When I was young, I believed there was an agency that monitored TV commercials in order to ensure that all of the claims made were true. As time passed, I began to realize that advertising was simply an unregulated free-for-all battle of competing claims, at least one of which was not true.

In 1962 I went to see Little Stevie Wonder at the Gardens Auditorium in Vancouver. Stevie was 12 years old at the time, and so was I. He stood awkwardly at centre stage and sang along with his records. There was no pretense about it. You could hear the needle drop on each track, and Stevie was the only performer on the stage. Everyone knew that he was just singing along – you could hear both his voice and the recorded original – but the audience understood that he wrote the songs and sang them on the records. He was the heart and soul of the tunes we loved, and we were honored to be in his presence.

Last week we opened for CCR. The week before we did the same for The Sweet. Both bands were paid very large sums of money to headline these shows. Neither of them featured the singer who sang (and in the case of CCR, wrote) their hits. (continue reading this post …)

After our Juno Awards thank-you speeches we were lead from the stage by a Juno hostess and ushered through a door at the back of the stage. Still buzzed from our victory – laughing and slapping each other on the back – it took us a moment to realize that we were walking noisily through the main kitchen of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. I still have a vivid memory of an oriental cook in white chef’s hat and uniform, staring at us curiously from behind an aluminum table. Elation turned to confusion as we realized we did not know where to go next. The five of us herded together alongside what we hoped was the back wall of the ballroom and eventually tumbled through the first exit door that presented itself. Flashes flashed and microphones were extended.

“How do you feel about winning the best group Juno?” I was asked.

“It’s fucking wonderful” I responded.

” ‘It’s wonderful’ said Trooper singer Ra McGuire at last night’s Juno Award ceremonies …” reported the Toronto newspaper headline the next day.

It has always annoyed me that I wasn’t quoted correctly. There is, of course, a HUGE difference between “fucking wonderful” and just “wonderful”.

The 2009 Junos took place in Vancouver tonight. I didn’t attend this year. Trooper has received seven Juno nominations – and won the “Best Group” award – but we’ve only attended twice. Once, in 1978, when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year” and in 1980 when we were up for both “Best Group” and “Album of the Year”.

We flew to Toronto for our first Junos when we were nominated for “Most Promising Group of the Year”. We arrived proudly in the Royal York ballroom which was decorated with large blown-up album covers of all the nominated artists, and saw that ours was the only cover that was, humiliatingly, conspicuous in its absence. The evening deteriorated further when the “Most Promising” award was presented to “The THP Orchestra”.

In 1978, we were one of five bands nominated for “Group of the Year”, but chose not to attend. Rush won that year. In 1979 we were nominated again for “Group of the Year” and we chose, again, to not attend. Rush won it again. In 1980, now simply following a comfortable tradition, we once again turned down the Juno organizer’s invitation to fly to the Toronto ceremonies. At first they tried to shame us into coming, which didn’t work. Finally, they broke down and told us that we were going to win at least one award. So we embarked on what was to become a great Trooper adventure that ended with, among other things, members of the band rolling, drunk and in white suits, in a Toronto hotel driveway with Burton Cummings. My personal most embarrassing Juno moment came that year when a young Vancouver friend shouted across a room filled with Canadian music-biz royalty.

“Ra McGuire!!” he shouted when he spotted me. “You’re BIG!!”

It’s funny that I still remember that. We’ve never returned to the Junos and, because the whole idea of them still makes me uncomfortably squirmy, I’ve only managed to watch them on TV two or three times in the intervening years. There have been a couple of occasions, however, when I would have enjoyed shouting back at Bryan Adams, who’s gone on to do quite well for himself.

I’ve had more to say about this (and other things) on Twitter. You can follow me, if you want, here.

It seems as though Ken never stops walking. We see him every time we walk the beach – and we walk at all hours of the day.

Tall, tanned, well-groomed and always wearing shorts despite the weather, he strides along the 2.2 kilometer promenade with the air of a man on his way to somewhere important. As the ever-present gulls hover overhead, we say “Good Morning” or “Good Afternoon” and Ken returns the greeting briskly in a british-tinged accent. Sometimes we just nod. Sometimes we raise a hand in a casual, regular-beachwalker salute.

