11 The Video Stars

By the mid-1980s a renaissance in Canadian pop music was in full swing. Canadian artists had the support of domestic labels, and access to a fanbase that embraced them with a fervour that previously had been reserved for stars from the U.S. and U.K. It was a glorious time to be writing, playing, recording and performing music in this country. Nowhere was this celebration of music in Canada more fully in effect than at 299 Queen Street West. A new generation of artists exploded on the screen.

GLASS TIGER

One of the faces of this new wave of stars was Alan Frew, the lead singer of Glass Tiger, a band from Newmarket, Ontario.

ALAN FREW [Video] was the single most important thing at the time. We had just watched what it had done for Duran Duran on MTV, and we started to realize that video killed the radio star. It was super important and along came MuchMusic and Glass Tiger and it was like a marriage made in heaven. It was vitally important in breaking the band.

When they debuted in 1986, Glass Tiger had the golden combination—a charismatic group of band members, a collection of memorable, anthemic songs and the support of a major label, Capitol Records. The first single from The Thin Red Line album, produced by Bryan Adams’ collaborator Jim Vallance, was “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone),” and it was a smash. For their debut video, Capitol turned to the hot hand, Rob Quartly. The resulting video was a hit on Much, but not so well regarded by the band’s lead singer.

ALAN FREW The video is very corny and difficult to look back on. The proof was in the pudding when the Americans said, “We love this track”…they insisted on an alternate video; they didn’t like the corniness of the trumpets and the kids and the marriage so we just shot a live video of us performing “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” on stage.

The single featured a cameo from a very recognizable Bryan Adams, but only on the record.

ALAN FREW When it became obvious that we weren’t getting Bryan for [the video]…I think it was Rob Quartly’s tongue-in-cheek moment to say, “What if we had a kid do the Bryan Adams thing?” People ask about the embarrassment factor…looking back on your life…we all look back on it like a scrapbook from high school. I mean, can I look at my ’70s high school yearbook with platforms and bell-bottoms and not cringe?…The saving grace is, just when you’re looking at yours and thinking, “Oh my god, did we really do that?” then you see something that Duran Duran did or Rod Stewart or Luba and you realize it was a sign of the times.

Songwriter Jim Vallance talked about his first gig as a producer.

JIM VALLANCE I got a call from Deane Cameron, who was then head of A&R at Capitol Records in Toronto. He’d just signed Glass Tiger, a young band from Newmarket. He already had a producer in mind, but the band needed help arranging their songs. I play guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, so in some ways it was a “rock school” session, with me sitting in on various instruments while making adjustments to the arrangements. It wasn’t quite songwriting, but it bordered on it. Maybe that’s why Deane suggested I try writing with the band.

A few weeks later the band flew to Vancouver. We spent a productive week during which we wrote “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” and “Someday” [two of the band’s biggest hits]. When Deane heard the demos, he asked if I’d be interested in producing the album. I felt bad, because I was stealing the job from another producer—someone I knew and liked—but I didn’t feel bad enough to decline the offer!

After the “Don’t Forget Me (When I’m Gone)” experience, Glass Tiger did develop a relationship with a video director that was built to last.

ALAN FREW The one [director] that really stands out for us is Don Allan who…eventually did eight Glass Tiger videos [including “My Town,” “Diamond Sun,” “I’m Still Searching” and “My Song”]. He brought cohesiveness to everything by involving us; he involved me behind the scenes in concept…it became more of a team as opposed to the way a lot of directors work where they go, “Here’s my concept, love it or hate it, but this is it, you ain’t changing it.”

Director Don Allan, who has worked with k-os, Rush and the Tragically Hip, among others, brings a strong point of view to his work.

Erica Ehm with Alan Frew and Michael Hanson of Glass Tiger

DON ALLAN I probably listened to a song more than the artists [themselves] because I listen to it hundreds of times as I’m writing the video. I then listen to it hundreds of times on-set and then hundreds more when editing it. When you analyze most songs, they’re quite trite and repetitive. There’s not much there, so often we would try and interpret what it was and give it more meaning than it had. As a particular chorus repeats, you can’t just have the same visual idea over again. You can musically, but you can’t visually. So you’re giving that same line other visual interpretations, often writing into it stuff that the original writer didn’t intend. There’s also the video hook, which is the technique….It has to have an arc like film or like a song does. Some videos—they’ve blown their load in the first minute and then they’re just repeating for the rest of the song. To me that’s a channel change.

