MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

What Brian Smith remembers most about the fledgling Malton rock ’n roller he met while they played lacrosse together as teens in the mid-1960s was that “he had a hell of a scream on him.”

Smith, a guitarist, lived in Westwood Village. Jim Tovey, a singer, lived in Victory Village. Smith had a band called The Soul System.

Tovey had a band called The Grass Impact.

The bands would get together to jam. Eventually they would join forces.

“The reason we got Jimmy in the band – which was renamed The System –  was because we heard him scream one night,” says Smith.

Tovey was doing his best James Brown and really struck a nerve with his future bandmates. “We knew that anyone who could scream that good would give us a great added attraction,” Smith laughs.

Tovey’s next door neighbour, Bert Mellen, played bass, Al Cairns was on drums, Smith was on guitar and Mike Whitham, the only one who from Brampton, was on keys.

Anyone who knew the enthusiastically independent Jim Tovey will enjoy the thought of him fronting  “The System.”

The band played Malton’s two community halls, local high schools and shows at Bramalea Civic Centre where they were often double-billed with another young group named Rush.

Rush bassist Geddy Lee often sat in the front row while The System played, keeping a sharp eye on the work of Bert Mellen to see what he could pick up.

The System’s repertoire of Rhinoceros and Steppenwolf covers, mixed with originals by Smith and Tovey, earned them a spot on the CBC-TV summer show Drop-In, where they played three originals.

Tovey auditioned to host another CBC show but lost out to some guy from Hamilton named Martin Short.

Jim at first appeared headed for a career as a visual artist – his primary arts passion in high school – before the magic of the music carried him away.

He quit high school to play full-time, a decision that didn’t sit well with his parents.

A farmhouse in the country on Airport Rd. where Jim and Bert lived was where the band rehearsed, partied, wrote, rehearsed, partied and rehearsed, not necessarily in that order. Smith stayed there on weekends because his parents wouldn’t let him live there full-time.

“We played every weekend, then went back to our families,” says Smith. “That was the start of it all.”

Jim was a natural showman, who could contort his body in strange ways. He had a confident stage manner, loved to lean out into the audience, swing the mic out and pull it back in and use his very loud voice to full advantage.

Smith, who did imitations of other band’s singers to warm up audiences, couldn’t imitate his own band’s lead singer because he was always changing his approach.

“He was born to be a frontman,” says Smith, who runs his own music promotion business in London, Ont. “He could quickly get people in the palm of his hand.

In a premonition of his future career as a carpenter, Jim cut up chunks of wood before one show, had The System’s name stamped on them and got the audience to play percussion, getting  everyone involved — a collaborative style he favoured in all his careers.

He’d studied voice at the Ontario Conservatory of Music and made his singing debut around age 10 in the Christmas Eve concert at Our Lady of The Airways Church.

He would prove to be a much better singer than altar boy.

After The System broke up, Jim was in several groups, including the regularly rotating membership of Bond.

His late brother-in-law Dave Cooper recalled on his blog that “Jim had this idea for a show band called the Alpha String Band. We played Jethro Tull, Moody Blues, that type of classical-inspired rock. We had these coloured suits,  pink, blue and white, a different colour for each set.”

The group formed after Tovey met John Oglivey in the subway, lugging a huge case in which he carried his cello.

One can just imagine the conversation:

Jim: “What’s in the case?”

John: “A cello”

Jim: “Cool. Want to be in a band where you get to wear different-coloured suits?”

In his blog, Dave Cooper explains that Jim later lured drummer Paul Nixon  – best known for his drumming on  Downchild’s original “Flip, Flop & Fly” — to join him, Brian Smith, and “Shady” George Bland in Rockit-88. Most of the band lived together in a house in Westwood Village.

It was a bluesier band that morphed into a group called Live Jive and then transformed into Hott Roxx, the band which survived the longest and for which Jim is probably best remembered. It featured guitarists Dave Harrison and Papa John King and toured extensively showcasing the music of The Rolling Stones.

That ended abruptly when an explosion and fire at a Thunder Bay bar destroyed their uninsured equipment.

Their many friends in the business held a benefit concert — but Hott Roxx never recovered.

Jim, with his wife Lee’s assistance, crafted a second career as a carpenter. They moved to Mississauga in 1989 and he started another career as Ward 1derful councillor in 2010.

