Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
As Toronto's once-formidable hit-making powerhouse, now the classic "oldies" Top 40 station, 1050 CHUM, gears up for its 50th anniversary bash today, a big question hangs over this key event and, indeed, over the station's year-long celebration of its humble beginnings on May 27, 1957.
We'll get it out of the way right off the top: Does boomer radio have a future, or is this its ecstatic terminal rush?
Common sense and radio ratings more or less prove that with the decline of the massive demographic force exerted on global culture by post-World War II children, now in their late 50s and early 60s and heading for shelter, vintage rock and pop ceases to have much meaning for subsequent generations of radio listeners.
Nor do such endearing domestic trappings as 1050 CHUM's culture-defining, high-rotation Top 40 playlist, its once-omnipotent deejays, its career-making CHUM Chart, its traffic-stopping stunts and contests (now the trademark property of MuchMusic and the video age), and memories of the heady days of pre-FM rock beaming in on transistor-powered portable wireless receivers.
"There will always be an oldies format, but it won't be music of the 1950s, '60s and '70s," veteran music journalist, radio consultant and Canadian editor of the North American music industry bible Billboard, Larry LeBlanc, told the Star.
"As listeners age, the more they want the music of their youth. As boomers decline, we'll hear more and more 'oldies' from the 1980s and `90s."
And that will happen on the stereo FM band, not on mono AM, which has long since ceased to be a factor in the marketing and dissemination of music, and, except for some holdouts in Canada, has been handed over entirely to talk, sports, news and to fringe religious and special interest operators, LeBlanc added.
In the Southern Ontario market several vintage music formats still thrive on old AM frequencies – notably Hamilton's CKOC 1150 pop/rock station, and CHAM 820 classic country music outfit, as well as Toronto's AM 740 pre-rock pop music station.
That so little music remains on AM is "lamentable, because the music that was made for AM radio still sounds so good on the AM band," LeBlanc said.
"And it's still viable territory. If radio hadn't been so quick to abandon music on AM after the FM revolution in the 1970s, if it hadn't got rid of its talent and burned out the repertoire by running the hits into the ground, it would still be an entertaining medium with a potential audience of eight to 10 million in this country.
"It was absurd to throw it away."
In CHUM Radio's main studio in its iconic 1950s-style building on Yonge St., the mood is understandably more optimistic, even as Bell Globemedia Inc. prepares to assert its recently approved ownership of CHUMCity Broadcasting.
It was a radio and television empire that began with the purchase by the late Allan Waters of a sunrise-to-sunset broadcast licence for a few thousand dollars in 1957, and was sold last year for nearly $2 billion.
"I really hope the format has a future on AM," said Bob Laine, the station's original overnight deejay and for 20 years one of the most powerful and likeable radio personalities in Toronto.
"The music will always appeal to young listeners who are discovering pop and rock for the first time, and it speaks to young listeners.
"It's simple, uncomplicated and timeless."
For Duff Roman, who for years was Laine's opposite number at the edgier CKEY before jumping to CHUM in the late 1960s – the two men enjoyed a unique friendship, against the express orders of their corporate bosses, often getting together at shift's end for a coffee, or hanging out in each other's studios hidden behind baffles and blinds – 1050 CHUM will always be "a Toronto icon, a statement of the city's sensibility in the years it dominated the radio market.
"I think that sensibility survives, and I hope, so will 1050 CHUM," added Roman, who brushed aside a reminder the station hasn't always been so sentimentally attached to the golden-era format. For a brief period in 2001, CHUM cavalierly dropped its long-established identity in favour of sports and talk, only to rethink its options a couple of ratings books later.
And while CHUM was indisputably the engine that powered the Canadian music machine in its heyday, it didn't always have its finger so tightly on the city's music pulse. It may have begun airing the Beatles a full year in advance of U.S. stations, thereby vaulting to the top of the Toronto radio pile, but its playlists, LeBlanc pointed out, were remarkably devoid of blues, soul and R&B in the years when Toronto's more adventurous teenagers were tuning in after dark to black music from Detroit, Rochester, Buffalo and beyond.
Even Elvis and the Rolling Stones had a hard time breaking the CHUM family-music code, finding a Toronto home first on CKEY.
And the famous CHUM Chart, entrée to which guaranteed huge sales dividends, was compiled from information no more reliable than a handful of Toronto record store sales estimates.
A hundred thousand copies of each of the 900 weekly CHUM Charts were printed between May 27, 1957, and April 26, 1975, and delivered, mostly by CHUM deejays and staffers in the early years, to every record store in the city, as well as convenience stores, concert venues, clubs and large public events, such as the CNE, where CHUM had a presence in the form of a broadcast trailer.
"It wasn't exactly scientific, and it was vulnerable to unscrupulous record companies with access to our key retailers," admitted Roman, who enjoys the fabulous distinction of having produced The Band after their split from Ronnie Hawkins and before they were taken under Bob Dylan's wing.
"There were scandals and bent noses ... but for more than 20 years, the CHUM Chart ruled. CHUM was an all-purpose radio station. There were no genre distinctions for radio in those days. On a given chart you could have artists as diverse as Marty Robbins, Hugo Winterhalter, the Everly Brothers and Elvis. Back then a hit was a hit, and the CHUM Chart was untouchable."
And so are the memories that remain 1050 CHUM's exclusive territory, at least for now. Many of them have been embellished and painstakingly resurrected over the past three years by Laine and longtime CHUM producer Doug Thompson in the CHUM Archives pages on the Rock Radio Scrapbook website (rockradioscrapbook.ca).
It includes detailed text as well as segments of actual broadcasts by former CHUM personalities Al Boliska, Dave Johnson, Laine, John Spragge, Donny Burns, Chuck McCoy, Tom Rivers, Scott Carpenter and "Jungle Jay" Nelson, among others.
The station's own website (www.1050chum.com), also houses a Toronto-centric photo and text treasury of enormous size and complexity.
But for Laine and Roman, who will help launch and promote other special events during the remainder of CHUM's 50th anniversary year, nothing compares to the memory of feeling the hair on the back of their necks rise when the Beatles played Maple Leaf Gardens in September 1964. They were radio rivals and CHUM clearly owned this city.
"None of us had ever seen anything so exciting," said Roman, for whom Fats Domino once cooked a steak on a hotplate in his Toronto hotel room, and to whom Louis Armstrong – for reasons he never made clear – gave a New Orleans constipation remedy.
"The noise of the screaming women was overwhelming, disorienting. Backstage, George Harrison was frightened.
"When Elvis performed at the Gardens in 1957, it was a polite, well-behaved country music concert. Something had happened to Toronto in the years between, and CHUM was part of that change.
"For the first time, the people who played the music were the same age as the people who made it. For the first time, Canadian musicians – The Band, David Clayton-Thomas, Luke Gibson and the Apostles, Ian & Sylvia, The Guess Who, Michel Pagliaro, Gordon Lightfoot – could hear their music on the radio, on Top 40 radio, alongside the Beatles and the Stones and Elvis.
"It was a magic moment."
