MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

When John Bride talks about his career, he makes it sound as if he was over his head in most of those formative musical groups he played in and which are part of the rich musical heritage of Mississauga and Toronto in the 1960s and 70s.

From the time he formed his first band, called the Odds ‘n Ends, at Clarkson’s Hillcrest Public School, John was always looking forward, moving on to bigger and better bands.

In high school, he started Papa Grey, which rehearsed at a house just up Stavebank Rd. from here, then joined Brutus, which briefly transformed into The Ugly Ducklings when that group’s lead singer Dave Bingham joined up. Then John won an audition to play with a group of older guys in Greaseball Boogie Band. “What have I gotten myself into?” he wondered when he saw the mock fights onstage and the lead singer eating a tube of Brylcreem a night to impress Greaseball’s fans.

He may not have been ready for their burlesque antics, but he was always ready to learn, stretch and extend his musical command.

Greaseball Boogie Band became Shooter which had a hit with a song he hates called I Can Dance. Then he and Ray Harrison created the consummate blues collar band playing out of the Cameo Lounge at the Hotel Isabella. John gave the Cameo Blues Band its name and a signature sound, with his highlight reel Fender Strat style.

Whether playing with the Partland Brothers, Cheryl Lescomb, Rita Chiarelli or Amanda Marshall, co-hosting weekly jams for years at the Fox ‘n Fiddle, or becoming a Monday night musical mainstay at The Harp with Tom Barlow, John Bride has always kept maturing as a player.

As Chuck Jackson, his old friend and former partner in the Jackson-Bride Band says, “John brings a band to life. It’s just like when you hear Otis Redding or Sam Cooke sing, when you hear that guitar, you know right away, it’s John Bride.”

“He commands that stage. Any band he plays with, he takes them up another notch.” John Bride is the epitome of the local guitar legend.

He knows the whole catalogue, handles every genre, has played all the venues, from the local high school gyms to the outdoor stadiums on bills with The Beach Boys and The Moody Blues, has opened for Ray Charles at Massey Hall – twice – is on a ton of great records and, best of all for us locals, can still be heard plying his craft weekly in Port Credit bars.

He knows his instrument, teaches his instrument, fixes his instrument for the lots of famous players – most of whom he prefers not to name – and lives his instrument. He got famous around town as a teen for playing a killer version of Robert Johnson’s venerable song Crossroad Blues.

With apologies to Mr. Johnson, when John Bride went down to The Crossroads and fell down on his knees, he asked the Lord for mercy and the Lord said – first – play the guitar please.

Welcome to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame John.

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.

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.

Despite what some people might tell you, the Southside Shuffle was not born 15 years ago at the St. Lawrence soccer fields at the foot of Hurontario St., where Downchild and Fathead held forth for a small but enthusiastic crowd.

It actually started many years before that, in a house at the foot of Mississauga Rd. — in what is now J.C. Saddington Park — the house where Chuck Jackson’s grandparents lived. That’s where the ritual gatherings of the clan took place, often on Sunday afternoons. Everyone grabbed an instrument and took a featured spot on the musical bill of fare.

Brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, parents, and grandparents played various instruments, mostly guitars — Chuck probably plucked away on his first bass purchased from the Dixie Music Centre in Dixie Mall — and his grandfather played spoons.

It was a musical mishmash full of mayhem and fun and a lesson in the collective joy of making music which Jackson tucked away in his fertile Credit River delta memory banks.

In fact, it could have been the inspiration for a memorable song he wrote many years later called “Dew Drop In.” There was another ritual that took place at Jackson homestead every fall — a giant family corn roast. When Chuck started the Shuffle in 1999, he made sure it was scheduled for September, in honour of his grandparents. This twin divinity of family and music is what the Southside Shuffle has always been about and what it remains about today.

Chuck Jackson lived the first 56 years of his life in Lakeview and Port Credit. His musical education got a big boost in Grade 5 at Forest Ave. Public School when the regular music teacher took a leave of absence. The substitute just happened to be the guitar player in a great Toronto band – Robbie Lane and The Disciples.

