Resource Notes

[PMH 9.2 (2014) 195-205] Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 doi:10.1558/pomh.v9i2.29459 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646

Brock Silversides Resource notes

Brock Silversides is Director of Media Commons University of Toronto as the University of Toronto. 130 St. George Street Toronto, ON Canada M5S 1A5 [email protected]

Canadian popular music resources can be found in numerous heritage and academic institutions scattered throughout Canada. One of the more important archival and special collections can be found in Media Commons at the University of Toronto. Toronto, the largest city in Canada, has traditionally been the centre of the nation’s music production, distribution, management, booking, record label head offices, live sound and lighting companies, event producers, scoring for films and television, advertising production, music journalism, and music broadcasting. It also boasts several colleges that provide training in the above activities, and is the location for much of the scholarly research in the field. Toronto is home to Can- ada’s largest community of musicians, the majority of the industry organizations (such as the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences), and the most active club scene. And as strong international business, cultural and educational net- works have developed around these related industries, the city is an important centre in global music circles. The University of Toronto is Canada’s largest university, and its library is ranked by the Association of Research Libraries as one of the top three academic libraries in North America (along with Harvard and Yale). This is due in no small part to its voluminous, rich and unique archival and special collections, many of which per- tain to popular music. Established in 2003, Media Commons is the library department tasked with acquiring, administering and preserving media-based resources for the University of Toronto community—both for teaching and research pur- poses. It is comprised of three sections—the circulating Audio-visual Library, the Microfilm Library, and the Media Archives. The mandate of the Media Archives section reads: ‘Media Archives acquires, preserves and makes available archival and special collection materials of Cana- dian national and regional significance relating to the audio-visual and media

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX. 196 Popular Music History communities, the entertainment industry, and popular culture. This includes, but is not limited to, historical and contemporary film/video production, animation, broadcasting, photographic arts, advertising, multimedia, and popular music production.’ The collections strategy is thus wide-ranging, and pertains to both the home-grown music scene, as well as to Canadians who have achieved a measure of success on the global scene. It is now opening up to international material as well. The archival fonds/collections in Media Commons are intended to document and provide primary source material for the three-pronged critical study of music as a creative and artistic process, as a business and industry, and also as an evolv- ing continuum of technologies. Archival collections are crucial for true scholarly research—how and why a musical production was created on a personal and technological level, how it was funded, marketed and disseminated, how it was received and how it affected musical trends as well as the industry and society. The finished works—whether a single song, an album, a televised concert or a video— are important to retain for posterity, but a researcher can only glean so much from them. Instead one needs to consult all the primary source documents gener- ated in the making of that final product as well as the various stages of production to fully understand the work and its milieu. Thus, the list of representative archival documents Media Commons seeks includes the following (both analogue and digital):

1. Textual: Correspondence, memos, corporate documents (incorporation, annual reports, employee records), contracts (production, recording, management, publishing, etc.), budgets, track sheets, editing notes, sheet music, lyric sheets, press kits/releases, published reviews/profiles, record company catalogues, Ameri- can Federation of Musicians engagement contracts, tour documents (itinerar- ies, crew, etc.), sales figures, royalty statements, files relating to music industry associations and organizations, music video scripts and storyboards.

2. Graphic: Album/CD artwork and logos, separation negatives and proofs, advertising, posters, promotional and candid photographs (negatives/prints/slides—live, studio, press conferences, etc.), certificates/awards, promotional memorabilia.

3. Audio: Multitracks, master mixes, alternate mixes, outtakes, live performances, rehearsals, composing tapes, demos, radio interviews/performances, lacquers and test pressings, copies of commercially pressed/released product, film and television soundtrack elements.

4. Film/Video: Unedited camera original film, field videotapes, rough cuts, fine cuts, printing elements and soundtrack mixes, master/finished productions, television interviews/performances.

To this end, Media Commons engages with and acquires fonds/collections from musicians, producers, managers, record companies, booking agencies, advertising companies (for whom music is integral to their finished product), film/video producers (who also use music in all of their work), music industry organizations, and even still photographers, graphic artists, fans, and record and memorabilia collectors. Representative and outstanding parts of the collection include the following.

