MISSISSAUGA MUSIC WALK OF FAME

Legacy stories run in rich veins through Bobby Dean Blackburn’s life. His great grandfather Elias Earls traveled the Underground Railroad from Kentucky to its terminus in Owen Sound where he married a local girl. Bobby Dean has recently served as artistic director for the town’s Emancipation Festival, established in 1862. His ancestors likely attended the same picnic celebration in their own time and sang some of the same songs.

Like the pioneers in his family, Bobby Dean’s musical sojourn has traveled a long road that’s taken him across the GTA, Ontario and Canada. It started at York Memorial High School where his band The Gems won a talent contest and played the first ever school dance. His reward was a threat of expulsion from the principal for “deteriorating the morals” of students by playing rock and roll.

He quit school at 16. He’s essentially been on the road ever since.
Bobby Dean and the Gems fought the Battle of the Bands with Toronto’s other top groups The Consuls and the Wildwoods. He recorded a version of You Are My Sunshine at age 13 at Fred Roden’s Record Corral on Yonge St. There was an offer from Nashville, which his father flatly turned down.
The Gems headlined dances before Bobby Dean truly made his name at the Zanzibar a Go Go, playing 4 hours every afternoon.

There were no after-hours clubs back then, so the Zanzibar became the home-away-from-home for every name jazz, blues and R&B player passing through town.

Music critic Jack Batten described it in 1973 as “the only room in Toronto, maybe in the whole world, where jazz musicians can wander in at any hour of the afternoon and jam away the daylight hours to an appreciative audience of their peers and their fans.” Bobby Dean was the ringmaster.

A short list of those who jammed at his Zanzibar Finishing School includes Paul Butterfield, Rick James, Buddy Miles, Jimmy McGriff, Taj Mahal, Richard “Groove” Holmes, David-Clayton Thomas, Roland Prince, Dougie Richardson, Don (D.T.) Thompson, Eugene Smith and Steve Kennedy. The Blackburn homes in Brampton and Malton, where the family lived for the better part of 40 years, were filled with musicians coming to pay their respects and play.

Blackburn took a three-year hiatus when his doctor diagnosed “smoker’s cough.” He resumed playing after B.B. King told him “you should never quit
playing because you never know when you might make it.” He moved to the
Bruce Peninsula about a decade ago and has revived his career – and not coincidentally the local bar scene – up there.

Blackburn’s CV includes a gospel TV show that tapped his childhood roots singing lead in Baptist church choirs, 3 years playing solo in Yellowknife and a gig on an Alaskan cruise ship.

He was the first black coach in the Mississauga Hockey League. He went back to Westwood Secondary School at 57 to complete his high school diploma and was chosen as valedictorian by hi fellow adult students.
His four sons have grown up imbued with their father’s music and his passion for it. Their Maple Blues-winning Juno-nominated “band of brothers” proudly carries the Blackburn name.

Bobby Dean counts a recent appearance with Blackburn at Summer Folk as one of his career highlights. Many of the group’s songs carry lyrical references to the family history.

In one, son Duane sings “My father played the blues/ always the real deal/ down on Yonge St.” Bobby Dean Blackburn is the real deal to a lot more people than just his sons. Music has been his life for six decades. It still is. Every gig in every bar in every town across Canada has taken him another step towards his arrival today on the Mississauga Music Walk of Fame.

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.

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.