Red Robinson's Legends

Happy Birthday, Canada! up next in my salute to some of my favourite Canadian artists is Randy Bachman (pictured here with fellow Winnipeg legend Daryl B). Photo taken at CFUN/Vancouver by Dee Lippingwell.

Talk about a musical prodigy: Randy won a singing contest at age 3 and by 5 he was playing the violin! Randy is quoted by John Einarson in the Winnipeg Free Press: "Winnipeg in the '60s was like that movie That Thing You Do, only multiplied by a thousand. It was so exciting and alive with music." In 1962 Randy hit it big with Chad Allan and the Expressions "Shakin' All Over". Early radio pressings of the single were simply labeled "Guess Who?" and that's where the name originated.

Between 1969 and 1970, The Guess Who sold more records than the entire Canadian music industry combined. My friend Bruce Allen took an interest in Randy's fledgling band Brave Belt, which morphed into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. BTO became one of the most successful bands of the Seventies. The Guess Who and BTO deserve a place in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame!

In this 1982 interview with Terry Moore, Randy reflects on his success and putting fame into perspective; the downside of music industry promotion; life after music.

Randy hosts CBC and Sirius XM radio program Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap and he's authored two books: Vinyl Tap Stories and Tales From Beyond The Tap.

Sony Music is releasing "The Bachman-Cummings Collection" limited edition box set, and Randy and Burton are planning to celebrate the music of the Guess Who and BTO with a rescheduled North American reunion tour! "Together Again - Live In Concert" kicks off next summer. They'll be at Rogers Arena here in Vancouver June 15, 2021. Check bachmancummings.ca for details. Stay up to date with Randy at randybachman.com.

Burton Cummings is a genuine Canadian musical icon. Best known for his decade with the Guess Who and "Clap For The Wolfman", "These Eyes and "American Woman", he's also enjoyed a solo career with "Stand Tall", "My Own Way To Rock", "Break It To Them Gently" and many other hits. I refer to him as “King of the Keyboards” and he does not disappoint.

Burton and fellow Guess Who alumnus Randy Bachman grew up in Winnipeg, where they were heavily influenced by radio: particularly by one of Canada's premier Top 40 radio stations, 50,000 watt CKY (home of Peter Jackson, Daryl B and Chuck McCoy). Burton also remembers listening to old buddy Dick Biondi playing "Da Doo Ron Ron" by the Crystals on Chicago's WLS! Legend has it the band's "Albert Flasher" was inspired by a visit to Vancouver's C-FUN.

Burton is in the Juno Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and has the Order of Canada. In addition Burton has a theatre named for him in Winnipeg. Great honors for a great Canadian.

You'll want to check out Burton's Facebook page facebook.com/burtoncummings. Lots of great stories from his career, Winnipeg memories and Burton's take on the music we grew up with. Well worth a visit!

This photo with Burton Cummings was taken backstage at the Red Robinson Show Theatre. The B.C. Lions sweater was a gift from the late Bobby Ackles on my 70th birthday. It says “ROBINSON” and the number 70 on the back and just the number on the front. I wore it on stage in honour of the Lions’ first outdoor win since 1982.

After the last four decades mostly in the United States, Burton now calls Moose Jaw, SK home. How Canadian is that?

Audio courtesy Global TV's Close Encounters series.

I can’t take any credit for Michael Bublé’s amazing worldwide success, unfortunately, but I can take credit for appreciating his talent very early on, in the early 1990s, when I went to see him sing at the BaBalu Nightclub in Vancouver. He was only a teenager, but he reminded me of Bobby Darin, who I love, and I figured he would achieve some measure of fame.

Robin Brunet has a great story in Red Robinson: The Last Deejay:

"Shortly after the Bobby Darin biopic Beyond The Sea commenced production, Bruce Allen told Robinson that Michael Bublé was being visited by Kevin Spacey nightly at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City, where the young singer was performing. 'Spacey keeps telling Bublé he reminds him of Bobby Darin,' Allen said.

Robinson sent Bublé (who, in his pre-fame days, played an Elvis-type soda jerk in the stage hit about Robinson’s life, Red Rock Diner) a tape of an interview he had conducted with Darin. Part of the interview featured Darin doing spot-on imitations of celebrities such as Jack Benny and Walter Winchell, much the way Spacey would entertain people off-set decades later.