Record companies/studios Alert Music Founded by Tom Berry in 1984, this Canadian independent record label has brought to the public the likes of Holly Cole, Kim Mitchell, Michael Kaesham- mer and The Box. The collection follows the careers of its artists—with pre- and post-production documents, master tapes, alternate takes and outtakes, and press and reviews for each and every album. But it also documents the history of the company—its incorporation, contracts with artists and producers, business and marketing plans, sales statements, posters, videos—both raw footage and edited music videos as well as live footage.

True North Records True North Records—one of the earliest Canadian independents and the brainchild of Bernie Finkelstein—was founded in 1969. It too contains the complete production packages of recordings and music videos of artists such as Bruce Cockburn, Murray MacLachlan, Syrinx, Rough Trade, Barney Bentall, the Rheostatics, Colin Linden, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings and many more. It also contains posters, gold/platinum records and marketing and promotional merchandise.

Wellesley Sound This was a full-service recording studio founded in Toronto in 1976 by Jeff McCulloch. It serviced the regional, national and international music community, as well as numerous advertising agencies . Some of the artists whose multitrack and master mix tapes are represented in the fonds include Lee Aaron, Johnny Dee Fury, Dream Warriors, Leslie Spit Tree-o, Maestro Fresh Wes, Pun- jabi by Nature, Razorbacks, Sturm Group, Alfie Zappacosta, Shirley Eikhart, Images in Vogue, Tom Jackson, Strange Advance, Maurice Gordon and ex-Byrd Gene Clark.

Individual artists Blue Rodeo The archive of this well-known Canadian band which began in 1984 includes all of their studio and live recordings, as well as outtakes, alternate takes, alternate mixes, live performances, bootlegs (they collect their own bootlegs which is very forgiving of them), raw footage for music videos, and dubs of all their television and radio performances. Other material includes lyric sheets, fan mail, contracts, press, photographs, gold/platinum records/CDs, posters—even t-shirts and other apparel used for marketing. In addition there are solo recordings, and recordings from their pre- Blue Rodeo period when they were known first as the Hi-Fi’s, then Fly to France.

Cowboy Junkies This is another comprehensive archive by a band that has managed its own business and ran its own record label from its beginnings in 1985. The textual records include the business correspondence, performance contracts, management contracts, legal documents, financial records and voluminous press. The video materials are a combination of television performances, television interviews, appearances on award shows, EPKs (electronic press kits), music videos and live performances. The audio materials are a combination of released and unreleased studio and live performances on every format from original multitrack tapes to vinyl discs and CDs. The master tapes for every album are present including a legendary lost album. Included also are a large number of rehearsals, jams, soundchecks, outtakes, alternate takes and alternate mixes/re-mixes. The memorabilia is promotional in nature and includes posters, artwork and t-shirts specifically connected to concerts, album releases, or venues where the band played.

Triumph This is undoubtedly one of the finer archives of a Canadian musical group. From their formation in 1975, Triumph were extremely business-savvy and well aware of their legacy. Not only is the archive comprehensive from the viewpoint of reconstructing their own rise and dissolution, but it shows clearly how the Cana- dian and international music industry worked throughout the 1970s to the turn of the century. The audio-visual material contains all of their released recordings and a huge amount of unreleased material. Included are all the multitrack studio tapes, outtakes and alternate takes, various mixes, test pressings, all commercially released product (LPs, 45s, CDs), audio mixes for television appearances, mixing board tapes of live performances, interviews, and so on.

The textual material contains all press, correspondence, contracts and licens- ing, fan letters, and all financial records and business deals (especially endorse- ments and sponsorship—which they pioneered in Canada), and the graphic materials include all the artwork and negatives and separations for the printing of album covers, advertising and posters.

Anne Murray This is a comprehensive collection covering the career of one of Canada’s most respected and successful vocalists from the late 1960s to the turn of the present century. It contains all legal records and contracts, photographs, rough mixes, test pressings, copies of every commercially released recording, video copies of every television performance, interviews, and all of her extensive press coverage.

