CMRMC Presents

Edward Bear was a Toronto-based Canadian pop-rock group. The band is best known for its chart-topping single, “Last Song”, and “Close Your Eyes”, used as the signing-off song for Delilah’s radio show.

The Edward Bear Revue, later Edward Bear, was formed in 1966 by singer and percussionist Larry Evoy and bassist Craig Hemming. The name is derived from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, whose “proper” name is Edward Bear. At first the band had a bluesy, rock sound; at one point they opened for Led Zeppelin.

The band signed with Capitol Records in 1969 with a lineup of Evoy, guitarist/vocalist Danny Marks and keyboardist/vocalist Paul Weldon.Their sound moved toward blues and pop. They released an album, Bearings, that year. Their single, “You, Me and Mexico”, was a Top 5 hit in Canada and charted well in the United States. Follow-up songs, “You Can’t Deny It” and “Spirit Song” did not prove popular. Marks left the band the following year and was succeeded by guitarist/vocalist Roger Ellis.

The band recorded several albums; the songs were mainly written by the band members. There were several chart successes in the early 1970s, including “Fly Across the Sea” and “Masquerade”. The band had its biggest hit in 1973, when “Last Song” charted at #1 in Canada and peaked at #3 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. It was awarded a gold disc in March 1973 for selling over one million copies by the Recording Industry Association of America. “Close Your Eyes” was a Top 5 hit in Canada and also made the charts in the United States.

Edward Bear won a Juno Award in 1973 for outstanding group performance. By then, most of the band’s original lineup had left. Evoy remained as the primary songwriter and organizer, rebuilding the band twice, until it finally was disbanded in 1974.

Evoy, who briefly embraced Scientology in 1973 (the band also recorded a jingle in 1973 for a Scientology TV commercial, and also mentioned it on the back cover of their 1973 album, Close Your Eyes), went on to a solo career, achieving a modest hit in Canada with “Here I Go Again,” after which he retired from live performance and began running a small recording studio. Marks has continued a career as a blues guitarist and radio host. Weldon performs with a jazz combo and teaches at Seneca College in Toronto. Bill Loop, bassist in the early 1970s, resides in Southwestern Ontario and plays locall

Duff Roman is the former on-air name of David Mostoway (born 1938 in Swift Current, Saskatchewan), a Canadian radio personality and executive who was named by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences as the winner of the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award at the Juno Awards of 2019 for his contributions to the Canadian music industry.

He worked as an on-air personality for a variety of radio stations in Western Canada before moving to Toronto, Ontario, where he became most famously associated with CHUM-FM. He was promoted to program director of the station in 1974, and to operations manager of the station in 1984. As operations manager, he oversaw the station’s transition to an adult contemporary program format which made it the most listened-to station in the Toronto radio market. In the 1990s he became vice-president of industry affairs for CHUM Limited.

During the 1990s, he served as chairman of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, and oversaw Digital Radio Research, a joint consortium of the CAB and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to review and develop policy around the emergence and development of digital radio in Canada.

Attic Records was a Canadian independent record label, founded in 1974 by Alexander Mair and Tom Williams. The label was known for developing Canadian talent, including Anvil, Lee Aaron, Maestro Fresh Wes, The Nylons, Teenage Head, and Triumph. The company was also active in distributing international acts not affiliated with a major label, most successfully with Jennifer Warnes, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Katrina and the Waves, and Creed.

Attic Records ceased to exist as an independent company in 1999, when it was bought by a consortium headed by Allan Gregg and merged with TMP (The Music Publisher) and Oasis Entertainment Distribution to form The Song Corporation. The Attic label briefly continued to exist as a subsidiary of The Song Corporation, but within months of its acquisition, the label name was changed to “Song Recordings”.

The Song Corporation filed for bankruptcy in May 2001. Attic’s Canadian catalog and masters are now owned by Unidisc Music.

There’s only one organization that can claim to have had Canada’s first independent record pressing plant…and that was the Compo Company Ltd of Lachine, Quebec.