Bublé gave the tape to Spacey when he next appeared at the Blue Note. 'He said he appreciated the gesture, and that was that,' says Robinson. 'Flash forward a year later: I’m with Carole and another couple at Hy’s steakhouse in Vancouver for my birthday. Carole is peering at a dark corner of the restaurant, and she nudges me: 'Do you see who that is? That’s Kevin Spacey.'

Robinson got a waiter to give the actor his business card along with a note asking if he had listened to his interview with Darin. No sooner did they resume eating than Spacey appeared at their table. 'I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m Kevin Spacey.'

Carole, who has been exposed to more than her fair share of celebrities over the decades, looked at him from head to toe and beamed. 'Of course you are; who else would you be?'

We should have declared May 5 to 10, 2008 Anne Murray Week in Vancouver. Canada’s first lady of song played to a full house at the 3000-seat Queen Elizabeth Theatre. I was asked to emcee the opening and told the crowd that I had discovered that during this, her final coast-to-coast tour, the longest applause was in Ottawa with a three minute standing ovation at the end of the show. I urged everyone in the audience to beat Ottawa and they did by 30 seconds. Later that week at the Red Robinson Show Theatre (another sellout), the audience there beat them all with a 5 minute standing ovation.

After the show we met Anne in the Green Room for this interview. We were joined by photographer Kevin Statham, TV camera person Sharron Bates, Carole, and some of Anne’s people. Bruce Allen, Anne’s manager, was on the speaker phone from backstage at Michael Buble’s Santa Barbara concert.

I told Anne that we had a special gift for her: the audio of Anne’s complete show at the Cave Theatre Restaurant in 1971- recorded illegally. It is one of a kind and might have been lost over the decades but it was discovered in the late deeay Jack Cullen’s collection. My friend Owen Coppin rescued it and copied it onto a disc. We had the pleasure of presenting it to Anne. She was awestruck as she had no idea anything like this existed. It was a special evening with a special lady.

During 1957's "Show of Stars" in Vancouver, it was my job to introduce each act as they appeared on stage, then I would rush backstage and tape a quick interview with one of the stars. The show was literally a live jukebox presentation, hit artist after hit artist and song after song. Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Bowen, Buddy Knox, Don and Phil Everly, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, George Hamilton IV, Buddy Holly and the Crickets - an incredible assortment of talent, a Who's Who of early rock and roll.

Paul Anka was just fifteen when I first met him during this tour. He seemed arrogant, but to me this was his way of covering up his obvious inferiority complex. After all, he was the youngest performer on the show and he had to compensate. His first hit "Diana" had just been released in the summer of 1957 and it launched his career. It came across as arrogance but there was no question about his talent and his stage presence. He was, at the time, the only Canadian who had made it into the international arena of Rock and Roll. On my taped interview with him during this time he sounds cocky but if he hadn't been, who else would have listened to him, who else would have promoted him?

Paul Anka was, and always has been, his own best promoter. He works at this as much as he works at songwriting and everything that he involves himself with. One of the differences with Paul Anka was his ability to write most of his own material. He has not only written hits for himself, but for others. He wrote "My Way" for Frank Sinatra and "She's A Lady" for Tom Jones and many other hits for many other singers.

As we celebrate Paul Anka's birthday today, please join me in extending your best wishes to a genuine Canadian music icon who is still going strong. And please take time to visit Paul at paulanka.com or subscribe to his YouTube channel, PaulAnkaTV. That's where you can hear Paul's latest, "Sessions". It's a masterful work by a true pop craftsman. I know you'll enjoy it!

Happy birthday, Paul!

Red Robinson: The Last Broadcast at friesenpress.com, chaptersindigo.ca, amazon.com, amazon.ca, barnesandnoble.com, play.google.com and books.apple.com. Here's another excerpt:

"First up as their mikes go live is a discussion about how radio stations used to be advertised by jingles, complete with catchy lyrics. 'They were infectious,' Robinson tells listeners.

'We wanted them to be in block chords so everybody could sing them and have emotional impact,' says O’Day. 'We didn't do it just to identify the station, we did it as a commercial for the station. We wanted them to be love songs, if you will, about the radio station.

'With the World’s Fair coming to Seattle in 1962, our jingles at KJR were old-fashioned and we needed to do something different; so I sat in the basement and wrote a jingle, which I stole from the Los Angeles station Channel 98. That resulted in a jingle still sung by people in Seattle!'

