Ivar Hamilton: Making Radio and Breaking Records

Tara Sands  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Ivar Hamilton is a name you would certainly know if you've ever been involved in radio records, the music industry and the music scene in Toronto. He's co hosting a new show called Music milestones YYZ with Scott Turner, and they are telling the stories behind the milestones of Toronto music history. I might need to explain to those who have not traveled to Canada before that YYZ is the airport code for Toronto's Pearson International Airport.

Clip  0:39  
Yeah, there was a lot of backlog last year, and I think that people were stranded here for like, four or five hours, which was pretty tough.

Matt Cundill  0:46  
It's also a song by rush, and I'm happy to disclose and I'm helping both Scott and Iver launch the show today, though I'm here for the stories. Now, I've never worked in Toronto before, but over the years, a lot of people have come up to me and said, You've got to meet Iver Hamilton, and now I know why, because we talk about C, F, n, y, the upcoming documentary some of the artists he's worked with at Polygram and universal and the online music property called n y the spirit, which is run by David Marsden and was featured on this show nine years ago. Again, Iver and Scott's new podcast is music milestones, yy, z and what follows is a really good episode. And now Iver Hamilton joins me from Toronto. Iver, how do you explain CF, NY to people outside of Toronto? Well, it

Ivar Hamilton  1:35  
depends on when we're talking about CFNY... are you talking to us about the classic spirit of radio era? Yes, so I will tell most people that are outside of Toronto or who don't know about the radio station that we were a free form radio station that basically existed between 1977 and 1987 to maybe 1990 in the spirit of radio era, it was, for the most part, led by a visionary by by the name of David Marsden, who's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and who I listened to on chum FM when he was on there in the 1970s and he was the evening DJ, and he blew me away back then. He was a guy who, you know, made me think, this is what I want to do with my life. And he was an incredible DJ, and I was very fortunate to be able to work for him, but I was actually working there before he was made program director and a full time employee. But I mean, basically, we did what we wanted to do. We were the early supporters of new wave and punk and post punk. It was very open. It was very wild. Some people, which I don't care for that comment is say, Oh yeah, you guys were a glorified College Station in some ways. We were immature and naive on certain things, but it made for amazing radio. And I love that time of my life. I never made any any money there, but neither did anybody else, besides the morning show. And I think that was pretty much par for the course for most radio, and probably part of the reason that people aren't radio today, because nobody ever made money in radio, apart from a very small few and some ownerships.

Matt Cundill  3:21  
I never got to work in that era. I got to listen a little bit in that era, you said free form. What does free form mean? Because I know a lot of radio stations have their playlists and have their rotations, but when I hear free form, I imagine disc jockeys bringing in records under their arm and then trying them out over the next few hours in a shift

Ivar Hamilton  3:41  
that did not happen. But we had such a huge music library, and there was so much to choose from in that library. When I initially got there, I started off as a I did two internships there. First of all, when I was in Humber College, in the radio program, I was a couple of years behind our friend Wayne Webster. He went there and Barry Stewart, they were both in the same program, radio program under Phil stone at Humber College. And so I went in in 77 when that was during the David Pritchard, Reiner Schwartz era, and taped albums. Just put tape on albums. It was everything was completely and utterly disorganized. It was me and a couple of other people. And then I went back again for a second internship that started in February of 1978 and that internship at that point was in the music department, you know, one day a week, and then starting to do some weekend things, some operating things, and just generally helping out. And it became like, you know, the high fidelity movie that I just started showing up more and more every day. And eventually they said, Well, maybe we should give this guy a job. So I ended up going full time in the music department in March of 79 and because it was such a small radio station, I mean, then it was like, oh, you should do a do a show or whatever. So I did a show called listeners church. Choice, which was listeners would come in and they'd bring their own records in from home. So that was coming in with an armful of albums, and then we would do two shows in an evening, and that was a lot of fun. And I was also the guy who I was still living at home, so I used to spend most of the money that I had because I and I worked a couple of jobs. I worked at Sam the record man at Bramley city center too, as well as working at the radio station and going to college at the same time. But at my my spare money I spend all on import records. And suddenly thought, well, you know, Ivers got all these imports, so maybe we should let him do an import show too. So I got to my entire tenure there, which was full time from 79 but basically part time, full time and 78 up until I left at the end of 88 not once was I ever, ever programmed. Now, I was a little bit different than most, but most of the DJs had the freedom on the albums that we would put in the early days, we put a whole album in, and the only thing that was restricted was, you know what time you could play songs or not play songs. The morning show we started once Pete and geets arrived, they started to program some of the music, the music that they played, but they were pretty feisty to some there, and they would bring their own records in from home, which is why we used to play slim Whitman and Marvel felts on the morning show. They bring those in from home. And then, then they decided they didn't like a lot of records that we played, so they just decided that they were never going to play them. So they never played Duran, Duran, they never played Prince. They hated them so, and they got away with stuff like that. It was like, well, Gates aren't going to play it. You know? Like, what are you going to do? But, you know, eventually there, you know, became some restrictions. But it was never up until I left in November of 88 that's when they started to program a lot of the shows. And towards the end I left, because they started, there was a, you know, a top 40 experiment, which was very unsuccessful. They may have said, well, our ratings went up, but they may have, but people hated it in the original core. They had World War Three in their hands with the listenership, which was, you know, pretty unprecedented, with people, listeners going to the CRTC, and petitions going and things like that. So it was quite the adventure. I must say, Well, I want to talk about that, but

Matt Cundill  7:23  
I need a little definition before we carry on. So let's start with import. So for me, Listen, I know what that is. In Montreal, we had duchies, we had a few places we'd go down and pick up some stuff that wasn't available at discus or ANA or Sam the record man, or any of those places. So what did you find? Like, where did you go in Toronto for your import records? And what did you find of note that you brought to air that later became successful?

Ivar Hamilton  7:48  
Oh, God, it was almost how the station, you know, ran its playlists. What we put on the air was probably at some point like, half of the records that we had on the air were, for the most part, they were records that were played first, because in those days, in many instances, the labels you know that release schedule was behind what was going to come out in Canada or in the US from what was coming out in the UK. I'll give a you know, an example is that the first u2 album came out in October of 1980 in the UK and Europe. Didn't come out till March of 81 in Canada, in the US. And so there were a lot of instances like that. I mean, I had the Joshua. Remember, the rep from Island Records came in and he goes, Hey, I got a tape here. I got a cassette of the YouTube Joshua Tree album. I reached behind my desk and said, I've got the full album. So we had a lot of fun with that. And it was about beating the chum F Sims and the Q 107, on things that they would play. But there were, there were so many records that we played that that were definitively C, F, n, y, that no other, nobody else would play, like bands like, you know, Japan and magazine some of the New York stuff, like Lydia lunch and Johnny thunders and like none of the other radio stations were touching that stuff, the Generation X stuff, until Billy Idol crossed over and became a solo artist, like all of that stuff, we used To mark the records up as being exclusive to us in the marketplace, which really made us unique. After a number of years, it sort of became a little bit tiring, and then everybody else kind of jumped on it. But having having the imports was a great way to discover artists before, before everybody else. I used to have a subscription to the UK magazine Music Week, which would come in with the import, so I would know exactly what was coming out in the UK. We had a station correspondent posted in London who used to call in on the air all the time, but he would call me and say, Well, this is hot. You should know about X, X and X. And he would go to the labels over there, and they would give him Records. Or the radio station, and he would send them over by courier or whatever. So we had a good relationship with FedEx at the time. And I also used to get records from one of the Indies out of Buffalo, guy who's no longer with us, Bruce Moser. He was very good at slipping us records before they were coming out. We got in trouble with the labels on occasion, and in the long run, I ended up going to work for Polygram, who most of the time, might beat beat them to air before their records came out. So my first week at Polygram, they were like, Where the fuck did you get those records? I need to know now. And I said, I'm still not telling you where I got those records from.

