By mid-1971 I began to feel that I truly had a record company. We had six albums in the market and had just gotten our first small taste of a radio hit with Syrinx’s “Tillicum.” Bruce’s High Winds, White Sky was now in stores and it was pretty obvious that it was going to be bigger than his first release. Murray was off to a great start with Songs from the Street and Luke’s album was getting lots of interest. On the management side, things were even better. Both Bruce and Murray were drawing strong crowds wherever they played, and I was beginning to think that Bruce could move into theatres if I could put all the pieces together properly.
Around this same time I was approached by a young man from Vancouver named Shelly Siegel. Shelly was a few years younger than me and may not have weighed much more than one hundred pounds. He told me he had been watching my label and thought I should open a West Coast office, a move that would have been unprecedented for a small independent label in Canada. I immediately liked Shelly. Although small in stature he had a big, passionate enthusiasm for music and the music business, as well as a compelling pitch for why I should hire him to work for True North in Vancouver.
I was always interested in being seen as a national company, but money was tight, and also I had the local CBS promo reps looking after things for me in the West. Still, it was clear that Vancouver, along with Calgary and Edmonton, was the future. If I wanted to be successful in what was the fastest-growing area of the country it would be important to have more control over what was happening several thousand miles from Toronto. Shelly was willing to come on board for next to nothing, which was about all I could afford, so I made a deal to hire him and open an office in Vancouver. Shelly would become True North’s West Coast promotion man.
The move paid off right away. Shelly tipped me to a tour that was about to happen throughout British Columbia and Alberta with two great groups: the Everly Brothers and Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen. The tour promoters were looking for another act and expressed interest in Murray. I jumped at the opportunity and quickly closed the deal, not only for Murray to do the tour but also to travel on the tour buses that the Everlys were using. This was one tour I was going to have to go on. The Everly Brothers were heroes of mine, and their records were indelibly imprinted on my mind: “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” and “Cathy’s Clown,” among others. No way was I going to miss this. I was also quite interested in Commander Cody, who was riding the charts with his novelty hit “Hot Rod Lincoln,” as fine a song about a car as you will ever hear.
The tour turned out to be both an amazing and an enlightening experience. I was surprised to discover that Don and Phil Everly not only didn’t speak to each other, they wouldn’t even stay in the same hotels. They even had separate tour buses. These weren’t the elaborate tour buses we associate with rock stars today. They didn’t have bunks, kitchens, couches, toilets, and TVs. These were just plain old coaches, the kind that Greyhound uses to move travellers from town to town. Still, any kind of bus beat crowding into a variety of cars – the kind of transportation I had become accustomed to since getting into music management. In the sixties, it wasn’t unusual for the members of a band to squeeze into a station wagon, jam a few amps and instruments in the back, travel from Toronto to Ottawa to play a gig, and then drive home the same night.
So for the entire tour, day after day, I would watch the Everly Brothers go their separate ways, then each evening hit the stage, give each other a big hug, and proceed to play some of the most amazing songs ever recorded. Their harmonies, which had even influenced the Beatles, gave me and the audience goosebumps every night. The shows were magic, and the fact that they made it onto the stage each night without killing each other was even more astounding.
The pianist in the Everlys’ band was Warren Zevon, a fine songwriter who would go on to have his own solo career and a huge hit single with “Werewolves of London.” Murray and Warren became fast friends during the tour. Warren loved Murray’s song “Honky Red,” and Murray was very fond of Zevon’s “Carmelita.” They agreed that as soon as they had the opportunity, each would record the other’s song. A year later Murray recorded “Carmelita” on his self-titled album, and as far as I know he was the first performer of any stature to record a cover of one of Warren’s songs. Warren never recorded “Honky Red,” but I did have the pleasure of hearing him play it on the tour.
During the time that I hired Shelly Siegel and Murray joined the Everly Brothers’ tour, I started thinking about Murray’s second album. CBS in the U.S. had an option on Murray, with the right to release his next album there as part of True North’s deal with CBS Canada. I thought he had the right stuff to make it in America and I was determined to give it my best shot. I started to put big pressure on CBS Canada to live up to the option I had given them and they responded. With their help I got in touch with Epic Records, the American label in the CBS family that was often used to release non-domestic acts. I had meetings with Walter Yetnikoff, head of CBS International; Ron Alexenburg, head of Epic; and Don Ellis, VP of A & R. All three seemed ready to work with us. The main topic of conversation was picking a producer for the new record. My goal was to make the American company a part of the process so it wouldn’t feel like we were just dropping a finished record on their already full laps. Nothing had been decided but we were well ahead of the game, seeing how Murray wasn’t quite ready to start recording in any case.
