(most recently updated on January 14th 2010)
Photo credit: Dave Hampshire
I was born in 1950 in Vancouver, British Columbia. I began singing professionally at the age of 12. My band, Trooper, has become both legendary and notorious and has, at this point, performed in nearly every city, town and village in Canada. I’ve written or co-written well over 200 songs – 100 of which have been recorded and released, a dozen of which have topped the charts. I’ve received multiple song writing awards for most of those hits and – possibly my favourite award – a West Coast Juno for “Best Male Vocalist”.
Over the years, Trooper has released 10 albums, been awarded 5 gold and 11 platinum plaques comprising millions of sales in Canada, enjoyed a dozen top-ten hits, sold-out coliseums across the country, and been honoured with numerous awards and accolades including a Juno Award (Canada’s Grammy) for ‘Band of the Year’. I humbly suggest that we’ve earned our reputation as “Canadian rock heroes of the first order … the best performing band in Canada.” (The Vancouver Sun). We continue to perform between 50 and 100 sold-out shows every year.
Apart from the seemingly constant touring, I co-manage Trooper, and am the president of a small record company (Great Pacific Records) and a publishing company (P.O.P. Publishing). I’m currently under contract as an artist or songwriter with Universal Music, BMG Music, Warner Music, and Sony/ATV Publishing. I’m also an active member of SOCAN, ACTRA, AVLA and The American Federation of Musicians Local 145.
More recently I’ve become a best selling author (you can check out my book, “Here for a Good Time”, here) and a national radio and TV personality – logging frequent appearances on the CBC as both host and guest.
An unintended side-career as a political shit disturber has resulted in my wife and I spearheading a three-year campaign that resulted in the birth of Surrey’s first Fine Arts school, and an unsuccessful two-year effort to convince city hall to limit building heights in our hometown.
I’m an avid blogger, photographer, Apple fan/shareholder, amateur film-maker, graphic artist and web designer. I’ve been married for 38 years and live with my beloved and talented wife, Debbie, and my beloved and talented son, Connor, in White Rock, BC, the fish and chips capitol of the world.
I am active on Twitter as @ramcguire, on Flickr as ra1000, on TripAdvisor, also as ra1000, and on Facebook, where I lurk under a pseudonym.
If you’d like to contact me, I will warn you in advance that my himself-at-ramcguire-dot-com email address is overseen by a maniacally protective gatekeeper. Even if you run this gauntlet, I apologize in advance for the strong possibility that I may not have the time to respond to you. If you’d like to interact with me, I encourage you to sign on to Twitter, where a small and friendly tribe of “followers” has developed.
This Site
ra mcguire dot com has been online, in one form or another, since 1996, when I began writing about my life on the road with Trooper and all those things that someone unfamiliar with that kind of life might find interesting.
My editors-in-chief are Debbie and Connor McGuire, who have helped and guided me with the direction of the site and its contents. I love and appreciate them both for this and a million other reasons.
In recent years the construction and maintenance of the site would have been impossible without the invaluable help and encouragement of Heather Uhl who also deserves my undying gratitude and appreciation.
This site is created on a MacBook Pro using Adobe Photoshop, TextEdit and Wordpress.