It wasn’t long before Chuck and four of his buddies formed a band they called Barewires. A couple of years later they hit the big time – playing the afternoon school dances in Grade 7 and 8. Port Credit Secondary School brought more bands – Full House, the Madison Street Walkers – and a new awakening.

At 16, he had the life-changing experience of seeing Buddy Guy in the flesh at the CNE. In 2007, Chuck would bag one of his biggest catches ever for Southside when he got Guy to agree to be in his lineup.
The same year that he saw Buddy play at the CNE, his buddy Angus McKie (Mac-Eye) went on holiday in England and returned with two records more precious than gold — an album by John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers and a song that had yet to be released in North America called Sunshine of Your Love by some new group called Cream. That really solidified Chuck’s love of the blues.

Pretty soon he hit the road — Dixie Rd. At a talent show at Dixie Mall in 1971, the judges — the well-known local group of Edward Harding and McLean — placed Chuck’s band first. They won a recording contract with Stop 8 Music and the resulting album, Get On Up with Dancer, captured the first-ever appearance of a Chuck Jackson vocal on vinyl. If you have a copy — or even better if you have it on eight-track — Chuck will be happy to sign it for you later!

Greater glory awaited on Dominion Day in 1972. Chuck and the band headlined at the A & W drive-in on Lakeshore Rd. at Front St. – near where the Starbucks now stands. The sound and light man for the show, by the way, was a kid from Erindale Woodlands named Gil Moore.

Jackson earned his stripes on the road with an r & b tribute band that played on the east coast before he joined the Cameo Blues Band in 1978. Two-and-a-half years as the house band at the Isabella Hotel refined the vocal and harmonica styles.

You pretty well know the rest of the story. He joined Canada’s premier blues band Downchild 24 years ago and is now their longest-serving vocalist.

He has flipped, flopped and flown his way to three Juno nominations, three Maple Blues Awards, the Toronto Blues Society’s Blues With a Feeling lifetime achievement award and innumerable other industry markers. Last year he was enshrined in Festival and Events Ontario’s Hall of Fame for his work founding and directing the Shuffle.

As brilliant as he has been over his long career as an artist, his work as artistic director of the Shuffle may be Chuck’s greatest achievement. He has created a vibrant, elastic, living/ breathing blues and jazz festival that has stood the test of time.

He has “borrowed” liberally from the best of the ideas he has seen playing festivals around the world and brought it all back home. The festival has changed with economic times. The big ticket main stage draws have been refined to a much more democratic, and much more accessible, regime.

For $10, you get a front-row weekend seat to the best musical entertainment that Chuck Jackson’s imagination can find. Some of the kindest words that ever fall on Chuck’s ear come from visitors who say, “man, those guys are good. I’ve never heard of them before.” That’s a tribute, of course, to his keen eye for talent.

Whether he’s singing for thousands of people at a festival or doing his weekly Sunday afternoon gig at Roc n Docs, Chuck Jackson “sits right down and cries the blues” with the same fervent commitment. When Chuck sings the blues, they stay sung. And when he founds a blues festival, it stays sound.

Memorial Park has always been central to Chuck’s life. He played ball here as a kid. He hung out with the hippies here in the 60s and he first learned to play the harp on a bench here. It’s a big part of who he is and through his efforts it’s now part of who we ALL are as a city and as a musical community. Chuck says that the Shuffle has now taken on a life of its own. In his words — “ the event itself has become the star.” Perhaps so. But if that’s so, it’s largely because of Chuck’s passion, his persistence and his perspiration.

The Southside Shuffle only became a star because one man had a vision of what it could become. It’s only fitting that Chuck Jackson’s name should find a permanent home in the park that shaped his life so vividly. He changed the park and the town forever when he first called the blues home to Port Credit — and made Port Credit the home of the blues.