Larry MacInnis: Radio's Creative Director

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now. Larry

Matt Cundill  0:13  
McInnis is the creative director at the pro bono group. He has had the most remarkable career in radio, working largely for the legendary chum in Toronto, standby for the stories everyone, Larry has now teamed up with Mike amore and over 100 other creatives to form the pro bono group. They create free public service announcements for worthwhile causes and charities. The sound off Podcast Network does not have all the inventory say that a radio station has but we do air some of their PSAs whenever we can. And we've got spaces to fill, we've done so with our latest creation, which our international audience is going to hear for the first time. Right now,

Voiceover  0:55  
it's time to stand for Canada. Please, let's all stand together and buy Canadian by choosing Canadian companies and products made in Canada, you'll be protecting Canadian jobs, Canadian businesses, our Canadian way of life. Shop as if your country depends on it. Keep your money in Canada, and we can keep Canada.

Matt Cundill  1:22  
If you work in Canadian radio, make sure you're on their distribution list. You can connect with them in the show notes of this episode. And now, Larry McInnis joins me from Toronto. We spoke just a few moments ago, and I detected the Cape Breton accent right away. And it's good to know that you haven't lost any of it. Tell me about how you've managed to retain your accent.

Larry MacInnis  1:44  
It's never left me. You know, you can take a boy to Cape Breton, but you can't take Cape Breton out of the boy. The chum studios were located at 3031 Young Street, the famous location at the top of the hill between St Clair and summer Hill. And I belong to a board of directors Catholic Charities board of directors, and the meetings were down the hill about three blocks. So one day in the middle of summer, I'm walking down the hill, and as I'm walking down the hill, it's a beautiful day. So walking down the hill, I see this young girl coming towards me, and as soon as I see her, I go she has a Cape Breton face. And I don't know why I thought it. I just thought it. She looks like she's in the maritime she has a Cape Breton face. And as soon as she started to walk towards me, I realized, Oh, my God, she must really be a Cape Breton her, because she's walking towards a total stranger in Toronto. And she comes up to me and she says, can you tell me how to get to McPherson Avenue? And as soon as she said it, I knew she was either from Glace Bay or Dominion in Cape Breton. And I said to her, you get down two lights and turn right, and she said, How long have you been here? What I figured must have happened was she's walking up the street, she sees me, and she goes, That guy has a Cape Breton face. So she came and asked me for directions. But no, I never really have lost the accent. And to this day, when I cast myself in a commercial, or I hear myself on the air or hear myself in a podcast. Of course, I can, I can pick it up immediately.

Matt Cundill  3:03  
And you grew up listening to the legendary CJ CB in Sydney. Listen

Larry MacInnis  3:09  
when I was a kid. CJ CB was everything to us. It was our Hollywood. CJ, CB radio. CJ CB TV. The only other radio station when I was young, before cheer came in in the middle 60s was CBI in Sydney, but I listened to CJ CB all the time, because was always on in her home. And one of the great blessings of my life is that my mother always had the radio on it. So these people were heroes to me, and I just loved CJ CB, and I became addicted to radio very young. I can remember probably about the age of eight or nine, I decided, man, that I would love to do that. And then when I was 15, for Christmas, I got a transistor radio, my own radio, so I could go to my bedroom and listen to everything I wanted to listen to. And then I became absolutely hooked. I went to Acadia University. When I graduated from high school, I had been hanging around the radio station with people like the great Dave Harley and Eric McEwen and George Aaron and Bill Anderson and those people, and they were all very, very kind to me at CJ CB, but I went to Acadia University, and about the third or fourth week, I was in the dining hall having lunch with my college girlfriend, and I heard I don't need no doctor by humble pie on the radio speakers. And I go, I knew it wasn't C, K, E, N and Kentville, because they were a very good local station, but because they were local Indianapolis Valley, they did farm reports and they did funeral announcements, and they played middle of the road and they played country. So I knew it wasn't them. And I turned to my girlfriend, and I said, Where's that coming from? And she said, Oh, we have a student radio station here, a radio Acadia. I didn't even finish my meal, Matt, I took my tray, put it back on the thing, and went down to the radio station. And basically never left there until April, and never went back to Acadia. And that summer, I sent out tapes to every radio station in the Maritimes, and I mean everyone, Newfoundland, Pei, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, every single. Station, and the only response I got was from Stan Carew at ckec in New Glasgow. And Stan called me middle of August and said, We don't have any openings for announcers, but we do have an opening in the copy department. As much as I had hung around radio stations, and as much as I thought I knew about radio I didn't realize they had writers, so I thought everybody made it up, so I just wanted to get into the station. So Stan said, Are you interested? I said, sure. He said, but I can't hire you without having you write something. So my mother had a typewriter. She had been a stenographer. So I ripped some ads out of the local paper and wrote an ad for Schwartz furniture store, and I think for a bar what I thought a radio ad should be it, sent it off to stand snail mail in those days. Call me a couple days later, he said, You're hired. Can you start the day after Labor Day? What I didn't realize was they had never had a copy department before. Up until that time, they had the sales manager wrote it, or the sales other sales person wrote it, or the announcer wrote it, or the client wrote it, but they didn't have a writer. So the beauty of that for me was anything I did was gonna be better on what they had, and there were no rules. So I was free to be kind of crazy and do stuff. Now, I look back at it now and I realize it probably wasn't advertising, but it was a great chance to be quote, unquote creative, and I think that's what got me eventually to Toronto. So as you're

Matt Cundill  6:19  
speaking, a whole bunch of things are going through my mind because you mentioned radio Acadia, which is where I got my start. Fantastic campus, it really is. And I have a stepdaughter who's attending there right now. She will not have the joy of McConnell dining hall. That's where

Speaker 1  6:34  
I was, that's where I was, right what I heard, I don't need no doctor by Hubble pie, all

Matt Cundill  6:39  
nine minutes of that song, and then crossing over to the Student Union Building, perhaps going up the stairs to the area near security, you know, to join radio Acadia, which was carrier current. So that's why it's a wise in the dining hall. That was the only way that the signal would get out across the campus. Was carrier current, which is like, I don't even know what that technology is, but you have to, if you plug the radio in. The signal comes in through the electricity.

