CHOM takes a licking

>> Boris and Bambi wanted to change the face of Montreal radio. They failed, but not without a fight

by CHRIS BARRY

So you think that CHOM FM sucks. You say you're fed up with music marathons featuring Moist, David Usher, some generic Can-con Pearl Jam band, more David Usher, more Moist and a little vintage April Wine.

Well, stop your whining and listen up, kids: Grandpa here thinks you've got it easy. In my day, back in the late '70s, CHOM was the only spot on the local FM dial that had a license to play anything even resembling rock 'n' roll. That's right. No CKUT, no BUZZ, no Brave New Waves. Nothing! Just Rocky Raccoon and Doug and the Slugs and Chris DeBurgh. If CHOM didn't play it, you weren't going to hear it!

And, except for a brief moment in the very early days, CHOM has always been spectacularly wimpy in its programming. The last station in America to playlist Nirvana and Guns n' Roses (okay, so maybe they're not all bad), CHOM has forever been slow to catch on to what's going on in the world outside of the West Island.

Even more frustrating is that back in the late '70s and early '80s, if you happened to be playing in a band that could, by some stretch of the imagination, be categorized as new wave or, God forbid, punk, then you were doomed in Montreal.

No radio play, no exposure, nobody at your gigs. Or, at least, nobody except the same few hundred people who had already seen your band ten thousand times before.

Boris to the rescue

Enter Boris Shedov and Bambi Concert Productions. Straight off the boat from a two-year stint in Moscow, British-born Boris was determined to bring punk rock--or at least Ultravox--to Montreal. Boris and his partners, Joe Martek, Pierre Tremblay and Joe DiMauro, all worked shitty day jobs for the express purpose of financing their, more often than not, ill-fated concert promotions.

Here were some real troopers, committed as hell to the local scene and to the musical revolution that was seemingly going down everywhere else but in disco-obsessed Montreal. To Bambi, no price was too high to bring bands like the Stranglers, Bauhaus or the Exploited to Montreal. To hell with the money! The Lurkers are touring America and our city will not be denied! "Joe, get out the chequebook!" $10,000 U.S. for Pere Ubu? Okay, fellas, better spend some extra hours bagging at the IGA, the kids need to hear David Thomas yelp about nothing!

Of course, with the exception of maybe Fugazi or the Ripcordz, bands will be bands. And the primary concern of most of these international touring "punk" bands was to grab as much money from wherever they could and from whomever they could, regardless of the financial situation of their hosts and of how much money the latter may have been losing. But to the twentysomethings at Bambi Productions, punk rock was political. And, while Bambi were infuriated with CHOM for cultural reasons, most of the bands they fought so hard to get playlisted just wanted to get on the radio so they could make some money!

CHOM, for their part, didn't give a shit either way. They had a formula that worked pretty well and, besides, they had a monopoly on local rock radio. For Boris, however, if Bambi Concerts were ever going to get into the black and get the music to the world beyond the 800 or so Montrealers who were already into "new" music, then it was absolutely crucial that CHOM learn to get hip. To dream the impossible dream!

Fighting in the streets

Ah, the naïveté of youth. Of course, CHOM wasn't going to get hip. What the hell did they care about music? After all, they were a radio station. To the management of CHOM, Boris and his ensemble of kooks were just a handful of very vocal eccentrics with zero understanding of the radio biz. To hell with them. So, with their finances in a mess and the musical life of the city in peril, Boris and Bambi Concert Promotions were left with no choice but to bring their battle into the streets.

"It's [CHOM] commercialism gone sick! They're lying to the kids. It's a whole generation brought up on lies! Someone who has been listening to CHOM for two or three years and hears the same crap day in and day out is bound to reach their breaking point. The masses are angry!"

With these words, Bambi Concerts announced to the world their intention of staging the first--and last--ever "Anti-CHOM Rally," to be held on Saturday, Nov. 15, 1980, at the recently renovated Music Machine (previously the Polish Hall and now Café Campus).

In those days, children, there were very few sympathetic media-outlets around to promote counter-culture activities. No MuchMusic or MusiquePlus, no Mirror, no Vice, no Exclaim, just a couple of 'zines that nobody could ever find. The only "mainstream" press that ever paid any attention to "alternative" music were the college papers, and even there the coverage was scarce.

Says Martek: "We had to do everything by word of mouth and by postering. In this respect, the Anti-CHOM Rally wasn't a whole lot different than any of our other shows, except that our most effective advertising tool--our weekly one-minute commercial on CHOM's import hour--was no longer an option.

"Nevertheless, once we announced that we were going to go ahead with the rally and published our anti-CHOM manifesto in the McGill Daily, people took to the idea like flies to shit. There was an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm for the show. By 1980, people were just totally fed up with the state of radio in this city."

Radio sacrifice

Even smug old CHOM FM was somewhat concerned about the enthusiasm people were showing for the rally. Martek recalls: "They started calling us up, all friendly, saying stuff like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we [CHOM] actually furnished the beer for this show, wouldn't that be funny?" as if our rally was a big joke or something."

Says Boris: "It was no joke, man--with the exception of Benoit Dufresne and Claude Rajotte--two deejays who helped the local scene out as much as they could--we hated those bastards at CHOM."

On the Saturday night of the rally, over 700 angry punk rock-types came out to the Music Machine to express their rage and egg on a few brave local bands like the Essentials and the Outrageous Spoons and Forks.

And at midnight: the sacrifice. Like something out of a bad Bruce MacDonald/CBC television movie, a portable radio, tuned to CHOM and piped into the hall through the P.A., was ceremoniously brought on to the stage and, to the cheers of the now-frenzied mob, was promptly destroyed under the Doc Marten's of Lorne Ranger and his band.

Recalls rally attendee Carole Marko: "You know, for such a silly event, there really was a lot of real anger in that room. Ironically, like CHOM, that radio was one stubborn sonofabitch and ended up taking a hell of a beating before it finally admitted defeat and died."

Most of the local mainstream press were there and the event, in all its glory, ended up getting front-page coverage in La Presse. Says Martek: "It looked bad for CHOM. I mean, no radio station that survives on selling the youth market to its advertisers wants to be singled out as uncool by a whole new generation of kids. It was a victory of sorts for us. We'd won a battle."

Epilogue

So, when all was said and done, did the Anti-CHOM Rally make any difference to the state of radio in Montreal? Did CHOM get scared and end up putting the Anti-Nowhere League on its playlist alongside Loverboy and Genesis? Did the rally accomplish anything?

"Well," says Boris, "at the very least I think it probably helped to open up a lot of people's eyes to the fact that there was a growing number of kids who weren't going to put up with 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Dreamweaver' for much longer. Shortly after the rally, Mike Biscott started playing new music on CFMB after midnight and the CBC introduced Brave New Waves, so some alternative radio did come into being."

And CHOM? "Well, for their part, they got a little braver and added an hour or two to Benoit Dufresne's Monday night import hour. Oh yeah, and I think they started to play Gary Numan every once in awhile. As to whether we changed anything over there? I doubt it, radio is--and always has been--about money and politics. That's where it begins and ends. Music's never had anything much to do with it. It's disgusting, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to really change that."

Well, we'll just see about that, Boris. We'll just see about that.