I asked Alan, who is originally from Scotland, if looking back, there was one video in particular that really stood out.

ALAN FREW My favourite memory would be getting the opportunity to go to Glasgow for the shooting of “My Town.” Poor Don Allan. He put me in my environment and every time somebody would say “cut,” I’d be in the pub or in the betting shop putting money on the horses. Don allowed me to be very involved in the concept, so there’s a couple of very cool moments. One is, my cousin is in the video, hanging her washing out in the backyard. Two of my favourite soccer stars at the time did cameos. My son Gavin and [keyboardist] Sam [Reid]’s son Justin are in the video. And a very famous old Scottish actor, Jimmy Logan…we shot one of the pub scenes at my pal’s pub in Glasgow, so it was like old home week. A lot of love, a lot of friendship [was] in the making of that video.

Director Don Allan shared in the family experience with Alan.

DON ALLAN “My Town” is about Glasgow and the idea of immigrating to a new country. The Scottish comedian, Jimmy Logan, who Billy Connolly credits with being the reason he got into comedy, is my uncle, so we used him in the video. Also my grandmother is in the video. In “I’m Still Searching”—both our dads [Don’s and Alan’s] are in it, sitting in a pub drinking.

One of the most visually arresting of the many hit videos that Glass Tiger did was for the song “I Will Be There.”

ALAN FREW We were on tour with Journey. We shot some of the footage live from the Journey tour and on a day off, they took us up to Vancouver because the director had this idea of flying us up to the top of Tabletop Mountain on this pristine, untouched mountain so that the first footsteps made on it would be ours. Those were the days when the money was there and you could do those kind of things and it was a beautifully shot video.

The band had a remarkable string of high-rotation videos and Alan was very clear about the effect of all that exposure.

ALAN FREW Nothing beats coming right into the living rooms night after night. MuchMusic made us popstars. Erica [Ehm] was with us when…we gave a free concert at the Parliament Buildings for Canada Day and there were in excess of a hundred thousand people there and it took us three hours to get from the stage to the main road. She was trapped with us in the van.

Larry LeBlanc, the dean of Canadian music journalists had a unique insight into the making of a hit.

LARRY LeBLANC The music business is not about music; it’s the right piece of music at the right time. The ultimate band in that era that was built almost singlehandedly by MuchMusic was Glass Tiger, from top to bottom.

This may sound like an indictment of a band that broke via video, but there were lots of good-looking bands with boatloads of money being thrown at them who could hire the best support team of publicists, producers and song doctors, but couldn’t sustain a meaningful career. There’s a reason why Glass Tiger’s songs are still heard on the radio today that transcends nostalgia.

ALAN FREW We knew that we were solid writers, solid musicians. We had cut our teeth…we knew our craft. What happens when you become popstars, the industry [the critics]…it’s the very nature of their job to hate everything…they were the ones that wanted to say, “This is all fabricated, it’s all bubblegum.” You pay a certain price for that.

To record companies, videos were a roll of the dice on acts that had already been gobbling up resources with ever-mounting recording budgets as well as other traditional promotional expenses. Former Warner head of marketing Dave Tollington who worked with bands like Honeymoon Suite, Messenjah, Blue Rodeo and the Odds addressed this issue.

DAVE TOLLINGTON From a business point of view, making domestic records, signing acts and doing all that, it effectively doubled the cost of doing business. Yes, they were fifty percent recoupable against the artist, but…the dirty little secret in the music business is if you have one profitable artist out of ten you’ve signed, you’re considered a genius. So you made two or three videos for all the ones that didn’t sell any records. It became really expensive and you couldn’t sign as many acts and take as many chances.

Kim Cooke, who was a senior VP at Warner through the ’80s and ’90s, mentions another aspect of the challenge for a label in making videos for their acts.

