MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

Steve DeMarchi would deliver a parcel for Prestige Couriers in the late 80s and the hit single When I’m With You would come on the radio. “They’d have CHUM-AM on. The song would play and I’d say ‘that’s me on the radio.’ They’d look at me and say ‘Sure it is.’ Just put the box over in the corner, you idiot.”

It was indeed Steve playing guitar and singing on Sheriff’s 1983 #1 Canadian hit. A couple of years later the band was out of work as punk and new wave changed the musical landscape overnight.

DeMarchi and lead vocalist Freddy Curci took jobs as couriers, while they awaited the chance to deliver more hits. In the meantime, they invested $70,000 in a 16-track studio in the basement of the DeMarchi home on Avongate Dr. in Mississauga.

DeMarchi and his talented multi-instrumentalist brother Dennis and Curci recorded a whole album in case they got another chance. A group of touring music executives in town for a convention couldn’t believe how much sound the trio were able to get out of 16 tracks, when 48 was the norm for professional studios.

One day, out of the blue, Capitol Records president Dean Cameron called saying “you’re going to have a hit.”

A Las Vegas DJ had started playing When I’m With You for a guess-the-band contest. The song took flight again, climbing into the top 10.
DeMarchi and Curci quit the courier business, headed off to do multiple American radio interviews.

They hooked up with three founding members of Seattle’s Heart to form Alias, a reference to the fact they were composite version of Sheriff and Heart under another name. One of the songs they’d written at the DeMarchi home while couriers, More Than Words Can Say eventually hit #2 on Billboard’s top 100 and #1 on the adult contemporary chart.

Steve’s two biggest hits are in rotation in “classic” radio formats, have been used in numerous TV ads, including on the Super Bowl, and are part of Time/Life music compilations sold round the globe. Alias’ death was as unexpected as its birth. The record started to do well – then grunge and alt hit and the bottom fell out – again.

DeMarchi has since toured the world, working as a side musician for The Cranberries. Steve well remembers the night Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts knocked on the dressing room door to introduce themselves and say “welcome to the tour.”

He spent two years helping lead singer Dolores O’Riordan write and record her solo record, part of which was recorded at Metalworks on Mavis Rd. While Alanis Morissette was singing background vocals on a Freddy Curci cover of Brown-Eyed Girl, she asked Steve what it was like to have a #1 hit record. He got to ask her the same question a few years later at an awards show in Europe.

Steve DeMarchi has played everywhere from the Mississauga Belle, the Locomotion and Superstars in his hometown to the Vatican, where he played with The Cranberries before 200,000 people at Christmas celebrations that featured an 85-piece orchestra.

He’s also appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and more than a half-dozen times on the version hated by Jay Leno. He even played the Nobel Prize concert when he and The Cranberries shared a stage with Shania Twain and Phil Collins.

“That’s something I never would have dreamed of as a kid playing the local bars around here,” he says.

All of that has earned Steve a well-earned place on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.

His fascination with music started as a four-year-old singing in the choir in Toronto. As a teen, he developed an uncanny ear for finding songs with staying power. He was a high school hit-picker for CHUM, then wrote the first “pick the hits” column for the Toronto Star. He DJed dances at almost every high school in Toronto, then started Canadian Bandstand 63, where he played tunes his fellow teens flocked to hear. Gordon Lightfoot was his first “live” entertainment , lip-syncing his first single.

He was the youngest music director ever in Canada when Foster Hewitt hired him at CKFH, where he broke songs like Born to be Wild by Steppenwolf. That group used to be called Jack London and the Sparrow when Joey was occasionally their guest singer in Yorkville.

It was an era when music programmers Frank Gould at Montreal’s CFOX, Nevin Grant at Hamilton’s CKOC, Rosalie Tremblay at Windsor’s CKLW and Joey Cee chose the theme songs for Canada’s musical coming-of-age parties. The last time somebody else paid him a regular cheque was when he left radio in 1970.

“I have to create things because I need to survive,” he says, “and I have to pull out all the stops.”

And, my, how many stops he has pulled. He’s written hit songs and sung a few. He published Record Week for three years — it was printed at Sam McCallion’s presses on Falconer Dr. He’s published HOToronto Magazine for two decades, owned an art gallery, emceed for Neil Diamond, The Who, Tina Turner, BTO and many more, owned and operated his own record label, Nightflite; produced a record album for Playboy Magazine owner Hugh Hefner; published concert books, set up a celebratory “Canada Day” in Los Angeles; been a Juno judge, co-ordinated Toronto’s Chocolate Ball and Chocolate festival; and has been associate director of the Beaches Jazz Festival for 26 years.

When he published Record Week his fiercest competitors were Walt Grealis and Stan Klees, who ran RPM Magazine and established the Junos. Years later, they honoured him with the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame Award. “When you came along, you lit a fire under us,” Grealis explained.

Since 1986, he’s run most of these ventures from his Erin Mills home. As promotion manager for Heartbreakers nightclub in the city centre, he established the first Mississauga Talent Search contest and pioneered the concept of all age dances, since widely duplicated. And he’s helped put on numerous local charity shows, including the Rainbow Ball and mentored about 100 interns, many of whom now work in the music business. And he knows a thing or two about walks of fame.