Music remained a powerful force in his life.

In 1994, Jim got up on stage with a band at the Grosvenor Exchange bar.

From the moment he nailed a Jaggeresque straight overhead kick to start off Chuck Berry’s “Oh Carol,” Andrew Dixon knew he’d found a fellow-traveller. It took about a month of convincing but Tovey joined the band known as The Primitives. It included Dixon on lead guitar, David Smith on rhythm guitar and backing vocals Bob Heinrich on bass and Dan Hill, later replaced by Stuart Hull, on drums.

They’ve played together since, across the GTA but especially up-and-down Brown’s Line.

His political career slowed the band down a bit, but Tovey continued to co-write songs and the band performed periodically, including backing him at the Waterfront Festival for the song he wrote to celebrate Hazel McCallion’s 40th year in office.

The chorus he wrote perfectly captured the intersection of a disaster and a political coronation:

“When the train it went flying

and the tankers were torn

That was the moment

the legend was born”

In the last few years whenever he felt people were giving him too much credit for one of the numerous projects he’d gotten rolling, Jim was fond of saying that nobody accomplishes anything alone.

It’s true that it often takes a community of people convinced to believe in a good cause before it can be achieved.

But there’s usually a main instigator – somebody who hears “no” and translates that into “there’s still a chance.”

The truth is that Mississauga Music Walk of Fame would not exist except for Jim Tovey’s love of music and his insistence that local players – be they musicians or singers or promoters or composers, be celebrated in – and by – the community that fostered them.

When Jim and Lee visited a music walk of fame in Philadelphia, which was then recreating itself as a city of the arts, Jim saw many names he didn’t recognize. He realized that enshrining names in stone in a local park would educate the public and celebrate many worthy Mississaugans – famous and not so famous – at the same time.

He suggested a “pilot project” that – like so many of his temporary ideas – has turned into something pretty permanent. He recruited a committee and cajoled staff and council on board – using the charm that made his mother say that, even as a child, he could sell anything to anybody.

The rest, as they say,  is history — our collective musical history celebrated.

He even helped install the stones the first couple of years.

Jim Tovey was a dynamite package of passion, plans and persistence.

Take, for instance, his idea to have some kind of physical recognition in Port Credit’s streetscape of the village’s rich music and festival culture.

He had the bright notion of having the pedestrian crossing at a major intersection marked in the shape of piano keys.

In the city that Tovey’s piano hero Oscar Peterson called home for the last 35 years of his life, it seemed most appropriate.

But the official answer was no.

So Tovey went home and figured out  – to scale – how it could be done, then went to the works yard to chat with the template maker.

The next week he got a call to visit the works yard to see the test strip of piano keys that had been painted on the parking lot.

When they were installed at Hurontario St. and Lakeshore Rd., a  photo of the “piano keys” intersection taken from on high from a nearby condo went viral on the Internet.

That was the Jim Tovey that people in the musical and political communities shared –  a man bursting with ideas from his hyperactive imagination with an infectious way of expressing them — so everybody sang along when it was time for the chorus.

The piano keys were just a quirky little dab on our landscape but they spoke volumes about the talent of the City of Mississauga’s musical frontman – James Michael Tovey.

We welcome him into the place that clearly wouldn’t exist without him: Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.

For 36 years, Canada had a Friday night TV date with a lanky troubadour who lived in Mississauga. His name was Tommy Hunter and his game was country music.

He didn’t have hit records. He didn’t dance. He hardly ever wore sequins. He didn’t yodel. All he did was invite a nation onto his front stoop and his back parlour, assemble some friends to sing some familiar songs, get everybody to relax and then entertain them like crazy.

He was that most Canadian of celebrities, a star without apparent ego. He really didn’t need one because he put us all at ease right away, from the cream of the superstar country crop in Nashville to an impossibly young Eileen Edwards — later to become Shania somebody-or-other — making her national TV debut.

The collective blood pressure of the nation started dropping mid-evening as 10 per cent of the country tuned in to see what small pleasures Canada’s “Country Gentleman” had for us this week.

Despite an endless parade of producers who wanted to modernize him, gussy him up and turn him into a showcase for the latest musical trend, Hunter knew his audience well and knew that they wanted the real goods he was delivering – honest music delivered in an honest way.