Matt Cundill  10:39  
Was it a Brampton radio station, because I seem to recall that, you know, it was licensed to Brampton. Today, I look at Brampton as being just another sort of extension of Toronto. But, you know, back then

Ivar Hamilton  10:50  
was it, yeah, I mean, it was based in Brampton. We very much wanted to be a Toronto radio station. It did not go on the CN tower until 1983 and there was lots of roadblocks along the way. I mean, they had applied numerous times to try and get on the CN Tower and were denied, but David convinced them that there were so many people commuting from Brampton to Toronto that we were very capable of servicing the Toronto Community. And of course, all the Toronto radio stations didn't want to have us there, but it was crucial to the station's financial well being too. And they were, you know, it was pretty cheap back then, he'd get an ad for 25 $30 on the air. And then as soon as we got on the CN Tower, and David was very big on promoting the station. Once they got in the CN Tower, we had a studio up on the where the circular part of the CN Tower was, so we did stuff up there, and they were all was kind of cross promoting, and a lot of the imaging had the CN Tower in it. And you know that we'd arrived in Toronto, but we went from, I think, about 250,000 listeners to like, 500,000 listeners in a matter of, like, six months to a year. And so, you know, obviously the sales guys were like, well, we can charge a lot more money for advertising at the time. So it became, you know, the things got pretty good for us once we kind of hit, like, 8485 you know, financially, it was a great era for music. It really was. I mean, I look back at the years all the time, and you know what was good about certain years and what was what my memories were of certain records and certain time frames. And you know, when there were records that, or when there were even times when there weren't so many good records. But even in those times, my thing was, you can always find good records. You can always find something that you know people are going to going to get into.

Matt Cundill  12:46  
David Marston has appeared on this show. It was nearly nine years ago to the day that I had him on to talk about and why the spirit, which is still going today. We can talk about that a little bit later. But for anybody who wants to roll all the way back, I mean, it would take probably about a half hour just to scroll back through all the episodes, because I've done so many of these things now, but it's right back to 2016 but I do want you to talk about 1988 was it McLean hunter that bought the station? Or was it someone else? Yes, I believe it was McLean Hunter. Yes. So. And you mentioned something that sort of rang in my head. Yes, you might have got more listeners, but now you're everybody's third favorite choice for a radio station. That seems to be the way that I remember is that, yeah, you can go ahead and play some pop records and play Madonna, where you can play glass Tiger, and you can probably get a little bit more tuning, but you're everybody's third or fourth favorite radio station, because everybody's already playing those records in the market. So walk me through what was going on in 1988 that sort of led to, you know, change and revolt and CRTC letters.

Ivar Hamilton  13:51  
Well, I think you know, David had been there, you know, and I'm sure if you had him on again, he'd tell maybe a slightly different story, or whatever. As we get older, I find that, you know, people are telling completely different stories. And I know it's very, you know, it's common with a lot of bands too, that, you know, it's like, they ask about a certain time, and wow, there's two completely different stories here. You know, it's like, David, you know, people ask him. We get asked a lot, like, where did the spirit of radio come from? And David, you know he he says, oh, you know, I was driving around one day and we needed a change, and and out of nowhere it came to me the spirit of radio. So he went back to the radio station and put up notices all over the control room and all over the station. It's like from now on, we're the spirit of radio. And I was like, you told me that you were inspired by Charles Lindbergh and the Spirit of St Louis, and that's where it came from. He was, I don't remember that. And I said, I remember you telling me that, you know so but in 1988 I mean, there had been a number of things that were distractions, I think for some of the people at CF and why, in the lead up. To 1988 and that was mainly in my mind as a young man at the time. I mean, I was at that time, I was probably, I just turned 29 in 1988 into summer 88 So still a pretty young guy. But one of the things that took away from what we were doing, and you know, it was a great endeavor, but it just went too far the other way. Was the unos that evolved into the CASBs. And, you know, it started off as like, hey, we'll show them. We'll show the Junos. And because David got all upset at the time that they had long john Baldry was nominated for a Juno for Best New Artist. And he's like, That's ridiculous. The guy's been around since the early 60s, and we got to change this. We got to come up with something so, you know, they come up with the, you know, awards, and the first ones up at the CN Tower and sparkles. And, you know, it's, everybody's at the bar having a good time. Here's a couple of awards. And, you know, you go home, and then the next year got a little bit bigger, and then it got bigger. And then next thing, you know, we're at the Royal York and people are wearing tuxedos, and, you know, we're partnering with the CBC, and, you know, all of this stuff. And it was like, holy shit. And then it just got so big that it took up so much time. They're like, don't we have a radio station to run here too? You know, you can't do all of this, because it was, you know, running in a running a big national TV awards show was just such a crazy thing, and that's just one of the things. There was a guy who was in the sales department, and there was a few people at the radio station that were always, they were, I guess, kind of traditional radio guys, right? Just sort of the people who'd worked at other radio stations, or sort of came from that mindset and, like, you know, we could be a lot bigger if we got a lot more professional and and I remember having sales guys coming to me. It's like, hey, Ivor Burton Cummings, you know, we got a new club coming on the year, and Burton Cummings is playing there, so we need to have put him on the playlist. I'm like, Get out of my fucking office, like, fuck off. We're not playing Burton Cummings on the radio station. That's not going to happen here, right? So, you know, there were some people like that that were doing these things. But David was, he was under a lot of pressure, especially on the, you know, his CASB stuff and all those things he was doing. And, I think, and he brought some other people in, you know, Earl Jive came in from the States, and while he was from Montreal, but also was originally from the States. And then, then he brought Don burns in, who was a top 40 guy from Buffalo, originally, great guy and but he was very organized too, right? He saw a bunch of inconsistencies in the radio station. Wanted a bunch of changes on things, but he believed in it. Don believed in the spirit of radio and what we were doing. But there were some other people who didn't so much believe in that. And one of the guys, his name was Jim fonger, and he was in sales, and he got the year of the General Manager. His name was Bill Hutton, who's no longer with us, and that we needed to make changes. And you know, if we were going to be this big station in Toronto, we need to become more of a commercial entity. We can still, you know, maybe have some alternative music in it, but we need to play top 40 music or whatever. And the way it was positioned, to me was we were going to have music meetings, and every week we had to have X amount of records on the air that were in the Billboard Hot 100 or the top 40 chart. And the caveat to that was, it didn't matter what they fucking sounded like, we were going to add those records. And I was like, Are you kidding me? Are you really going to do this or whatever? But they did. And so it happened. It happened on the Labor Day weekend in 1988 that's when it started happening. And I just remember I went away that weekend because I was like, I can't be around for this when it starts. But the shit really hit. Hit fans with the listeners. They just weren't used to it. I mean, people were just looking at the radio station. Did I just hear George Michael on C F N Y? Did I just hear Def Leppard on C F N Y? Did I just hear candy in the backbeat on cfny, or did I just hear Tiffany on cfny or whatever? And then there's, you know, and so that's, you know, David had left by then, and they let this gym guy take over. And Don could only do so much because he was the assistant. PD, but you know, I remember seeing a memo that Jim had said, you know, to Don, you know, you either let me do it or stand aside and I'll do it myself or whatever, right? And then, then they came to me and said, Hey, Iver, we got something for you think we're think is going to be really exciting. And said, Okay, what do you what do you think? And said, ch, ch television, we're going to start a CF and white television show down in Hamilton. We'd love for you to go down there and be a part of that. And I was like, What are you talking about? I don't know the first fucking thing about television. Why would you have me go to Hamilton to be set up for something, to do something like that? So the answer was a flat No. Is that I'm not going to do I am not going to do that. So, you know, not only myself, but many. Other people felt the pressure and and so for me, the writing was on the wall. And if I had have stayed, I would have been moved out, or they would have found something else. And I'm like, I can't do this anymore. So I ended up looking to people at the labels, and eventually I got hired to be a regional promo rep for Polygram. And then that turned into a 35 year career, morphing from regular promo to being doing national promotion. And then, you know, through all those mergers, wearing many hats when I was at Universal, including being, you know, Vice President of Marketing at Island Def Jam, and then being a Vice President of Marketing at at Interscope. At one point even, you know, having a huge staff under me. And then in 2012 they had made a bunch of changes, and people had left or whatever. And I remember Randy Lennox called me into his office and said, he goes, What do you like best about your job at Universal? And I said, I love breaking records. I love breaking artists. And he goes, that's irrelevant. You're going to catalog that's where I think is best for you. Now, when that happened, I was, at first, I was a little I was unsure, but once I got into it, I loved it, and I it was to me, the last decade at Universal was one of my best times, because I was in the skin of doing things that I loved. You know, I ended up working with all these acts that I grew up listening to and buying their records and going to their shows, and I'm like, Yep, I'm working with, I'm working with Kiss. I'm working with you too. I'm working with, you know, I wasn't Bon Jovi fan when I was at CNY, you know, working with them. I'm working with the Pixies, like all of these bands, it was like, Fuck, this is great, you know.

