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 a girl who started out singing made-up songs to her hairbrush and her horse in a small voice, Alex Pangman has come a long way.

Her innate musicality caused her to compose songs in her childhood Erin Mills home. She’s ridden all her life so it was natural to serenade the horses while she groomed them.

When musician Mike Walmsley of the Climax Jazz Band heard her singing in the stable, she was recruited for karaoke at the Christmas party. He and other band members lent her Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong and Maxine Sullivan records.

At age 14 she was “petrified” in her club debut at the Suisse Marmite (now The Brogue Inn) in Port Credit. It was likely her back, which was aimed at most of the audience that left the biggest impression.

The doctors at Sick Kids insisted singing was good for a girl with cystic fibrosis.

But that’s not why she sang. The music and sound of the era of 78s enraptured Alex. She started singing in the Credit River Jazz band and Hot 5 Jazzmakers and at clubs around Toronto.

When she went to university at U of T’s Erindale College breathing problems forced her to miss 18 months of school. That’s when she made the decision to pursue music full-time, a decision she’s thankful her parents fully supported.

Jeff Healey aided and abetted her early jazz education, producing the first two albums that earned her the title of Canada’s “Sweetheart of Swing.”

She’s recorded 4 more CDs, cooked up a Lickin’ Good Fried side tour of Western swing/country roots music with husband Colonel Tom Parker and haunted summer festival schedules and concert stages. The first song she published earned a National Jazz Award nomination and the last CD she did earned her a Juno nomination.

The teen who hated to ride the “short bus” in high school that confirmed you were different, wanted people to come out to hear her music, not “to look at the sick girl.”

Although the smoky bars eventually stopped her from performing, she only made her condition public because she “had this wonderful thing called a transplant and wanted to help other people get transplants.”

She’s an ongoing charitable ambassador who’s recorded a single for Hurricane Katrina victims, done videos for the CF Foundation and made a charming Christmas album, with proceeds to the Trillium Organ Donor Foundation.

Shortly after she opened for Willie Nelson at Massey Hall during the Toronto Jazz Festival, Alex had her second lung transplant.

Those lungs, once down to 33 per cent capacity are now up to 94 per cent. They sound best when they fill with the echoes of the 20s and 30s that resonate through the essential music that Alex Pangman lovingly saves, replenishes and champions.

She says thanks – to both the music and the donors who gave her second and third chances to enjoy it – by getting on stage and singing just as loudly as she can.

How appropriate.

That way the gifts that she has received, are given back to the world.

Every high school has a long history of wannabe rock bands. Toronto’s East York high school in the 1960s was no different. A group called Misty Blue often played school dances. One guy, the bass player, made it big in the music business.

But not in the way you think.

Neill Dixon was no Paul McCartney, but he quickly recognized his natural flair for the business side of music. He became de facto manager of his group.

When he returned to his native England to go to school, he booked acts like Donovan, and the group that would become Pink Floyd, to play at his arts college.

Back in Canada in 1967, Dixon opened a coffee house on Jarvis St. called Grumbles where he booked acts like Joni Mitchell, Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.

His music business apprenticeship continued with RCA Records in 1972, while he also booked acts for a club that had just been taken out of mothballs, the El Mocambo.

While marketing and promoting for RCA and GRT Records, Dixon developed critical contacts with agents, managers and record companies. Soon he was an A & R manager, while booking acts at the Colonial, Le Coq d’Or and The Hook & Ladder.

He often crossed paths with a band manager named Steve Propas. They formed the Dixon-Propas marketing partnership in the 70s, an alignment of stars that was recognized in 2013 when the pair won the “Pioneer Award” from Music Managers Forum Canada for their groundbreaking work, which included producing innumerable concerts at the Ontario Place Forum.

One of the groups Dixon managed was Act 3, including young guitarist Rik Emmett. When a fledgling group from Mississauga poached Emmett from the band, Dixon-Propas ended up managing his new group through their first three records and their U.S. breakthrough. “Triumph went from a bar band to an arena act in a very short period of time,” says Dixon. He had more than a little something to do with that.
While Triumph was able to get a record contract stateside, other groups in the Dixon-Propas stable weren’t so fortunate.

