Forever Like Young

Iconic Montreal-made music show host Jim McKenna reminisces on life, TV and the anglo music scene of the late 60s and early 70s

GROOVE TUBE: (Clockwise from top left) McKenna with Like Young dancers, Andy Kim, Ben E. King

My generation of Montreal musicians got burned. When we came up in the late 70s and 80s Montreal was a wasteland, and anybody who wanted any recognition for their shit had little choice but to flee to Toronto, New York, London, L.A.…anywhere really. It felt like musicians in Regina had it better than we did here.

Yet only a decade earlier, back in the swingin’ 60s/early 70s, there’d been a legitimate anglo music scene in Montreal. Artists like the Haunted, the Rabble, J.B. and the Playboys, April Wine, Andy Kim—these dudes were making records locally and reaching audiences across the continent. And at least part of the credit for that has to be attributed to a local TV show, produced by CFCF 12, called Like Young.

Like Young began life in 1962 as a way for Channel 12 to reach the then enormous teen market. “You have to realize,” says Jim McKenna, who at the tender age of 17 scored the gig to host the program, “that at that time there were more Canadians under 25 than at any other period in history, so we were just responding to who the audience was. Back then, stations like CFCF had to do a lot of local programming. CTV wasn’t even a network yet, so each station had to produce a lot of its own content. Like Young was just one of many shows CFCF put together.”

Although initially an educational/info-entertainment thing for the young’uns—“our first shows featured stuff like Ukrainian folk bands and teenagers talking about arts and crafts,” recalls McKenna today, now 67—Like Young soon morphed into an all-music show, showcasing pretty well every major—and minor—artist who ever passed through Montreal in that most musical of decades. The Beatles, the Stones, Martha Reeves, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Tim Hardin, the Haunted, Joni Mitchell, Tommy James and the Shondells, Joe Tex, Ben E. King…“Basically, if you had a half-way decent single in that decade you probably would have been on Like Young—and almost certainly if you were a Montreal or Canadian act.”

SATURDAY NIGHT, LIVE

BEHIND THE SCENES: McKenna today

Most interestingly, the show was shot live-to-air every Saturday night from 6–7 p.m., with none of that lip-synched crap and kids dancing to the hit parade common to other youth shows of the day, like American Bandstand. “We had the perfect timeslot,” recalls McKenna, “because, say a group were performing at the Forum or Esquire Show Bar, we could get them on shortly after they’d done their soundcheck and before they had to be back at the venue for their gig. When we couldn’t get a band to come play live in our studio, like, say, the Beatles, then we’d send a crew to film their show and I’d go over and interview them, airing it the following week.”

The format worked. According to McKenna, by the mid-1960s Like Young had become a Saturday night Montreal tradition that was killing not only in the local ratings, but nationally as well. “We were getting three times the audience in our time slot than all the other stations combined.” In 1971, the show got picked up by Dick Clark’s empire and started airing prime time in all the major U.S. markets as well.

“Like Young was the first ever Canadian program to be syndicated to the U.S.,” says McKenna proudly.

Looking back, McKenna reckons much of Like Young’s appeal came from the variety of acts they’d book on the program. A typical Like Young episode could include a band like Alice Coop­er or the MC5, alongside the likes of Tom T. Hall, the Turtles and a couple of local acts like Andy Kim or the Wackers.

“Basically whatever was happening is what we’d have on. We never had a policy of ‘We do this, we don’t do that.’ Whoever was coming through town or coming on to the scene would gener­ally find themselves on our show.”

FRANK ZAPPA AND JERRY LEWIS

Not all of the “underground artists,” however, were as certain of Like Young’s hip quotient as McKenna might have been. “I remember when Frank Zappa did our show,” recalls McKen­na. “He was at the height of his hipness then. He’d even recorded a two-album set with Wild Man Fischer, this totally psychotic freak he found on Sunset Boulevard. Off-camera, the guy was intense but friendly, but as soon as he got on-camera he suddenly became this big counterculture creep, saying stuff to me like, ‘I don’t really dig doing these stupid interviews,’ giving me a rough time, being aloof, challenging me on everything, not answering questions, basically just putting me down. He certainly wasn’t all that aloof or anti-establishment when it came to the record business though. His record exec told me that when he met him at the airport the first thing Zappa wanted to know as soon as he got off the plane was how his sales were doing.

“You see, a lot of these bands wanted to be counterculture,” McKenna continues. “They weren’t getting any AM radio play. They were appealing to a druggy, underground, FM radio rock crowd. So when they’d get on television they sort of had to portray that they weren’t buying into any of this commercial TV bullshit, that they didn’t need it. So I’d often have to deal with these artists like Zappa. And yeah, it could be embarrassing sometimes.”

Funnily enough, it was actually comedian Jerry Lewis who, of all the performers who visited the Like Young set, McKenna recalls as being the most difficult.

“Having him as a guest was weird to begin with, but he wanted to be on because he had a new movie coming out and knew we could deliver him big numbers.”

Apparently Lewis arrived at the CFCF studio with a sirens-blazing police escort and decided to stumble onto the set unannounced, hamming it up something fierce while shamelessly milk­ing the audience for applause.

“When he finally sat down for our interview, I didn’t have much prepared for him, so we just talked about his new movie for a while. After that subject was exhausted I threw him some softball question and suddenly this dark look comes over his face and he turns on me, grabs the mic out of my hand and shouts ‘Let me teach you something about comedy, boy!’ So he starts lecturing me very loudly for a while and then just stops in the middle of his rant, screams ‘Who needs this?!,’ drops the mic to the floor and walks off the show. To this day I still can’t watch that asshole on his Telethon with his fake sincerity and crocodile tears. He was probably the biggest jerk I ever encountered.”

FORMATTED FOR FUN: McKenna and his audience

THE LAST HONEST BROADCAST

The occasional self-important comedian or snarky hipster musico aside, for the most part McKenna says the vibe on the Like Young set was convivial. “Like Young was a very Montreal thing in that there was never any power stuff or payola going on. It was all done in the spirit of cooperation back then. We were on the air every week for something like 12 years, 52 shows a year, so we had a lot of repeat visits from artists, many of whom eventually became my friends and, in fact, remain some of my closest friends today.”

By 1974, with its youthful demographic growing older, preoccupied with arguably more adult concerns like raising families and making money, McKenna says Like Young had finally run its course. “By that time all the local English TV production was moving to Toronto. Same with the music industry—everything went there. Montreal wasn’t producing anything anymore. There were suddenly no work opportunities, not for English-speakers, at least.” Within a few months McKenna would make his own way down the 401, where he would go on to enjoy a notably successful career as a producer/writer/director, work he still does today.

So where the hell does all that incredible archival footage they shot reside?

“It’s all gone,” McKenna answers wistfully. “You see, everything was done on two-inch tape then, which was expensive at $350 a roll. We’d shoot about 30 shows on each one of those tapes, erasing the previous week’s show and recording a new one over it every Saturday. Shows went out live and that’s it. Nobody thought there would be any historical relevance to them. It wasn’t just Like Young. Ten years of the Tonight Show are missing because they also recycled their tapes. It’s so unfortunate. We had so many great, iconic artists on our show. I did a lot of really great interviews with them, too, you know.” ■

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