when our music got cued up

Another killer article from The Star's Greg Quill...

Somewhere in the late 1970s Canada's fledgling music business joined the big leagues.

Soon after the institution in 1971 of the challenging and visionary ruling by the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, demanding a minimum of 30 per cent Canadian musical content from commercial radio stations across the country, the seeds that were sown in isolated pockets of musical creativity in the 1960s finally flowered.

Canadian music, for the first time in history, started doing nationwide business. Supported by FM radio airplay and a rudimentary concert infrastructure, bands could tour from coast to coast. Record sales rocketed. Labels sprang up like tulips in springtime as money greased the cogs of this new and vital homemade machinery.

Without those still-divisive CanCon regulations, Canada would likely still be a small part of the U.S. music business.

This update is brought to you courtesy of This Beat Goes On, the second two-hour installment of veteran Toronto music journalist/producer Nick Jennings' and Gary McGroarty's continuing chronicle – and celebration – of Canada's pop and rock music history makers.

It's old news, of course, but to thousands of young Canadians making their way in a new musical landscape, This Beat Goes On provides a bridge to similarly driven pioneers in the not-too-distant past.

"I believe in history, and I believe this story needs to be told," Jennings said last week, after a gathering at the Gladstone Hotel by many of the 1970s and '80s music stars who contributed to his films.

"We need to know where we came from. It's important to our culture. Our musical legacy runs deeper than Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot and Leonard Cohen. Thousands of artists have made invaluable contributions to our musical life, and they need to be on the record as well."

The documentary features some 50 abridged musical clips from the 1970s, interviews with music stars of the period, as well as with their artistic offspring in this decade, and with long-time Canadian music industry movers and shakers. It airs in two parts in CBC-TV's Doc Zone at 9 p.m. Thursday and at the same time the following week.

A third part of the series, Rise Up – airing in the same slot Sept. 10 and 17 – examines how music videos and MuchMusic cranked a new crop of TV-friendly Canadian pop and rock artists to previously unimagined levels of international acceptance, and plugged them into a new global music market in the 1980s.

The documentaries, which took almost three years to put together, are sequels to Jennings' and McGroarty's lauded Shakin' All Over, the two-hour, 2006 TV special based on Jennings' book Before the Gold Rush, which examined the origins of a new national consciousness expressed in music and song in the 1960s. Proud as he his of that book, Jennings is mystified by its lack of companions.

"In America, Britain, Australia, a sense of cultural history is ingrained," he said. "In other countries, dozens of books have been written about music in the 1960s. In Canada, as far as I know, Before the Gold Rush is the only one, and I think that's shocking, particularly because songs and music are Canada's strongest and most meaningful forms of self-expression, stronger than literature, movies and art.

"Music holds this country together."

This Beat Goes On – the title is borrowed from Vancouver party rockers The Kings' breakout 1980 single – and Rise Up, referencing Toronto band Parachute Club's politically charged pop hit from 1983, sticks to the formula that made Shakin' All Over a memorable TV event.

"The trick is to make the big-picture story clear without too many sacrifices on the music side," Jennings said. "That means we have to move pretty fast. The stories have to set in the context of the times, and illustrated with lots of music, both classics and cult classics."

In both programs, Jennings and McGroarty – he managed Francophone folk-rockers Cano in the 1970s and went on to produce, write and direct Stand and Be Counted, the TV series about the role of music in 20th-century politics – achieve a balance between instruction, revelation and nostalgic entertainment.

It's surprising to learn, for example, how many current pop and rock artists took their musical cues not from big international stars, but from Canadian bands and songwriters they saw in local clubs and arenas in the 1970s and 80s, more or less proving Jennings' thesis.

"We tried to be as inclusive as possible, given how expensive it is to obtain clearances (rights) to air the music," he said. "But there's always someone left out ..."

A couple of glaring omissions in This Beat Goes On will certainly raise eyebrows: Vancouver-based hard rock band Heart, and Montreal songwriter Michel Pagliaro.

"We had a long discussion about Heart, whose key members are American," and ruled the band out, Jennings said. "I'm not sure it was the right decision."

And Pagliaro? His manager rejected the idea of being part of a retrospective, Jennings said.

"`Michel is a contemporary artist with a contemporary audience,' he said."