One day not long after the Everly Brothers tour had finished, I got a call from Shelly. From a jail in Vancouver. He’d been busted for marijuana possession. In those days, if you had more than a single joint the police would charge you with trafficking, and that was what they were going to do to Shelly. I arranged to pay his bail but his days working for True North were drawing to a close by his own choice. He was a wonderful person and I would have gladly kept him on, but he was totally consumed with his possible criminal conviction and wanted to spend as much time as possible fighting the charges. I was a bit shocked by the whole episode. It made me examine my own conduct more closely and although I didn’t change my behaviour right away, I became somewhat more circumspect when it came to drugs.
As disappointed as I was about Shelly deciding his True North days were over I was secretly relieved. As little as I was paying Shelly, it was still more than I could afford. I didn’t replace Shelly, but I certainly had a new love and respect for the West that I owe in part to my close relationship with him. I stayed in touch with him and we remained good friends. On trips to L.A., which is where he eventually moved, I would often stay at his place. He did eventually beat the drug charge and went on to have a very successful career in the music business. He was one of the original founders of Mushroom Records, which signed several great bands including Chilliwack and Heart. With Heart, led by Ann and Nancy Wilson, he had three consecutive international hit singles in 1976: “Dreamboat Annie,” “Magic Man,” and “Crazy on You.” I like to think that while I was learning from Shelly, he was picking up the odd thing or two from me. Shelly’s career tragically ended in 1979 when, at only thirty-two, he died of a brain aneurysm.
By early 1972, the time had come for Bruce to play larger halls across Canada, the so-called “soft-seaters” like Toronto’s Massey Hall, Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, all of which had capacities of around 2,500 seats. But it’s one thing to decide it’s time to make the move and another to figure out how to make it happen. With both Murray and Bruce consistently playing and selling out the Riverboat, I had been spending a lot of time with the club’s owner B. C. (Bernie) Fiedler, whom I’d known since the sixties. Bernie knew how successful both of my artists were becoming because he was often the one at the door selling the tickets! It was impossible to spend any time in Yorkville and not know about the city’s most famous folk club and its owner. Both were local institutions. Going back to my time with the Paupers and Kensington Market, I would frequently pop my head into the club to check out the acts playing at the Boat. They were always great. I knew Bernie was promoting many of Gordon Lightfoot’s concerts, so I approached him with the idea of presenting Bruce at Massey Hall. One thing led to another and the talk turned to doing a cross-Canada tour. Bernie came up with the idea of involving Marty Onrot, who was at this time one of Canada’s top concert promoters. Together they cooked up a proposal that covered the right cities and right venues, as well as appropriate artist guarantees, percentages, and promotion. I liked what I saw, so we worked out the details for a tour that would hit most of the country during November of 1972.
At the same time, Bruce was putting together the songs that would form his third album, Sunwheel Dance. We would eventually do ten albums in nine years; the tenth, 1979’s Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws, contained the international hit “Wondering Where the Lions Are.” Not that Bruce really needed a hit single to have a successful career, but it certainly made my job a lot easier, although maybe just a bit harder as well. But that’s a different story and was still eight years in the future.
During the time I was working out the tour details with Fiedler and Marty, Fiedler had started talking to me about possibly getting involved in my management company. I was interested. As well as things were going for me, when you come right down to it, I didn’t really have an organized business. Sure, I had an office, but I was always chronically short of money, and certainly didn’t have a clue about accounting and bookkeeping. I was just plain disorganized – and I knew it. The important things were being done and I was even ahead of the curve when it came to the music and artists, but when it came to banking, financial records, and other items that a growing business required, there was no question that I needed help. I could also see that the headlining concert business, at least for my acts, was where we had to be pointed, and with all the things I had on my plate – from managing artists to music publishing, in addition to running a record label – I was more than just a bit busy. I also loved spending time in the recording studio, which meant there were plenty of nights when I just didn’t sleep. It wasn’t unusual for me to spend all day working in my office and then all night in a studio watching Gene produce our records and making whatever contributions I could to the recording process, requested or not.