Larry MacInnis  7:02  
Well, the Student Union Building opened the year I was at there. So that's how long ago I went to Acadia. And so when I was at Radio Katie, it was an old house on campus in the basement of an old house, and moved into Student Union Building the year after I left Acadia, I only stayed there for the one year because I was so desperate to get into radio after I had basically never left the radio station at the campus for the entire semester.

Matt Cundill  7:27  
So I was lucky enough to get on at C k e n, on the F m station. And so I finished my degree at Acadia, but I just commuted back and forth from Ken Phil to do overnights and

Larry MacInnis  7:36  
well, you were lucky. I would have done anything to work at C k e n, I became good friends with Lauren Stevens, who did the morning show then, and was the program director, and George Aaron, who later went on to work at CJ CB and had a great career with CBC in Newfoundland.

Matt Cundill  7:50  
I'd be remiss, by the way, if I didn't mention that Stan Carew named that. I didn't know he was up in New Glasgow, but I knew him from Q 104 in later days in Halifax. What was Stan

Larry MacInnis  8:00  
who discovered me? And he was only 23 at the time, at the time. He was the program director, and he was really kind and wonderful to me, and I did some stuff for him when he was doing Saturday weekends on CBC and Halifax. I did some pieces for him, and we stayed in touch over the years. He was tremendously gifted broadcaster and a wonderful guy, and he worked with Doug Barron, who was another wonderful person that I got a chance to work with there.

Matt Cundill  8:25  
So I've only heard tell of this story through other people. And this is how you get to Toronto. And it's a wild story. How did you get to Toronto?

Larry MacInnis  8:35  
Well, it is a wild story. So Frank, low who worked at ckec in those days I listen, nothing has changed in my life. I was 19, then I worked 18 hours a day, then I work 18 hours a day. Now, I never left the radio station. I would rather. When I was a kid, I would forego a party. I would get your date. I would do anything if a chance to be at the radio station come up, or even if a chance to hang out in front of Woolworths, where the disc jockey was in the window doing a remote come up. I was one of those guys, so I've always had a big place in my heart for somebody who was a quote, unquote Radio Group, because I if I hadn't got in the business, I would still be showing up at remotes at McDonald's today. So I'm working late, and it was in February, Frank comes into my office. He was he was doing the rock show at night at CKC, come in with my office with an old RPM magazine. And he said, Look, they're looking for a writer in St Catharines at cktb. And I said, Frank, I don't really want to go to Ontario. He said, We think the stuff that we're doing here is is great. Why don't you send them a tape? They seem to get a reaction to kind of get an outside opinion. In the control room, I pulled 12 cards, so within the production, I put them all on tape and sent them off to Maureen Rogan at cktb in St Catharines. And a week went by, I heard nothing. A month went by, I heard nothing. Two months went by, I heard nothing. Three months go by, I heard nothing. And then one night, I'm sitting in the my office, and I pick up the RPM magazine, and I realized that the RPM magazine is three. Years old. I have responded to an ad in a cktb That was three years old, so I said to myself, well, she just thinks I'm a lunatic, so no wonder she hasn't responded to me. So I'd forgot about it, and then, on my 20th birthday in June, 1973 the phone rings in my office in the afternoon, and I pick it up and the guy says, Hi, my name is Mike Kornfeld. I'm the copy manager at chum radio in Toronto, and I'm wondering if you'd like to work for us. No, I hadn't sent a tape to chum. It was my birthday. All of my friends knew that if there was one radio station that I could work at, it was chum. I talked about the non stop I was a huge fan of of chum, and so I hung up on him. I thought it was a joke. He called back. He said, I don't know what's going on there, but did you send a tape to Maureen Rogan at cktb in St Catharines? I said, Yes. He said, but we've been looking for somebody here for two months, and we've had over 200 applications. And out of desperation, we started reaching out to people we knew in the business, and we called Maureen and she said, Well, I got this tape from this kid a couple months ago. He's very young and he's very raw, but she should listen to it. He said, we listened to the tape today. We all agreed that you should come and work for us. Said, Oh my God. He said, but I can't hire you without meeting you. Can you come to Toronto next week? I said, I can't. I'm the only writer here. He said, Well, I respect that. He said, What time do you take lunch? I said, I can take it anytime. He said, Okay, this is a Friday. He said, I'll take you to lunch. I'll be down in New Glasgow at one o'clock on Tuesday, and we'll go to lunch. So he flew to Halifax, rented a car, drove two hours, took me to lunch, hired me, and two weeks later, I was in Toronto, where I stayed at chum for 40 years.

Matt Cundill  11:37  
What was it like when you first got off the plane in Toronto, and what were those first few weeks like?