He nominated Norman Jewison for his spot on the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Blvd. He tried but failed to find backers for a Walk of Fame in Toronto, a decade before it became a reality.

He’s usually the guy organizing the Walk of Fame ceremonies but today Joey Cee can add a new innovation to his resume — first time being on the receiving end of a Walk of Fame induction.

Congratulations Joey.

A group of some of the most seasoned professional musicians in Canada once played through a new arrangement — written by Ron Harrison — of the classic Québecois folk song Un Canadien Errant.

When they finished playing, they looked at each other in awe — and then stood collectively as one to give him a standing ovation.

That doesn’t happen very often among professional musicians. But then, Ron Harrison has a talent that doesn’t happen very often among professional music writers.

Harrison was in the front ranks of Canadian composers for many decades, largely because of his ability to seamlessly match music with visual images on the screen, somehow creating a third dimension — one that speaks to the emotional core of the viewer.

In retrospect, it almost seems Harrison was genetically and culturally pre-disposed to become a film composer. His father Harold was a big band leader in Britain before he emigrated to Canada and played piano in silent movie theatres in Hamilton. When talkies killed the industry, the elder Harrison became a film projectionist.

“I was brought up on music and film my whole life to the point where I could look at a film and know exactly what kind of music it needs,” Harrison says. More than one of his employers has told the self-effacing Mississaugan that he was the most talented film composer they’d ever worked with. One even told him “You hit the nail on the head every time.”

Harrison has scored more than 750 television series, specials and films and was recruited by Disney Corp. when they came looking for, quote/unquote “The Best Composer in Canada.” He was subsequently nominated for a Grammy for his writing for the How The Grinch Stole Christmas CD-ROM.

He demonstrated his ingenuity and adventure in that project by showcasing Silent Night in a minor key, highlighted by Black Sabbath-style guitar played by his son David.

Harrison’s legacy will endure most profoundly in the vocabulary of the music that accompanies nature films. He was originally commissioned to do four wildlife film scores. He proved so adept at it that it “snowballed” into a whole industry and many him a very much in demand commodity for a great many years.

In the Audubon Wildlife series of more than 100 films that was sold in 60 countries around the globe, Harrison pioneered not only a style of sound for wilderness productions but what amounted to a new language.
“He won’t take credit for it,” says his daughter Anne, who heard much of that language being developed as her father worked at the piano. “But if you listen to what they’re doing now, you’ll hear his influence in those long-held notes and extensions.”

A lifelong learner, Harrison had his own band at 15, studied with fellow Mississauga Music Walk of Fame inaugural inductee Oscar Peterson in his 20s, attended the Eastman music school in Rochester, took film composition at UCLA and studied with the famed Canadian composer and music theoretician Gord Delamont for seven years.

Perfectionist that he is, Harrison was finally shown the door by Delamont who told him “there’s nothing more I can teach you.”
After he’d finished putting together a project, Harrison would always ask the question: “Who shall we get to conduct this now?”
The answer was almost always the same – he’d be told he should do it himself.

Reluctant though he was, he always handled the job with skill and aplomb and — as usual — he proved to be the best man for the job.

The Mississauga Music Walk of Fame Committee is delighted to welcome a very deserving Ron Harrison to its ranks.

When Rik Emmett’s grandfather gave him an acoustic guitar as a child — one of the ones you ordered out of the catalogue — it wasn’t the hula girl and the palm trees stencilled on the front that enthralled his grandson. It was the sound it produced and the possibility of creating something that was unique and personal.

He’d barely learned to play two chords when the pre-teen wrote his first song. It was undoubtedly heavily influenced by those Beatles tunes he and his buddies lip-synced to as they strummed their tennis racquets and listened to Twist and Shout on an old Seabreeze record player.

That was the start of a musical journey that has taken Emmett from school auditoriums to some of the world’s biggest outdoor concert venues and back to the human-scaled concerts that his fans can now order up in their own local communities by going to his website and requesting his presence in their community.

And while the world may still want to measure him by the keening vocals, smoking lead guitar licks and driving rock and roll anthems he wrote with a Mississauga hard rock trio that went viral before viral was invented, Emmett has shown over and over throughout his long and enduring musical career that it is his own muse that he continues to chase — not anyone else’s pre-conceived idea of who he is or what he should play.

Under the spandex and makeup and that shock of blond hair in the 1970s was one very serious musician. This we have all learned — to our delight — as his eclectic tastes in guitar and musical styles have unfolded before our eyes in so many memorable musical releases over the years.

This is a thinking, inquisitive WORKING musician who has never stopped perfecting his craft. After the early Triumphant years, Emmett found himself on Middle Ground, you might say, between a rock band and a hard place.

Unlike so many contemporaries — long since forgotten — who put their imaginations on “repeat” by perfecting endless variations on the riff that made them famous, Emmett has always moved restlessly into new and adventurous directions. He founded a record label and the first thing he issued on it featured classical guitar, with the finger style guitar pieces he’d always wanted to highlight in that format.