KIM COOKE As the A&R guy, I found that making or commissioning videos was harder and much more stressful than making records because when you’re making a record, there’s a belief in an artist who has a bit of your soul and there’s usually a communal vision on who’s going to produce, where it’s going to be recorded. When you’re making a video, you’ve got this whole other person between you and the artist. Sometimes it turned out great and sometimes there were disasters….Sometimes the directors wanted to make art.

In an effort to reduce risk, the labels wanted bankable directors and there weren’t many of those in Canada. Okay, there was just one—the ever-reliable Rob Quartly. There were lots of other very creative people in the field, some doing excellent work, some directing videos for songs that became hits. But this was one guy who seemed to have the touch with hits for Platinum Blonde, Corey Hart, Glass Tiger and others. So when CBS was ready to shoot their wad on a video for singer Lawrence Gowan, Rob got the call.

GOWAN

Lawrence Gowan had waited his turn after emerging from the crucible of the ever-tough Ontario club scene with his band, Harlequin. Having learned a few things about keeping an audience’s attention, Gowan was one of a very select group of acts who used video as an artistic vehicle as opposed to merely an advertisement for a single. He tells a great story of second, maybe last, chances, and the value of doing it your own way.

GOWAN I had a lot of failure prior to getting to make a record in the first place and in particular getting to make a second record, because that’s what changed my career—getting that second chance….The music I made was always referred to, by record companies who would never sign me, as being too quirky, overly theatrical and overly “cerebral” (Lawrence laughing), which I had to go and look up. There was nothing cerebral about it; it was basically a lot of science fiction gobbledygook. I think Freddie Mercury was my patron saint of the ’70s. When I finally got a record deal, I decided on my first record to really tone it down to such a degree that I thought. “Oh, don’t be that flamboyant.”…We did a video…I had no input at all, relying entirely on CBS records to push that record, because they’d just had the success of Loverboy, and it fell completely on its face.

The lucky thing is, when I got a second chance in 1984, I thought, “If I’m going to fail I will do it the way I would like to have it done.” So when it came time to do “Criminal Mind,” it was like this was my one and only shot at doing something that I think is kind of fun. When it came out in 1984, there were people in the record company who said, “The subject matter—you gotta be really careful, this song, ‘A Criminal Mind,’ it could be too dark.” Already they were thinking about the barriers…you had these people wringing their hands because there was a lot of money at stake. Either you made a ton of money or you made zero.

Second guessing is endemic to the record business, perhaps because it gives people cover in case something they were involved with flops. Any opportunity to let someone else put themselves on the line is taken; just as any chance to take credit for a hit is grabbed. As an artist, you need a hero, and Gowan had the right one.

GOWAN The president of CBS at that time, Bernie DiMatteo, was very enthusiastic about “A Criminal Mind,” mainly because his two sons kept playing the song over and over when they got the record, before the album came out. He said to me, “I think this is a great single. What are you thinking about for a video?” When I began to describe it to him, he said, “Yeah, I think that’s going to be too dark for them to play on TV.” I was talking about the electric chair and stuff like that. Bernie said, “Did you ever watch Batman?” “Oh god, I’d love to make it like that! Can we have animation in it?” He said, “Why don’t you start working on it and we’ll see what we can spend money on and what we won’t.”

I went home and started working on the storyboard…They got Rob Quartly to make the video and he was the hot guy at the time. They gave him a budget for the animation so basically I was able to turn myself into a cartoon character, which was my lifelong dream anyway!

The video for “A Criminal Mind” won the Juno for Video of the Year. Director Rob Quartly recalls the making of the video.

ROB QUARTLY I think it was Larry’s idea to do the comic book feel, so we blended his performance into the comic. There was always a rush to get things done in time for the single release and with animation, that was a challenge. Cel animation [which is hand-drawn] is painstaking work.

Like most artists, Rob looks back and sees the flaws in a hugely successful video that put Gowan on the map.

ROB QUARTLY There’s a section where Larry is on a conveyer belt and he gets pancake mix poured all over him. I remember looking at it and thinking, “That looks like pancake mix. That’s really stupid.” We did some video effect to put a bandage over it.

Lawrence testified to the instantaneous power of video.

GOWAN We shot that video in November of 1984 when I was playing piano with Ronnie Hawkins. The week the video was released, MuchMusic started playing it immediately. We were playing an auto show in Montreal and at the end of the first set, there was a bunch of people asking, “Hey, are you that guy with the criminal song?” That’s how instant the impact of television was. It was the power of television and the power of the mullet!

