(Belleville, Ontario, Canada)

Today was another example of how you just have to roll with it when you are travelling.

As I had been itching to get out on the road again, we drove to the nearby city of Belleville.   Our “excuse” was that today was Record Store Day and the last remaining Sam The Record Man store is located in Belleville.  Record Store Day now receives a lot of mainstream press, so I don’t think I need to describe it in detail.  In brief:  it is a celebration of independent record stores and more specifically the vinyl record format.  Lots of unique and rare records are released on Record Store Day…and only to independent record stores.  You won’t find these records at big box stores.

Alas, none of Sam’s Record Store Day offerings appealed to me.  We headed downtown to grab some lunch (Thai House – very good) and to see if there was any music of interest at the nearby used CD/record store.  While their vinyl offerings were uninspiring, we stumbled upon a DVD entitled “Radio Revolution:  The Rise and Fall of the Big 8”.   This DVD chronicles the fascinating history of Windsor’s CKLW radio station…a history that I knew nothing about, as that station essentially died in 1984 and I didn’t get involved in radio for another couple of years.  If you have any interest whatsoever in the history of Canadian radio, you’ll enjoy this documentary.

I met my wife at CFRC (Queen’s University Radio) in the late 1980s.  My band first got airplay there and I was actually interviewed as a musician there before becoming a programmer.  Once I passed my broadcast test, CFRC became the place to hang out between classes…and pretty much any other time.  It had interesting people and a hundred thousand records – what more could you ask for?  While I didn’t spend quite as much time at the station after (finally) finishing my studies at Queen’s, I ended up broadcasting at CFRC for 17 years.  Many of our closest friends today first came into our lives at CFRC (including the guy who helped me set up this blog!).

This documentary vividly brought back the characters, the fun and even the technology of our radio days.  What a special opportunity we had – all this music, with almost complete freedom to play whatever we wanted and to do so with as much creativity as we could muster.  We met some famous musicians as well as many more not-so-famous musicians.  All of them had a soft spot for grassroots radio; in fact, many of them had worked at stations just like ours.   Whevener I meet a musician today, my radio station experience is invariably the common ground.

I had hoped to take some spring photos on the way back to Kingston but fate intervened again.  The “CHECK ENGINE” light appeared in our car and we thought it would be best to get back to Kingston without stopping.  Of course, I have no regrets – our earlier-than-expected arrival in Kingston allowed us to watch the radio documentary almost right away.

Physically, then, it was a trip to Belleville.  In reality, however, it turned out be a trip through my broadcasting past (via Windsor!)…and a reminder of just how important radio has been in my life.

Stay tuned for what will undoubtedly be some very exciting adventures as I fly on Tuesday (with a stopover in Vienna, Austria) to my next destination!