“I don’t want any hot-shot material,” he once told an interviewer. “When a new writer comes along and says he wants to write comedy, I tell him he’s got learn how to write, “Hello folks,how are you tonight?”
When his audience tuned in, they “wanted to feel like they were putting on an old slipper,” Tommy says. Our feet have never been in such comfortable hands.

They called it The Tommy Hunter Show but they could just as easily have called it what they named a later CBC show — Heartland — because that’s where he touched this country. The show was a kind of regional religion in parts of Canada that otherwise had little in common.

That’s why, when Tommy went out to play the legion halls and churches and community theatres across this land, the public flocked to see him.
Over its lengthy existence, The Tommy Hunter Show had a consistency of character — the host’s character — genial and exuberant and gentle on our minds.

He has a special place in our local history because he wrote our theme song, “Mississauga” when the municipality was incorporated as a city 40 years ago. He even had the foresight to use the future mayor on backing vocals.

The song was his idea and he guided the whole process, getting the studio for free; collecting Mississaugans from all walks of life; putting them on a bus downtown; and making them an integral part of the recording party.
If Tommy Hunter’s one-time background vocalist is known as the “people’s mayor,” then surely Tommy himself should be known as the “people’s troubadour.”

The chorus of his civic theme song urged the listener to “Come on out to Mississauga, it’s the greatest place we know.”

It’s advice the rest of the country should heed — simply because it’s coming from arguably the greatest example of a home-grown, natural story-telling entertainer Canada will ever have the pleasure to know.

Welcome to the Mississauga Walk of Fame, Tommy.

After watching a student talent showcase at Mount Carmel Secondary School in the spring of 1993 featuring three school bands, English teacher David Rogers had an idea.

What if the three standout guys who were in the band called To Each His Own hooked up with the standout guitarist in the band Dragonflower? He planted the idea with them and, sure enough, over the summer Ben Kowalewicz (Ko-wall-a-witz) Aaron Solowoniuk (Sol-won-ee-yuk) and Jon Gallant got together with Ian D’Sa to see what would happen.

What happened was an instantaneous musical bond. The energy and mutual admiration were immediate. One of the first songs they played was a Neil Young’ cover. It was supposed to be practice, but Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World turned out to be prophecy.

Even though it was a mixed marriage — two of them were from Meadowvale and two were from Streetsville — the guys made it work. There was no punk-pop scene in Mississauga at the time, so they all but created one themselves, turning Friday nights at the Masonic Lodge in Streetsville into a pilgrimage for every angst-ridden teen in town with a sense of musical adventure. And they gained a reputation — which they’ve never lost — for delivering the real goods onstage.

Whether it was upstaging the headliners at Jingle Bell Rock 4 at Mt. Carmel or playing for a few friends and family at a billiards joint in Lakeview, the guys in Pezz — which became Billy Talent to the rest of the world — were totally committed to the energetic execution of their musical vision on stage.

They wanted desperately to get better and better — and they did. That they played with the same energy and commitment and edge in front of 100 kids in the basement of the Masonic Lodge in the late 1990s as they did in front of 100,000 people at the Rock Am Ring concert in Germany last year, is a mark of their high personal standards of excellence.

Their songs have evolved rhythmically, lyrically, melodically and harmonically over the years, but the nuclear musical fission at their core remains intact.

After a decade of hard-slogging, they became “overnight” successes. While they can now measure their success in terms of millions in sales, and international tours, and media coverage, and awards (seven Junos and nine MuchMusic video awards and counting), they prefer to measure it in terms of their own musical evolution. Which is ongoing.

In introducing their Mississauga forerunners, Triumph at an induction ceremony last year, Ian said “as artists they showed the world time and time again how to give bigger-than-life performances. And they showed the value of really connecting with their fans.”

He might just as well have been speaking of Billy Talent. Despite their huge successes, the band members are very much still the same Toronto Maple Leaf-loving, neighbourhood pub types that they were when they started out. They’re a “friends and family” band for the punk set. From their first gig in Ian’s parents’ basement in Meadowvale to their appearance yesterday before thousands at Riot Fest in Downsview Park, Billy Talent has rocked the talk.

And — now that they’ll have their very own stone — they’ll be able to rock the walk on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

Congratulations Aaron, Ben, Jon and Ian!