commentator Walter Winchell, combining the words “disc” as in records and “jockey” for the operation of the equipment. Deejays or DJs, these were the guys who were spinning the hits of the day. In some U.S. markets, DJs became legitimate stars, Alan Freed being one of the most famous in the 1950s. R&B music, pejoratively called “race music” in the United States, was played largely in southern black communities but rarely in white America. Freed, at WJW in Cleveland, soon began mixing white and black rock music as a centerpiece of his broadcasts. He began his program in July 1951 and would later start calling it “rock ‘n’ roll” music. He would also pioneer a new kind of “DJ talk,” riffing on the hipster/jazz music/beatnik argot of New York City. “Yeah, daddy,” he would say, “let’s rock and roll!” He was twenty-nine years old at the time and poised to become a bona fide radio star. His late-night show, “The Moondog House,” soon became popular with the young kids – black and white – of Cleveland and beyond.  Freed soon moved up to WINS New York, the biggest radio market in the United States. There he established himself as a force, parlaying his radio career into TV and film work while promoting musical revues that showcased R&B artists like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, The Drifters and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers.

Sadly, Freed’s run would end badly by the end of the decade, becoming a cautionary tale that had future DJs revising the way they did business with record-label promoters. Facing charges that he accepted bribes (payola) to play certain records (Freed called it “consultation fees”) as well as tax evasion charges, his radio carer was never the same. He died in 1964 – a broke and broken man – of kidney failure due to complications from alcohol. But Freed had introduced R&B to white and black America, and in 1989 he was one of the first inductees into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

The Alan Freed payola scandal was a setback for the fledgling rock radio business, which was run by conservative radio executives, some of whom believed rock ‘n’ roll was the devil’s music and who seized on the scandal as an excuse to tone things right down. R&B was too sexual. Even the term rock ‘n’ roll mentioned in some black artists’ songs was code for sex. It was “jungle music” to radio programmers, too risky to play for fear of alienating present or potential sponsors. For a few years, rock radio went with safe, white, sanitized rock music.

Most mainstream radio stations in the U.S. and Canada took to playing the Bobbys : Darin, Curtola, Vinton and Darin. Pat Boone made a whole lot of money with his pasteurized version of  Chuck Berry’s “Tutti Frutti.” Perry Como was still hanging in there along with some Elvis knock-offs like Ricky Nelson. And then there was Elvis. Nobody touched Elvis. He got away with his gyrations and jungle sounds. He was, after all, a good lookin’ white boy from the south who used to sing in church with his mama. But Elvis, in the prime of his rock ‘n’ roll ascendency, was drafted into the U.S. army in 1958. When he came back two years later, it seemed that experience had knocked the Jail House Rock right out of him. Presley, though he no longer rocked the way he had early in his career, turned out to be a durable performer, still charting into the 1970s. Meanwhile, in another example of a derailed rock star, Richard Wayne Penniman, a.k.a. Little Richard, decided in 1957 to forego his rock music career to join the ministry. It would be five years before he came back to his music, but he never again regained the momentum he’d had in the early fifties.

With those two rock pioneers gone, radio stations looked in other directions to fill the airwaves. There were plenty of musicians ready to step up to the plate and hit a number-one record out of the park. Artists like Chubby Checker, Ray Charles, The Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Ben E. King, Lesley Gore, The Four Seasons and The Beach Boys, along with the beginning of a wave of girl groups like The Shirelles, The Chiffons and The Ronettes (who introduced the legendary Wall of Sound, the brainchild of a young producer, Phil Spector) edged their way onto the early-sixties Billboard charts.

And as for me…

I ate up all that music, when I could find it, on my trusty transistor. I didn’t have anything to play 45s on and though they were only 99 cents, that was beyond my pre-pubescent budget, but my older brothers seemed to have more purchasing power and if the timing was right, I could sneak into my oldest brother’s bedroom and play his 45s on his portable red and white RCA Victor record player. There would be hell to pay if I left any trace of my presence in his bedroom or was caught in the act of trespassing. Ultimately, I inherited that RCA player and played the hell out of my meagre collection of 45 rpms. Finally, I was spinning my own music.