I asked if Lawrence had any mullet regret.

GOWAN No, I’m convinced that decade needed a haircut like that, like the ’50s needed the ducktail.

And as for criminal activity in the fashion department…

GOWAN I don’t think there was one thing I wore in the 1980s that was not a crime.

The video for “A Criminal Mind” won Quartly his second consecutive Juno for Video of the Year.

Great Dirty World, the follow-up album to Strange Animal, featured a classic ballad called “Moonlight Desires.” Sony’s commitment to Gowan was evident in the budget for the beautiful and grandiose video that accompanied the song. When the crew headed to Mexico, there were some payments that had not been included in the budget.

GOWAN When we got to Mexico…we had hired a Mexican crew and we went with the specific purpose of shooting on the pyramids [at Teotihuacan, near Mexico City]. We had permission, but when we arrived in Mexico City we found out that things are done very differently there [from Canada]. There was a government guy who met us at the airport who handed us a lovely welcoming letter saying, “Please feel free to shoot anywhere in Mexico that you feel is appropriate except for the Mexican pyramids.” The first little bit of graft money goes to this guy—it might have been the equivalent of fifty bucks, but he was the first one in a long list. Over the course of the next ten days, everything had to be paid off. By about Day Five I’d convinced Jon Anderson [of the band Yes] to fly from England to Mexico to do that one scene on the Pyramid of the Sun [the largest pyramid of Teotihuacan]. That was the loose concept behind it—I’m on [the Pyramid of the Moon], dressed in blue and black—so there’s the night. And Jon Anderson is the bright sunshine of day. I’m pulling away from the daylight into what the moonlight does to people.

Catherine McClenahan and Gowan

The video was shot at a number of archeological sites, but none more awe-inspiring, or historically significant, than Teotihuacan, so it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that a Canadian music video crew might have raised some hackles among the locals.

GOWAN The morning of that scene, a bunch of cops came to the hotel and said, “We’re going to confiscate your film,” and “if we see you on another pyramid…you’re going to find out what Mexican jail is all about.” So Rob went out to Teotihuacan and met the guards and told them, “We’re going to come here in the morning,” gave them a few hundred bucks and said, “we’re going to film from the helicopter, there’ll be no cameras on the ground.” The idea being that if the cops arrive, there will be no film on the ground; the helicopter will go and land and Rob will know what to do to get the film out of the country, secure it so it doesn’t get confiscated and we’ll give them some other footage that he had in the helicopter. He did about three passes with the helicopter. No cops showed up so they were well paid off. When the helicopter landed…a lot of dust picked up and the pilot lost his bearings and he set it down roughly. Rob got out shaken up. The helicopter pilot got out…and was yelling at the Mexican film crew and he left the helicopter there and left on foot. He said something to do with the gods (in Spanish), “You guys are cursed!”

Director Rob Quartly adds his recollections of this extraordinary shoot.

ROB QUARTLY There’s a thing called a Tyler mount [for stabilization] for shooting on helicopters and taking all the vibration out. It’s mounted on the nose of the helicopter. When we got to the chopper at dawn, they’d taken the side door off and suspended a tire with bungee cords. I said, “What’s this for?” and they said, “You asked for a ‘tire’ mount.” We ended up crabbing the helicopter sideways to get all the shots, with the camera in the tire.

Rob offers this bizarre postscript to the story.

ROB QUARTLY We did take a grand piano up one of the pyramids, and watching that was a movie unto itself, fifteen guys carrying a piano up the pyramid for a dawn shot. The piano was covered in a great big tarp, which we removed to reveal the word “Steinway” written in great huge gold letters. Larry went white and I said, “What’s the matter?” “I’m sponsored by Yamaha.”

Later, in post-production, a guy painted over the word “Steinway,” frame-by-frame.

THE PARACHUTE CLUB

The new medium helped Canadian artists avoid the pigeonholing that had dominated the industry for so long. A new era meant that every act didn’t have to squeeze through the “Canada’s answer to…” filter before getting support from the industry. Was the Parachute Club an analogue to anything from the U.K. or the U.S.? Not for a minute. I asked Lorraine Segato, lead singer and songwriter, where their influences came from.

