The many artists, record company and music industry executives who paid tribute to Randy Lennox earlier this year when he received the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the Junos had some trouble defining his skill set.

Bono & U2, Gord Downie, Bob Ezrin, Kiefer Sutherland and other friends couldn’t decide if he should be recognized for:

• his legendary two-decade service at Universal Music’s Canada where he forged critical business and innovative cultural mergers among many other initiatives to double market share
• helping land seven Canadian artists in the top 10 chart the same week on Billboard record charts in late 2015
• raising an estimated $50 million for charities through his many initiatives such as the “Waving Flag” single and campaign for Haiti
• his acumen and resourcefulness in readapting and leading his industry through a precipitous 60 per cent drop in revenues because of piracy in the early 2000s
• his legendary tenacity and Guiness-record volumes of daily e-mails on behalf of his clients and his employer
• his unshakeable belief in Canadian musicians and their rights and his unique ability to recognize an artists’s gift and package it perfectly for the wider world to admire.

It was probably a case of “all of the above.”

Before he became head of Bell Media two years ago, Randy had been Music Industry Executive of the year seven times and Universal Music had been named Label of the Year for 15 consecutive years. His company won 185 Junos during his tenure.

He’s been named one of Canada’s 50 most influential people by Macleans Magazine, is in the Music Hall of Fame and would likely be on Canada’s Walk of Fame if he wasn’t so busy serving on its board.

A record store clerk at Sam The Record Man before he talked his way into a job – working for free – in the mailroom at MCA Records, Lennox eventually worked his way up to become head of the company – after he’d pulled a few mergers to make it the right size for him.

Randy’s peers, and the artists he represented, identified different aspects of his career but they all agreed on one singular source of that success – his quality of character.

Perhaps Peter Gabriel said it best, “I’ve been signed to many different labels around the world but in Canada, I just wanted to be on the label where Randy was.”

Kiefer Sutherland called Randy “a global face of the Canadian music industry for decades now.”

When he was a kid, Randy was already honing his future musical scouting skills. He’d go into his bedroom each week and compile his own list of what he thought the CHUM chart should look like.

When the list actually came out, he’d work on his future lobbying skills by phoning the station to argue that his list was better than theirs.

His eye for spotting and nurturing talent and his loyalty to his clients are legendary.

His success has many sources. One of them is his willingness to outwork everyone else in the business.

Another is his understanding of his role to push everyone, including himself, out of their comfort zones.

And his appreciation that the music business stands on the shoulders of those it serves.

“The true joy of our business is the sense of discovery and the unconditional belief in an artist, committing to their gift, seeing and feeling their spirit and sharing their journey and always remaining awestruck, never losing sight that you are there to serve their vision,”  he says. “You stand behind them through thick and thin.”

Canadian artists big, medium and small could not have been more expertly served by their champion.

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.

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.

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.