Imagine radio in the 1980s, if you will. There was no Internet. We didn’t have email or cellphones, let alone smartphones. I saw my first laptop in the hands of CKSL afternoon drive announcer Dick Joseph. It never occured to me that it was anything I would use, much less own, one day.
Recording artists actually visited radio stations and at CKSL, a clone of Toronto’s CFTR, they did so often. Phone interviews were poor substitutes for face-to-face meetings and back then, before downloads and file-sharing, it was all about getting on the radio.
The mid-80’s were Kim Mitchell’s Go For Soda days. His first full-length post-Max Webster solo album, Akimbo Alogo, came out in 1984 and also included the hits Lager and Ale and Feel It Burn. Kim was riding high.
So when a few of us from the radio station were invited to join Kim and his band for dinner prior to a London show, we leapt at it. We all met in a private room of a downtown hotel and while I can’t recall which one, it definitely wasn’t the Hilton. Introductions were made and there was a lot of laughter, radio people and musicians, all wanting to impress each other. I was seated at the long banquet table across from Peter Fredette, Kim’s guitarist and the guy who sings the high parts on All We Are and other songs. He’s super talented. I don’t recall us saying much to each other. And then the soup arrived.
Calling it soup is exceedingly kind. It was thin, warm milk with melted butter and, if you stirred it, pieces of carrot tumbled around. And that’s exactly how it tasted. There must have been a spice shortage in the kitchen.
“What do we have here?”, asked Kim.
“Cream of carrot soup”, the server replied.
Silence.
I touched the spoon to my lips and recoiled, as I knew I would. Even crackers wouldn’t make this swill edible. Peter looked around the table and settled on me.
“You’re not gonna eat that?”, he asked me. “Um, no” Everyone else was also pushing their bowls away from them.
Peter sprang into action. One by one, he went around the table and reached over our shoulders, took our bowls and drank their contents like a glass of water. He’d still be chewing the carrots as he grabbed the next bowl. At first we were all howling at his almost desperate antics. But with 15 or so people there, it became routine and we resumed chatting as he knocked back those servings of soup.
I met Kim and his band many more times over the years but they never recognized me from previous occasions and that’s understandable. When you’re a touring musician there are so many towns, so many radio people, so much free soup.
I remember the Akimbo Alogo album back then well, for I was studying to be a sound engineer and some of our studio work was at the same studio where Kim was recording his album and I got a sneek peek as it was being recorded and the evening of the industry listening gathering.
That must have been a great experience for a budding sound engineer, Allan.