LORRAINE SEGATO We were inspired by the music we heard travelling through Cuba, Trinidad and Jamaica. Africa was brought to us…through the lives of many of the scrappy artists who were living on Queen Street West. There, we were surrounded by similar artists who were recent immigrants and politically engaged…and it was the late ’70s and early ’80s and Toronto was morphing from its parochial, small-town conservative beginnings. We hung around a lot of reggae musicians from Trinidad and Jamaica who befriended us and taught us how to play authentic reggae and soca grooves….We wanted the band to be polyrhythmic and we wanted to say something. We became absorbed in what is now called world music….There was a surge of cultural, political and artistic change that was pushing the city to grow up and to grow out and we came out of that.

So, how did a band this ambitious and eclectic deal with the music biz?

LORRAINE SEGATO The music business never liked us. It was the fans, the loyal fans, and other musicians who liked us, because we were political, we were opinionated, non-conforming and didn’t really fit in anywhere. None of those things make the corporate mentality comfortable, so in terms of the industry, we never really fit in.

This created some challenges when it came time to make the band’s first video.

LORRAINE SEGATO In the early days every time we met with video directors, they wanted to push a kind of sexuality on the women in the band that was so old school, so dated and not really well thought out. Very few people were interested in the storyboard or the concept—they were only interested in the look. They never really got to an interesting storyboard that was reflective of who the band was.

After meeting with the best-known directors of the day, they settled on Bob Fresco who was willing to work with the band from the storyboarding onward, developing the concept for “Rise Up.” The result was an incredibly memorable video. Lorraine recalls the shoot with affection.

Dan Gallagher with Lorraine Segato of the Parachute Club

LORRAINE SEGATO It was an amazing day. It was very hot and sunny. We had a permit to be on this flatbed truck and we were travelling around and we were singing and we kind of had our own little carnival going on. Everywhere we travelled people joined us as we went along…It was a joyous day and you can see it in the video.

To stand out in this new era an act had to be original and have a unique look, but more than anything, I believe it takes a great song to launch a career. The Parachute Club had one of those, right out of the box, with “Rise Up.”

LORRAINE SEGATO I’m still very surprised to see how important that song has been to so many lives. It had so much to do with timing. At that point, Canadian radio was focused on things like Loverboy and Bryan Adams. When “Rise Up” came out it was a summer song, summer ’83 with this upbeat soca groove, kind of reminding you of Trinidad, of carnival. It had a singable melody and a celebratory groove. It was partially the song, partially the video. It was identifiably Toronto with the diversity of people. The song became this anthemic call to shared power for any group that felt disenfranchised. If you feel that you’re not being heard, not being represented, “Rise Up” is one of those songs that is inclusive of everything you are. It was timing, luck and the convergence of video and a new style of music. Daniel Lanois’ production had a lot to do with making the song appealing.

“Rise Up,” which won the 1984 Juno for Single of the Year, was the first in a number of hit videos for the Parachute Club. The band collaborated with director Ron Berti for “Love Is Fire,” winning the Juno for Video of the Year in 1987.

MARTHA AND THE MUFFINS, A.K.A. M+M

Another era-defining band that Daniel Lanois worked with was Martha and the Muffins, whose 1979 hit “Echo Beach” established them worldwide, before video was considered an important tool in building a career. Martha Johnson talks about that first video experience.

MARTHA JOHNSON I remember we had pretty much nothing to do with its planning. We shot it in London right around the time “Echo Beach” started climbing the U.K. charts. Video was very new to the record business then and the video crew, including the director, were all probably flying by the seat of their pants.

“Echo Beach” was directed by Russell Mulcahy, who went on to direct videos for Duran Duran, Rod Stewart, Def Leppard and Elton John, as well as films and TV series. But they found their match creatively working with director Bob Fresco on videos like “Black Stations/White Stations” and “Cooling the Medium.” Martha talks about Fresco.

MARTHA JOHNSON Later on…we had a lot of creative input. Bob Fresco was the most inventive director we worked with. He had lots of interesting ideas and liked to experiment like we did.

