Scenesters still
Doug Kirby was one of the seminal Saint John rock n' rollers; more than forty years later, he and his wife Joan remain players in the Canadian music industry
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Doug and Joan Kirby in their Oakville office.
Grant Kerr
Although it was a half a century ago, Doug Kirby can remember two seminal moments in his life that steered a suburban New Brunswick kid into the perilous life of rock and roll.The first was hearing Bill Haley and the Comets' bang out Rock Around the Clock in 1954, arguably the moment rock and roll was born.
The second was nine years later when young Doug swaggered into Ben Goldstein's music store on Charlotte Street and scooped up a copy of an album by a thenunknown British band. Kirby was already a rocker, a Rothesay kid with slicked-down Brylcream hair, just like his idol, James Dean, and old Bill Haley. Haley and Elvis taught him how to rock and Kirby and some friends put together some of Saint John's earliest rock bands.
"I brought that album home and played it for the band.
It was November '63. Nobody had ever heard of them.
I says, 'Here's a band that can play as bad as we can,'" Kirby says of The Beatles, who had just released their debut Canadian album, Beatlemania! With the Beatles.
Forty-three years later, Kirby is still a rocker, sporting a blunt-cut mane of greying blond hair. A one-time drummer, he's still making things tick. Just not as a percussionist.
Now based in Oakville, Ont., Kirby is co-founder and CEO of LiveTourArtists, an agency that quickly became a major player in the Canadian music industry.
With about 70 artists on its roster, LiveTourArtists is a fraction of the size of Canada's dominant player, S.L. Feldman & Associates. But it's an award-winning topfour company when it comes to handling some of this country's top musicians.
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Kirby's company is made in Ontario. His expertise, though, was honed in Saint John.
While still a teen, Kirby drummed for local favourites like Johnny and the Kingsmen as well as a legend in the making, Dutch Mason.
"In those days, he was a real outlaw," Kirby says of Mason before he was crowned Prime Minister of the Blues.
The son of an insurance man, Kirby grew up middle class in Kennebecasis Park, back when it was still a new subdivision. As a day student at Rothesay Collegiate, his early taste for rock and roll didn't go down well with many of his well-monied classmates. Tame by today's standards, it's easy to forget how shocking the music of the day, and its accompanying fashions, seemed.
"We had brylcream in our hair and James Dean was my hero. Some of my closest friends wouldn't talk to us.
They thought we were Hell's Angles or something. We were like outcasts," Kirby says of his small band of rocker friends.
Many of Saint John's older musicians, the city's first rock and rollers, remember the kid with the steady beat and Buddy Holly glasses.
"I remember him playing in the gymnasium in the YMCA. I was about 14 at the time. I remember him playing this drum solo and I was flabbergasted. He was so loose
He influenced me greatly," says Norman Calp, who eventually replaced Kirby in Johnny and the Kingsmen and went on to become one of the greatest drummers the city ever produced.
Other kids looked up to him too, including Ken Tobias, a musician who wrote a million-selling hit for Montreal's The Bells and had a few hits of his own.
"They were the big boys at the time. He was a role model," says Tobias, a one-time drummer who used to hang out at the Kirbys' garage/ rehearsal space in KPark.
Even back in those early days, the kid from the outskirts of town was working behind the scenes when he wasn't on the drum stool.
"I was handling the bookings for the bands, but I had no idea what I was doing," Kirby says.
Pretty soon, he was lining up gigs for just about every group in town. It got to the point that he was doing more booking than drumming.
A trip to Toronto's then-hopping Yorkville area planted a seed in the young man, who by this time had hooked up with a pretty little blond by the name of Joan White.
"We went to see David Clayton-Thomas and we were quite enamoured with the whole scene and Doug says, 'How do they get here?'" recalled Joan (White) Kirby, who handles accounting and immigration at LiveTourArtists.
"Ronnie Hawkins was up there playing the Coq D'or.
When we got back to Saint John, Doug wanted to get into the business." He did too, before moving to Moncton in 1970, Halifax four years later, then Toronto in 1986.
"It was an eye-opener seeing all these large artists.
Those days in the village were big. Now we're booking all those people that we saw in those days," Doug says, pride jumping through the line.
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(Courtesy LiveTourArtists)
We say to the promoter, Do you know Ashley MacIsaac?' Yes'. Do you really know Ashley MacIsaac?'
In many ways, the Yorkville village scene was the birthplace of Canadian music as we know it. **({[Gordon Lightfoot]})**, Ian and Sylvia, Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan and the early folkies all got their start there.
These days, LiveTourArtists handles the affairs of many of them, including McLauchlan, Hawkins, Sylvia Tyson and David Clayton-Thomas, who would go onto considerable fame as the frontman of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Countless others too: John McDermott, Ashley MacIsaac, Michelle Wright, Susan Aglukark and Patricia Conroy among them.
