The only thing I knew about Toronto was the Maple Leafs. (And why is it the “Leafs” instead of the “Leaves,” I could never figure that out.)<\/p>\n
You see they played the Rangers on Saturday night on channel 9. Not that I was a big hockey fan, but there wasn’t much else on TV at that time, and I lived for sports. We knew so many sports, especially from Jim McKay and the “Wide World of Sports” on ABC.<\/p>\n
But my true endearment to the Maple Leafs came via my home hockey set.<\/p>\n
You’ve got to know there were two competing styles… One involving a puck, the other involving a ball. The one with the puck allowed you to move the players back and forth, but the action was slow, whereas the one with the ball…the players were stationary and the game was even faster than the real one. You could wind up and send the ball all the way from one end of the ice into the other team’s goal. And the two teams were the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs. And the Canadiens were in red and the Maple Leafs wore blue jerseys and at the time blue was my favorite color so that’s probably why I liked them more.<\/p>\n
Now with the expansion of the league, and the ascension of the Bruins and the Islanders…hockey’s visibility was raised. But at this point there were only six teams in the league and seemingly every player was Canadian. The Great White North. I couldn’t have picked out Toronto on a map, I was actually caught off guard when I learned that it was closer to Buffalo than Burlington. Not so far north as to have the frigid weather Americans think permeates the northern nation.<\/p>\n
And I still can’t tell you why Toronto is the epicenter of the country, it’s probably got something to do with shipping and the Great Lakes, but Toronto is cosmopolitan and…<\/p>\n
A city.<\/p>\n
I called up an Uber and it was there in two minutes. In L.A. one never comes that fast, especially in the hills. There are people walking on the street and it was raining and COLD! Like in the forties. A temperature very rarely seen in Southern California, where it is definitely spring, I could feel the weather change definitively on my birthday.<\/p>\n
So I’m here for Departure, the new incarnation of Canadian Music Week run by Randy Lennox. And I woke up at the crack of dawn, by my standards, never mind the time change, to interview Kevin “Chief” Baruk.<\/p>\n
Funny about the music business, when you get to the core, where the action is, I’m utterly fascinated. It’s different from being a fan of the act, it’s about the nuts and bolts, the movement behind the scenes, and don’t forget music doesn’t require a degree, there’s no natural hierarchy, you rise and fall on your own deeds, the most successful people are entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
So Chief (a guy in the studio called everybody that name, like “chef” in “The Bear,” and it stuck to Kevin) went on the road with Nickelback for more than a year before the hit. Do I need to remind you?<\/p>\n
And that was the entr\u00e9e to Nashville. You see Chief’s longtime buddy Joey Moi had the idea of bringing the Nickelback sound to country. Needless to say, Nash Vegas wasn’t buying it, but then Moi employed the Nickelback formula with Jake Owen and Chief ran the management arm of Big Loud, and first came Florida Georgia Line and then Morgan Wallen and then Seth England decided he didn’t want to be in the management business anymore, after FGL looked at new managers and ultimately Chief spoke with Michael Rapino who told him he’d back him in a new venture and you can see the resulting enterprise here:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.thecoreentertainment.com<\/p>\n
Core built Bailey Zimmerman from scratch. A friend of Chief’s found him on TikTok, an old friend Chief hadn’t spoken with in fifteen years who was not in the business and…<\/p>\n
Now Chief is the manager of Nickelback.<\/p>\n
He says that everybody in Nashville loves Nickelback, and he put them on fifteen country festivals, they just played Stagecoach, where they killed. I know, you don’t believe it, you’re still a hater, but that doesn’t matter, because Nickelback doesn’t need you, they’ve got a mailing list of 750,000…that’s who pays the bills, and there are younger fans who aren’t being reminded, they’re finding out about the band two decades later, it’s new to them.<\/p>\n
As for social media… Nickelback was not on it, not to any degree. Chief said it’s not about manipulation, trying to goose a project into virality, you just have to make music available and then the fans pick it up or they don’t. It always comes down to the fans.<\/p>\n
And there were many more details and I wish it was a podcast because you would have dug it and learned stuff, but…<\/p>\n
Then I sat in the audience and listened to Kevin Lyman, Warped is back! Backed by Insomniac. But the most fascinating gems from Kevin were the little things, minor, but ultimately major. Like the billing… Kevin did research, discovered that most people only read the top two lines of a festival bill, so he decided to list the acts alphabetically.<\/p>\n
And once he got going, Kevin got wound up, he became passionate, he couldn’t stop talking, he was excited. And that’s the difference between the music business and the straight world. That passion, that excitement, without it you are not successful and if you manage to get a gig you don’t last. And music is one of the last fields where you still make it up as you go, there’s not much of a blueprint. You have an idea and then try to bring it to fruition.<\/p>\n
Kevin also talked about the charitable component…this is important to younger fans, and also needing to police the acts themselves, from checking for underage groupies to keeping the performers from being strung out. He’s camp counselor, best friend and majordomo all at the same time, it’s a hands-on operation.<\/p>\n
And then I went to the Four Seasons for lunch with this guy I met on a cruise to Japan and his buddy who’s kind of the Charlie Rose of Canada and… We were having a jolly old time shooting the sh*t and then his secondee invitee Rosie arrived. She said she was a fan of musicals. But really, she’d been a Canadian Supreme Court Justice! There’s mandatory retirement at 75, and now she teaches law at Harvard and NYU and by time I finished getting her story I felt inadequate, you can read about her here:<\/p>\n
https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Rosalie_Abella<\/p>\n
And everybody always talks about the money, but it’s the people you meet that is the main exponent of success. The conversations. They’re so stimulating, you learn so much…<\/p>\n
And now I’m off to the Live Music Awards…<\/p>\n
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