Jeff Healey The Jeff Healey 78 rpm collection is an accumulation of over 20,000 78 rpm discs from the late Canadian guitarist’s personal collection that he used primarily to provide content for his jazz radio programme on the Canadian Broadcasting Cor- poration. These date from 1917 to 1943, and cover the genres of blues, jazz and especially American dance music. It is a truly astounding musical resource, international in scope, and containing many rarities and collectibles.

Music industry players/organizations Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) This is a widely varying collection of musical performances by Canadian artists who have been members of this performing rights society. SOCAN was formed in 1990 with the amalgamation of PROCAN (Performing Rights Association of Canada) and CAPAC (Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada). The collection consists of both commercially released product by their members, but more importantly of a hundred boxes of unique composing and demo recordings (tapes and even acetate discs from as far back as the 1940s). The demos rep- resent all regions of Canada, all genres, and show the full range of talent from rudimentary amateurism to astonishing professionalism. It is an amazing cross- section of Canadian popular music over a four-decade period.

Martin Melhuish Melhuish is an important player who has filled every role one can in the industry. He has been a musician, a manager, a festival organizer and promoter, a journalist

(the Canadian writer/editor for Billboard), an author (of six books including a history of Bachman Turner Overdrive, two histories of the Canadian music industry— Heart of Gold and Oh What a Feeling, and one on an international genre entitled Celtic Tides), and for the past ten years a producer of radio and television music documentaries. His archive contains all of his writings, all of his taped interviews with Canadian and international musicians he has written about, contracts and legal files, runs of music magazines including rare Canadian ones likeBeetle or Rainbow, and Rock Express (later Music Express). An inveterate collector, he also donated his CHUM hit parade charts (the most influential rock radio station in Canada in the 1960s–70s), programmes from numerous award shows and rock festivals, and his accumulated musician press kits and photographs.

Lou Cooper A collection of early musical performances on film by jazz groups and artists in the 1940s can be found in the Lou Cooper collection. These are the predecessors to the music video of our era. Each 16 mm b&w film—known as a ‘soundie’—is between 10 and 30 minutes in duration and includes ensembles such as Count Basie, Artie Shaw, Ted Heath, Jimmy Dorsey, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Willie ‘The Lion’ Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Glenn Miller, Bessie Smith, Coleman Hawkins, Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton and Benny Goodman.

North by Northeast Music Festival This is the premiere Canadian music and art festival held annually in Toronto since 1995. It is modelled on and connected to the South by Southwest Music Festival of Austin TX. It features primarily unsigned and independent artists from Canada, the US and Europe. The fonds comprises artist submissions (almost always with a demo audiocassette/CD), schedules, directories, press releases, clippings, posters/ banners, staff meeting minutes, final reports, t-shirts and examples of other promotional merchandise for the festivals up to 2002.

Production companies Media Commons also possesses a number of fonds/collections which are not specifically music—but which are directly related to the field. Included are the archives of such individuals and companies as:

Moses Znaimer Producer/host/executive/media philosopher Znaimer has been a pioneer in the world of popular broadcasting since the early 1970s, and this fonds documents his

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. Resource notes 201 roles in his flagship television station CITY-TV (known for the advent of 24-hour video jockeys and programmes such as The New Music), and the speciality chan- nels Much Music and Quebec equivalent Musique Plus. It contains administrative and production files, and both raw material and finished masters for many of his programmes. In addition it contains material from his entry into radio broadcasting in 2008 with the stations CFMZ and CFZM.

Insight Production Co. Helmed by John Brunton, this company has been responsible for producing the Juno Awards (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammys) since 1989. There is contained within the archive considerable raw footage, edits, masters and production files. Insight has also been responsible for the Canadian Country Music Awards, Canadian Idol, the 1983 CBC programme Heart of Gold—the first examination of the history of the Canadian popular music industry (written by Marty Melhuish), its counterpart Country Gold, several years of the Canada Day Concerts, and one-off documentaries on Canadians Joni Mitchell, David Foster, Prairie Oyster and Jann Arden.