That’s why they formed the prophetically-named and highly-successful “Solid Gold Records” which broke numerous Canadian bands in the U.S., such as Chilliwack.

In the early 80s, a weekly music tip sheet called The Record started an annual convention to build its circulation and credibility. Dixon’s company, Chart Toppers, was hired in 1983 to put it together. It was a match made in musical heaven.

Neill’s extensive network of contacts in all aspects of the business, his penchant for innovation and his ability to exploit emerging trends made him the perfect match for the job. Thirty-four years later, it’s now the industry powerhouse known as Canadian Music Week. Dixon became a partner two years after it began, swallowed the publication that initiated it in the early 90s, added the attached musical festival in 1991 and guided it safely through astounding changes that have transformed it – and the industry it serves – multiple times.

Like its patriarch, it has always been on the cutting edge. After almost three-and-a-half decades of producing the showcase – Canadian Music Week and Neill Dixon – are all but synonymous. As the record business morphed into the fragmented and downsized “music business” we see today, Dixon never forgot one simple fact: it’s ultimately “all about the song.”

“Bands can always tell if you’re just a guy in a suit or if you’re on their side,” he says. “I think I’ve been successful because I have an artist’s mentality.” An artist’s mentality and a natural business acumen will get you a lot of things, including a nameplate on Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.

Rob Wells has been in the studio with some of the most famous musicians in the world, but it’s the tinkling from behind Westacres Public School that really get his musical motor running. It may not be the Justin Bieber or the Ish or the Nelly Furtado or the Olivia Newton-John or the Selena Gomez product that he’s shaped for the public – but it cuts to the heart of what music is really all about.

Over the past few years, Rob has hosted a Songwriters’ Circle where some of his musical playmates, like Randy Bachman and Matt Dusk, drop by to play at an annual concert. The proceeds go to his local school in Applewood Acres to support and sustain its music program. Rob’s personal interest has helped support, sustain and inflame students’ passion for the pursuit that is his life’s work.

“Music is related to so many different aspects of life,” he says, noting that Albert Einstein, who played violin and piano, insisted that the theory of relativity was a “musical thought.” He’s not the first one to notice that “math, patience, focus, listening skills, give-and-take, and response” all seem to be intimately connected to music. That’s why walking by West Acres and hearing kids banging on bongos or pummelling the xylophone gives him such a thrill.

Some of those kids would be thrilled themselves to know that Wells and his engineering co-conspirator Chris Anderson worked with Justin Bieber not far away from the school to produce My Worlds Acoustic, an unplugged album of songs from Justin’s first two albums.

Rob was a mild-mannered computer animator, writing songs for himself in his spare time until he attended a game-changing one week songwriters’ course with 40 other would-be musicians at Metalworks Studio in 2001. He went from “incredibly nervous” the first day to “depressed” on the last – not because his dream was shattered but because the course was over.

The rest, as they say, is history. Wells, like his brother Rob, is a highly sought-after writer, producer, player and collaborator who works with many of the best-known contemporary acts in the business.

He thrives under the pressure of going into the studio in the morning with an idea and, in collaboration with the artist and lyricist and the rest of the band, emerging with a completed product. “By the end of the day you have a track and people are freaking out about it – that’s the best.” The writing is still the best part of the job. “It soothes my soul… lowers my blood pressure. It’s the best therapy of all time.”

His music has appeared in countless TV shows, film scores and too many CDs to count. He’s doing the new Katharine McPhee album in Hollywood and writing for the new Degrassi series on Netflix. If you walk into the new dinosaur museum in Calgary and catch the epic chase scene that greets you, listen carefully to the chase music. That was written by Rob.

From dinosaurs to Daisy Dares You, Wells has it covered.

It was 2003 when Rob first heard one of his songs on the radio. It was Craig Smart singing What Went On. That’s when he says he first thought, “Wow, I can do this.” Wow, can he ever.

Welcome to the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame Rob.