So when Bernie said he wanted to get involved, I was intrigued by the idea. When he offered me some money, I became even more interested. My arrangement with Brazilian George had gone completely off the rails and I was ready to try something new. I decided to wait and see how the tour went. If it was successful and I enjoyed working with Fiedler, then I would take him up on his offer and form the partnership.
The tour went off without a major hitch. Not every show was a sellout but we did extremely well in all the right places, including a sold-out show at Massey Hall. I was impressed with the abilities of both Bernie and Marty. It wasn’t lost on me that Marty Onrot seemed to be doing much of the work, but that was part of Fiedler’s charm and also a trait that really appealed to me. What counted was the ability to bring good people into the picture who could get things done, not who actually did the heavy lifting. With the tour over I sat down with Bernie and we started to work out the details of our proposed partnership. Fiedler was to be represented in the final negotiations by a lawyer named Bernie Solomon. Later we would collectively be known as the Bernies, since Solomon became our company’s lawyer and the three of us would spend lots of time together. We would not throw everything into the same shared pot but in the end we’d have a lot of ground covered under one roof: artist management, concert promotion, a record company, music publishing, and the Riverboat, the leading club in the country for our kind of music. It promised to be a sweet arrangement if we could pull it off. On top of all that, Bernie was also going to give me $10,000. Money that I sorely needed.
But things in the music business are never straightforward. It’s not a business for the faint of heart. (Have I already told you that?)
Two incredibly distressing things happened almost simultaneously. First, Brazilian George served me with a lawsuit stating he was my legal partner. Second, the tax department claimed that Fiedler owed a significant amount of money in unpaid taxes. I had to move quickly to decide what to do under these extraordinary circumstances. I ignored whatever caution I had left in me and went forward with the deal with Bernie. I remember thinking right after we signed our contract that I wasn’t really sure whether Bernie and I had become partners or whether the government of Canada and Brazilian George had just become partners. Either way, things were changing once again and I leapt into the void. I never once regretted the decision to join forces with Fiedler, although we had our share of stormy times before our partnership ended in 1982. But it was a great ten-year run.
One of the things that came up almost immediately was that Bernie was now unable to come up with the full ten thousand. I took five with a promise to receive the other half later. I never did get the other five but that was my choice. I let Bernie off the hook one day when we were playing chess in our office. By then it didn’t matter much to me as things were moving along quite nicely.
Our management company was called Finkelstein-Fiedler and our first two clients were Bruce and Murray. The first thing we did was take Murray to New York for meetings with CBS. Our plan was to finish the work I had started with them, notably finding a producer for Murray’s next album. Until then, I didn’t have a contract with Murray, but Fiedler wanted our new company to have one and I could see how it was a prudent move. Although the details had been worked out and approved by Murray before we left Toronto, New York was the first opportunity we had to be together, so we signed the contract at a pharmacy in Manhattan, where we had it notarized. (It was not unusual for pharmacists to be notary publics in New York.)
The drugstore was just around the corner from the Russian Tea Room, where we were to have lunch with the three senior executives from CBS, Walter Yetnikoff, Ron Alexenburg, and Don Ellis. At that time in my life, the Tea Room was one of the most beautiful restaurants I had ever been in. I loved it. The decor was spectacular and the food was great. For many years, if I happened to be in New York on a Wednesday, I would go there for lunch, as it was the only day of the week that the restaurant served pelmeni, a Russian delicacy. Pelmeni, Russian Tea Room–style, are little dumplings served in a chicken broth into which a liberal dollop of sour cream and mustard have been blended. For my money, this is one of the great dishes in the world.
But pelmeni wasn’t the only thing cooking at lunch that day. We had been kicking around the idea of hiring Ed Freeman to produce Murray’s album and now the idea seemed even better, seeing as how Ed had just produced Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a single that had been number 1 in the U.S. for four straight weeks and would turn out to be the record of the year. Ed was interested and he was available to start work on the project right away. It seemed like a great opportunity, providing the chemistry between Ed and Murray was right.