Sphinx Productions/Ron Mann Based in Toronto, Mann has directed/produced numerous examinations of popular culture in North America. While all of his films use music, those that are particularly rich in musical history include The Beat (poetry and rock music in the 1950s), Twist (a history of rock and roll dance), Dream Tower (a history of Rochdale College in the late 1960s—a free college associated with the University of Toronto that was inti- mately tied up with Yorkville, rock music and drugs), Grass (a history of marijuana) and Know Your Mushrooms. Part of his research files consist of copies of numerous films from the 1950s dealing with the dangers of rock music to the youth of the day. Three other titles that are all about music include Imagine the Sound (live and on occasion discordant performances by jazz musicians), Listen to the City (a movie featuring the 1980s Toronto band The Spoons) and Blue Rodeo in Stereovision. Also in Mann’s collection is a long run of the underground newspaper Guerilla from Yorkville (Canada’s Greenwich Village or Chelsea) from 1968 to 1970. Through its advertisements, reviews and commentary, it highlights what was happening in Yorkville in a particularly important period of Canadian music.

Advertising Another type of collection where music is a part of every production is the advertising fonds. The two collections below provided the soundtrack to much of Cana- da’s radio and television commercial output from the late 1960s to 2000.

Syd Kessler and Jody Colero The Kessler–Colero collection spans the period 1975 to 2002 and documents the work of the two donors, both alone and in partnership. They have managed/ owned several notable advertising production companies over that period including Einstein Brothers, Creative Interchange, Kessler Productions/Kessler Music Inc., Air Company, Animation House, Berryman Studios, Partners Film Company, Section Eight Productions, Silent Joe Inc. and Supercorp Inc. They produced groundbreaking broadcast advertising for all the major and minor, national and regional clients in Canada, as well as in the United States. The audio materials are unique, and consist of musical segments with voiceovers from actors and visual segments with music. The collection incorporates the work of many of Canada’s finest musicians such as Doug Riley (‘Dr. Music’), writers and producers. Kessler owned Sounds Interchange recording studio in Toronto for several years, and in this collection are a number of master tapes from albums by Canadian artists who recorded there such as Mary Margaret O’Hara, Tim Thorney and Craig Russell.

The Radke Group Founded as a traditional advertising production company in 1992, this is now a group of connected subsidiaries producing different kinds of advertising for different demographics and markets. They have their own music video division called Soft Citizen which counts individual bands such as Broken Social Scene, Death Cab for Cutie, Choclair, Kathleen Edwards and Alexis on Fire as well as various record labels as their clients. In addition they have their own in-house original music and music design department called Vapor Music which utilizes the talents of many of the country’s premiere composers and session musicians. This fonds contains all the raw visuals and soundtrack materials, as well as all the client and production files.

Still photography A couple of still photography collections are rich in musical content.

John Reeves The esteemed Toronto portraitist John Reeves has donated a large part of his artistic output. In particular he took portraits of both well-known and obscure jazz musicians and singers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A selection of these were published in a book co-produced with the jazz writer Gene Lees entitled Jazz Lives. The collection contains both publication proof prints and enlarged exhibi-

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. Resource notes 203 tion prints of Oscar Petersen, Maynard Ferguson, Dizzy Gillespie, Ed Bickert, Peggy Lee, Diana Krall, Gerry Mulligan, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Bud Shank, Randy Brecker, Herb Ellis, Clark Terry and Artie Shaw—amongst many others. He also started a similar project for country artists (it was never completed)—so there are also portraits of John Michael Montgomery, Kitty Wells, Ronnie Dunn, Allison Krause, Charlie Major, Billy Ray Cyrus and many more.

NOW Magazine NOW Magazine, a Toronto-based independent cultural tabloid from 1981 to the present, donated its photograph archive. The publication played a major role in documenting the Canadian music scene, and its photographers covered all major and minor international acts passing through the city. In particular they captured the Queen Street scene (Toronto), punk and new wave—the Spoons, Pursuit of Happiness, Jane Siberry, Blue Rodeo, Parachute Club, Rough Trade, the Viletones, Nash the Slash, as well as touring acts like Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Rotten, Herbie Hancock and many more. Along with the almost 34,000 images is a complete bound run of the magazine up to 2001.