Matt Cundill  21:37  
So tell me about Polygram when you first joined. And you can even tell me what you knew before you joined, because that was the experience that I had being, you know, working in a music department, but working with the people from Polygram. So just to paint the picture as a music director, when I was, you know, early 90s, there were seven record companies. So that was seven nights out of there, seven days in a week. We can have dinner every day with a different record company. And, you know, never have to pay for a meal. That's kind of the way I looked at it. But how is Polygram different than the other ones that were out there?

Ivar Hamilton  22:12  
Well, what I liked about them is they were really, really strong on, first of all, on acquisitions. So they had a lot of things in Canada that Polygram did not have. In other parts of the world, there was a at that time the business was not as consolidated and sort of the way it is today. So there was a bunch of bands that were on Polygram that were not on Polygram in the United States, like, for example, we had the cocktail twins. They were because we had a deal with beggars, banquet for for ad. So we had the cocktail twins. We we had the Pixies. We had throwing muses. We had Bauhaus. And then there was like they did a deal with Tommy Boy. So we had della soul and Queen Latifah. None of those bands were on mercury or Polygram and in the United States. So those were all pretty exciting to me, that they had, they had those things. And one of the guys that was in their product marketing department, a guy named Michael therio At the time, and it was another guy, Peter Hardman, they were fantastic at, like, going to the opcos, which are the, you know, their head offices of these labels in UK or wherever else they might be based, and asking for all these different tracks and things that they could add on for Canada. So we constantly had these things that we were putting out. It's like, well, this is a Canada only release. This is only available in Canada or whatever. And they were very good in my top my later years at cfny, they were really good at getting stuff up pretty much the same time as as the UK. Oh, they also had Virgin Records too for the longest time. So it was pretty exciting to work for a company like that. The personalities there were, you know, were challenging, and I certainly had my challenges with them, but, but, you know, things, things change pretty dramatically when they sort of had some changes at the top, when some of the folks from Germany that were previously at the top, they ended up having Tim Rooney came in from, he was originally from South Africa, who'd worked in South America too. And he, when he came in, things started to to change quite a bit. And then all of a sudden, there was changes again. And he left. And then he had Doug Chappelle come in, you know, from A and M Records. And like, Doug was a great guy to work for. He was fantastic. And so, so there was, we went through a lot of different periods in that history. And then, of course, the, you know, the giant one was in 1998 when universal, you know, bought Polygram. And, you know, at the time, it seemed odd because Polygram was a lot bigger than universal was at the time. I mean, Polygram had bought an A and M Records. They bought Nyland records, they bought Motown Records. A and M was in the building. There was like two companies at the same time, and then, and then were. Purchased by Universal. Every person at Universal had to re interview for their jobs and and they had appointed decided that they'd make two people the head of these two new divisions. It was the mercury poly door and inter scope. And that was Steve Kane, who who had come out of a and m and then gone to Virgin work, Virgin and then they got him back. So Steve Kane came in to run the new side, I guess, the mercury Polydor side. And then Sarah Norris, who had come previously from capital as well. And they interviewed every single person in the company. I was the very last person interviewed for my job, and fortunately, I was able to stay on. And I, you know, to this day, I still have an amazing relationship with I mean, I worked for Steve and for Sarah. I'm not as close to Sarah as I'm very close to Steve Kane. We talk all the time still, and, you know, he we like a lot of the same music, and so we talk about that, and we talk about the industry stuff, and he was a very funny guy too, right? He was very particular about his music. I don't know how well you you knew Steve, but as much as Steve was a huge Canadian Music supporter, and all the things that he did, his sense of humor was a little a little crazy, and there were certain bands he had no time for. And I think you'll know this gentleman, Tony zambor, one afternoon, it was late in the afternoon, and out of Tony's office, there was super tramp playing pretty loud. And Kane's like, who's playing Super Tramp? I said, Who's playing Super Tramp, right? He called a staff meeting together. He calls everybody together. He goes, anybody who plays super tramp in the office, from here on in, you're fired, right? And so then as the years went on, like that extended to a very big list of bands that you're going to get fired by Steve Kane if you play anyway, like years later, after he left it, he's at Warner. I'm sitting in my office. I was all proud of myself. I got a new yes reissue, right? And i've showed it a couple of people took a picture of it. He calls Tony zambor and he goes tell Hamilton he's fired. Okay. So anyway,

Matt Cundill  27:08  
what was your job at Polygram when you first started in 8889

Ivar Hamilton  27:13  
I was regional promo, so I was reporting to Bobby Gale when I first got there, and I went out, and I worked mostly, you know, Southern Ontario radio. I had the London market and down to Chatham and Windsor and Toronto stations. I think I was doing chum FM and ckfm at the time, and I'd go back to cfny and work them on records, which used to, used to drive them nuts, but that was okay. And about a year after that, Bobby Gale left the company, and and then I was sort of given a bigger portfolio. I started doing publicity too. And I was doing much music at the time, so that that was a, you know, that took up a huge amount of work. And certainly, yeah, it was pretty crazy, because there was, there was a, you know, we were in Toronto at the time, only a branch office, and we were the, you know, Polygram was the only company that existed as a branch office. And then a few years later, once Tim Rooney came in, he kind of saw the writing on the walls like, you know, the business is in Toronto. Why are we here? So they, you know, shut down the Montreal head office and moved everybody to Toronto, where we were up on Denison Avenue, or Dennis, whatever it was Denison. And then, you know, in 1990 they bought a and m, and so a and m moves in so, but they, they were pretty good about that. When they bought a and m, they saw the wisdom of some of the A and M leadership when they had Jerry le corsic and Joe summers. So they ended up being the head Ted's a Polygram once that merger happened. So, you know, there was a lot, lots of changes there, but I kind of burnt out on doing promotion. And you talk about yourself when you were a music director, you know that you could go out for dinner seven days a week with the labels, but that's what I was doing with radio stations. And we had a hell of a lot of shows. And, you know, we were we had some domestic records at the time that took up a huge amount of attention, that boot sauce record, and there was Sue medley at the time. I remember those ones, plus the they had announced that they had signed this girl from Timmons, Shania Twain, and Terry Clark and people like that. So they all took up a huge, huge amount of time in doing promo runs across the province and and then, of course, the bigger action that you you know, had to give a lot of attention to. So I just totally burned out. I'm like, I do not want to be out on the road all the time. I mean, I think I put like, 230,000 clicks on my minivan, which I had to wood paneling on. It looked really great, but it was just like, I can't do it. So I really wanted to get into, start, to get into product marketing. And initially, when it was still under Polygram, under Bob and sullen, he wouldn't, he wouldn't do it. He goes, No, no, no. And I use it's, we got to keep them in promo or whatever. And then eventually, when Doug Chappelle came in, he let me move over to that just meant I was spent more time in the office, worked just as hard. I just wasn't on the road all the time. You know? Yeah.