This morning was cool, grey and threatening rain. Debbie and I wore sweaters, jackets and, in my case, a knit hat. Ken was wearing his shorts, as usual. We never talk, but each time I see him I’m reminded, as I was this morning, of the night the three of us sat, as strangers, in the White Rock city council chambers with a group of concerned and angry citizens. (continue reading this post …)

The thing looked like a designer kitchen utensil – like half an egg-beater sporting additional mysterious appendages and missing a handle. Although clearly made of metal, glinting as it did in the afternoon sun, the circle of thin graceful flame-shaped blades at one end appeared to float in the polaroid blue sky – the tops seemingly too thin to otherwise successfully support themselves. It was beautiful in a streamlined yet asymmetrical way. It was both magical and clearly mechanical. The four star-like projections under the metal flames were supported by two sets of delicate bracing arms, suggesting that without them the craft might fold in on itself and fall from the sky. There were clear and detailed markings under the long flat body. One of the shots was a close up. Neatly centered and laid out like a copyright notice on a Henkel knife – the unreadable characters were accompanied by small crests. Or were they vents? The four photos were astonishingly clear but their subject was too baffling to allow interpretation of the finely captured details.

“Charlie”, who had sent the photos to a national radio show but wished to remain anonymous, said he just wanted to know what the craft was. He was worried that the humming noise it made – “like” he said, “when you’re near very large power lines” – was detrimental to the health of his wife and their unborn baby. He would only say that he lived in Northern California.

In ten minutes I’d found a perfect CGI video recreation of the craft, moving around on a makeshift background – ostensibly proving that fakery was probable. Five more minutes took me to a website where a collection of disparate photos of the “Dragonfly Drones”, as they were now calling them, had been assembled – all slightly or significantly different from one another and all from supposedly unrelated sources. One set of photos depicted a craft of such confusing complexity that I grinned with delight. Why would anyone, terrestrial or otherwise, create such a byzantine mass of tangled airborne technology and what possible purpose could it serve? I flipped from my browser to check my mail.

Of course, it didn’t need to serve any other purpose than the garnering and sustaining of attention. The whole idea of the dragonfly drones had held mine for over half an hour. I downloaded the mysterious “CARET documents” that appeared to tie-in with the under-body hieroglyphics. They were beautifully drafted and intelligently presented. The diagrams were high-tech art – marred only by two penciled question marks and a few roughly drawn circles and arrows. I opened Photoshop and removed anything that appeared to be of human origin. I printed the five pages and stood them up against the wall at the side of my desk and then wondered what I would do with them.

Trooper recorded their first seven albums while under contract to MCA Records. In December of 2006, Universal Music (formerly MCA) released five of those albums to the iTunes Music Store where they can now be purchased and downloaded.

Two albums remain conspicuously absent from the digital music store. Trooper’s first album was not part of the iTunes offering, nor was the seventh, and last, album released by MCA/Universal.

In the non-digital world, products with marginal sales are discontinued. Manufacturing, shipping and storage expenses eclipse potential income. For this reason, the first and last MCA Trooper albums (ironically, both titled “Trooper”) have not been available in stores for years. But digital replicas of those albums are not encumbered by the brick-and-mortar paradigm. They require no warehouse space, no shipping – and can be cloned, like magic, from the master recordings. The tracks from the missing albums could have been prepared and uploaded with minimal additional effort. I am cursed with a mind that cannot help but ask why they weren’t.

I’ve emailed the record company asking them to upload the additional albums, but I am obliged to accept whatever action, or inaction they choose to take. Notwithstanding the fact that I wrote and sang the songs, spent months in the studio recording the albums and months on the road promoting them – Universal owns all seven records and can do whatever they want with them. This can include, sadly, making them disappear off the face of the earth forever.

Very few people understand the relationship between a band (or singer, or musician – the contract refers to us all as “The Artist”) and their record company. Many still believe that the artist owns and controls the recordings they make. In most cases, nothing could be further from the truth.

Most record company contracts ‘loan’ the artist money to record an album. In exchange for this recoupable loan (and promises of promotion and distribution), the record company takes ownership of the resulting recordings. The artist is promised a royalty – a small percentage of the retail price of the finished ‘product’. BUT … before the artist receives any “artist royalties”, they must first PAY BACK the record company the total cost of the recording (and, usually, the video) – not from the total profit on the sales but from their artist royalty. If you have not paid off your first album debt by the time your second album is released, the difference is simply brought forward and you continue to pay back the accumulated amount.