Walter Yetnikoff was one of the true characters in our business. He had a reputation for being ruthless and capable of erupting at the drop of a hat, and for having a ferocious drug habit. None of these things seemed like a problem to me, and my own experiences with Walter were always positive.
Just after Murray’s second album was released in the States we encountered problems crossing the border on our way to a show at Passim, a famous coffee house located in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In those days we never had proper visas. This was entirely out of ignorance of the procedure and it was usually easy enough to just go through American immigration and customs. It was nerve-wracking but I just didn’t know how to approach getting the job done properly. A failing on my part for sure, but so far so good. We’d never had a problem although from time to time it was a bit of a nail biter.
On this occasion, after we landed at Boston’s Logan Airport, Murray was thoroughly questioned at the immigration office, located just inside the terminal. He gave them our usual story – he was just visiting friends and would be in town for a few days. Although the immigration officer finally let him into the country, he issued Murray a B1 visa for only two days. The visa would then have to be stamped by Canadian customs authorities upon his return. Our problem was that Passim was a four-night engagement. I had cleared immigration ahead of him, and when Murray and I met up at the luggage carousel we decided not to risk having a run-in with the U.S. government.
I sent Murray immediately back to Toronto and I did something I rarely ever did during my career: cancel a show. The owner of Passim, Bob Donlin, understood and was even sympathetic (and Murray would play at the club several more times in the future). Then I got Walter on the phone and explained the situation. I knew he was a lawyer and thought he might be able to help us. Walter was willing to see me the moment I arrived in New York.
A few hours later I was sitting in his office. Walter called in Gary Baker, one of CBS’s in-house lawyers, and said, “This schmuck needs a visa, give him a hand.” Gary explained the visa process to me and started a petition for us to get one, sponsored by CBS. About thirty days later, Murray had a visa. I ended up using Gary Baker to do visa work for me for many years. From that time on I made sure that my acts always had the proper visas, not only for America but for every country in which they toured. Today there is information on the visa process readily available and the Canadian Federation of Musicians will help artists get them. But back then, the Canadian music industry was still in its infancy and these kinds of legalities were hard to figure out. The real point of the story is that Walter was there when I needed him. Although we were never close friends, I have fond memories of him and I’d take him, with all his excesses and his fearsome reputation, over many of the people posing as music industry professionals in the business these days.
Murray’s second album, simply called Murray McLauchlan, turned out to be a good one. While in New York recording the album Murray was inspired to write “Farmer’s Song.” The recording was pretty much finished by the time he wrote it and it could easily have been left off the album, but fortunately he and Ed Freeman decided to give it a last-minute shot. It was the simplest recording on the album and was about as close to a solo number as you could get without it being just guitar and voice. “Farmer’s Song” would go on to be the biggest single of Murray’s career, selling well over 50,000 copies in Canada alone, which in those days made it a gold record. The funny thing is that it wasn’t even the A-side of the single. For those who may not remember, singles were seven-inch records with two sides. The A-side was always the song intended to be the hit, while the B-side was often just a throwaway number. Sometimes artists and record companies deliberately put another potential hit song on the B-side, hoping for a “two-sided hit.” That’s because occasionally DJs, music directors, or program directors would flip over a single and play the B-side.
Here’s our story. The first single was picked after much consultation with CBS in Toronto and New York. We decided it would be a song called “Lose We” with “Farmer’s Song” on the B-side, a decision I fought hard for. I thought that maybe after “Lose We” became a hit, we might be able to get some mileage from “Farmer’s Song” on country radio. Even though Murray wasn’t a traditional country artist, I thought commercial country radio programmers might like the song and the natural country twang in Murray’s voice.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to wonder what was wrong with all of us, especially me, that we didn’t make “Farmer’s Song” the A-side from the start. Or, if you’re more charitable, you might marvel at how smart we were to have made “Farmer’s Song” available, despite the fact that our record distributors on both sides of the border didn’t have any interest in it. Well, there’s an old saying that goes something like this: “If I said yes to everything I’d said no to, and no to everything I’d said yes to, things would turn out just about the same.”