Matt Cundill  30:14  
So I remember the Montreal office because it was on highway 40. Was probably on like, high missed or one of those streets. In fact, I was just driving there yesterday. I do remember the big Polygram logo that was at the on the side of the of the 40 as you made your way into Montreal, and then one day it wasn't there. So I guess that's when it moved to Toronto. The rep in Montreal at the time was Alwyn Ross,

Ivar Hamilton  30:36  
lovely guy. He picked me up the first the first week that I started at Polygram, they had me go to Montreal just to sort of get indoctrinated and get to know everybody. And he was the guy who met me at the airport, so I was always thankful for that. But he him and I got along famously just talking music all the time because

Matt Cundill  30:54  
he was a really, really great music guy. And Sue medley, he sent us that record. When I say sent us I was. He also worked the Maritimes as well, and that's where I was working in the early part of the 90s. Melissa Etheridge, that was Island Records, was that, so that fell under yours. And so Terry demote is going to be by in the next couple weeks. To do we do a Christmas show every year, I'm going to get him to tell the story of Melissa Etheridge, because he tells a story where she opened up for somebody I can't remember, but he loved her so much. Played the entire record the next morning on the radio, and Montreal has had a love affair with Melissa athridge ever since.

Ivar Hamilton  31:29  
Melissa had some great fans. She had great management, too, and she was such a hard worker and great supporters in the states that would do things for her too. So it was a really good run with her. And she was such a, you know, a strong core artist at the time with, I mean, Island and A and M were, I mean, they were fabulous mini majors, you know, at the time, and when they got behind records, man, oh, man, they would, they would fly, and Canada was usually ahead of the curve on that. Scott Turner and I were talking on our podcast about Brian Adams and reckless. And you know that it was the first Canadian album to go diamond in Canada. And I was like, well, it was on A and M, so not that that's a guarantee, but man, oh, man, they were. They were very, very focused team, as we're Island Island Records too. On getting the job done with those types of artists, I

Matt Cundill  32:25  
almost feel like I have to explain this to people who might be under the age of 40, on how it worked and what your job was. Aside from, you know, getting music directors to become enamored with the records you were bringing them, there was a glut of radio stations you would go visit, but a lot of them played new music, and then you would go and introduce the new music and connect them with the right songs based on the format. So you got a bunch of radio stations you got to go visit, but you did touch on much music. So what did you have to do differently to approach the people at much music versus going to a radio station, whether it be like, you know, Q 107 in Toronto, where Shelby Montreal, or hits the St Catharines.

Ivar Hamilton  33:07  
I mean, it there, there was two things. I mean, first, first of all, there was more opportunities to put people on the air than there generally would be at a radio station that usually are, you know, most radio stations would have, you know, maybe one or two things like, you know, Q, 107 would have the six o'clock rock report and C F n y would have live in Toronto. But the days of you dropping into radio stations like it might C F n y days in the early days like, you know, artists were dropping in all the time, just on various shows, that pretty much went away once the, you know, once the 90s hit it was like, just a few things in there. And then, of course, there was, you know, the rock radio network and things like that were, you know, you could put those national specials together, but much music was, was more open. So you could have an artist in town and go in and say, Well, yeah, let's take them in there and see, see what we can do. And, you know, set up things like whether there's a, what they call an interactive or with a new music, or whatever those things. Or have them go in and do multiple shows that they could go in and tape. But I also had to, you know, work them on adding things into rotations. And sometimes, you know, there would be things that would, you know, go and say, Look, we're going to play this on unwrapped city, or we're going to play this on electric circus, or, or they had that they had their alternative program. It was called the wedge. It was purposely called the wedge because it was a take on the edge when CF changed to the edge, which I never knew until I started working much music or whatever. So, I mean, it was similar, you know, process. I mean, I would spend a lot of my weekends sitting down at a and preparing my facts of what we were going to work and, you know, you do similar things, you'd say, well, here's the other stations, here's some US stats, here's some sales stats, or here's whatever's relevant to your market. Here's a stack of press or whatever. I mean, when I was a promo guy, the one thing that I was never I was not into, and some of these other promo guys that were into, I was never into, like, the wacky promotions that some of the promo reps decided to try and do. I remember it was a bill bannham from, I think he was it Warner or whatever? And the Jive bunny came out, and he dressed in a bunny suit. And then, in Montreal, somebody hired a tank to try and get Frank. He goes to Hollywood on the on the radio. And, you know, I think Kevin Shea dressed up in a diaper or something to try and get Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio. Well, I remember

Matt Cundill  35:40  
that one? It was Kevin Shea, and I think he said, this baby needs a home at show but at the same time, I think, I think the program director at the time at showmer, at least the people who did the programming, I think, were a little resistant to a very obvious ad. Sometimes they need a push.

Ivar Hamilton  35:56  
Yeah, I mean, you know, I applaud them for that, but I used to just think some of those things were silly, and I believed in in doing hard work to get the ads, and I had some really good success with certain records. I will tell you that on Smells Like Teen Spirit at the time, Pauly Graham didn't have a lot of records like that. We did not have a lot of grunge records. We did not have a lot of records that were rolling up the chart. We were unfortunately caught with our pants down and missed the big draft picks. So we had a lot of the hair bands at the time. So we were like, you know, Cinderella, Bon Jovi, kiss, do you have la guns? We had la guns. Velomazek, if you knew him. We called them Val and I called them the cannons, la cannons. So we had all those acts. And then, you know, along comes Soundgarden, along comes nirvana or whatever. And I remember, I'm like, I don't even have any records to work. So really, I mean, I always had records to work, but I'm like, I don't have any records that are like this. But I decided that I was going to work with Nirvana record, even though it was on a competitive label. So I go into the radio stations, I'd sit down, here's my records. And I said, Before I leave, let me just tell you something. If you don't play Nirvana, it Smells Like Teen Spirit. This is a generational record. You are missing the boat. This record will be as big as Led Zeppelin's whole lot of love, and as big as Black Sabbath, paranoid, I guarantee it. Mark my words. Please play this record. You won't regret it. You just could feel it. And I remember Steve warden and John Derringer when they were doing the six o'clock rock report, and they they knew it was happening too, and they just said the times have just have changed. Now, at the our music world is completely and utterly changed. And I never forget them doing that. And then a couple of weeks later, and Kevin Shea was, he was at Universal at the time at MC, and he called me goes, I just wanted to thank you for working our record on nirvana. So when I, of course, I get to, you know, when I get the universal, but universal, they gave us a plaque. You get plaque for how many X years of service. So when I, when I hit 30 years, and my 35 when I left nirvana is on that plaque, even though I wasn't working there when those records were out. But I worked the catalog very hard over the years and but I, I'll always remember that was kind of a one off. You're going, you know what like this is, you know, this is going to be one of the biggest, most meaningful records ever. So I'm going to say my piece.