Larry MacInnis  11:43  
Oh, my God. Well, first of all, I had never been on an airplane before. Biggest town I'd ever been before was Sydney, mines. Sydney. I'd never been overnight in Halifax. I've driven by Halifax. I'm away from Acadia, but never anywhere. So I arrive at the airport and I get picked up by Mike Kornfeld, the man who hired me, the copy director in those days, and another great writer in the station, Steve boiling, who later would become the creative director there. Steve is driving the chum cruiser. Mike is in the passenger side. I'm in the back seat. We get in the car, and as we're pulling out of the airport, people are, I mean literally, people are pulling off the side of the road, hocking their horns, rolling down their windows and yelling, chum, chum. I love chum. I listen to chum. Chum. They're hocking their horns. They're separating to let us go through as if it's you know, as the Prime Minister, Mike Kornfeld, who's sitting in the front seat, turns to me in the back seat, and he says, they think you're a star kid. That was my first night. I went through tremendous culture shock. I don't know what it's like in reverse. I don't know what it'd be like if you grew up in Toronto and then your first job was in Kentville. But I do know that coming from Sydney mines and New Glasgow and your first job in Toronto, it was a tremendous culture shock. It was so big, so fast, so good. I remember my first morning at the radio station in our production meeting, but halfway through the production meeting where they're playing all the best spots from the previous week, I'm sitting there and I'm going, oh my god, they've made a terrible mistake. Maybe I can get at flight and be out of here this afternoon. It was that overwhelming for me. So I was terribly homesick. I had left a girlfriend behind. I was lonesome. I was overwhelmed. My boss was tremendously hard on me. And listen, when you're a kid, you resent that, but now as an adult, I'm so grateful that Mike Kornfield saw all the talent I had and knew I had no skills, and that if I he didn't teach me and be hard on me and make me use my talent, that it would be wasted. So, you know, eternally grateful. But in those days, not so much. So I was hired in June, in October, I went in and quit, and Mike said, Are you sure you want to quit? I said, Yeah, I'm out of here. He said, Okay, two weeks notice. So I go back to my office. In those days, the office had little cubicles. It wasn't as overwhelmingly, kind of like oppressive, the way cubicles are today, but we were brighter, so we needed some separation, because it was typewriters. Everything was so loud, and everybody was always on the phone. A couple of hours later, Mike comes into my office, and he stands in front of me, and he says, I was just up to see Mr. Waters, Alan waters, who owned the station, of course, the legendary, wonderful, benevolent Alan waters. And Mike said, I told Mr. Waters, but he said, Mr. Waters has had his eye on you since the day you started here. You know, I just turned 20. I was hired. He called me on my 20th birthday. I'm a kid. He said, Mr. Waters thinks you're just homesick. And he holds out a credit card, and he says, this is Mr. Waters personal Air Canada credit card. And I look at it, and it said, Alan F waters on it. And he said, Mr. Waters, wants you to take this credit card down to the Air Canada headquarters on University Avenue and get yourself an open ended ticket. Get the ticket and go back to Nova Scotia. Stay as long as you want, and when you're ready to come back, we'll have a job for you. So Wow. So I do that. I go back to Nova Scotia, I stay four days, and I come back, and my job, of course, is there. I stay three more years there, and I get Steve boyling, who inherited the creative director job from Mike Kornfeld. Steve gets hired by an advertising agency as creative director. On his first day on the job, he calls me and asks me if I want to go to an ad agency. Of course I do, because every young writer wants to go to an ad agency. Used to try other things, to do, TV ads, print ads, all that stuff. From the very first day I started at the ad agency. I'm at one ad agency for six weeks. I get hired at another ad agency. I go there for six more weeks. I hate it. It's not a radio station. The doors are closed. There's no music. There's no lunatics in the hallway. There's nobody coming in the office every minute telling you a joke. It's just, it's a business. They were good agencies, but I wasn't happy there. And I thought, oh my god, I'm trapped. So this happened in May. In September, I get a call from legendary J Robert Wood, who's the program director then of 1050 Shaman. And he said, Are you ready to come back? I said, Absolutely, but I didn't want to be in the copy department. The reason I left, he reason I left, he said, well, make a list of everything you want to do and what you want to be paid for it, and I'll sign it. Okay? So I went home to my wife. We just newly married, and she said, you'd be a fool not to make a list. So I made a list. I want to do a morning show. I want to write comedy. I want to do TV ads. I want to work with everybody and for nobody. I want to do movies. I want to do all these things a long, long list, and I put a price tag on it, and I met Bob for lunch, and Bob looked at it, he said, I'll have to run this by Fred Schrott, but it looks good to me. The next day, he called, and two weeks later, I was back at the station again, where they kept the word on every single thing I was doing the Morning Show with Jay Nelson, then Tom rivers, then Roger at Ashby and Mike Colin. And then I went over to work with Roger Rick in Maryland for 25 years on FM. I did the history of rock film. I did the chum 30 on TV. I did all their print ads, all their contests, everything for the next 35 years. And I can't really, you tell people this, even people in the business I taught at Humber and Seneca after I left chum, and I would tell students, first of all, I would tell them they'll waste your talent, and I would tell them all the stories that I'm telling you. And then even in the telling of these things that happened, being how good things were and how good they treated everybody, not just me, the kindness that the waters family showed everybody who worked for them is mostly kept secret because they didn't want public acclimation for anything but kindness and recognition of talent and nurturing of talent and teaching and forgiving. I made so many mistakes. Matt, my first six weeks at chum, I didn't do anything right, but they could see the talent, and they could see that I love radio, and that was really important to everybody at chum in those days. And as far as I know, it's still important to everybody at chum, but it's it was really evident in those days, and and I've tried to pass that on to everybody. I've worked with my own sons, who none of them are in the radio business, but a couple of them are in marketing. One of them is in film. One of them is a teacher. And they saw how much I loved my job, and how much I didn't think of it as work and and how devoted I was to it. And I think I passed that on, and I was so lucky, like I was lucky that Stan Karu called me. I was lucky that Maureen Rogan sent the tape to chum, that chum called me, that I hung up, and they call back that when I quit, the first time I was invited back when I quit, the second time I was invited back. And I know it doesn't happen to everybody, but it happened to me, and all my dreams in radio came true. There was nothing I would change, I don't think in my career.

