Sounds of Motown

In 1968, with the Drake formula firmly in place and Trombley picking hit after hit, Drew left the station just as a wave of Canadian nationalism, fueled by Pierre Trudeau’s arrival in Ottawa, hit the cultural industries. A new Broadcasting Act passed that year required Canadian radio and TV stations to be at least 80 percent Canadian owned.

The Broadcasting Act also created the crtc, which was preparing Canadian-content regulations that would soon lead to a dramatic showdown with cklw, now arguably the most important radio station in Canada. Pat Holiday, who today is vice-president and general manager of three Toronto stations, including Mix 99.9 (ckfm), says programmers were routinely studying cklw’s playlist, often picking up a song they had previously rejected just because the Big 8 was playing it.

cklw’s growing clout wasn’t lost on Ottawa, where the crtc’s first chairman was Pierre Juneau, a French Canadian intellectual whose sensibilities couldn’t be further removed from that of the freewheeling, entrepreneurial world of commercial radio. As a young man in Montreal, Juneau was part of a dynamic clique clustered around the political journal Cité libre, which included Trudeau and future cabinet ministers Gérard Pelletier, Maurice and Jeanne Sauvé, and Marc Lalonde. They were all part of the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s, when the province went through a period of progressive political, social, and cultural upheaval symbolized by Premier Jean Lesage’s slogan, maître chez nous (masters in our own house).

To Juneau and others involved in shaping Canada’s broadcasting policy, the crtc (which in 1976 was renamed the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) was seen as a potent force that could usher in a similar revolution, one in which the state would intervene to strengthen English-speaking Canadian culture against the pervasive American influence. Regulations were soon changed, requiring domestic control of radio and television outlets. As public policy, Juneau’s move was radical. It marked the first time the government had required that foreign control of an industry be repatriated to Canadian ownership. As a result, in 1970 cklw’s American owners sold the station to Baton Broadcasting, controlled by the Eaton and Bassett families of Toronto, for $4 million (U.S.).

In 1971, new regulations also required that 30 percent of the content on AM stations had to be Canadian. To qualify, a record had to meet at least two tests: a Canadian must have written the lyrics, composed the music, produced or performed the song, or the recording had to have been made in a domestic studio.

The crtc’s rules soon triggered a national debate over the merits of protectionism and the Canadian public’s sovereign right to listen to foreign music. In the long run, most agree that the new Canadian content regulations (the so-called CanCon rules) accelerated the speed at which the nation’s music industry matured. But Larry LeBlanc, a veteran music journalist who today is Canadian bureau chief for Billboard magazine, believes that too much emphasis is placed on the role of CanCon regulations in its development. What is beyond dispute, though, is that in the early 1970s there wasn’t enough high-quality content to adequately fill the air time, resulting in seemingly endless repetitions of songs by famous singers such as Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, and transplanted Canadians like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

In most Canadian cities, where U.S. radio stations were far enough away to be a weak presence on the dial, the crtc’s interference was annoying but manageable. The staff and management at cklw, however, directly competing with powerful Detroit stations, felt betrayed by Ottawa. At repeated crtc regulatory hearings in the capital, they pleaded for an exemption. It would prove fruitless.

Fred Sorrell, a Windsor native who was the station’s general manager from 1969 to 1973, is still appalled. “We were talking to a brick wall,” he says. “They didn’t understand this city and didn’t respect the success of this radio station. They only knew the cbc mentality.” Asked what was behind the crtc’s stubbornness, he replies bluntly, “Nationalism. Wave the flag. And ignorance of the market.”

Class and regional politics were also involved, says Toronto filmmaker Michael McNamara, who recently completed the documentary Radio Revolution: The Rise and Fall of the Big 8. Why would the crtc, he asks, led by Quebec intellectuals, pay any attention to the people of Windsor? “cklw was in a blue-collar city and it reflected rock ‘n’ roll,” explains McNamara, a native of Windsor. “It was loud, brash, working class. The men and women running the crtc were upper-middle-class central Canadians, many of them from Quebec. None understood, let alone liked, commercial pop radio.”

That was a sentiment often expressed in Windsor, where McNamara says people share the same sense of alienation from Ottawa as Western Canadians do. In Radio Revolution, legendary Toronto newsman Dick Smyth, who worked at the station in the 1960s, points out that the city is located in Essex County, a neck of land that juts into Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, giving people a kind of “island mentality,” a sense that they’re psychologically isolated from the rest of the country.