Matt Cundill  38:19  
Yeah, I remember it, of course, I was, I was working in radio, but I was, it's my graduating year of university, so I was, I put the CD on, and I said, Holy shit, what is this? And I think I bought a bunch of copies, like, October, November, you know, before it really breaks, it doesn't even really break in December, it's still getting momentum. And now we're getting into 1992 and then it starts to take off. And then, but every radio programmer had to wrestle with that and go, what's my audience going to think of this? Am I going to upset or who am I making happy here? And that wasn't just rock, because a few months later, by February, top 40 started to play it, and they had to figure out how to make that sit next to a Janet Jackson record. Good luck, right? I know,

Ivar Hamilton  39:06  
I know. I just, I just the conservative people in radio just would drive me around the bend. I had incredible issues with many programmers across the province who refused to touch any R, B, soul records or hip hop records outright, not play them ever. And there's some of the biggest records of the era, nope. This is like London Ontario Chatham, or whatever these records, they don't belong here. Our listeners don't want to hear this stuff, or whatever it's like. That's your problem. Or whatever these records are going to sell without you so.

Matt Cundill  39:39  
But even today, Canadian radio just doesn't have any pulse when it comes to R and B and urban. I think I can count the number of urban stations in Canada on like, two fingers.

Ivar Hamilton  39:50  
I mean, you know, my last couple of years at Universal, and you know, the radio departments still exist, and they still go out there and pound the pavement or whatever, but we didn't even talk about. Radio. I mean, there was a time when radio was such a big, you know, what was the radio strategy was such a giant part of, you know, what you did, and it was so impactful. But it just went the other way. And it all, it all went to what our strategies were going to be for Apple and Spotify and Amazon and some of the other, you know, players coming into the market. It completely and utterly changed, you know. And then the radio stations are asking for, you know, all of the DSPS, digital service providers, stats, and then they would decide to go on records, you know, which is really lame to me, but that's like getting AI to write your essay, yeah, but it was, it was part of the reason, you know, too, when I left in 88 I mean, I just was, like, it was kind of frustrating. But you know, every once in a while you'd have a victory on some things, and that made you feel good, especially if it was a Canadian record, Matthew good's beautiful midnight record in 99 and that was also that was coming out, just as our merger had happened with Polygram and universal. And it was just, you know, I guess the first six months or year into the merger, and I would never forget that it was like the records coming in at number one, and it it beat out, oh, I think it was Britney Spears, and it beat out limp, Bizkit and whatever else was super hot at the time when the record ended up going platinum, we took the sound scan chart and put all put the top 10 of the SoundScan chart below in the awards so we could see what, what our competition was. And it was, it made you feel so good that you had a Canadian artist that could overtake those other artists with True, true numbers and that that was a very gratifying thing. Was the same with Sarah Harmer too. You know, it was like we got it to gold. But man, oh man, when you get a Canadian record to gold from scratch or whatever, that really is a satisfying thing.

Matt Cundill  41:55  
Yeah, well, you touched on two of my favorites right there. So one of them is Matthew good. I'd forgotten how good that record was. It was great. I was working at Edmonton at the time, and he'd always come by, but he was never really interested in doing promo at 420 in the afternoon, 440 or in the five o'clock hour either. Anyway. So I remember going on there and just saying, well, the band is here, but Matthew couldn't make it, and that happened two or three times. In the end, it was all soothed over with, I think it was Paul Jessop's idea, too, Matt, we're going to let you host the national special with Matt. Good. I'm like, okay, great. That's going to be fun. And it was great. We had a great time. Yeah. I mean,

Ivar Hamilton  42:37  
he, he respected. There were certain people he had a lot of respect for in the business. I know that one of the persons he used to talk about, he goes, I will do anything for Denise Don London. That doesn't matter what it is. I will do it for her. I, you know, I think she's great. And there were a few other people. I think there were some people at the edge. I think he was really like brother Bill, and a couple other people like that across the country that he had real respect for. But other people he just, he just didn't do it. But I, I remember we did a promo with him, pretty sure it was a much music promo. I can't remember, but it was a promo to go to the UK with Matt and go and see an arsenal game. And I think was, you know, was one of the videos that was shot about the soccer field, or whatever, you know. So we went over there, and he just missed home. He just this wasn't his place. Once he got there, and I remember, you know, eating shit on like a, like $1,000 phone bill, he just kept phoning home. It's like, I missed being home or whatever. You know, they went to the soccer game, and the the winners didn't turn out to be the, you know, the supermodels that he had hoped they would be, or whatever. Because, you know, you're lucky if you get a winner, who knows who the artist is, right in those days, right? I'd get lots of people like, what did I we what did we win? Who are we going to see, or whatever, you know, but it was a challenging trip back then. But anyway, that was the world of promo back then,

Tara Sands  44:00  
sound design of the sound off podcast is inspired by mega tracks, the sound of entertainment, providing music and sound effects for radio podcasts and media professionals. Mega tracks is your one stop shop for library and custom tracks. Start your music search now at Mega tracks.com, the sound off podcast with Matt Cundill,

Matt Cundill  44:25  
1999 to me, feels like the last year when the parts of the record and radio relationship in the industry still were kind of glued together because, you know, after that Napster came, and then the bits began to fall away. Were the parts were there to have a Matthew good be the number one sound scam, because the radio stations are all put together. There was going to be no computer interference. The promo was there, and then slowly, after that, it comes apart.

Ivar Hamilton  44:56  
Yeah, I mean, I'll agree for the most part on. That, I think there were a couple of bands that the hip bucked the trend, most certainly like the hip, you know, no challenges, very few challenges on the hip. Across the country, everybody loved the hip, and everybody would play all the records. And even even up until when I left a couple of years ago, we were putting out these reissues with, you know, a couple of songs that had never come out before. And they were like, Oh my God, these are the, you know, fan holy grail tracks they were looking for for years. And it's like, you know, next thing you know, we got, like, a, you know, a top 10, top five hit. But, you know, the thing is, like the radio was certainly a big part of it still, but you had to do so much else. And it was all, obviously, all the provisions and things that we, you know, ended up having to do, you know, new things. And that was a big learning process for a lot of Canadian classic bands, or bands that have been around for a long time. And it's like, and I would have to learn these things too, and it's like, so what's your Tiktok strategy? And like, we're not even on Tiktok or whatever. So we, you know, and that was the same for me and and in the in the marketing world, a lot of those long standing bands, and they'd have pretty slick managers, and the managers would would not be thinking old school anymore, either. So I was at a bit of a disadvantage, because they wanted young people on these records, or whatever. And I remember having a huge, huge blowout about Black Sabbath. And when they were doing the 13 record, and one of their management persons came in from the US, and I gave him my card, and it said, you know, VP, catalog. He goes, catalog. What's this? Why are you working my record? He goes, What do you know about Black Sabbath? And I'm like, more than you think you'll ever know like and so, but I got like, it was just a huge political thing, and Randy Lennox was hugely helpful. But he got, he managed to convince. He goes, Look, we've got the right guy to work on this record. There's nobody better in our company to work on Black Sabbath than either. But I need to show you what he can do. And so Randy goes, I need you to put the plan together in 24 hours. And I never did like work so damn hard my life than putting this together. And you know, I had to win the trust of Sharon Osborne. And you do not want to get under Sharon Osborne's skin, let me tell you, because I heard her give it to a lot of people over that timeframe. But I was, I was very fortunate at the end that, you know, Canada did very, very well on it. It was okay, but it was a it was a huge learning curve. And most of those classic bands all went that way. All needed to adapt to whatever new trends were. And, you know, this is the thing for these bands that you know, used to be big radio partners. It's like, okay, what are we doing? You know, what are we doing special with, with these digital partners? But that ended up changing towards, you know, the last couple of years too, because you'd have situations where they'd execute a global plan, and so you'd have, like, something like a Spotify going, this is, this is what the global plan is going to be for X act. So they can guarantee these, you know, these playlists, or these certain things are going to happen at the same time around the world, you know. And some of it could be just visual things. Sometimes I remember for the Rolling Stones, when that Hackney diamonds came out, it was like, Okay, we need the UK, we need Germany, we need Japan, we need Brazil, we need Mexico and Australia. We need you to execute these items for visuals around the most iconic parts of your cities to be seen and shared on social media around the world, and to create this massive impact. But these were all these global plans, whereas before, you'd never, most of the time, you wouldn't have these, not so much, these global plans in the in the 1990s