Most are veteran artists whose hit-making days are over but still have busy careers. Others are up-and-comers, like Nova Scotia blues man, Charlie A'Court and PEI's pop perfect cuties The Chucky Danger Band.
"Doug is so hands-on, it's ridiculous," says Larry Le- Blanc, Canadian bureau chief of Billboard magazine, the pop music industry's bible on this continent. "If anything remotely looks like new talent, he's there." As an illustration, LeBlanc spins an anecdote about Kirby's commitment to digging out new talent. About 18 months ago, Kirby went out on a limb for a New Brunswick blues musician who had the stuff, but needed a push. Even though he wasn't representing him, Kirby set up a Toronto showcase gig for Bairsdsville's Matt Andersen and invited everyone he knew in the industry to check out a blues giant in the making. That included the president of Sony Music Canada, "I thought that was pretty generous," LeBlanc says. "If I had a blues act, or a certain type of roots act, I would go to Doug first. He is able, unlike a lot of agents, to work in the trenches developing artists." Kirby didn't end up singing Andersen - a rival agency grabbed him - but he's willing to take a chance on other artists that others won't touch. Some of them are legendary in the industry for being difficult with a capital D.
Cape Breton's Ashley MacIsaac is one of them. The enfant terrible of the fiddle has been notorious for drug abuse and erratic behaviour, both onstage and off.
Kirby and LiveTourArtists signed him anyway.
"He can be difficult but we made things easy," Kirby says. "We say to the promoter, 'Do you know Ashley MacIsaac?' 'Yes'. 'Do you really know Ashley MacIsaac?' 'Yes'. 'Do you still want him?' 'Yes'. Then you have to go ask (MacIsaac) to do the gig. We do not book Ashley MacIsaac to people who don't know him." With some artists, "It's a love/ hate relationship," Joan says.
Doug tries to be diplomatic: "You are dealing with musicians and they are not like other people. They think differently. Our job is to make the deals, get the contracts signed and get the money." The Kirbys' strength is that they are tireless survivors who have worked just about every angle in the business.
In 1970, when April Wine was an upstart Nova Scotia act that was making its move to Montreal to make it big, Kirby booked the band into Netherwood School. At the time, it was a strict all-girls institution. "We were all shocked (the school allowed it). It was the beginning of the acceptance of rock bands in Maritime society. It was bit of a coup at the time," Kirby says. He was able to book them for just $250.
"They had to be escorted into the school by the RCMP."
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* Through the 1970s and 80s, Kirby kept working behind the scenes, handling the affairs of seventies hitmakers like Harlequin and Matt Minglewood.
The bottom dropped out of the industry by 1991, so Kirby went to work for Copps Coliseum, bringing in big acts like Guns'n Roses and Metallica to Hamilton, Ont.
For a man whose life had been spent making deals, Kirby got devastating news seven years ago. At the time he was told he would never talk again, having lost his voice through a rare neurological condition called dystonia.
Kirby's voice undulates wildly in conversation, shooting up in pitch, then cutting out to barely a strangled whisper.
"When your doctor says, 'Go home and go to bed for the rest of your life,' I wasn't having any of that. We started this company instead (five years ago). We signed bands other agencies wouldn't sign and we gave them their careers back. Artists are the power. We just try to keep them organized," Kirby says.
It's extraordinary that he did what he did when he did it. Although he refuses to give his age . this is a still a business where youthfulness rules . Kirby, and his wife, are in their early 60s.
With his business partner, Darcy Gregoire, Kirby has a staff of 14 and will be hiring a couple more in the near future. It's a family affair too. In addition to Joan, all three of the Kirbys' children work at LiveTourArtists.
Dana's an agent, Kathy works with her mom and Chris is an IT man.
Other than the Kirbys, the company's employees are young, generally three-plus decades younger than Doug and Joan Kirby.
All 14 employees work out of the Kirby house on a quiet Oakville street, taking up more than half of their 4,000 square-feet of space.They're looking at adding two more employees soon and expanding the office as well.
"It's an office in a home but it's not a home office," Kirby says.
This expansion is in direct contrast to the common perception that the music industry is doomed. LTA's CEO isn't buying it. Live music is alive and well and business is good, thanks.
"There are some red herrings out there that the music business is hurting and that the major (record) labels are hurting. It's true but (record labels) never kept up with the times. Downloading has helped with promotion.
(Record companies) were the gate keepers for 50 years and they kept the best talent out. Now that the gatekeepers are gone, it's a good day," Kirby says.
A veteran pitch-man, Kirby isn't sad that it's looks like the end of the road for major labels.
[ October 03, 2006, 08:10: Message edited by: Jesse -Joe ]