Technology Technology plays a huge role in the production, study and preservation of music archives. In its vast holdings of music-related documents, Media Commons has almost every type of audio format known to man—from discs of all sizes and speeds, to mono, stereo and multitrack audiotape on reels and in cassettes, to magnetic and optical discs, to hard drives with digital files. So too with visual documents. Musicians and performances have been captured on film and video since the beginning of moving images in the 1890s. That increased considerably with the advent of television, and then exponentially with the advent of the music video. Media Commons has material on 35 mm, 16 mm and 8 mm film, on 2 inch, 1 inch, ½ inch video reels, and of course every cassette format from Digital Betacam to VHS, as well as DVD and Blu-ray. Many music scholars find it convenient for a library or archive to provide every- thing they want to study in a digital format, and Media Commons is slowly moving in this direction. While indeed that makes them easy to access, it may very well miss the point of archival research which is to experience (at some point) a document in the format in which it was originally produced. Every format has had its own unique characteristics—its own sonic and visual limitations and technical pos- sibilities, and those characteristics have played a huge role in what was composed

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2015. 204 Popular Music History and how it was recorded, assembled and presented. Recordings on multitracks could be mixed in almost countless variations, and the recent use of digital technologies can achieve sounds and tempos, overlays and distortions not previously even envisioned. The process and the product have always evolved together—to fully understand one, you have to understand the other. True historians of music production will attest to the fact that there is a very specific experience with every audio-visual format that cannot be replicated when moving it to another format or enclosing in a digital file. The ‘content’ for the most part can be captured—but not the feel or the experience, and one needs the experience to fully comprehend the music, its effect, its impact. Following from this, for many years Media Commons has been collecting both current and non-current playback equipment to allow access to all documents, as well as for cataloguing and to make researcher or preservation copies. Staff can play back any size and speed of grooved disc, any format and size of open reel audiotape (including multitracks), all of the audio cassettes and cartridges, any gauge of film and all the newer optical discs.

Storage The audio-visual material found in these archival and special collections is comprised of surprisingly unstable ingredients. They are susceptible to repeated phys- ical handling and playback, to light fading, and especially to temperature and humidity. There are relentless chemical reactions going on inside these ingredients which cause them to shrink, deteriorate, shift colours, delaminate and even weaken or lose their electrical pulses. In order to provide optimum care for the original works in these collections, they are stored in one of two secure, environmentally controlled preservation facilities. The first—known as the Cold Vault—is a large facility completed in 2006. It is one of only three in Canada dedicated solely to audio-visual media, and is located on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto. It consists of two rooms—a modest processing room where material can be temporarily stored, viewed, cleaned, organized, labelled and put into archival enclosures. Adjoining it is a large walk-in storage room—actually a room within a room—approximately 5,000 sq. feet that is water-tight, electronically monitored, insulated, and built to maintain an unvarying temperature and relative humidity (RH) (7 degrees C and 25% RH) all year round. It contains approximately 2,200 linear metres of both sta- tionary and mobile shelving. The other facility, built in 2009, is located on the northern outskirts of Toronto, and houses a variety of library resources including three million books, as well as massive amounts of manuscript holdings.

Finding aids All the archival and special collections have finding aids or inventories. However as they have yet to be standardized, they have not been linked to the University of Toronto online catalogue. The first point of entry to the resources, though, can be found at the Media Commons website under ‘Media Archives’. Each fonds/collection has a collection-level description which gives contextual information about the material and the creator/donor—dates of creation, formats represented/ numbers of items/durations, scope and content notes, rights and access notes, language of creation, as well as listing either the series or recording project titles. For item-level description, a researcher has to contact the staff archivists. Media Commons continues to expand and diversify its holdings, and has already proven itself to be an invaluable resource for researchers—academic, jour- nalistic, and from the general public. For further information on the holdings and services, one can access the website: https://mediacommons.library.utoronto.ca/ media-archives-about.