Martha’s partner, Mark Gane, talked about their work with the director of these two innovative videos.

MARK GANE Bob had a 1940s Hollywood cameraman’s special effects manual from which we got a lot of ideas, like how to use miniature scale models, shooting through water sandwiched between glass panes and so on. The creative process genuinely excited him and his enthusiasm was infectious for everyone involved. As grown-ups doing this kind of thing for a living, it was kind of marvellous!

Here’s Martha’s memory of one of the videos they did together.

MARTHA JOHNSON We got the idea for the upside-down room in “Black Stations/White Stations” from the 1951 Fred Astaire movie Royal Wedding, where Fred dances up the walls and across the ceiling. In our video, the poor guy who looks like he’s sitting at the table on the floor was actually strapped to a chair that was fastened to the ceiling. We kept asking him if he was okay. He always said “yes” so we would keep shooting.

When Martha and I decided to become a duo, it seemed like an opportune time to shed the weight of the band’s past and for me to escape being called a “muffin”…in retrospect changing the name was a foolish thing to have done…most fans liked the original name better, and many casual listeners never realized that “Echo Beach” and “Black Stations/White Stations” were by the same people.

Mark Gane, M + M

I wondered what the wackiest thing they had done to make a video was.

MARTHA JOHNSON To get a shaky camera effect we strapped the camera to a clothes dryer in spin cycle.

Mark recalls the band’s relationship with Much, starting in the early days of the network.

MARK GANE Much back then had the feeling of a small family of committed people who genuinely loved music in a non-corporate atmosphere of excitement and innovation. We received a lot of support for several years from MuchMusic and it had a crucial role in our mid-’80s success. Of course the reverse was true as well. If your videos didn’t get playlisted, which happened to us during the ’90s, it was the kiss of death for your album in Canada. You just got buried. That was when I felt that MuchMusic had become too corporate, too powerful and there needed to be alternatives. Then the internet came along.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Proving that you didn’t need to have a budget in the tens of thousands to find a home on MuchMusic, a $400 video, shot on the streets of Toronto caught the attention of the programming committee, the group that met weekly to decide what would be aired on Much. We decided to immediately put it into a significant rotation. We were excited to get behind the Pursuit of Happiness, an indie band led by Edmonton singer Moe Berg and their wonderful tongue-in-cheek rock ’n’ roll song “I’m an Adult Now.”

Manager Jeff Rogers, who had been working with Honeymoon Suite, talked about how he came to manage the band.

JEFF ROGERS With Honeymoon Suite, it was, “How can I look like a rock star?” With the Pursuit of Happiness, it was, “How can I not look like a rock star, but still do this?” Their first video was them busking on the street and it was the equivalent of a viral video on YouTube. Everyone loved it and everyone talked about it. I was at MuchMusic and editor Joni Daniels asked if I’d consider managing her friend’s band and I said, “No, I don’t care who they are, I don’t want to manage them.” I was working on a movie called Hearts of Fire with Bob Dylan, and I was the “rock consultant,” making $400 a week and I didn’t want to blow that. She said, “Please come see them tonight at Larry’s Hideaway; Erica [Ehm] will be there to interview them,” so I said, “Okay, what are they called?” She said, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” and I said, “Are you kidding? I love the Pursuit of Happiness. I can’t believe they don’t have a manager.”

Steve Anthony with Kris Abbott and Moe Berg of the Pursuit of Happiness

Moe Berg recalls the casual way the video came to be.

MOE BERG I had an old friend in town named Nelu Ghiran who was a film director. He suggested we shoot a video for one of the songs, more for something to do than anything else…We cobbled together some friends as extras but mainly wandered around Toronto looking for cool places for me to “mime” the song. We set up the main shoot on Queen Street West near the old Bamboo Club. It was all guerrilla film-making, no permits, no makeup. Just a director, producer, cameraman and sound man.

Moe tells how the street to the screen wasn’t such a leap in those days.