Matt Cundill  18:30  
So right from the get go, you're young, and you get in there, and when I hear you say, my boss was hard on me, I can envision him going back to you and saying, this needs to be rewritten. This needs to be rewritten, this needs to be better, this needs to be tighter, this needs to be thought differently. But there was a whole lot more than that, because I know, you know Jim waters and Ross Davies and you know Brad Phillips, they're the guys who, they have a standard that. And I think the mentality is that if we're not hard enough on you, there's no way we're going to beat this difficult competition out there, and it's the kind of stuff today that I feel is lost. Now it just gets reported to HR. My feelings are hurt and can be misconstrued, but they're nurturing, but they're tough on you. That's always the feeling I got. This is legends, of course, so you're going to have to debunk it for me, that there would be commercials that would come in from agencies that would be of poor quality, that would just get sent back and rejected. We're not taking your money and running this ad. Did that happen?

Larry MacInnis  19:29  
Oh, absolutely, every day, every day, it had to fit the chum sound. It had to be, not only technically, it had to be almost sometimes philosophically, in line with what we were doing. For instance, 1050 chum never ran the original K tel radio commercials because Bob Washington, the announcer on them, was fantastic, but he didn't. He was a Winnipeg announcer, and they felt they didn't meet the standards of chum. So Terry Steele would record the K tel spots that ran on chum, and they would be better than the original K. Tell ads, because we had such great producers, like Bob McMillan and Zeke stebiak and great talent, obviously, like Terry Steele. So K TEL is just one example, but we didn't run client voice commercials in those days. We were limited. You could only have three addresses in a spot. No more. Your ad came in with four addresses in it, we sent it back. And because chum had such power in those days and was so effective for advertisers. Agency says no, had no problem going back into a studio and re recording their spots that meet our standards. What

Matt Cundill  20:30  
about phone numbers? Phone numbers and commercials? Okay, we

Larry MacInnis  20:33  
put phone numbers in, but we counsel them. We weren't allowed to repeat them. You could say them, but you weren't allowed to, like, do them five times we would counsel clients in those days, the way I talk to my own clients these days, phone numbers are wasted in commercial. They take up time. Nobody remembers them. I mean, there's the obvious exception, that pizza, pizza, singing phone number, etc. But we allowed them, but we discouraged them. We certainly didn't often use them in the commercials that we wrote and produced ourselves, which are often as good or better than the agency supply commercials anyway. So

Matt Cundill  21:06  
when I think of client red commercials in Toronto, I think of bad boy. So was bad

Larry MacInnis  21:12  
boy a client. Bad Boy was a client, and they were re voiced by Terry Steele as well.

Matt Cundill  21:16  
Okay, because it wasn't that way on TV.

Larry MacInnis  21:21  
Well, listen, I had nothing against bad boy as a marketer. I understand why the bad boy ads worked, and that philosophy changed. We came around later to allow all of those things as the radio stations progressed, that as things changed with management and programming, it was always the difference with chum in those days, in the 70s and and beyond was that the power at the radio station was the programming, not sales. And that was always a distinct difference from other stations. Even in those days, the final say would always go to programming if it affected the sound of the radio station, if it felt that it hurt the sound of the radio station, it wasn't allowed and and sales bought into that because sales knew that the reason that they were selling so much advertising was the quality of the radio stations, chum, 1050 chum and Chum FM two. Of course, when I got there, 1050 chum was 1,000,003 a week, and Chum FM was 170,000 a week. And of course, that ratio changed over time, when chum FM became the monster that it became. But this is the other thing about chum in those days was we had two of the best radio stations in the world across the hall from each other. 1050 chum was one of the great top 40 radio stations ever. And Chum FM in those days, especially when we had David Marsden and David Pritchard at John Donovan and Pete gates, and we were kind of like almost an underground radio station, two more different radio stations, you couldn't imagine, but we, the staffs, all got along. We cross pollinated writing and production. We loved each other. I have no qualms about saying that the chum family, and that's why, when Jim waters passed away recently, it was horrible, horribly sad. But there was 500 or 600 of us who got together to reacquaint ourselves, of some of us who haven't seen each other in 20 or 30 years. And so when we get together, we pick up where we left off. It was a beautiful thing. And then that all came from the top down Alan waters and Fred Charette and Duff Roman and those kind of solid, solid human beings, not just radio people and Jim waters, of course, and his the entire waters family made life a joy. It was competitive, and we worked hard, and we were as competitive as anybody. But there was not a day that I, that I walked in the radio station at 1331 Yonge Street that I wasn't happy to be there.

