Forgive me. The subtitle of this post is borrowed from Michael Palin’s “Miles Cowperthwaite” sketch from early SNL days and is meant to acknowledge a certain amount of self-pitying on my behalf – begun in last week’s post but continued here in earnest. If you haven’t read post #18 yet, I encourage you to go back and read that to get the full context of my venting.
So, where was I?
Oh right – at the age of 45 or 46, my dad was betrayed by friends and colleagues in the pursuit of a greater leadership role in the United Steelworkers of America. It broke him for a good long time and I only recognized well after the fact that I was exactly that age when what was starting to look like a storied career with the CBC was abruptly cut off in an eerily similar way.
I’d been the host, writer and co-producer of Global Village – a weekly, national show on CBC Radio since our pilot season around 1997. It ran on Radio One, Radio Two and Radio Canada International and we broke a lot of new ground – including being the first show at CBC to gather content from far flung correspondents via MP3 file transfers if you can believe it! We were also the first show to have our own dedicated website and I learned HTML and DreamWeaver to update that site every week. We won a bunch of internal and international awards including multiple Deutsche Welle World Music Radio prizes, which earned us repeat visits to Bonn, Berlin and Köln and our multimedia special produced in Belgrade just weeks after the end of the war there was a genuine triumph.
But I’d been chomping at the bit to come out from the yoke of Global Village and my friend and colleague, Paolo Pietropaolo, and I conceived a series that would finally get some electronic music onto CBC’s fusty airwaves. I’ve written previously about how we were then teamed up with famed Newfoundland-based producer Chris Brookes and we became a real force – with that series as the foundation of our trio’s origin story.
So by 2005 and 2006, we’d achieved the highest possible praise and international recognition for that series, The Wire: The Impact of Electricity on Music, [which, amazingly, after years of being told it would not be available, is now available to stream on demand from CBC! See the Bonus section on this CBC page].
We won the prestigious Peabody Award, and the Third Coast Audio Festival Director’s Choice Award and a Prix Italia and the series was being broadcast around the world. At Third Coast in Chicago, RadioLab founder Jad Abumrad told me our work was inspiring. We followed up with a pilot for a collaborative international radio series to be called Invisible Cities. CBC passed on it but the Ideas show ran the pilot and it won a New York Festivals medal. In the meantime, we dusted ourselves off and pitched a follow-up to The Wire called The Nerve: Music and the Human Experience, which also went on to win numerous international awards and has been replayed many times (as has The Wire) on CBC Radio over the years. While we were working on that, changes happening at RadioTwo (to begin the transformation into what is now RadioMusic) caused them to cancel Global Village. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t surprised or even really that upset. After all, we’d been on the air for 10 years – a good long time for a kind of upstart, orphaned, under-resourced show. Plus, I’d been feeling stymied by my producer, AM. She had a particular political point of view about music as a tool in the struggle and the vast majority of stories we featured or interviews we did were designed to highlight primarily this point of view of the role of music and culture in life across Canada and around the world. We had frank conversations about what I felt was too narrow a view. Interviews weren’t fun for me. I was good at it and had learned from the master, John Sawatsky, but never got to apply that skill because we just had a rote set of questions meant to tease out the same kind of narrative from artists from different genres and cultures and personalities from all over the world. In spite of that, we did some excellent work and we had a great time doing it. Lots of laughs, lots of travel, lots of pioneering work, lots of awards (more Prix Italias and New York Festivals medals and those Deutsche Welle World Music prizes). Mostly, I was proud to have written and hosted a successful weekly show for our national public broadcaster for almost a decade.
We were called to the office of the head of RadioMusic, MS, and we kind of knew what was coming. We were told quickly and matter-of-factly that the show was being cancelled but that there would be other things for us to do to help build the new RadioTwo. We’d been kind of stunned by the brevity of the meeting and were walking back to our office in a bit of a reflective daze. I was feeling philosophical. As we walked, eyes down, I put my arm around her shoulder and offered a well-meant platitude like “Man. Ten years. That’s a pretty good run.” That’s when I felt something I will never forget: after all that we had shared for the better part of a decade, some genuine closeness and camaraderie as world music rebels in a classical music milieu: no leaning in, no reciprocation. In that moment she kept a kind of antiseptic distance that chilled me. It was palpable. I told her that I wasn’t too worried about other opportunities for me within the new regime since my side projects had been so successful and that surely the Peabody – the first for CBC in some time and the award that every broadcaster dreams of – would remind the bosses of my value in upcoming meetings. “Oh, I wouldn’t mention the Peabody in those meetings”, she replied mysteriously. I mean, why the hell wouldn’t you? In that business – especially for a public broadcaster where you’re not making a ton of money – what else have you got? Stephen Colbert would mention his Peabody practically every night on his old show and he kept the award on set to bring attention to it regularly. It was the first visceral feeling I had of being… severed, but it wouldn’t be by any means the last.