MOE BERG Once the clip was finished, we walked into Much, which you could do at that time, and dropped off the master, hoping it would end up being screened a time or two on City Limits, which as you well know, was the alternative music show at the time. The next day, someone named Morgen called me to say that not only was it going to be played on City Limits, it was going into regular rotation. Again, this was at a time when Much’s programming was more open and breaking bands was part of their ambition. That pretty much got the TPOH train onto the tracks and things began to happen very quickly from there. I remember begging the Rivoli to let us do our own show there, really humiliating myself. They finally relented on the condition that we do it with a co-headliner. In the time between that deal and the show, the clip had begun to air. The Rivoli show was completely sold out and getting gigs ceased to be a problem.

After a couple of record deals broke down in the negotiation stage, they finally clicked with an A&R person who got it.

MOE BERG Kate Hyman [from Chrysalis in New York] came to see the band play in a terrible fern bar in Winnipeg during one of their minus thirty cold snaps. She offered us a deal shortly thereafter, god bless her, and we recorded our debut with Todd Rundgren in the summer of 1988.

Being able to support bands in their infancy was very satisfying and it fit with Much’s self-image at the time. Here’s Moe’s take on the connection.

MOE BERG I think the reason a lot of people connect us with MuchMusic is that we both came of age at around the same time…This was the start of indie bands being able to make records and videos and get national attention. I think it paved the way for other bands without labels to do the same thing. There are a handful of videos that were unique to MuchMusic that gave it an identity.

DALBELLO

While Sass Jordan, Colin James, Kim Mitchell and Barenaked Ladies expressed feelings ranging from mild bemusement to complete distaste for their own videos, artists like Jane Siberry and Gowan embraced the opportunity for a new means of expression. Lisa Dal Bello, who performed as Dalbello, was firmly in the latter group, seeing video as more than an advertisement for a record.

LISA DAL BELLO The idea that you could…stretch out your song, I never thought of it as a commercial vehicle at the time, but rather an extension of creative expression. You could put into pictures what you saw when you were composing those words and building that sonic landscape. It was open season.

To get to the point where she had the freedom to pursue that artistic vision, Lisa had to go through the record company mill.

LISA DAL BELLO MCA…created a new label, one that I was kind of shocked by, they said I was a “dance artist.” Years later I remember hearing Alanis [Morissette] say that she’d gone through the same branding without understanding.

Unsurprisingly, the pressure to use sexuality was ever present.

LISA DAL BELLO Right from my first album cover that was often the case. “Why don’t you pull that strap down and why don’t you bend lower?”…I was only seventeen so I was very uncomfortable and without…the emotional, experiential vocabulary to express that. You’re partially fearful…it took a long time for me to be able to draw that line because every time I did, there would be pushback. “Well, you’re really hard to deal with,” they would say. “Why don’t you wear something to show your boobs like Kate Bush?” I was really tiptoeing and didn’t have a sense of self yet.

Lisa sang extensively on Alannah Myles’ debut album and I remember how effortless her work was and her comfort in the studio.

LISA DAL BELLO My safest place really was in the world of studio session work where there was no tipping of the hat to one’s gender at all; you just arrived and did your stuff.

Her first album for MCA resulted in a Juno for Most Promising Female Vocalist of the Year; the unexpected outcome was that she was let go by her label, because of the cost of making the record.

LISA DAL BELLO I went into [legendary movie mogul and chairman of MCA] Lou Wasserman’s office and begged, “Please don’t drop me,” and he said, “Hey sweetheart, it’s just business.”

Two albums later, Lisa dropped her first name, and as Dalbello, recorded the album whomanfoursays for Capitol Records in 1984 with David Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson producing. Musically, the album was a creative leap and the accompanying videos were arresting and highly original. Lisa recalls one idea she had that didn’t float with the label.

LISA DAL BELLO For the first video I had gone to Capitol in L.A. and proposed a young up and coming Canadian director, David Cronenberg! They laughed me out of the room.

Once she did make the video for “Gonna Get Close to You,” Lisa went for the less obvious.

LISA DAL BELLO While that may have seemed on the surface to be about someone obsessed and following someone else, there was a second layer of meaning which was, it was my own shadow following me. It was a battle of the inner self and the superficial self.