Matt Cundill  23:38  
I had a tour there in 1992 and it was given by Brad Jones, who

Larry MacInnis  23:44  
showed me around one of my all time favorite people. Brad could do anything. He's one of those guys. You could give him any job and any radio station and not worry about it getting done to perfection. Fantastic. Fantastic guy might

Matt Cundill  23:59  
have been 1994 Come to think of it, but I do remember that Jim Waters had time for me, and I was doing, I was working for chum, and I was doing overnights in Montreal, but still time for me. Absolutely tell me about some of the workings and the writings that you did inside the programming people, people, when you got to work with Tom rivers or other parts of morning show. What were you doing? Exactly? Because there was copy, but there was also this. And a lot of the stuff that we have come to know about our chum stations, you know, eventually across the country, did emanate from you. Well,

Larry MacInnis  24:31  
I was sending your morning show material, and Chum for at least two years in the 90s, every day, Bob Wood called me in one day in the 70s and said, Would you like to write jokes for Jay Nelson, I said, Yeah, never written really jokes before, other than the comedy stuff I'd done in commercials. So Jay was tremendously kind to me. He taught me what a setup was, what a punchline was, taught me radiopacing. Then when Jay was moved on to city TV, Tom Rivers was hired, and I went in with Tom, and I shared an office and I wrote. And directed that show. Tom's show pretty intensely every morning I was actually in with him. I was writing probably 15 to 20 to 25 jokes and bits a morning for him, and Tom was let go. And Jim waters called me in the office and explained the situation that Tom had to be let go. And he said, Don't worry, Larry, we'll find you another morning show. You know, I thought when I worked with Jay and Tom that I would never have that much fun again in my life. And then two years later, Roger, work in Maryland, came along, and that show was, is so much fun. Roger and I, Roger was the first person I met at the radio station my very first morning he was filling in. I didn't know at the time I woke up, the alarm clock went off in my apartment, by the way, which chum rented for me, paid a month in advance for me, and stocked with dishes, cutlery and food for a month when I arrived, that's what was waiting for me. I didn't have to worry about finding an apartment or getting food or any of that. But anyway, my first morning, I wake up when I hear the first break, and I go, this is Jay Nelson. This is everything I had imagined that Jay Nelson would sound like. He's fantastic. And it wasn't until the second break when he introduced. We'll look around in circles by Billy Preston. And he said his name Roger Ashby. But Roger was only 23 then, and was as seasoned and as sharp and as slick as could be. And so while I'm waiting in the lobby for my first day. Roger comes out of the studio and walks through the lobby, and that's when we met. Raj and I became friends very soon afterwards, when he and Bob McMullen and I wrote and directed and produced the video history of rock, which played in every Southern Ontario high school for the next three or four years. We produced that at ckvr and Barry, which is a chamon TV station in those days, we became very close. So when Roger took over mornings on chum FM, Ross Davies, God, I can never thank Ross enough for this. I thank him for so much, but he put me in with Roger, and then I was writing and directing that show for the next 25 years. And with them, Marilyn, of course, and Rick Hodge and Jeff Howitt and Larry Wilson and Tom jokic as our audio producer and writer, co writer, and it was like I used to explain that morning show, like the Beatles, John Paul, George Ringo, everybody was unique, and everybody complimented each other's skills and talents and personalities. And that's what Roger Rick and Maryland was like. And not just the people you heard on the air, but the people behind the scenes. It was a mutually collaborative, creative machine. Some of you say to me, of all the things you've done, and I've done, just about everything you could do in radio, because I've been in radio now for 52 years, the thing I'm most proud of is the quality and consistency of Roger Rick and Marilyn and all the things we did that are now still being copied to this day, not just in Toronto, but across the country and other places around the world as well. So it was so much, so gratifying, and we had total freedom. What you know, Ross Davies allowed us to be a self governing entity. Ross would meet us in the hallway if he had an idea, or he'd come into the office, usually, because I was there all day. I go into work at 430 in the morning and stay all day because I never, you know, I just never wanted to leave the radio station. And I'd be in my office working on contests and print ads or TV ads, or whatever we're doing at the time, and Ross will come in and something, but that's how we communicate. There wasn't a meeting every week. I joke with Ross. Now, Roger and I joke with Ross, we say, you know, Ross would call a meeting for the morning show once a year, and I'd resent it, but it was that kind of work environment, and what often gets overlooked with Roger worth of Maryland show is our news. Jeff Howard, Elaine MacDonald, Larry Wilson, all the people who did news for us, they made news as interesting as it could possibly be and as finely tuned and appropriate for our audience as you could get. So it was, it was tremendous fun. And of course, at one point for two or three years, Ross asked me if I would, and though this is when faxes came into play, and it became easier to do, and later I could do it with email, of course, but Ross had me do my all the material I wrote for the morning show, and it was usually between 15 and 25 bits a morning, and I would send them out to the radio stations in all the chum stations in Halifax, Winnipeg, Montreal, Windsor, Vancouver, all the stations across the country. Ottawa, Drumheller, drumhell every everybody got them every morning. Everything that Roger did that wasn't Toronto centric, it was sent out Halifax, c1 100, Peter Harrison and that crew there, and so that was tremendously gratifying for me to know that the stuff that I was writing was not just being heard in Toronto, but being heard around the country.

