Do you miss listening to “the oldies”? If so, you’ll be happy to learn that well-known Peterborough broadcaster and author Gordon Gibb has brought them back to the Kawarthas with his new online streaming service at yourkawarthaoldies.com.
In previous years, local residents could hear classic hits and oldies on the radio by listening to CKRU-FM 100.5. From Elvis to the Beatles to the Rolling Stones to Michael Jackson, many listeners in the Kawarthas tuned in to “The Kruz” to hear the music that made up the soundtrack of their lives.
Over the last couple of years, the Corus-owned radio station began injecting more and more contemporary music into its mix of hits and oldies, to serve a younger demographic of listeners of interest to advertisers. Last summer, the station changed its format completely to play only high-energy pop favourites from the 1990s to present day and rebranded itself as HITS 100.5. With a roster of songs from artists like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and One Direction, HITS 100.5 was a fresh new direction for local radio (this month, the station rebranded itself again as 100.5 Fresh Radio, while maintaining the same format).
As CKRU-FM moved further and further away from the oldies format, a void was left in the Peterborough area for this beloved era of music — which Gord decided to fill.
Gord (who’s still an afternoon DJ for 100.5 Fresh Radio among his other efforts) officially launched “Your Kawartha Oldies” at yourkawarthaoldies.com on February 16th.
He had been developing the idea as a side project for a couple of years.
“I’ve had people say to me ‘I really wish people would play the old stuff. Whatever happened to it?’,” Gord says. “I can’t disagree with Corus’s logic to go in the direction they are going. I understand it. With that said, it’s a shame that the oldies are gone.”
“I got into radio when I was 15 in Lindsay,” Gord recalls. “In the back of my mind, I always knew that I’d love to acquire an original control board or something similar for the centerpiece of my studio where I do freelance voice-over work. I wanted an old-fashioned rotary top control panel. I’d been looking for one for more than 35 years, but I happened to come upon one in the spring of 2013 just by luck.”
Gord explains how he obtained the control board from Queen’s University.
“I found an old article about CFRC, which was the university radio station at Queen’s,” he says. “It’s the oldest university radio station in the world — it’s been around for over 90 years. This article was from back in the ’90s and contained a photograph of a group of guys standing beside this old control board donated to them by the CBC.”
He called Queen’s to ask whether he could acquire the old control board. They said no, because it’s part of the university’s history (it came with a plaque and letter from the CBC) — but they offered him another one.
“So it turns out what I got is an eight-channel stereo control panel manufactured back in 1968,” Gord says. “It’s very similar to the model I trained on back when I was a kid, so my past is coming back to me.”
As Gord began to experiment with his new acquisition, the idea for Your Kawartha Oldies fell into place.
“I had this control board sitting on the desk of my basement and I thought that maybe I’d like to restore it,” he explains. “But in order to restore it, you first have to see if it’s going to work. I have all these old songs that I’ve been collecting for years and I thought I should digitize them, put them on a computer, and then run a computer through the board. That got me thinking. As [100.5 Fresh Radio] continued our transition away from oldies to more current music, there was no home for people who like oldies music. So I thought maybe I should keep it going.”
As he still works for 100.5 Fresh Radio, Gord approached Corus with his idea. Since there is no overlap or competition with their new format, Corus supported Gord’s personal project.
“I’m doing this on my own time with my own resources,” he says. “I’m legal and I’m licensed with SOCAN [Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada]. For the past two years, I’ve been working on this in my spare time. I’ve been going through the process of loading the music and I’ve got close to 4,000 songs. I’ve got news flashbacks, old commercials, old TV shows, and old music from the ’40s to the ’80s. It’s literally been a thousand hours of work.”
“I want to play music that people can identify with and that reflects the history of the region, including audio artifacts from the Kawarthas such as the Wired Woodshed,” he says, referring to the fondly remembered country music show hosted by local radio legend Sean Eyre and broadcast on CHEX radio in the early ’70s.
“I’m trying to lay my hands on as much audio archival material as I can to reflect the community,” Gord says. “The photographs are there, but I want to find the audio. That’s going to be my mission, and to ask people if they have any old tapes in the basement to lend to me so I can digitize them.”
Although Gord loves all music from all eras (he admits that he’s a fan of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift), he has had a life-long love with audio and a strong connection with the music that he listened to as a youth.
“I was a very quiet and solitary kid,” Gord admits. “I didn’t have a lot of friends. I tended to like my own company and I would spend a lot of time reading and — like we all did — watching TV. I spent a lot of time in the car going back and forth from my grandparent’s house in Toronto to our house in Scarborough, and we made several trips to Miami. So we listened to a lot of music in the car. The music of the day was Dean Martin, Andy Williams, and Frank Sinatra. I listened to a lot of that music. Some people have photographic recall. I have audio recall. I can hear something and play it back 35 years later. So I think that music I heard as a kid stuck with me. I always had a fondness for it.”
Gord’s teenage years also had a profound impact on his musical tastes, especially since that’s when he first got into radio.
“The teenage years is when people really identify with music, that music stays with you in your life,” he explains. “You develop additional music taste as you go along, but that music you discover as a teenager really stay with you. I was a radio announcer when I was a teenager, and we were playing the current music but also playing the music from 10 years before. When I got a job at the old CHEX 980, I was playing the current hits on the AM in the evening, but I was always spending lots of the time in the library going through all the albums and the singles.”
“It was an era where music was the bigger thing,” Gord theorizes. “It wasn’t a big business like it is now. Now the music is put together more with computers — you hear the same sample or the same kind of thing in dozens of songs. Back in the day, it was four or five guys and some guitars and drums jamming, and the guy at the control board mixing the thing is using his gut. It was more honest.”
I ask Gord which of the old songs he’s most excited to bring back to the Kawarthas, and he gives me a wise answer.
“All of them,” he replies. “I may think something is an unremarkable song, but to somebody else that song takes them back to their youth, takes them back to their high school dance, and has a special place in their heart. It may not have a special place in my heart, but it does for somebody else.”
My last question for Gord is what motivates him to spend so much time and effort on Your Kawartha Oldies.
“It’s a labour of love for fans of the music and fans of the era,” he explains. “I enjoy the music, but it’s not about me. It’s about people out there who does not have ready access to this music, or they don’t have local access to it. That’s why I’m doing this.”
You can listen to Your Kawartha Oldies using your favourite web browser at yourkawarthaoldies.com. High-quality low and high bandwidth streams are available. The service also supports mobile devices.
Photos courtesy of Gordon Gibb except where noted.