LUBA

I think a lot of people would be surprised to know that the Juno Female Vocalist of the Year for three years running, from 1985 to 1987, was Luba Kowalchyk, a pop singer and songwriter from Montreal with a very soulful voice who had a string of hits through the ’80s in Canada. The same month that MuchMusic launched in ’84, Luba released “Let it Go,” an infectious pop anthem that featured her powerful vocals. The video was a playful Bob Fresco—directed piece that was set, via chroma key, in a blimp. Luba still shakes her head at that video.

LUBA All those strange-looking people on some sort of blimp. It wasn’t my idea. My mother still thought—“How did you get up in the balloon?” Those little girls with the weird hats, the spaceship hats. I have no idea [who they were]. I came and they were there. Do you remember those hats? Those girls kept twisting and turning their heads…there was a rotor blade…I swore somebody was going to have their head chopped off. There wasn’t much room on that so-called blimp. It was so bloody hot. We were on a sound stage; it was the middle of summer in Toronto and it was brutal…but it was fun in its own bizarre way.

Looking back at the video, I can see what Luba is saying. Odd, inexplicable characters were fairly common in music videos, but the one thing a label and a director usually made sure they got right was the artist’s name.

LUBA What struck me was on the blimp…I have this logo with a long ‘L’ and the ‘uba’ came on top. For some reason they painted the L the same colour as the balloon so it looks like ‘UBA.’ I mean, can you at least get that right? It was a comedy of errors.

Luba was in a stronger position when it came to choosing who she’d work with for subsequent videos, including the one for “How Many (Rivers to Cross).” Like any good relationship, a lot comes down to chemistry.

LUBA The label kept pressing me to work with this one director but I found all the videos were very similar and I wanted to do something different so they sent me to London. I met a few different directors but one I really hit it off with—he was born in Canada, lived in Australia and ended up in London…from the moment I sat down it was like I knew him; we hit it off.

The director was Gregg Masuak. Luba talks about how they clicked.

LUBA Gregg is always laughing. Everything is positive and bright. I kind of feed off that; I can get a little dark and depressive, especially in my music.

I was curious about the origins of some of the style choices Luba made for the “How Many” video and for her stage performances.

LUBA The braid was my sister’s; my mother got sick of brushing her hair all the time…I used to dance in a Ukrainian dance group so we would have to wear a braid…gloves, probably because I used to bite my nails…I’d go to these vintage stores, collect gloves…I always liked the look of gloves, kind of Audrey Hepburn…we didn’t have stylists back then…I’m sure the label would have liked something a little less layered, clothing-wise…I loved long coats; I liked the way they flowed, the movement on stage. They would’ve preferred me in a wet T-shirt.

Luba and J.D. Roberts

The video shoot was, as is so often the case, not without unforeseen difficulties.

LUBA It was bloody cold [standing] in that water. There was a day outdoors and a day indoors…they had fake rain.

One of the most memorable aspects of the video is the gospel singers on the beach. Surely, that was fairly straightforward to shoot.

LUBA Those choir girls—they were supposed to be a gospel choir but they had no rhythm. They couldn’t even clap in time. Gregg was getting aggravated. I was getting aggravated. They staged some sort of walkout; “no, they don’t want to come out. They don’t want to clap.”

Even with the fake rain and dodgy clapping, an arresting performance by Luba helped “How Many” win the Juno for Video of the Year in 1986.

Luba, M+M and the Parachute Club all shared the guiding hand of producer Daniel Lanois, who went on to produce Peter Gabriel, U2, Bob Dylan and Neil Young, among others. Luba spoke of her experience working with Lanois.

I remember him warming up like it was for a soccer match, and he’s a big soccer fan, jumping and jumping. I said, “Alan, save some of this.” He said, “I’m just getting going!” He’s got that thing in his eye. He wanted it.

Rob Quartly (on Alan Frew of Glass Tiger)

LUBA I would consider him a musical genius. He was the first producer I worked with. He just had the strangest things going on in the studio. He’d make a loop with tape and have it going through rooms—it was bizarre…but the sounds that he was getting would be super incredible, so different, very experimental. He was really good with vocals—very patient.

Luba talked about visiting MuchMusic, where she was a major star.

LUBA I remember the first day I stepped foot on your premises. I was so nervous I was going to explode. It was new for everybody. It must have been exciting to work there…and later, toward the end of the ’80s, it was like coming back to family or to very close friends. I just felt very comfortable.