Matt Cundill  48:48  
you mentioned Sarah Harmer, so I remember the band weeping tile, the band that she played in beforehand. And I remember having a number of conversations with, I guess, management at the time, and, you know, I think we sat around, we would have some drinks. Full disclosure, the manager is my cousin, Patrick Sandberg. Oh yeah, he's my second cousin. And we would spend a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, so like, how does it work, where you start to get airplay and it starts to build. And I can't imagine just how hard it is for the job in a record company in the ANR department, like, how, like, what skills do you have to go in to say, yeah, that's gonna work. I've tried to pretend that I'm an ANR and I I can't do it. I think I have an idea of how a record's gonna work with the audience on the radio station that I'm programming, but I would have no idea to pick out a star in a club and go, that's going to be a hit.

Ivar Hamilton  49:50  
It's not easy. And the ANR, the ANR position, you know, shifted dramatically too, right? Because it used to be, oh, you know. Like the gentleman who worked for us back in the day, Dave Porter, great guy. And, you know, Dave Porter was at the horseshoe, you know, eight days a week, and all the clubs in Toronto seeing these acts all the time, or whatever. But that all kind of shifted into, you know, digital, you know, YouTube, and seeing things that way. And you see these stories of people like Lord and Billy Eilish and things like that, who kind of, you know, started making YouTube videos in their basement and getting discovered that way after, you know, they got huge amounts of hits or whatever, so that there was that whole dynamic shift in that. And now, you know, you see the labels shifting into, you know, a lot of cultural cultural signings. I don't know they call it cultural signings. But, you know, because the Canadian market's so diverse, you know, like Warner put a, you know, a big emphasis on South Asian artists and doing partnerships, but, but also, you know, building artists in Canada. So there's all this, like, whole underground scene that guys like you and me, we don't know about, like, it's just in some of these artists, like, blow you away. You're like, going, this artist just is plenty here Canada center or the Scotiabank arena, and I've never even heard of them, or whatever. And so there's a whole thing behind the scenes with those things. I mean, I remember there was also, like, you know, there was a couple of artists that we had some international artists, and we were tasked with doing ethnic marketing to say, Okay, we need to create campaigns in in Mandarin, or we need to create campaigns work with people that can do like, you know, Korean marketing to that type of marketplace, all quite different. Sometimes it was quite limited. You weren't sure on the impact and then and other things that would would happen. And you just like, go, Okay, this artist from Italy just sold out Scotiabank, and they're asking us for all this product. And okay, you know, so, so it kept it interesting, that's for sure.

Matt Cundill  51:54  
Yeah, thinking back to Sarah Harmer, it was a combination of hard work touring and then the label and marketing part comes in. Is it a sum of all those parts and a little luck in airplay? Or, like, what's the

Ivar Hamilton  52:08  
makeup of it? Yeah. I mean, it's combination of that. I mean, these days, though, the thing that blows me away these days, I remember in the 90s or whatever, if you didn't have any airplay in a market, and was really before social media, you know, there wasn't much you could do to promote an artist. Maybe if you like this artist, you might like this artist. You do, you know, play copies at record stores and you solicit for reviews and things like that. And I remember having some of our acts, some of these, sort of, like 480 acts first time through, or whatever like, and having concerts where there was like 10 people, where there's like, because nobody knew, right, it was like, even though these bands would go on to do bigger things, or they would be big in the States, so they crossed the border, nobody knew who they were here in 2025 because of social media, whatever, and word spread on that. And you know, you can see these stats on on social media pages, on Spotify and things like that, where the followers are, and some of the analytics that are pretty readily available that a lot of these acts build big followings in parts of the world that you're just like, Are you kidding me? Like, so there's more sort of backward, you know, I shouldn't say backward, but more opportunities for these bands to come in and play these festivals and like going, oh shit, they've got 10,000 followers in Toronto. Who knew I was out for lunch with a friend of mine, and he asked me. He said, he goes, Hey Iver. He goes, I'm thinking of buying some tickets to go and see St Paul and the broken bones. And I'm like, oh, okay, are they, like a local cover band or something? And I'm like, he goes, No. He goes, these guys are big. And I said, I never heard of them and had no idea. So I look these guys up. They've had been making records. They're from Alabama. They're like a soul R and B act more. So on the soul side, we make an album since 2014 they have played on Coachella, they played at Glastonbury, they played Lollapalooza. They played on Jimmy Kimmel. They opened for the stones on some of their dates a couple of years back. And they played Toronto seven times. And I'm like, I never heard a single note of these guys. And they played, like, mid size, you know, Queen Elizabeth theater, 1500 cedars or whatever. So there's a lot of that going on that didn't really exist before, that these acts can come in and do these things because of these, you know, my little secret on social media and people turning each other onto these things from these bands around the around the world, I find it quite fascinating. And then, you know, there's a whole. Soul. There's this music scene in Southern California, which is a like 60 soul groups sound, you know, just sound like that early 60 soul like the impressions and, you know, people like that. But it's Mexicano, Mexicano soul music right now. And it's fantastic. I love this stuff, right? And so the sinceres and the altons. They were in Toronto a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't go because I had another I had another commitment that night. But I know they played a sold out show in Toronto, and they just sold out show in Buffalo or whatever. And like, nobody knew who these guys are, you know. So there is a

Matt Cundill  55:35  
documentary in the works. It's been in the works for a while, that's about C, F, n, y, what can you tell us about it?