Compo was founded in 1921 by Emile Berliner’s eldest son, Herbert after a family dispute saw him leave the Berliner Gram-o-phone Company of Canada (for an abridged history of Emile Berliner’s recording related inventions and accomplishments, see the RCA Victor section). Nobody knows why Herbert chose the name Compo, but it was certainly successful from the very first day it opened its doors.

Herbert was much more than simply another record executive sitting behind a desk. Herbert opened a recording studio and released several thousand Francophone recordings on Compo and various affiliated labels. For more than 50 years, Compo was the most active company in the Francophone market.

RCA Victor and Compo were the only two Canadian record companies to survive the financial crash of 1929 and the subsequent depression, although it required Compo to do several other things, including retooling the Lachine plant to press floor tiles.

Like Quality and Phonodisc, Compo relied on licensing recorded masters from U.S. companies. Their largest client (beginning in 1935) was Decca Records in the U.S. (for whom they were also pressing records for American distribution). That gave Compo exclusive Canadian rights to such best selling Decca stars as Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, Guy Lombardo, The Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots, Glen Gray and His Casa Loma Orchestra, Woody Herman and Bill Haley & The His Comets, the man many music historians credit with launching rock and roll to a mass audience in 1955 with their # 1 hit “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around The Clock”. Decca also had a large country artist roster which included Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Loretta, Lynn, The Wilburn Brothers and Patsy Cline. Later successful Decca pop recording artists included Brenda Lee and Burl Ives. The Brunswick and Coral labels were wholly owned subsidiaries of Decca. Buddy Holly and The Crickets along with Jackie Wilson were among the most popular performers for those labels.

But there were other American labels Compo distributed in Canada as well, including Cadence Records with top selling artists as The Everly Brothers, The Chordettes, Julius Larose and Andy Williams as well as Roulette Records, run by the controversial Morris Levy, who allegedly had close mob connections. Roulette was home to Ronnie Hawkins, Buddy Knox, Frankie Lymon and pop-folk singer Jimmie Rodgers.

United Artists was another Compo licensing deal. UA had Don Costa and His Orchestra, the popular piano duo, Ferrante & Teicher, guitarist Al Caiola and Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot.

Apex was Compo’s main label for releases in Canada with performers such as Billy Van, Pierre Lalonde and a Toronto based teenage pop group known as The Lords of London, who gave Apex a # 1 Canadian smash hit in 1967 with the song “Cornflakes and Ice Cream”. The song also went to # 1 in Boston, Georgia and Australia. Sebastian Agnello was a member of The Lords of London and he remembers that it wasn’t much fun being a 14 year old Canadian teen idol while still living with your parents “We rehearsed in the morning, went to school, had supper at 6 o’clock, then get driven to a gig and driven home again and that was the routine. My dad would get peeved ‘cause he’d be sitting on our veranda and a whole bunch of girls would come and stare at our house and he’d be like ‘Why are these girls staring at our house?’ Until he saw us on TV, with the girls screaming, and said “Oh gee, you’re on TV. He had no clue.”

While Compo had pressing facilities at their headquarters in Lachine, Quebec, its largest Canadian pressing plant/warehouse was in Cornwall, Ontario.

In 1961, Herbert Berliner was diagnosed with cancer and sold Compo to Decca in the U.S. As it turned out, it was a misdiagnosis and he didn’t have cancer after all. For the rest of his life, he bitterly regretted selling the company. Two years later in 1963, the Music Corporation of America (MCA) bought Decca and with it, went Compo. Herbert Berliner remained with Compo under the various new owners until his death in 1966.

Since then, the company was bought and sold several more times and is known today as the Universal Music Group.

Phonodisc came late to the Canadian record industry. It was launched in April of 1956 by founder Don McKim as Canada’s newest independent record company, but by then, the Canadian scene was already crowded with most of the majors – Capitol, Columbia, Compo, RCA Victor and several others.

But Phonodisc was the little company that could. And they did…at least for a while.

Like many of the other Canadian indies, Phonodisc depended on licensing recordings from American and British sources. One of the slogans on their early 45rpm record sleeves was “One Hit Leads To Another From Phonodisc”.