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  29:31  
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Matt Cundill  30:02  
there are two TV campaigns that come to mind when I think of chum radio stations, and I want, I just asking, I have no idea if you were a part of them or not, but the two that come to mind, it's all you need to put on, which I think had the morning show naked with a radio at a bus stop. Was that you

Larry MacInnis  30:18  
No, that was G Jeffrey and partners an advertising agency. They did that campaign, and a fantastic, fantastic campaign. And the cactus, the cactus, I you'll have to remind me of that. It obviously wasn't mine, if I don't recall

Matt Cundill  30:35  
it, we may have gotten that from another company, but it was, I think what happened was we would turn on the radio, and the cactus would come to life. And it was very was very phallic.

Larry MacInnis  30:43  
No, that wasn't. That was not. So I did most of the TV campaigns, beginning in the 80s, and all of the contests beat the bank breakfast and Barbados. The breakfast and Barbados trips were fantastic because we would take 70 couples with us, or 35 couples, 70 listeners, and they would show up on the beach at 530 in the morning, and by nine o'clock, they'd already been at this great party, and they still had the whole day ahead of them. And everybody showed up in the morning, and I was sitting, I was at a podium, kind of directing traffic, and Tom was back in the studio in Toronto, playing the music and keeping everybody up and animated. Roger and Rick and Haji and Jeff Howitt were in person as well, and so that again, I went to Barbados 21 years in a row to do those shows. So there was lots of wonderful benefits to being on that show. Beat the bank

Matt Cundill  31:33  
is more popular than ever. Not only that, it is copied and imitated and duplicated on a number of other radio stations through other companies. I mean, it's still going.

Larry MacInnis  31:43  
Let me tell you of the kind of creative environment we worked in. Rob free now, come into my office one day and he said, I want to do a contest called beat the bomb. We ran it in Ottawa. Rob had worked, I think, worked for Rogers in Ottawa. And I said, Rob, you can't do a contest called beat the bomb. What if a terrorist blows up something on Tuesday, or what if you'd have to take the thing off and and Rob said, and this is, this was said to me by all of my managers over the years. Rob said, Well, if you can come up with something else, we'll go with that. So I took the weekend, I come back on Monday, and I said, What if we do beat the bank? Oh, you open up vaults, and every vault has more money than the one before, and if the alarm goes off, you lose everything. And Rob says, I love it. Let's go with it. I'll tell you another great example of that, Brad Phillips, you mentioned Brad Phillips earlier. Brad once decided to buy a syndicated TV advertising package from San Francisco, and he called all the department heads into the boardroom to unveil it. And there was 13 or 14 of us in the boardroom, and we were sitting around kind of a U shaped table, and he started at the opposite end to me, so everybody went right around the table, and he played the ads. And I'll tell you what the ads were. They were listeners, supposed, listeners standing in front of a landmark. So it was obviously recognizably the city, and saying, I listened to K K L a, let's just say that k k L A during the work day, because they play a better variety of music with no repeats between 9am and 5pm you're spelling back focus group, consultant miners, that are completely unbelievable. So he plays the ads, and he goes around the table and he starts at the opposite end of me. So I'm going to be the last person of the 15 people to comment. Everybody says they like them, everybody. And I'm thinking to myself, is this going around the table for God's sake? Somebody say they don't like them? Because I'm going to have to say I hate them. So it comes to me, and Brad says, What do you think? I said, Brad, I said, I hate it. I said, it doesn't it's not real. It comes off as phony. And Brad said, well, Larry, if you can come up with something better, we'll go with that. So I come up with a campaign where we had Roger Rick and Marilyn pretend to be listeners, and so Roger would dress up as a cab driver, Marilyn would dress up as a structure worker, Haji would dress up as a felon in prison, and they would talk about all the benefits of listening to the radio station. And those ads ran for two or three years, and they ran all over America. The company that produced the We Still hired the company that did the original ads, that we turned down to produce them, because they did a great job of producing ads. And they bought the campaign from us. They called it unreal people, and they syndicated it all across America for years based on that concept, and the our original concept, with Roger Rick and Merriman, ended up winning the mercury award that year for the best locally produced media advertising in America that year for our campaign. So the fantastic thing about working for chum, and my experience with chum, was that I was given tremendous opportunity listen. Nobody at chum is going to take anything they don't want. But I was always given the opportunity if I didn't agree with something, to come up with something better. And not everybody gets that opportunity. I realized how lucky I was, but that's the kind of managers we had. We had managers who only cared about the best product idea, not. Thing went down the air because it was somebody else's idea. It had to be the best idea, and that's the way we worked in every department. We had such great management. And I know that. I know it's a different world now. I know that programmers and sales people and everybody else has worked to the limit, because they're all doing five jobs instead of one job, and the world has changed. I get that. But I was just I was very lucky to live in a world, to work in a world where we were given the opportunity that the best always wins and gets on the air, and maybe that's what's missing too often these days. I understand why I get it. I get business, and I get I get things like that, but we were always given the opportunity to do good work, and good work was always appreciated and always rewarded.

Matt Cundill  35:44  
So I didn't know this, but you had a pretty large hand in the creation of one of the great shows on the CBC, and under the influence with Terry O'Reilly.