The KJR jingles are played, and then Robinson plays jingles from C-FUN. The short segment is capped by O’Day acknowledging that the jingles may sound corny in retrospect, but they caused people to whistle the melodies in public: the best mass market advertising any station could hope for."

In this episode, a medley of classic KJR and C-FUN jingles; Red and Pat swap Jerry Lee Lewis concert stories.

"The Last Broadcast" with Red's special guests Pat O'Day and Bruce Allen, aired on CISL650/Vancouver on August 27, 2017. Here's another excerpt from Red Robinson: The Last Broadcast, out now at friesenpress.com, chaptersindigo.ca, amazon.com, amazon.ca, barnesandnoble.com, play.google.com and books.apple.com

"Meanwhile, in the lounge, there is joking about the guest format of Robinson’s final broadcast. Someone says to program director Stu Ferguson, 'Whose broadcast is this, anyway?'

Ferguson takes the comment in stride. 'Red’s in his element when he lets others with his experience do the talking.' Although the spotlight has shone on Robinson since his teenage years, he’s part of a tightly knit community of fellow travellers and loves when the attention directed at him is disseminated to include them.

At this point in the broadcast, younger people at CISL may well have wondered why so much attention was being paid to singers who are merely recognizable names in the 21st century, nostalgia value notwithstanding.

But in a sense, what Robinson, O’Day, and Allen are conducting is a history class. The subject may be pop culture, but as with any subject it’s impossible to fully appreciate today’s trends without understanding what led to them.

In the case of Elvis Presley, he fused the country-western music of the South with the rhythm and blues of African Americans to form rockabilly, which became one of the key sounds in rock and roll. Without him, musical entertainment today would be entirely different."

In this episode, Pat and Red share their memories of Paul Revere and The Raiders; Bruce tells the story behind Elvis' "If I Can Dream".

"The Last Broadcast" with Red's special guests Pat O'Day and Bruce Allen, aired on CISL650/Vancouver on August 27, 2017.

O’Day, who is emerging as the trio’s prime storyteller and who shares Robinson’s knack for shifting gears, interrupts. “Speaking of funny Hawaiian twists, Tom Rounds was the music director of KPOI in Honolulu,” he says in his melodious manner of speaking. “I’m over there on vacation, I think it’s ’64, and we were sitting in his office opening packages of new records, and we put on this thing from MGM and listened to it. I said, 'God, that is the strangest thing. I think it’s a hit.’

“Tom Rounds says, 'I agree.’ So, I called the station in Seattle right away. I said, 'There’s a record on MGM, you got to get it out of the envelope, get it on the air right now. I am telling you it’s a hit.’”

O’Day gets to the punch line: “It was Sam The Sham, 'Wooly Bully’. Not one of the greatest artistic achievements of our time, but it went to number one.” Allen and Robinson laugh.

Also in this episode, Red and Bruce talk Neil Diamond; the guys remember an appearance by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Red Robinson: The Last Broadcast is out now at friesenpress.com, chaptersindigo.ca, amazon.com, amazon.ca, barnesandnoble.com, play.google.com and books.apple.com

I first met Susan Jacks (then Susan Pesklevits) on the set of Let’s Go, Vancouver’s weekly contribution to the CBC-TV series Music Hop. I co-hosted with Fred Latremouille. The show allowed Canadian talent to get exposure from coast-to-coast on television. Susan was a wonderfully talented, stunningly beautiful lady with a voice like silk.

Susan married and divorced another Let’s Go performer, Terry Jacks, but in between they created some of Canada’s most memorable hit records as the Poppy Family. Terry was inducted into the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2004 and Susan was inducted in 2010.

50 years ago this week, the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Goin’, Billy?” reached #1 on music trade magazine Cashbox and #2 on Billboard (right behind The Beatles' The Long And Winding Road). It was Vancouver's first million-seller! Susan Jacks remembers how the song's title came about.

You've heard the radio, now read the book! Red Robinson: The Last Broadcast, is available now from friesenpress.com, chaptersindigo.ca, amazon.com, amazon.ca, barnesandnoble.com, play.google.com and books.apple.com

"The Last Broadcast" with Red's special guests Pat O'Day and Bruce Allen, aired on CISL650/Vancouver on August 27, 2017.

In this episode, the guys recall Ray Charles' roots in Seattle; Red and Pat share how they helped make Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" a multi-millon seller in 1963.