Put your head on my (virtual) shoulder: Paul Anka sings past classics while embracing the future in hologram technology BY FRANCOIS MARCHAND, VANCOUVER SUN AUGUST 28, 2015 Singing legend Paul Anka is performing at the Hard Rock Casino on Aug. 28. Photograph by: Keith Munyan, Handout PODCAST: In the launch episode of the Unedited podcast, host Francois Marchand chats with pop and swing legend Paul Anka about how much the music business has changed since the 1960s, his relationship with The Beatles, Las Vegas, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Michael Bublé and venturing into the future with his hologram company ARHT Media. If you own an old vinyl copy of Paul Anka’s 21 Golden Hits compilation from 1963, look on the back of the sleeve. There’s an address for Anka’s fan club, a PO Box (number 166) located in New York City’s Times Square. When asked what would happen should anyone send a letter or postcard to that address now, Anka bursts out laughing. “Good luck!” Anka exclaims over the phone. “I don’t even know if there’s still a building there. That was our fan club back then, and that’s how they dealt with (the mail), through PO boxes. It’s all changed. The building I was in is gone, the record company — everything’s just changed. You gotta understand that’s the way it is. Life is like that: You take the change and you do the best you can.” Hollywood | Los Angeles | Toronto | www.ARHTmedia.com 1 Over the course of his career, nearly 60 years running, Anka has witnessed plenty of change. But the 74-year-old singer has never hesitated to be that change himself. A few days before performing at the Hard Rock Casino Vancouver in Coquitlam, the talkative Ottawa-born pop and swing legend was discussing what the next wave might be with The Vancouver Sun. For Anka, the future is holograms. Yes, the master songwriter who penned the theme songs to The Tonight Show and D-Day film The Longest Day (in which Anka also acted), Frank Sinatra’s My Way, Tom Jones’ She’s A Lady, and the last song ever recorded and released by Buddy Holly, It Doesn’t Matter Anymore, is working on making hologram technology a reality for both home and stage. ARHT Media is the Los Angeles/Toronto company for which Anka sits on the board of advisers, along with former CNN anchor Larry King, Burnaby-bred singer Michael Buble, TV personality and entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, and actor Jason Bateman (Anka’s son-in-law), among others. The company has been developing a technology it calls the HumaGram, a “scalable, repeatable and transportable form of 3-D without glasses,” ARHT’s website states. (ARHT stands for “Augmented Reality Holographic Technology.”) The technology is being developed for use in promotional displays, in health care facilities, in entertainment settings such as concerts or conferences, and for home communication. “We have our Frank Sinatra (hologram) done,” Anka says. “We’re an eight-month old company out of Toronto. We’ve just finished Tony Robbins where he was sitting somewhere in Florida and thousands saw him in Australia. We’ve got a Warren Buffett coming.” One can’t help but think of the Tupac Shakur hologram on display at Coachella a few years ago, a novelty bit that turned many heads and generated heaps of chatter all over the globe. “You’ve seen the Michael Jackson one (at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas),” Anka adds. (Note: The Jackson hologram wasn’t developed by ARHT.) “We’re much different than all of that. We do it a lot better and a lot differently. This application will be part of the future of the entertainment industry. If somebody comes from Vegas and says, ‘We want to do a Rat Pack show’ or, ‘We want to do Anka’s life but we want Sinatra, Buddy Holly and Tom Jones and everybody you’ve written for’ — sure, that’s all in discussion, at the right moment and the right time. Right now we’re a public company on NASDAQ, we’ve got a good team of people and a good product, and all of that is possible.” Anka has always been a visionary. At the peak of his success in 1960, he moved to label RCA Victor, buying back his entire catalogue from previous label ABC-Paramount — including hits like Diana, which Anka wrote at 15, Puppy Love, Put Your Head On My Shoulder, and Lonely Boy, which became the title of the cinema-verite documentary classic. “It was such a sensitive time back then,” he says. “You cherished what you were doing and you didn’t want to lose it. The record company had started giving up because I was this young kid and they were wondering where we were going to evolve to. Even with that, I knew they were too small a label and I knew I had a deal at RCA Victor because I’d already travelled throughout the world — I was hitting France and Italy and singing in different languages and I knew that the world was where I wanted to play in but this company didn’t have those kind of chops. “I said, ‘Look, I want to leave but I want to take my life with me. Here’s $250,000 I’ve got in my savings. Give me everything back and let me own it and they kind of laughed at me like they had the deal of the century. I didn’t care because I just wanted to keep it together. I didn’t want any loose ends that would come back and haunt me.” Hollywood | Los Angeles | Toronto | www.ARHTmedia.com 2 Anka has owned all of his publishing ever since, and it’s been one of the best business moves he ever made. The timing was ideal, because the same year his 21 Golden Hits record came out Beatlemania hit America, and the British Invasion dethroned singers like Anka and overtook the charts for much of the decade. “I knew The Beatles. I was working in France, in this country I love, and I spoke the language because I took it in school. So I was always over in Paris. I met them there — backstage. It was not a media-driven society, it was a whole different scene back then. So I brought these records back to my agent and I said, ‘These guys are great — listen to this.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, Beatles? What is it?’” Anka says the arrival of The Beatles opened up a whole new market. All of a sudden Madison Avenue was paying attention to rock ‘n’ roll. “Sure, they blew us off the radio, but I was surviving. I was writing. I had The Tonight Show theme, The Longest Day. My friends were gone and I really put myself in the mindset that, ‘This is gonna be healthy.’ The Beatles were here but I still had Top 20 records. I really felt it grew the business to where it had to be.” It may surprise some to learn that Anka was always a fan of heavy music. Performing at the Hard Rock Casino Vancouver isn’t such a stretch, especially when you consider his 2005 album Rock Swings, in which he covered the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. And he’s still penning No. 1 hits. Last year, Michael Jackson’s posthumous chart-topper Love Never Felt So Good, from the Xscape album, was a song originally written by Paul Anka in the early ’80s. Perhaps the biggest song Anka ever wrote, My Way, came out at the heart of the ’60s, in 1966. Anka was 28 when he wrote the song, which is often used as a soundtrack to “looking back” on one’s life and times. At 74, the song feels much different to Anka than it did when he wrote it for Sinatra. “It’s gone through many moments of feeling for me,” Anka says. “These past five years, with my age and with all the dynamics in my life, there’s a whole new meaning when I sing it. There’s a whole new meaning when I reflect back. There’s a meaning in it today, in this preparation I’m doing for (talent agent and film producer) Jerry Weintraub (who died in July) and dedicating it to him because of his passing, and explaining the whole Sinatra connection — we all knew each other. “It really goes into a whole new orbit when I do it today because there’s a lot of personal aspects to it that I can apply to myself. When I introduced it I was 28 years old, theoretically too young to sing an older person’s song. So it’s a much deeper and much more emotional meaning for me than it was years ago.” [email protected] Twitter.com/FMarchandVS © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun URL: http://www.vancouversun.com/entertainment/your+head+virtual+shoulder+Paul+Anka+sings+past+classics+while+ embracing+future+hologram+technology/11319075/story.html Hollywood | Los Angeles | Toronto | www.ARHTmedia.com 3 .