Let’s just leave it at that, but the B-side was there by choice, and it turned out to be the best B-side of my career. “Lose We” was getting a bit of top-forty AM radio airplay, which was an improvement over anything on Murray’s first album, but it wasn’t exactly lighting up the phones. Finally we began to pay more attention to “Farmer’s Song.” I was all over the CBS Canada promo staff to get radio programmers to listen to the B-side and I started working the phones myself, calling everyone I could get hold of at country radio. Our first break came after a DJ named Ted Daigle at Ottawa’s leading country station started playing it and reporting loads of requests. It didn’t take long to spread the record to more stations, although there were certainly lots of holdouts at country radio, especially from those programmers who were into image, as opposed to music. By that I mean they were into playing the artist, not the song – no matter how good the record was, they just weren’t going to play a folk singer from Toronto on their stations.
But things really began to take off in Canada when a few top-forty pop stations started playing the record and listeners began requesting it, as had happened at the country stations. Soon plenty of people were going into their local record stores and buying both the single and the album. “Farmer’s Song” was off and running. Murray had his hit, and I was over the moon. The record went top ten on all of the big three radio formats of the era – country, top-forty, and adult contemporary. True North had its first-ever gold record. We would end up with over forty of them before it all ended, but for me none ever felt as sweet as this one.
Murray would go on to have many other hits, even though making hit singles wasn’t really his game. And you could say the same about True North Records. But we all liked hearing our music on the radio.
Sadly, I couldn’t break “Farmer’s Song” in the U.S. After Epic released “Lose We” with little result, the company pretty much gave up on the album. When “Farmer’s Song” began climbing the charts in Canada, I flew down to New York for a morning meeting at Epic, to ask them to consider working “Farmer’s Song” for us. This was during the time of Epic’s major involvement in Gamble and Huff’s wildly successful label, Philadelphia International, the home of the O’Jays and Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes. They were having number-one records, one after another, with songs like “Backstabber,” “Love Train,” and “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” Not only was radio full of these Epic recordings but it was also the time of the Spinners, who were in the middle of a run of great songs like “I’ll Be Around,” “Could It Be I’m Falling in Love,” and “One of a Kind (Love Affair).” I loved all of these records, and it certainly wasn’t lost on me that I was not exactly going to be the guy to fill the pipeline with more of the same. In other words, it wasn’t the best time to be sitting with a successful, hard-nosed record executive in his Manhattan office telling him that he should get excited by a record called “Farmer’s Song” that wasn’t exactly pop, rock, or country. Which, to record executives, means it’s neither fish nor fowl. Still, I was going to give it my best shot.
When I walked into Ron’s office that morning, he had his Gucci loafers up on his desk with the sound system at ten playing “Love Train” by the O’Jays. Ron was likeable but he could also be abrasive. Before we could get into a real discussion about my reason for being there he took a call and abruptly left to attend a meeting upstairs. We agreed to meet again at two that afternoon. With a little time to kill I did what any respectable person would do. I went to the Gucci store around the corner on Fifth Avenue and bought my first pair of Guccis, in brown suede, which I wore back to CBS. When we reconvened in his office at two, I put my new shoes on Ron’s desk. He burst out laughing and asked what he could do for me.
Ron didn’t feel that he could do much with “Farmer’s Song” out of the New York office without the help of their country division in Nashville. He agreed to set up a meeting for me with the top country label executives and we would decide the next move based on the results. I flew to Nashville that same evening.
Epic’s Nashville division was the home of the great country artist Charlie Rich, of “Behind Closed Doors” fame. The guys in Nashville were courteous and seemed to be interested but I could tell this was going to be an uphill battle. Murray’s style just wasn’t going on in Nashville at that time. The “Americana” sound, as it would come to be known, would take another thirty-odd years to come to Nashville and was at best only a distant rumour during my meeting there. Murray was truly on the cutting edge of something new and exciting. A mix of country, folk, and rock, but Nashville wanted lots of twang. Epic gave the song a modest shot but nothing really came of it.
Still, Murray did have his first hit in Canada and his reputation started to grow in the U.S. Looking back, it saddens me that I was unable to get that record off the ground in the States, but then, if the music business teaches you anything, it’s to be prepared for disappointment even when you’re having some success. So, even while we were receiving our gold single in Canada, I was feeling let down by what seemed like an obvious failure to get that song charted south of the border.