 Mom, How Could You?
Sometimes mothers just don't get it when it comes to their
sons' stuff. I remember back when I was just a pup, coming home after a summer away to
find that my maternal unit had pitched all my beloved CHUM Charts. She knew I would have
slipped a cog had anything happened to my records themselves, or the rather dubious
equipment I had for playing them at the time, but I suppose she figured the unruly pile of
tattered sheets of paper were trash, so she tidied them into oblivion.
For those who didn't grow up in Toronto, CHUM was the first
top-40 station in Canada, and among its promotions was a weekly listing of the current
best-selling records, which the station published for something like 30 years. At its
peak, it had the widest distribution of any such chart on Earth.
Like most audiophiles -- or, in this case, embryonic
audiophiles -- my interest in sound equipment grew out of a love for music. I was brought
up in a house where there was always lots of music, but most of it was classical. I still
love "serious" music, but perhaps out of a sense of defiance or even just
perversity, I took to early rock'n'roll with a passion and spent every cent I had on
records. Even then, I looked upon it as a collection, rather than just a stack of records,
and I still have every one.
But I knew even then that there should be some backup
information. There would never be any lack of historical material on classical music, say,
or jazz, but back then I imagined that the music I listened to would be entirely
ephemeral, so I hung onto the only written matter I could find that related to it: the
CHUM Charts. Week by week, they detailed the rise and fall of records and their makers, as
well as the rather odd group of people who spun the records. Now my reference was gone.
As it happened, I needn't have worried; a substantial
industry has grown up that rehashes that era's music over and over, both on the air and in
print, but it took me a long time to discover even a part of what was out there.
Then, in the early '70s, a colleague plopped onto my desk a
book called The Gold of Rock & Roll, 1955-1967 (Arbor House Publishing, New
York, 1970). It was compiled by someone who gloried in the name of H. Kandy Rohde, and it
listed the top ten records of every week during that period, plus what purported to be the
top 50 records of each year.
To me, this was a gold mine, and served to provide a
context for my old records. There were annoyances in this book, now long out of print (my
friend had in fact picked it up from a remainder table, having paid a whole dime for it).
For one thing, Ms. Rohde decided to save some ink and dispense with artists' first names.
Later readers would no doubt be able to figure out who E. Presley and P. Anka might be,
but what about S. Nelson or J. Wallace? Worse, the listings turned out later to be quite
arbitrary, bearing little resemblance to actual sales.
Still, it was better than nothing. And shortly afterwards,
I found more detail in Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia (Workman Publishing, New
York, 1971), which provided biographical material and discographies on who was big at the
time. Looking back, it seems ridiculous for her to have spent as much space on Dave Dee,
Dozy, Beaky, and Mick & Tich as on Neil Diamond, but again there wasn't much else out
there.
Surprisingly, there was a pretty good book on the Canadian
scene: Axes, Chops & Hot Licks by Ritchie Yorke (M. G. Hurtig Ltd., Edmonton,
1971). The publishing house is no more, so this book is inevitably hard to find (although
some libraries may have it), but it's worth seeking out as a fairly comprehensive -- if
rather turgidly written -- snapshot of Canadian pop in its early days.
Now it seems odd that there was such a paucity of material
back then. Wind the clock forward 15 years or so to the mid-'80s, and there was an
explosion of words on the subject. The boomers had become book-buying grownups that wanted
to read about their adolescent idols.
For those of us who are less interested in the lives of the
stars than in the music they produced (and the details of how it fared), there are two
essential works. The first is American, and absolutely the last word in who did what,
rockwise: Joel Whitburn's Top Pop Singles (Record Research, Menomonee Falls,
Wisconsin). Whitburn has been obsessively churning out annual editions of this work for
years, crunching and recrunching the various charts compiled by Billboard magazine,
the big trade paper in the United States.
When the DJs tell you when a record came out and what it
did on the charts, they're looking at this book. It lists every single record that hit the
Hot 100 over a period of almost 50 years, arranged first by artist (with occasional skimpy
bio material) and cross-referenced by title. They've added a few album graphics and some
back-of-the-book extra material, but the listings are what count and they're invaluable.
The Whitburn book has been a major source of information
for cataloging my own collection for decades, but its relevance to the Canadian scene is
limited. Yes, there are listings for all the Canadian artists who charted in the US, but
no sense of what they did at home. And lots of American records fared very differently in
the two countries.
Not to worry. Someone named Ron Hall, who is obviously as
obsessive as Joel Whitburn (and me), put together a Canadian equivalent of the Billboard
book compiled from -- Hallelujah! -- 30 years of CHUM Charts. For anyone who grew up in
Toronto in the '50s and '60s, the actual charts reproduced inside the book and on its back
cover will bring a pleasant pang of nostalgia, and the 15 Canada-only record labels on the
front are a treat.
But the listings represented what happened with the records
when I was buying them, and that's a much better specific reference, at least for me.
About ten years ago, I was delighted to find all this material gathered together in The
CHUM Chart Book (Stardust Productions, Etobicoke, 1990) by Ron Hall.
Sadly, it has been out of print for several years, although
copies show up on second-hand book tables in the Toronto area from time to time. Wilson
& Lee in Oshawa, Ontario -- arguably Canada’s most comprehensive retailer of
oldies, both on vinyl and CD -- bought the remaining stock when the title went out of
print, and sold the last of them several years ago. Store partner Bill Wilson says they
still get asked for the book.
I consider my copy one of the more important pieces of
audio equipment in my system. Mom, you're forgiven.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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