Ivar Hamilton  55:43  
So it was something that I always thought we should do. It was, was a sort of common idea that Alan Cross and I had an Alan and I are, are very good friends. We've been very good friends since his time working at cfny. We have a, this is not a lie that whoever dies first gets each other's record collections. It's in each other's wills. So we stay close on on a bunch of things. And so about 10 years ago, we had a conversation about, like, we should try and, you know, see if we can get a documentary made about CF and why? Specifically, you know about that time in the 80s and late 70s and what have you. And so between the two of us, we talked to lots of people over the years, and Alan, sort of, you know, rotates in a bigger circle than I could have, just because of my universal responsibilities. And Alan is a freelancer in his position, so he knew more people out there that I did so he, he sort of went to a bunch of different people. And, you know, it was very frustrating for the longest time we couldn't find people. By the way, Alan and I actually, as a side note, tried to start a radio station at one point too. We, we were very seriously trying to get the license that ended up becoming in the 88 and we had a backer to do it, but in the in the long run, we realized we were way over our heads and couldn't have managed it, so we didn't do it. But anyway, we kept on this documentary thing, and it went on for about 10 years before some people finally came forward. And I didn't, I didn't, honestly didn't know them. I still don't really know them, which is Highball entertainment, and they've got, you know, you look up their website, and there's, you know, there's a bunch of films on there, a lot of them, I don't know, but they're in the business, and had done some some documentaries. And then he knew this woman, Julia, who'd done some work with him at some things at CF and wine or her other half. Matt schtner was a, he wasn't a film director, he was a film producer, younger guy, and so they got the money to finally do it. It started filming three years ago, but there was never a script on it. There was never sort of like a sit down script on it's like, ah, we'll just, you know, we'll, we'll interview a bunch of people, and then we'll be able to piece it together and and so anyway, because I was still at Universal, I was pretty limited in how I could participate, because I was, actually, I'm an executive producer on it, but I wasn't during the filming, because I was, I just corporately, I couldn't, because of what I was doing at Universal but I had a lot of say in in you know, what was going into that? One of the things that is a common misconception about that film is what happened on the Much Music thing. When the Much Music documentary it came, it was premiered, but never seen on crave and never seen anywhere else, because they never did the proper music clearances in it. And there was a ton of music in there. So I made damn sure on the CF and why one that we were going to get the clearances. I wanted to see what the music budget was and what we had to work with. And that was where I could really help, through the business affairs department at Universal to sort of keep an eye on things, to make sure that that we were covered on most of those things, and knew that we were going to be okay on that. So we started filming three years ago. There was filming in Toronto at the Elma combo, and then there was filming in Los Angeles and New York, London, and I think one or two other locations around the UK that were, you know, within a train ride of London, within a day, I think they went up to Liverpool to do OMD and and then Manchester to do Peter Hook from New Order. So it was a good combination of Canadian artists, bunch from back in the day, and artists that also grew up listening to the radio stations that are more contemporary today. So, for example, metric singer is in it, and Derek will be from some, some 41 Ben koala, it's from Billy talent is in it. And, you know, Steven page is in it, and so, so they're in it. And then internationally, as I said, we got Peter Hook, we got OMD. We got one of the members of Japan, one of the members of Gang of Four, law tallhurst, who was in the cure, couple of other people, mercuradus, Canadian guy who's one of the world's biggest publisher owners, is a multi billion dollar company. But his very first job in the business was, he was a promo rep for Virgin Records, and his station was Main Station was C, F, n, y, but he was so young at the time, he had to get his girlfriend to drive him to the radio stations. He didn't have his license teenage heads in it. And of course, you know many of the DJs who were part of the spirit of Radio Days, obviously, David Marsden, myself, Scott Turner, Alan Cross, Liz Janick, David height, Daniel Richler is in it. Jim fonger, who made the mistake in 88 did the operations manager, which I actually was against at the time. But Scott Turner said to me, because Iver, we need to have a villain in the film or whatever. So anyway, I mean, everybody was was cordial. I wasn't there when he did the when they did the interview, but everybody was nice to one another. I mean, that was 30, you know, whatever. 3537 years ago. So you, you know, you move on from it. But anyway, the release of it is imminent. It is, we're hoping to have it announced next week, and looking forward to having people finally see it. I I will be honest with you that there was a lot of back and forth on things that shouldn't have been in it and things that should have been in it, and but I know that just that is a straight ahead process that happens with any documentary. And you know, we live, we live the life. So it was important to us as the people who were directly involved with this film, that things were fairly represented. I had Mike Downey help us with some stuff. And he's like, Ivor, for God's sakes, we just leave it alone. And they were just on little things, right? Scott Turner and I would, we were the same. And he's like, you know that that footage of the level OMD there, that's not at the concert hall, that's at another place. And, you know, Mike sitting, look guys like, just let it go. Nobody cares about stuff like that. So it was like, Okay, that's a good learning, because people probably don't care about, you know that that's not a shot of the concert hall. It could be somewhere else. But anyway, it was, it was a great experience to be a part of. And we are hoping that we can also take it out on the road and do some rep theater presentations where we have some people from the station, and, you know, we might even put a little video, like some music videos together, but hopefully we'll get trying to work on something to do some merch with the old CF and why logo from the 80s, and even the one that they had in the 70s, to get that out there again. But we'll see what happens with it. There's a ton of footage that never made it into the film, like there always is with any stuff, including some things that we shot. Alan and Scott and I went up to Brampton and went to 340 Main Street, which is now like a, I think it's a nail salon and a hair salon. And that was the where the original building was in this new building, it's up there. And the building where most they spent most of the 80s, at 83 Kennedy Road, south in Brampton. And we went into that building, and we had the, you know, when you go to London, and you can walk around London and see, this is where Jimi Hendrix lived, and this is where David Bowie played his last concert. Well, we we mimicked those and had some fake plaques made up saying, you know, 340 Main Street. This is the the home of the spirit of spirit of radio. And 83 Kennedy road south. One day, we hope that those plaques will be real. So you

Matt Cundill  1:03:31  
yourself haven't given up on radio. You're still doing it. You've got a show at NY, the spirit.com that's been going on for quite a while. What goes into that show every week?

Ivar Hamilton  1:03:41  
Well, you know, here, here we are 2025, and I've been retired for two years, and I have two radio shows now, and sort of on the fringe, I got three radio shows, so NY, the spirit one, and so David, David started it, I think it's, it's going on 12 years ago now. And he also had another digital thing before then. It was iceberg radio. And I did some work for him on that too, on the side, or whatever. And actually had a year on Q 107, too, that I did in the 90s as well, which was a lot of fun. But then the PD at the time was Danny Kingsbury, who's a very nice guy like him a lot. But, you know, he, remember him calling me because I agree. I listened to your show for four weeks. I didn't know one song that you played, and I was like, well, Danny, then, you know, we agree to disagree. I send in all my music for you guys to bet. Nobody said anything. So, anyway, so David, you know, but David's thing with NY, the spirits being kind of existed, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, as if c, f and y never changed from what they were doing during his tenure there, and we were still sort of doing things in a similar fashion. So I have always played what I wanted, and I go very, very wide. I think I even go wider than even if I was was still at. C, F and Y on on things. But it's, it's really, you know, my love and music, and I always still strive to, you know, find new acts to play along with, whether that be, you know, some, some classics that hadn't heard, been heard on C, F and Y for a very long time, if ever. I also strive to find acts that were out during that time period at CF, and why that we never played. But had we been there, if we could get in the way back machine and go back and, you know, do it again, we would be playing these acts, right? Found a few cool ones that I still think are really good, but I branch out into like, you know, I'll play, I'll play a lot of, you know, reggae. I'll play soul music from the 60s. I'll play garage music and psychedelic sometimes, and, you know, once in a blue moon, I'll play a little bit of comedy in that. So it's been a pretty good experience. But I, you know, when I left universal and moved down to Niagara on the Lake, and I spent some, you know, my time at Universal. I was very tight with the people at PBS. And there was PBS as an office in Toronto, and a rep and and one of the guys who come up and visit from Buffalo all the time was a former alternative radio program