Although it feels like dropping single grains of sand into an ever-enlarging beach bucket, Trooper eventually, with the help of a greatest hits album that required minimal recording costs, paid back all of their recoupable loans. Nonetheless, we still do not own those recordings.

Many people would ask why someone would sign on to a contract like that.

Because, for years and years, it was the only game in town.

In 1994, “The Artist (get it now?) Formerly Known as Prince” inked the word “SLAVE” onto his face. He told the press that he had become “merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Brothers” (his record company).

In 2000, Courtney Love delivered a scathing, landmark rant to the Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment Conference in New York. She began by saying:

“Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software. I’m talking about major label recording contracts.”

She went on to say that:

“The system’s set up so that almost nobody gets paid.”

Most major recording artists rely on their major record labels for their major money, but, because Ms. Love had developed an income from films, she could afford to bite down hard on the hand that ostensibly fed her. Everyone with even a remote interest in the future of recorded music should take the time to read the transcript of her speech.

Prince and Courtney Love kicked open doors that have since been pinned wide open by a growing storm of discontent. The digital world now looms large and threatening over once arrogant and implacable RIAA executives. Not unlike Courtney Love, I have very little to lose by talking candidly about my former record companies. The royalties I receive have gone from pitiful to laughable and I haven’t had a new record hanging in the balance for many years. I have a list of grievances – real and possibly imagined – that could, no doubt, parallel hers. Like many of my peers, I believe that the reign of record company control over recorded music, and the artists who make that music, should and will end soon. I can say this with confidence and a reasonable certainty. But talk is cheap.

One way or another, Connor will be recording his first album this year. He’s been thinking a lot about how he’ll get it out to the world. Questions about the feasibility, morality, and, for that matter, longevity of record companies have become, suddenly, non-hypothetical.

As the old paradigm dies … what will rise to replace it?

Connor’s band, Anger and After, started to break up when their twenty-one year old drummer began devoting more time and attention to a twenty-something band with connections to a local recording studio. Just at the point where A&A had gig offers, he became double-booked – and chose the more mature band over his two seventeen-year-old Anger and After band mates.

Disheartened, Connor and Simon struggled through auditions. One young drummer brought his girlfriend and asked for a mid-audition break so he could smoke some pot. Another played, unaccompanied, the complete and extremely complex drum part from a Dillinger Escape Plan song.

With a new drummer failing to materialize, Simon became less and less committed to the idea of the band. He explained that his musical tastes were shifting toward more artistic and experimental music. One night he called Connor to say that he would be unable to attend the drummer audition planned for that evening because he was going to a concert by one of those artistic and experimental bands. Although the two of them had been best friends since grade six, their musical partnership ended that night.

Two years later, last Friday night, at a coffee shop in Crescent Beach, a standing-room-only crowd listened intently as Connor, acoustic guitar balanced on his lap, described one of the first songs he had ever written.

“I’ve revamped the chords a bit, but the words still suck.” he said, grinning.

Then he called his friend Simon to the stage to sing the song with him.

From the moment he said; “Hi, I’m Connor McGuire, I write my own songs”, he had the young, and usually fidgety, audience in complete pin-drop-quiet control. He played for an hour – just him and his guitar – interspersing his amazing songs with charming and engaging banter. The crowd cheered, whooped, whistled and hollered after every tune. He completely owned.

Just two years after the collapse of his first rock band, Connor has returned to the stage with a completely new, and improved, version of himself. He’s written a collection of heartbreakingly powerful songs – each new one better than the last. He’s taught himself finger picking and has profited from the classical guitar lessons he took. His singing has become natural and unaffected and his vocal phrasing amazes me.

Connor’s show at the Wired Monk on Friday was a watershed in his music career. He’s proven to himself that he can do this by himself. What he did on Friday can be replicated successfully on any stage anywhere.

On November 22nd, 1963, US President John F. Kennedy was shot dead as his motorcade slowed round a bend in Dallas’s Deeley Plaza. A short month later, a British group called the Beatles released their double-sided single “I Saw Her Standing There/I Wanna Hold Your Hand”, initiating what would soon be called Beatlemania. Six months earlier on June 13th, at the onset of a seemingly endless Fraserview summer, I turned 13 years old.

Every man in the sprawling Fraserview housing project was a Second War veteran, the father of three or more children and the unwilling but not ungrateful recipient of a lower than average income. These were contracted conditions of the rental agreement. The houses in the project shared four identical floor plans. There were kids everywhere.

