FRED LANGAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED 2 DAYS AGO
UPDATED DECEMBER 10, 2018
PAUL SMITH/LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
Lyman Potts compiled a huge catalogue of Canadian content for radio stations. He did it not because some government edict told him to, but because he wanted to. Mr. Potts, who has died at 102, built the foundations for the Canadian music industry by creating domestic content for radio stations, recording bands and singers in a collection called the Canadian Talent Library.
Gordon Lightfoot was one of the Canadian musicians. Mr. Potts arranged for the first recording session of the man who would go on to become one of the most successful recording artists in this country.
“Willa Burke, who worked at the office, said she’d heard this young singer named Gordon Lightfoot playing around the corner,” Mr. Potts recalled. “We went to see Gordon and asked if he’d like to record some of his music. He agreed and we did seven songs in a one-hour session,” Mr. Potts remembered years later.
“It was mostly traditional folk songs from the Maritimes I was singing back then at the Purple Onion,” Mr. Lightfoot said. But it also included at least two songs Mr. Lightfoot had written himself.
The problem facing radio stations here was how to get their hands on Canadian-produced music. The musicians’ union loved the rules that forced stations to play live music. There was no recording industry in this country so any recorded music came from the United States.
Mr. Potts, a radio executive at Standard Broadcasting in Toronto in the early 1960s, went to the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) – the predecessor to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) – and came up with a plan to record Canadian artists. The stations could then play Canadian music and at the same time keep the broadcast regulator happy because of the money spent on home-grown talent.
By 1963, the plan was approved and Mr. Potts set about organizing the recording of Canadian musicians. The Canadian Talent Library contained 266 albums with 3,000 individual selections. The music was mostly big bands conducted by the likes of Howard Cable and Alexander (Ragtime) Read, but it branched out into individual singers.
The Canadian Talent Library was a huge success and more than 200 private radio stations played the recordings across the country. It even replaced Muzak on Air Canada.
The recordings also had the desired effect of making the regulators happy. “It cost the radio stations a fair chunk of dough, but they bought a lot of goodwill with it,” Mr. Potts said. “It also put money in the pockets of the people who made the recordings.”
It also made Mr. Potts a legend in the radio and music business. In 1978 he was made a member of the Order of Canada for “the establishment of the Canadian Talent Library, which has done much to encourage the recognition of Canadian performing artists.”
Many musicians were in favour of recorded music, but the head of the union, Walter Murdoch, was dead set against it. He wanted to stick with live orchestras and singers in studios. In the long run, the union agreed it was in the interests of the artists, and Mr. Potts was made an honourary member of the Toronto Musicians Association.
Not many years later, the middle-of-the-road music was knocked off the air by rock 'n' roll. But by that time, the Canadian recording industry was established. When the CRTC made a rule in 1972 ensuring the airplay of a certain amount of Canadian content, it wasn’t that difficult to provide it, even though at first Anne Murray and Mr. Lightfoot perhaps got too much exposure.
Joseph Lyman Potts was born in Regina on Nov. 11, 1916, just 11 years after Saskatchewan became a province. He was named after Lyman Abbott, a hockey player on the Regina Victorias – coached to victory in the Allan Cup by his father, Joe Potts. Captain Abbott, awarded the Military Cross twice, was killed in the last months of the First World War.
Along with coaching hockey, Lyman Potts’s father ran a barbershop, and not just any barbershop – it was an elaborate operation with seven chairs on the ground floor of a building that housed lawyers and doctors. It was a meeting place for the local establishment. Many of them kept their own razors at Mr. Potts’s barbershop.
Young Lyman went to Regina Central Collegiate. He was not an athlete, but he was outgoing and active in things such as high-school plays. He was also fascinated by radio from the age of 5 when he watched transmission towers being installed on the Regina Leader Post Building.
As a teenager he also wired his own neighbourhood, using thin copper wire hooked up to his own radio at home to send programs to some of his neighbours. He also had a microphone to practise broadcasting. He started working at the local radio station, CHWC, when he was 16, and took a full-time job there when he finished high school. The pay was $5 a week.
In the 1930s, live music of big bands was the staple of private radio stations in Canada. On a Saturday night the Regina station would handle the broadcast of an orchestra from a local ballroom. The station would come on after a similar broadcast in Winnipeg and, after an hour and a half, would switch to a broadcast from Calgary.
Mr. Potts worked as the announcer, technician and traffic manager, organizing the logistics of it all. One night he remembered packing up the equipment and rushing out to meet some friends. He had a date with a girl he never thought would go out with him. All of a sudden there was a problem with the next station and he had to go back inside, set up his gear and get the band playing again to broadcast for another half hour. Things with the young woman worked out. He married Michelle Bole three years later.
PART TWO in next post.
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