MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

He’d grown up immersing himself in the Bon Jovi albums Slippery When Wet and New Jersey and was blown away by the songs and the band.

He was a budding guitarist who might have found a little fuel for his big musical ambitions that night in a couple of lines of one favourite song that the band played, a song that was the calling card of his own youth: “We’ll Make it I Swear – Livin’ on a Prayer.”

You might say his prayers began to be answered on April 14, 2011, when he got a call from an unknown New York number. “Hi Phil. This is Jon Bon Jovi. Give me a call.”

That’s what began the slow integration process that five years later saw the man they call Phil X officially succeed Richie Sambora in a band he’d idolized for many years.

Not bad for a kid who launched his career singing Elvis.

Phil grew up in a Mississauga household filled with music, mostly Greek music. After being given his first guitar (a copy of a Vox hollow-body teardrop model) which he could barely hold at age 5, he watched and learned as his musician father Peter played bouzouki and sang.

It was Phil’s father who, during his band’s intermission at a “big fat Greek wedding” convinced his son to play and sing Blue Suede Shoes and Teddy Bear.

The audience was enthralled with the 8-year-old — and he was enthralled with their enthusiastic response.

At 17, he was bartending at his Dad’s pub. The Magnet in Westdale Mall. When Dad went on vacation, Phil booked his own band to play the small corner stage.

For six years Phil played in a band named Sidinex, which was his surname spelled backward. They played covers of metal bands and made an EP in 1985 that placed in the top 25 in Q107’s Homegrown contest.

After a sound man for Frozen Ghost heard him play he alerted producer Arnold Lanni who checked him out at The Gasworks, then rushed him into the studio to record with Frozen Ghost. After working with Aldo Nova he succeeded Rik Emmett in Mississauga’s ultimate metal band Triumph.

Starting anew after moving to L.A. in 1997, Phil was painting producer Scott Humphrey’s garage when Tommy Lee needed a guitar player for Methods of Mayhem.

The paint strokes were swapped for guitar strokes on a Les Paul. Phil’s work must have been impressive because it quickly led to additional sessions for Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper, with whom he recorded Brutal Planet.

A Chris Daughtry recording in 2005 cemented his growing reputation. Phil X has since marked the spot as “supreme session guitarist for hire” on records by Chris Cornell, Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson, and Thousand Foot Crutch, to name just a few.

And he still finds time for his own band, Phil X and The Drills.

What marks Phil’s work is total commitment — whether squeezing the last ounce of energy and sound from his instrument, straining for that last squeal out of his voice or searching for the exact pace and tone that best suits the material.

Phil’s a generous teacher – as a series of legendary YouTube videos attest.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, he should be flattered at the seemingly endless supply of copycat efforts.

He’s also generous with his time, whether on GTA school visits or guesting at clinics or on podcasts.

When a 25-year-old Mississauga woman and hobby musician died suddenly of congenital heart failure a beloved guitar she had designed was donated to a local guitar shop. Phil heard of it and played it in concert at a Bon Jovi show at Air Canada Centre to honour her memory and her creative flair.

That brought immeasurable comfort to her grieving family.

Phil X and his irrepressible style epitomize the infectious energy that’s at the heart of the music he plays.

He says he still gets goosebumps when he kicks in with the talk box on “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Which may explain why so many of the rest of us also have that same reaction. He’s never lost the joy of performing that thrilled all those people at that long-ago wedding.

And he’s able to convey that same sense of joy to his audience every time he picks up a guitar or sings.

An exemplary career that’s taken him from a childhood covering Elvis to electrifying Bon Jovi means Phil X marks the place on Mississauga’s 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.

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.

If you can make your passion your profession, you will never have to do any real work again. It’s a philosophy that many men and women have dreamed of, but few have successfully executed.

Pre-eminent among musicians who have transformed their careers on the stage into a business that hasn’t just survived off the stage, but has earned its stripes on the forefront of the Canadian music industry, is Mississauga’s Gil Moore.

Everyone knows the story of Triumph, the Mississauga band who performed anthemic metal miracles in arenas around the world in the 1970s and 1980s, releasing more than a dozen albums, selling millions of records and eventually earning a place in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame.

In 1978 the band opened its own private studio on Mavis Rd. so it could tinker with its songs and not have to worry about booking studio time. When Triumph stopped performing a decade later, Moore dedicated himself full-time to the studio.

“Who doesn’t want to work at Disneyland each day?” he said when asked about his motivation in launching the studio. It is a decision that Canadian musicians — and musicians everywhere — look back on with deepest gratitude.

Metalworks has gone from a hole-in-the-wall industrial unit, with 20 students, to a musical mecca that is now more than 17,000 sq .ft. in size and features six studios, state-of-the-art lighting and sound, and audio facilities and innovative teaching techniques that reflect its owner’s unmistakable stamp of professionalism — a word that isn’t always top of mind in many aspects of the music business.

“Word of mouth from the artists is important,” Moore told The Mississauga News in an interview last year. “I think trust is number 1.” When the referrals are coming out of the mouths of artists with first-hand experience at Metalworks whose names are David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, The Cranberries, Rush, Prince, Tom Cochrane, Christina Aguilera, Guns ‘N Roses, Nelly Furtado, Anne Murray, Feist, and Metric, to name but a few — that’s a gold-plated endorsement.

Metalworks was named Recording Studio of the Year at the Canadian Music Industry Awards for a dozen consecutive years – so often that it might as well have been renamed the Gil Moore Recognition Award.

With all of the accolades that Triumph and Metalworks have received, you might think that a little some of that might go to a person’s head. But Gil Moore remains the same native son of Mississauga, the same unpretentious guy who founded Gil Moore Audio as a teenager and attended Streetsville and T.L. Kennedy Secondary Schools.

The same guy who always had a yen for construction – which may be why the never-ending expansion of Metalworks continues to this day. If you need a Mississauga Idol judge or sponsor, Gil is there. The prize may be studio time for just the winner, but somehow, he finds time for the top three finishers to record.

Metalworks sponsors the Q107 Homegrown contest , which is no accident. Moore has always had a deep and abiding respect for homegrown talent and he’s always respected his roots — which were planted deep in Mississauga, where he still lives.

He grew up in Erindale Woodlands and his parents, Martha and Herb, wrote columns for many years in The Mississauga News. One of those columns was called Suburban Style.

The Moores would be infinitely proud to know that their son has come to epitomize his own form of suburban style — one grounded in respecting and teaching the entire business of music, from conception to performance to recording to marketing and beyond, to succeeding generations of musicians.

Yes, Gil Moore is a wonderful musician, but we recognize him today for all the things he has done that make him so much more than that — those things that make him a true champion of his craft and a perpetual leader of his industry.