At the time, I was the singer for the Epics. The group’s guitarist, Brian Graham was my best friend. Derek Solby, a Killarney High School wunderkind, played the drums and Ken (Tarpaper) Hynds was the sax player. Gerry Andrews played a Fender Jazzmaster, and, with his guitar swung out of the way, the electric organ. It was Gerry who hooked me up with another group – a Fraserview soul band that would soon be called “Little Ramon and the Enduros”.

Gerry had signed on with the nine-piece horn band and had recommended me to replace their diminutive but muscular singer Fuji Forchuk. The remaining musicians were a hard-core crew of soul music fanatics in their mid to late twenties. The singer that preceded Fuji, and who had remained attached, talisman-like, to the band, was Rick Cameron – a quintessential James Dean greaser and a member of the notorious Bobolink Gang. I met with Cameron alone in his kitchen one afternoon to discuss my role in the band – tempering my adolescent admiration of his rebellious cool and juvenile delinquent fashion sense with wary respect and an abject fear that he was probably well accustomed to. It was hard for me to believe that these guys were giving me the time of day – let alone a spot-lit place at the front of their soul revue.

Brian Henderson, the lead guitar player was the fastest, coolest and funkiest player I’d ever known. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, sported a blonde pompadour and played a Fender Telecaster. He was Fraserview’s Steve Cropper. The band’s manager, a burly, hard-assed, unpolished lout, was the drummer’s father. He would occasionally visit us in his dungeon-like basement – where we practiced – and deliver what he thought were inspirational pep talks, in the manner of the Commitments’ Jimmy Rabbit – but lacking the conviction, passion and intelligence. It was this man who announced dramatically, when Gerry and I had finally tired of his two-bit tyranny and given our notice;

“Singers and Guitar players are a dime a dozen.”

Paul, the sax playing Sal Mineo look-alike, taught me ‘the Continental’ – the cool and casual step with which all the players shifted, in perfect rhythmic synch, from side to side – the pivot executed at the drop of the left foot, and then the right.

Fuji Forchuk stayed on to deliver a final unforgettable basement command performance, so that I would be clear about what was expected of me. Wearing a tight white wife-beater over his dark muscular torso, he moved with animal grace and sang ferociously. In the musty basement darkness, lit by a single bare light bulb, he jumped, shook, gyrated and, at one point, rolled on the floor. The band’s manager nodded in told-you-so approval. Fuji was the best.

I watched in hopeless appreciation and dismay, knowing that my thirteen-year-old feet could never fill Fuji’s shiny, black, and lightening-fast shoes. I was convinced I lacked the cool, the charisma and the menacing command of the stage that characterized Fuji and his band-mates, and I was probably right. I was thirteen, five-foot-eight, weighed 110 pounds and could not, for the life of me, get my mother-cut curly hair to stay molded into the essential pompadour position – despite liberal applications of my Dad’s Brylcream. Worse yet, I was a nerdy smart kid at school – I had skipped a grade only two years prior – introverted, socially awkward and nearly always afraid that guys like Rick Cameron were going to beat me up for sport. But for all that, no one in this new band seemed to notice, or care.

At home, alone in my room, I nervously dropped the needle onto a borrowed James Brown LP, ready to begin transposing lyrics and fleshing out melodies. The music filled the room and I was transported to a dark, wild and erotic alternate universe. This was not the clean-cut radio music I knew and loved. This music was dangerous and dirty – too passionate and overt for Fraserview. Songs like “Please, Please, Please” and “Try Me” – unashamedly over-the-top soul ballads – were unlike anything I’d ever heard. A week went by and I was emulating every note and emotional vocal scratch that came from the throat of the man soon to become the ‘Godfather of Soul’.

Singing with a full horn section blowing thick, sweet and menacing chords behind me was thrilling. Jumping on to, and riding, the careening guitar hook of “I’ll Go Crazy” was an exhilarating vocal adventure that was different every night. The tight, staccato horn shots punctuated the funky groove like syncopated rifle shots and kicked into my back as I sang.

I learned to dance – in a fashion. I did the Continental with the band at the appropriate moments. I lost myself in the deep soul groove. I may not have mastered Fuji Forchuk’s moves, and no one ever invited me to throw in with the Bobolink gang – but for a brief groovin’ moment in the long summer of 1963 I was Little Ramon, a soul singer unaffected by the cruel and clumsy teenage reality of his otherwise un-soulful world.