Larry MacInnis  35:54  
Well, yeah. Well, the two, the two people who made that come alive were Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant, of course, but we were having the mike Tennant, Mike ockenmore, who's my partner in the pro bono group, and Terry O'Reilly, who's friend of all of us, we used to have lunch regularly because we admired each other's work. We were tremendous. We couldn't wait at the radio station something at the beginning of the week, we heard commercials from pirate were coming in. We would all wait to hear them. We couldn't wait to hear them. So we became friends with Terry. We had lunch occasionally. And one time we're having lunch, Terry used to have seminars at the Eglinton theater. Used to rent out the theater, and he'd do a seminars where he would stand at a podium, and he would play great commercials from all over the world, and he would talk about why they were great, and the history behind them, and who did them, and and all of that. And he would sell tickets to it, and agencies would show up. And I was always invited, and Mike and I were always invited to go, and we're having lunch one day in Rosedale at a restaurant just down the street from chum. And I said, that thing you do with the seminars, they'll make a fantastic radio show. He said, What do you mean? I said, Well, he'll go on the radio, play commercials, talk about them. He goes, what radio station is going to so I think the CBC probably would. And that afternoon, I gotta go back to the radio station. Think nothing more of it. Mike Tennant calls me. He says, Do you mind if I follow up with Terry on this? He said, I think it's a fantastic idea. I said, I don't have time to do it. Go for it. And so they went for it. And Mike and Terry did the age of persuasion, I think was the original show they did. Oh, right, no. It was O'Reilly on advertising. It was the original version, and then it evolved into under the influence where it is now. Terry is always generous in giving me credit for coming over the idea, but it just seems so obvious to me. And of course, it's a fantastic show at one point, as far as I think it was maybe probably the most listened to media podcast in the world. And of course, it's a great radio show as well.

Matt Cundill  37:42  
How do you think AI is gonna affect creative and commercial? What do you see so far?

Larry MacInnis  37:47  
Well, I used AI myself. I'm on a retainer with a fantastic radio company, Durham radio, in Oshawa and Hamilton and Vancouver. I'll tell you a little bit with Durham radio. Durham radio when I left Chum the day after I get packaged out by Bell Media, Ross Davies called me, who I can't thank Ross enough for all of the great things we collaborated on over the years. He was a fantastic boss and a great friend of mine, and he called me after I got packaged out. He said you should call Doug Kirk in Oshawa. You live in Markham. It's 25 minutes across highways seven to hit the radio station, you should call him and see if you can do some work for him, because I know you'd love him. I said, Ross, I'm going to take a year off. I'm not going to do anything. I'm going to travel. It's the summer. And so that's what I did. I just basically did not follow up. And a couple years later, I did some work with Moses, Nimer stations, in his classical station and zoomer radio, and had a fantastic time working for Moses's people, fantastic staff there. Liberty Village is a great place to work. It's a horrible commute, but it's a great place to work. And a guy named Al kingdom, who's one of the legendary radio managers, broadcasters, sales people, who was working of Durham radio, heard he had been a former General Sales Manager for Moses, heard what I had been doing for him, and called me up and said, Will you be interested in doing the same thing for where I work in in Oshawa? And I said, Where who you work for? You said, Doug Kirk. And of course, then the bell rang. So I said, yeah. So I started working with them seven or eight years ago. Now it's a fantastic environment. And one night we were I was doing a commercial there late for a pizza company, and I had voices recorded at our station in Hamilton to be used on the commercial in in Oshawa. And it's like 11 o'clock at night, and the producer and I are listening to the takes from Oshawa, from Hamilton, and they're not working. The woman is just not hitting it. She's not doing it. And they were starting the next day. We had no so he said, I have this app that I could do AI. This is a couple years ago now. This is before AI became kind of Top of Mind. And I said, What do you he said, Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the app. He said, I'm gonna type in your copy line. He said, Do you want to be a woman? I said, Yes. He said, How old do you want it to be? I said, 25 he said, Do you want an accent? I said, No, just straight. Can. Idiot. He said, Okay, type tune in to come back and the read, the AI read, was perfect. I put it in the commercial. To this day I could play the commercial and nobody would ever know that it was aI doing the endorsement for this pizza. So I believe AI, but I believe that AI will work like anything else. What you get out is what you put in. So I think AI is still dependent on what humans put into it to get it what they want. I find it difficult to believe that AI will never be able to rate comedy The way I wrote comedy for morning shows. But I may be wrong, and I hope that day never comes, but I could be wrong about that. Who knows what's going to happen. People say. Why do people listen to radio? They listen to be radio for information. Of course they do listen the radio for music. Of course they do, but they listen to them radio for companionship. You know, we had people over the years tell us that radio, the people on the radio, were their closest friends. They were living alone in apartment like me knew from a small town lost in the big city, going through tremendous culture shock, as I did when I came to Toronto, and at night, I would be listening to Carl Banis on CK FM and Fred Napoli doing short story readings in the middle of the night on CK FM with music and David Pritchard on chum FM. I mean, radio is a companionship, and I don't know if AI is able to deliver that kind of human connection, yet maybe they will, and maybe we won't be able to tell. And who knows, maybe people I'm listening to on radio right now are are AI generated, but I believe that radio, above everything else, is companionship. And the most important thing about radio, radio is local. Local is what makes radio work. Speaking to the people about their everyday lives and the community where you live is what makes radio successful. That's why Durham radio is so successful. They're intensely, intensely local. And chum was intensely local, even though it was a big city radio station, it was in touch with everything that was happening in Toronto. And I think that's what makes radio great. I don't know if AI is going to be able to replace

Matt Cundill  41:58  
that. So thanks to the people of broadcast dialog, I became aware of pro bono and found some space on our podcast network to play your ads, but they're really targeted for radio stations. There are 32nd ads for organizations that need assistance that may not be able to afford regular radio advertising, and radio does have, sometimes some additional inventory, and your company is making great audio and great sounding PSAs for these organizations. So tell me a little bit from pro bono and where I went wrong with how I summarized your group.