When he hooked up with Dave Dunlop to explore the sound of dual guitars in the group called Stringed Troubadours, the powers that be determined that the result was “smooth jazz.”

So, since another new “demographic pigeonhole,” — as he terms labels given to various musical genres — had been created to stick him in, he went with the flow, at least for a while.

He hired an expert rhythm section for a new CD, chiselled off the harder edges and sailed his way to a bunch more “Smooth Jazz” awards. But no category can hold Emmett for long. “I’m very uncomfortable listening to old recordings I’ve made,” he once said. “I am always interested in the NEXT song I’m working on, the next project coming down the pipe.” I’m sure he agrees with the wise assessment of American bandleader Duke Ellington who said there are only two kinds of music – good and bad. It’s quite clear the kind of music he has made, no matter what the label, and it is all good.

The thrill of sitting down with a guitar and his imagination and making some musical magic hasn’t lost any of its charm, all these years after he received his first guitar.

As he told one interviewer, “The thing that is still the most satisfying aspect of self-expression is to sit down with an acoustic, create, write, then sing & play something that I wrote myself. Even the anthems that filled arenas for Triumph can be boiled down to simple acoustic folk songs, which is how they started life anyway. I know that my career ‘reputation’ is probably more one of ‘guitarist’ – but the truth is, I’m one of those dreaded multiple-slash kinds of people – guitarist/singer/songwriter (add producer/arranger/recording artist into that mix), and it’s all just one big ball of wax.” And what a wondrous big ball of wax it has been.

You could say that Rik Emmett started his career in Triumph and worked his way back to Respect — one solid record at a time. He may have described himself best in a couple of lines from one his best-known songs, Ordinary Man, when he wrote:

“I will not be a puppet. I cannot play it safe. I’ll give myself away, with a blind and simple faith.” Emmett hasn’t played it safe and he has paid simple faith to the music be believes in.

And we are all very grateful that he has given so much of himself away to us, in so many lovely and different forms, through the years.

Oscar Peterson’s sound may be the most recognizable thing in jazz.
In fact, it may be the most recognizable thing in music. Millions of jazz fans can tell from just a few notes that they are listening to Oscar play piano — his sense of time, his phrasing, his command and his vitality — they all signify that you are listening to “the Maharaja of the piano” as Duke Ellington famously called him.

Peterson was born in Montreal, was unveiled to the world by his great friend and producer Norman Granz at Carnegie Hall in September 1949 and was embraced by the international jazz community in a career that spanned six decades — and spawned a legacy that is unmatched by any other Canadian jazz player and few other musicians anywhere in the world.

His fellow performers revered Peterson for his impossibly high standards, his relentless drive to be the best and his versatility — which saw him front his brilliant trios, act as the house pianist for Verve Records for a decade and then turn around and become the sensitive accompanist to the best-of-the-best of the jazz singing world, from Billie Holiday to the superb duets of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

When Oscar Peterson sat down at the piano stool, there was never any doubt that something extraordinary was about to happen. He’d flash that big smile, then unleash that big arsenal of sound to which, he alone, seemed to have exclusive domain.

Fellow pianist Marian McPartland may have put it best when she said: “He creates a different kind of emotion, a heady excitement, because of his overwhelming capacity to dazzle and generate exhilaration. At times, it’s almost as if he’s driven by a force greater than himself that makes him play at an impossible speed, but when he changes pace and performs a reflective piece, one can hear the tender side of Oscar, the voicings he uses that are his alone.”

Peterson was a proud Canadian. His Canadiana Suite is an homage to his homeland that is as breathtaking in its scope as are the variations in landscape from Newfoundland to British Columbia that inspired its creation.

He was also a proud Mississaugan who lived here for some 35 years. Although he won 8 Grammies, the UNESCO International Music Prize, the Governor General’s lifetime achievement award for performing arts, the Jazz at Lincoln Centre award for artistic excellence and the equivalent of the Nobel prize for the arts, the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award, he said that two of the greatest honours in his career were the City’s 2003 tribute day for him, which included an all-star concert at LAC, and the naming of Oscar Peterson Public School in his honour.

Peterson was a mentor and an inspiration to pianists everywhere, from Diana Krall, to Hiromi, the Japanese fusion phenom. The first words she learned to say in English were “Oscar Peterson.”

She told me in an interview before her 2004 tribute concert at LAC that one of her greatest honours was meeting Peterson at his home when she was in her early 20s.

“It was an amazing experience. I could touch his piano. I could play his Boesendorfer. I was seeing my super-hero right in front of me. I was crazy- happy, listening to all of the stories about Frank Sinatra and all the other jazz legends he’s been playing with.

“It was like a dream house to me, with all of the posters of old concerts on the walls. It was like a museum to me.”

She continued by saying “When I got back home I went to the park and they took a picture of me jumping as high in the air as I could. I love jumping. I sent it to Oscar and said this is how I feel to meet you.” That’s how it was for everyone to meet Oscar and to hear his marvellous music.

He made us all leap for joy at his genius.