Matt Cundill  1:06:18  
who I want to say, Tom Calderon. Tom Calderon,

Ivar Hamilton  1:06:22  
well, Tom Calderon, you know, he is the CEO, President of the PBS outlet there. But this other fellow, William Sauer, he was also out of alternative radio numerous places in the States, and programmed lots of stations, own stations, so he has a lot to do with the programming hubs and all the, you know, various PBS stations that they have there. But when Tom came to PBS, he he decided they needed a radio station. So, so they programmed the bridge. And I had listened to the bridge before, and, you know, and they said, Well, we call it, we program ourselves, position ourselves as college radio for adults. And so when I left universal, or was on my way out, they graciously drove up from Buffalo. It was Tom and William and Dave rivet, and they took me out to dinner, and we had a great conversation and and they were said, yeah, we'd love to support the CF and wide doc. So at some point, we're hoping that we're going to do something special with PBS to promote the doc down there. But the other thing was, we had a discussion about doing a show. I said, Well, you know, guys, I love, I love what the bridge does. It's kind of feels to me like C, F and Y did, and that's what Tom based the radio station on. So it wasn't a great stretch for them to have me on there. So I've been on there since May of this year. Have Done 3031, shows, but here, here it is, coming into Christmas and realized I'm like, okay, so I also do a guest spot, which happened quite a few times this year on the, you know, the original radio station, CF, and why, they have a show called The Edge time machine, and they go back and look at certain months in various decades. And so Robbie Johnson, who's Alan Cross's producer on every single one of his ongoing history episodes and his crime episodes, he's been the go to guy for the 90s and a little bit later on. So Robbie said to the guy who puts the show together, dusty, lawless, he goes, we haven't done any 80s stuff, but if we do, we should have Iver Hamilton in to do this. And so I've done like, 10 or 12 of these now go in there, like quite regularly we knock off two shows. So here it is. And so I get noticed from the bridge. They say, my shows usually Thursday nights. And they said, Because Christmas is on a Thursday, we're going to move your show to the Sunday that week. And I'm like, okay, so four o'clock, I'm on NY the spirit. Six o'clock, I'm on C, F, n, Y, and 10 o'clock, I'm on the bridge on the 21st of December, all playing completely different music on each show. But it's all going to be alternative Christmas music, with a few mainstream things, a few favorites in there, some comedy stuff, because I love playing. There's some real fun Christmas parodies. I don't know if you remember Bob rivers, but there's some really good ones. So that's kind of what I'm doing. And of course, you know that we're working together on my podcast with Scott Turner, yeah.

Matt Cundill  1:09:14  
I mean, you just clearly had plenty of time left over to do a podcast. And

Ivar Hamilton  1:09:21  
I gotta say, My dog's not too happy with

Matt Cundill  1:09:26  
Yeah, music milestones. Yy z is now out wherever you get your podcast, and you and Scott Turner are doing it together. And as of this, recording your five episodes in what's the show about?

Ivar Hamilton  1:09:38  
So we had a show when we were working together for a short period in Toronto, live in Toronto, and during the sort of like middle part of the 80s, when we started doing things together, we just started writing things down in a ledger book as to when bands were coming to town, when they played, where they played. And we just kept it going. And after I. Often 88 I think may Potts stepped in, and, you know, maybe it was Kim Hughes afterwards, but a couple of people stepped in and they kept it going. I think Captain Phil helped with it too, but Scott was always very good at keeping records of these things that happened. And so when we got into when the film started working, and originally it was just Alan, myself and two other outside people, one based in Nashville, and the other based in California. But the California person's originally from Toronto. It was just us. And then I said, you know, for the sake of accuracy and the sake of documenting more things, since there wasn't a script, we should bring in Scott as an executive producer on that. So once Scott came in and put a lot of his input into the documentary, we had started having conversations about, well, what can carry on the legacy? Especially, you know, when you've got a documentary that's whatever an hour and 20 minutes, or whatever it is, there's a million things that are going to get missed. And so we, you know, Scott had documented all of these things he'd carried on as a personal, you know, as a personal thing, and just putting up on his own personal Facebook, you know, 35 years ago, it was CNC Music Factory. You know, he'd do this stuff when he was at his energy 108, and Dave FM, or whatever else he was at. And then it would be like, okay, 1970 the stones came up with Jimmy shelter, or whatever sort of never been CF and why presented this. And so it ended up growing into a base of about 30,000 entries of things, whether that's somebody's birthday, somebody's death, a record release coming out. But he also, you know, he marked down all sorts of things that I I wouldn't really keep track of, and other people, for the most part, aren't there. Like he, he pulled some ads that he felt. There was some, some personal want ads. He pulled, you know, old like now magazine star. And it's like two guys, two single guys looking for chicks into C, F, n, Y, or whatever. I'm like, okay, you know, whatever phone, whatever you know. So so he saved, you know, some, some silly things like that. And so that sort of gives us a little bit of extra, extra things to talk about on our shows. But we go through a given week in history. Generally, we go back 60 years. Once in a while we maybe go back a little bit further. But generally, my thing to Scott was because originally he said, Now we should go, you know, later. It should be later. And I said, no, no. He said, You need to acknowledge, like the British invasion. To me, what the start of it was during the 60s is, you know, to me, a Rolling Stone single that came out in 1965 is just as relevant as a Tears for Fears song that came out in 1990 for people to hear about, you know, just depending on the level of what it might be. But the focus is on those, you know, historically on those releases. But the main focus is things that happen in the Toronto and GTA area. And maybe, you know, we'll go on a limb and go, Okay, well, we'll do things that are maybe buffalo, London, Detroit, Hamilton, things like that, if it's meaningful, but and also if it's something like this past week or a week ago was the 45th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon. So we're going to talk about that. If we were on the air back in the summer, we would have done a big thing on on Live Aid, is one example. So things that have sort of have, like a global meaning as well. And it's important to me, we kind of divide it up, and he, he puts together a lot of this historical stuff, and then I will talk about some things that are sort of like new, new ish that are coming out, ISIS so. So, you know, one of the examples was, we talked about pretty much in depth. What was going on in Stranger Things. Okay, last season coming out. Okay, you get the Psychedelic Furs in there. Kate Bush is back in the episodes, but one of the cast members is wearing a fall Ben sinister t shirt. Who knew that? So, you know, you get into, you get into little things like that. We talked about some re issues that come out. You know, it was like that Beatles Anthology. And what's the difference between this? Here's some of the, you know, our top records of the year. Here's some things to recommend this week. We're doing a big thing on, I say, The Big Three of Canadian classic rock bands. Guess who triumph and rush, all going out on tour almost concurrently in 2026 and you know, you had a Burton coming to 77 and Randy Bachman, who's 82 and you know, a triumph who certainly seems better days and rush or getting into shape with a new drummer, you know, so, so there's lots of things to talk about, there's, there's, there's no shortages of things to talk about on a given week. We certainly intend to have numerous guests on once we get into 2026, and we will, we will look to do potentially, you know, depending on the level of who the artist is, or the person who the guest is, that we might do, you know, some second, second episodes in a week. Say, you know, let's just say. It was like, Oh, it's this famous author, or it's, you know, somebody from the hip, or, you know, whatever that might be, or somebody international that we might have access to, Ivor.

Matt Cundill  1:15:10  
This is great. Thank you very much for just sharing stories. And, man, you told a lot of stories.

Ivar Hamilton  1:15:17  
Well, I mean, this is the thing, like, you know, Scott and I worked together pretty well on those things. And, you know, he will put sort of like, you know, the sheets in front of me, like, here's, here's all the things that I think we should talk about. And I'll look at them, and inevitably, I'll have a story to tell that's somewhat related. I'll find things that I remember or things that I can dig into. And when you have 10 years of radio experience at a place like CF and wine, the artists that we experienced and broke and, you know, played a part in supporting their careers. Having those experiences under your belt, and then having 35 years at a major record label, the world's biggest record company, you're going to have a few stories to tell about the music that are in your lives and that affected other people's lives too, and I hope that people enjoy them and we bring some meaning to people's lives.

Tara Sands  1:16:09  
So the sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan cerminsky, edited by Taylor McLean, social media by Aidan glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com you.