For a time, they had me “writing a blog” in defence of the coming changes to Radio Two. For decades, it had been a bastion of classical music on the public service. But in multiple ways the demographics of Canada couldn’t justify maintaining this preserve for a shrinking audience. But that audience skewed old, white, moneyed and very vocal about “their” radio network so it was going to be a very public battle to pry it from their cold, not-yet-dead hands. My job was to acknowledge their pain but make the case for change in my own words and I was very much on board with changing RadioTwo. They trusted me to have this conversation in this “blog” – except when they didn’t. When I acknowledged their pain too much, MS would have someone call me on a weekend to take down what I’d written or remove references he didn’t like. So it wasn’t a blog and it became apparent they didn’t want my actual thoughts on the matter or to engage in real conversation but rather to leverage whatever credibility I might have to assist in their whitewashing of the carnage to come. And it wasn’t just carnage for the classical music crowd – they got so many in the world music community, for example, behind the changes and then abandoned them in favour of advice they got from a Philadelphia-based consultant about the programming of AAA radio in the U.S. I was part of a complete snow job. I had no office to work out of. They had me set up in common areas and gave me a laptop to work from home and equipped me with all the latest tech that I didn’t want so they could reach me at any time of day or night and ensure I was towing the party line.
Once that phoney blog had run its course, they gave me a new job hosting the new RadioTwo overnight show, embarrassingly named Nightstream. I didn’t have to work overnights. Rather, I assembled multiple shows during the working week that ran in the overnight slot. It was meant to be a seamless bridge between the folk, jazz or blues shows that ended at midnight and the classical music that would resume at 5:00 or 6:00am. This was all done by computer, which segmented the hours according to quasi-adjacent genres. Once the computer had created the playlist, my job was to make replacements here or there, create little gaps every few songs and then go into a cubicle studio by myself to record my own tedious blather about whatever I’d just played (or pretended to have played). Here’s the thing: the total library of music to populate this 5-hour-a-day-7-days-a-week show was about 4000 pieces. For comparison, I had at home a library of perhaps 400,000 songs. I even had 20,000 songs on my then state-of-the-art iPod. I was permitted to add to the library but that was to be done on my own time. So you can imagine, I was “selecting” a tonne of repetition from a molehill of music I either didn’t care about very much or that was complete dreck. I would spend my own time adding little bits of music I loved just so the show would reflect some inkling of my, frankly, copious musical knowledge. And there I was mispronouncing the name of some classical music ensemble I wasn’t familiar with soon after having “chosen” to play some ‘80’s soft pop hit by Luba or the umpteenth Blue Rodeo track that week. I genuinely care about music and about a universe’s worth of music but here I was forced to feign some kind of enthusiasm for things that were just not interesting to me.
On top of the humiliation of the show itself, I worked completely alone in an office with no window off a hallway between two nowheres. If you’ve ever been in the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto, you’ll know that it is a confounding rabbit warren where no two floors are laid out the same and you never take the same route twice to get where you might need to go. There was a mail-delivery robot that patrolled the halls with the help of some magnetic dust tracks laid in the carpet (it was nicknamed F.R.E.D., for F***ing Ridiculous Electronic Device) and sometimes your best bet was just to walk behind FRED until it lead you to other humans. (There’s a fascinating rumour I heard about why the building is so unfriendly to navigate, which I’ll share in a members-only post later). MS, the head of RadioMusic called me into his office once – to tell me I was mispronouncing a couple of composers and ensembles but otherwise offered no feedback. I felt like a kid in the principal’s office. One day, while I was in my little cave, he stumbled by and leaned in my doorway. He engaged me for a minute or so in some conversation so trivial that I couldn’t imagine why he’d ventured so far from his office in the centre of the department to darken my door. Then he tipped his hand: “Can I get to Randy Barnard’s office this way?” There were days on end when the only people I saw were the ones who got lost on their way to somewhere else.
When it came time to record my voice inserts, I’d venture out to the studio areas where there were these tiny closets off the main studios where you could tap into the DALET system, make your recordings and return to your office. The way these were set up, I’d sometimes have a window into the main studio and I’d see friends come in in pairs or teams to make real radio programs. Sometimes they’d wave. It brought new meaning to the term “isolation booth”.
Gosh, this is getting heavy and I confess I’m not done yet. And since my last post, a former colleague has reached out to tell me their own travails with the Mother Corp that sound at least at a level with mine and possibly much worse. So while I digest that I’m going to defer the remainder of this tale of woe to Part 3 (if you can bear it).
Thanks for staying with me.