Their initial label affiliations were with King Records, founded by Syd Nathan and based in Cincinnati, Ohio, which gave Phonodisc Canadian distribution rights to all of James Brown and The Famous Flames’ recordings (“Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag”, “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World”), as well as artists such as Hank Ballard (the writer of the biggest dance craze of the 1960’s, the Twist), bluesman Freddie King, Earl Bostic, Bill Doggett, Billy Ward and His Dominoes along with Little Willie John.

The Del-Fi/Donna/Mustang labels owned by Bob Keane in Los Angeles were also represented by Phonodisc in Canada. Keane, a former big bandleader and clarinet player, produced, recorded and released hits by Ritchie Valens (“Come On, Let’s Go”, “Donna” and “La Bamba”), Ron Holden (“Love You So”), former “Mickey Mouse Club” mousekateer and 60’s TV star of “The Rifleman” Johnny Crawford (“Your Nose Is Gonna Grow” and “Cindy’s Birthday”) and The Bobby Fuller Four (“I Fought The Law”).

Other American. and British record companies signed for Canadian distribution by Phonodisc were Audio Fidelity (with its large catalogue of sound effects records); Kapp/Congress (with artists such as Jack Jones, Paul Evans, Shirley Ellis, Linda Scott, early Dave Clark Five, The Searchers and very early Elton John singles); Warwick (Johnny & The Hurricanes, The String-A-Longs and The Fireballs), Sue Records (Wilbert Harrison, Baby Washington, Jimmy McGriff, Barbara George, Inez and Charlie Foxx, The Duals and Ike & Tina Turner), Jubilee and Carlton Records (with artists Jack Scott, Merv Griffin and Anita Bryant). In 1968, Phonodisc signed a licensing agreement with Britain’s Pye label (The Kinks).

In the early 1960’s, Phonodisc managed to grab Canadian rights to Chicago based labels, Chess/Checker/Argo from Quality Records, which gave them access to recordings from Chuck Berry, the Ramsey Lewis Trio (“The In Crowd”), The Sensations (“Let Me In”) and Bo Diddley, among many others.

While all of these labels produced successful 45rpm hits and album sales in Canada for Phonodisc, there was a new record company in Detroit that President Don McKim and his staff were quite excited about. It had been launched with a family loan of $800.00 by former professional boxer, fledgling songwriter and Ford/Lincoln/Mercury assembly line worker Berry Gordy Jr. That company became world famous as Hitsville U.S.A. aka Motown. Gordy’s first label was named Tamla, which had such artists as The Miracles (later known as Smokey Robinson & The Miracles), Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Barrett Strong and The Marvellettes. Later labels were Gordy, Motown and Rare Earth (Motown’s ‘rock and roll’ label).

Ron Newman was Phonodisc’s superstar promotion man. Ron’s personality was so infectious and likeable, that he was able to build strong, lasting relationships with many disc jockeys and radio stations across Canada, which is crucial for record company airplay for their artists. Ron became so successful that Motown hired him and moved him to Detroit. Ron’s son, Garry Newman, who also went into the record business and eventually became President of Warner Music Canada, remembers staying with his dad as a teenager, “He had a farm in Stouffville [Ontario] and I can tell you one time at Christmas, he had The Temptations performing in the basement. Lionel Richie was there with The Commodores. Lionel signed my dad’s piano. My father used to say, ‘You can bring ten friends’, so first I would pick all guys, and then [as I got older], it was five guys and five girls. They’d all say, ‘Who’s going to be singing’ and when I’d tell them, they all went crazy.”

Phonodisc had a highly successful run as distributor (Billboard Magazine, the bible of the music industry titled a December 1968 article on Phonodisc as “David Among Goliaths”), and although Motown eventually left to form their own Canadian organization, Phonodisc continued on with its other label licensors. In the 1970’s, they opened an office in New York. Phonodisc did release albums by Canadian performers as The Munks, Tommy Ambrose, Peter Pringle, Newfoundlanders Figgy Duff and Edmonton’s Belinda Metz, but these were not best sellers and Phonodisc closed its doors in the 1980’s.