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.

On March 28th 2007, after a bizarre month-long exchange of email, LP jacket information and two CDs – one from Japan and one a bootleg – Suzan from Universal Music assured me that, once the “metadata entry process” was completed and the “Digital Scheduling process” had “moved ahead”, she would give me a “targeted release date” for the first and last Trooper albums released on MCA/Universal. Counting the two months that have passed since then, it’s been three since I asked Trooper’s first record company to complete the seven-album MCA portion of Trooper’s iTunes catalogue. I emailed Suzan about this, again, today. I received an “out of the office” automated reply.

Back in February, Universal Canada quickly determined that the two albums in question were “not in the system”. They wrote and asked me if I had “finished CDs” of the albums that I could send to them. And the front and back cover artwork. And, uh … could you copy some information off your vinyl versions of the records and send us that too.

Fortunately, The last MCA album (the one that had no name – or any other information – on the cover) was re-released, in Japan only, on CD, and I had ordered one in the nineties. I sent it to Universal. The first “LP” – the orange one featuring the hideous seventies plexiglas construction – was never ‘officially’ released on CD. So I sent them a bootleg made by a fan.

Universal wasn’t hoarding these albums in a vault somewhere, refusing (or simply neglecting) to make them available. No one at the company knew they existed. It is brutally ironic, and fundamentally sad, that it is against the law to copy and share this collection of songs that cannot currently be purchased anywhere, from anyone.