Larry MacInnis  42:30  
Well, no, the pro bono group is that started as the same group. We're under the influence for Terry O'Reilly, Mike Tennant. Terry O'Reilly, Mike ackermore, who's now my partner in the pro bono group and myself, Mike Tennant came to the three of us, probably at one of our lunches, and said, I'd like to do some ads for Amnesty International to make the world aware of torture. And they've asked broadcasters around the world to contribute, and I think we have something to contribute. So under Mike Tennant's guidance, and with Terry offering pirate studios to record and Mike and I on board. We started their very first campaign was for Amnesty International. That's about more than 25 years ago now. And every year we find some other organization to promote. We did a lot of work for Canadian Red Cross. Then Terry got involved in his thing. You know, he's got his radio show, he's got his podcast, and he would still make the studios available. Terry was directing the ads in those days, which was fantastic, because he's one of the world's greatest radio directors, and then he kind of stepped out of that after several years to be more involved in his own podcast and Cbc show. And Mike Tennant has a tremendous career as an author, and he wrote the book with Terry for age of persuasion, and he worked helped create Terry's show, and now he does tremendous podcast work around the world. So in recent years, has been Mike amore and I have continued to carry the torch. Mike Tennant still contributes writing to our projects when he's able to, but we're doing work now for the Canadian lions to end homelessness in Ontario for feed Ontario, for food banks, generally food banks across the country, and we have something called the pro radio project, which is a project that Mike ackermore and I decided we would do for radio to thank them for all of the assistance they have given us on our other pro bono projects. So their pro radio Project is an effort to alert advertisers to the benefits of advertising on the radio. And the line we use at the end of our commercials is be where anyone who needs you can meet you be on the radio your customers are already here, which is true. People who listen to the radio buy things. And we just want to, we want to remind advertisers of that, and we've had tremendous support on that campaign and all of our other campaigns from radio stations across the country. I think probably we're covered in 80% of English language radio markets across Canada on our various projects and getting we get reports from most stations every month on how many commercial. US, and PSAs are running for us, and we're already seeing results from all of those projects. It's, I'm not going to lie to you when Mike tennen came to us and said, Oh, let's get together and do some ads for Amnesty International. Sure, we wanted to help Amnesty International, and yes, we wanted to bring attention to torture, and yes, we all want to get to heaven. But I think the reason we did it, and the reason I still do it is a chance to do great creative work and work with people I love and and respect and admire. And we have tremendous buy in from actor who make all their voice talent available to us at no charge. Wanted sound and picture one of the one of the world's great audio and animation production houses we're lucky enough to have right here in Toronto, makes their studios, and Jeff Steiger, their ace engineer, available to us for all our projects. Everybody on the pro bono group works pro bono. It's the world's worst business plan, but it's a chance to do good work, and as Mike ockmore is always kidding me, it's getting me closer to Heaven.

Matt Cundill  45:56  
Larry, I hope you don't visit heaven anytime soon, because you're a joy to speak to on this podcast.

Larry MacInnis  46:03  
Well, you know, as I said earlier, my career has been so blessed. I get it. I was born with talent, but I I was lucky enough to be discovered and then to be taught properly. The thing with chum was character and talent always won out. You could have all the talent in the world, but if you didn't have character, you didn't really last there. Character was so important, because we had so much character at the top of our organization in the waters family, that we felt like you were letting them down if you misbehaved or behaved badly. I used to talk about Chalmers as a badge of honor that I felt I had to polish every day, and I still feel that way. I feel that way that one of the reasons why I love Durham radio, I keep talking with Durham radio is that reminds me of chum in those days, with Doug Kirk and Mary Kirk at the top and great Steve McCauley and Steve cassay. And there's a lot of chum people who have migrated to a Durham radio because they feel the way I feel about it. They recognize in Durham radio kind of original good chum commitment and vibe. And there's seven or eight ex chum people who now work for for Durham radio. So we all kind of gravitate to what we what we have always liked and and I've been lucky that way. I've just been very, very fortunate in my career that I've had people who saw the best of me and then brought out the best of me. And that's what I've tried to do with everybody I've worked with, especially one of the reasons I love teaching at Humber and Seneca after I left Bell was the opportunity to be among young people again, because most of the people in the radio classes in those schools were very highly motivated for radio, but they were like me. They didn't know there was such a thing as a copy department. Like I didn't know whether it was a copy department, and so you just try to teach them the right way and get them to appreciate the right things. And I've had several of my students at Humber and Seneca go on to great careers. And it's wonderful when you discover somebody in a school, in a classroom, who reminds you of you. And I've had that occasion happen to me several times teaching where I go that kid has it. He doesn't know he has it, or she doesn't know she has it yet. And I'm going to make her believe that she can do it, and I'm going to show her how to do it the right

Matt Cundill  48:09  
way. Larry, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. It has been educational and a wonderful trip down memory lane to speak with you

Larry MacInnis  48:17  
a pleasure and always nice to meet another Acadia alumnus, fantastic. 

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  48:22  
The soundoff podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com. You