519 Magazine - April 2019

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The LaSalle Boy Who Grew Up to Become The President of eOne Music By Dan and April Savoie We’ve interviewed several international superstars and famous musicians from every corner of the world, but none of them was as fascinating as our conversation with Chris Taylor, the LaSalle boy who grew up to became the Global President of the world’s leading independent record label and music distributor - eOne Music. From his humble beginnings at Sandwich Secondary School to his time at the University of Windsor, Talyor always felt his future was going to be one of music advocay, Throughout the 90s, Taylor fronted the rock/reggae group One, which was signed to Virgin Records and toured North America for five years. But that wasn’t enough. Taylor founded Last Gang, an idie music label, publishing and management company that propelled artists such as Metric, 1979 and Arkells to international succecss. And at the same time founded the law firm Taylor Mitsopulos Klein Oballa, which represented artists like Drake, Avril Lavigne, Billy Talent, Three Days Grace and Gordon Lightfoot. In 2016 Last Gang merged into eOne and he became the Global President of eOne Music. We sat down with him to chat about Windsor, entertainment law and of course, his “tingle” for music. How do you think Windsor and Detroit shaped you personally and musically? Living in Windsor is almost like living in a suburb of Detroit. So you really are inundated with US media, newspapers, radio and television. Culturally you end up listening to a lot less Canadian music then you might if you lived in Toronto, Montreal, Chilliwack or something like that. Windsor is a border town in every sense of the word. I can get to the heart of downtown Detroit in about 15 minutes from my parents house, growing up. I think I made it in about 11 minutes one time. You’re a lawyer by trade. When did you realize that’s what you wanted to do? Even in high school, I can remember wanting to be a lawyer. I remember my guidance counselor recommending against it because I didn’t have very good marks. What really changed it for me was when I went to University and not really knowing what I wanted to do. Part of me thought maybe I’d want to be the Prime Minister of Canada, because most of the Prime Ministers were former lawyers. I was part of the NDP youth on campus at. I ended up taking a job one summer working at the General Motors transmission plant and it really it struck me at that point that I was going to need to get serious about school if I was ever going to go to law school. Following the first year of University, I spent a lot of time in the library. I really got focused on school work and ended up getting into law school. I think I realized at some point if I wanted to be Prime Minister, I was going to have to learn French and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. I fell in love with music and I played in bands all through high school, University and even through law school. We ended up putting a band together that had a number of Windsor guys in the group: Rob DeMarco and Tim Lane for example. We started playing shows up and down the 401, so we played Windsor, London, Toronto and by the time law school finished we had a pretty sizable following. Instead of practicing, we actually went on the road for pretty much five years straight with that band from 90 to 95 touring all over N o r t h America, making records and videos and everything else. Do you ever get the desire to get back on stage? Not really. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So if I was to do that, I want to rehearse for a month and I don’t have the time for that at this point. Really my job at eOne is a 24/7 gig and I’m very dedicated to that. I am passionate about helping the artists that we represent as opposed to building my own musical career. I gave it a really good run and we did it full time for five years, but its part of my past. I might get up for karaoke every once in awhile, but there’s no desire to put the band back together. You’ve worked with some pretty big names on the legal side, Does it get more complicated the bigger they get? Somewhat. There is more to do. Someone like Drake is getting multiple phone calls and multiple offers every day that you have to weed through and explain to him and his management, but those are good problems to have. The phone is always ringing. One part of my job that is somewhat unique and pretty proactive is about helping people actually find record deals. So if you are an artist and you had amazing demo recordings I would work with that. Nelly Furtado came to me with four songs. I was friends with her manager, but she didn’t have a record label and she didn’t have a publishing deal. She didn’t have that sort of infrastructure around her. A regular part of my routine was going to New York and Los Angeles and shopping for record deals. So that was a whole other part of it. And once you’re able to set that up, then that it does get busy and it does get complicated, but that’s really the fun part. In the music world, do you think you’ve contributed to bettering the music industry in some way? That’s a good question. I do think so. I think I did play a small part in helping to introduce Canadian artists to the world. Historically, I think a lot of great talent in Canada has gotten shipwrecked particularly before the rise of the digital world, the internet and everything else. If you were an artist in Lethbridge, Alberta and you wanted someone in Australia to hear your music, you really did need a record company to help you bridge that gap and that was a big part of my job - taking really promising artists from Canada, mainly to the US market, and trying to get US recording companies interested in investing in their careers. We did that with Three Days Grace, Sum 41, Nelly Furtado, Drake and a whole bunch over the years. Now it’s a different dynamic. Someone like Shawn Mendes or Justin Bieber might be doing YouTube videos and someone’s discovering them in the US and contacting them directly. So lawyers aren’t as much of a catalyst as they once were. Kids are now recording in their bedrooms and putting songs up on SoundCloud, and the second they start to get a positive reaction, it’s almost like the whole world knows about them overnight. I think I played a small part in some of those artists careers that I mentioned, helping introduce them to global audiences. You started Last Gang, which saw careers of Metric and the Arkells and others rise to fame. That’s a big transition from law to record label, publishing and management. There are some different skills involved for sure, but there was some crossover as well. It really stems from my desire and my passion for artist advocacy. I want to help artists achieve their dreams and doing that as an attorney was one way to do that. The impetus for the label and everything we’ve done there was to help Metric, that was another group that I was shopping. I shopped them to dozens of record labels and couldn’t find anyone to help us and after about four or five years of trying to get Metric to second base, I decided to start the record label myself. I was going to spend some of my own money that I’m making on the law firm side and start a little record label to try and help this band and that went fairly well and that led to other signings. There really wasn’t a master plan, it was almost like a hobby that kind of got out of control a little bit. Before we knew it, we had 10 staff and distribution all over the world. It became its own business onto itself. You have an eye for talent. Not many have that ability to see the bigger picture. So what are some of the things that you look for when you are scouting? You know what; it’s changed over the years. You used to sit in your office with a 150 CDs and listen to them and all the songs. I’ll listen for melody and lyrics and a point of view that is distinctive and special. My old business partner Donald Carlton used to call it “the tingle” and it really is. It’s almost instinctive. If I really love something and respond to something, chances are the rest of the world is going to love it as well. Today, there’s a little bit more data analysis that kicks into it. You are able to see in real time what the rest of the world is tuned into and cares about. You try to combine that with an instinctive eye, in a similar way to “the tingle”. It’s like a combination of “the tingle” and the data and helping someone run the next three laps around the track with the resources in the platform that we have here. That’s it in a nutshell I think. Do the musicians need to do anything to grab your attention for you to get that tingle? It helps if the music comes in the door with a good team. So, if there’s an established manager that we’ve had some success with before that we like working with, that could be helpful. You’re getting up on the radar by sort of proving your concept a little bit independently. It could be a video that’s done well or some SoundCloud activity or even songs that people are releasing independently on Spotify. Everyone is chasing after the same thing and there’s a new artist exploding almost every single day, but you tried to be selectively from that list and pick the ones that you think are going to have some longevity and be great to work with.
Metric Members Still Maintain Strong Friendship 20 Years In By Dan and April Savoie Metric will be touring Canada in 2019 with July Talk. The 12-date arena tour will span most of Canada and run through April and early May, with one lone stop in the 519 at London’s Budweiser Gardens on April 28. The four-time Juno Award winners broke out in America when they coscored the Hollywood blockbuster Twilight Saga: Eclipse with legendary composer Howard Shore, for which the soundtrack was nominated for both a Grammy and an American Music Award. With the release of their chart topping new single Dark Saturday, Metric broke the record for the artist with both the most #1 singles and the most weeks spent at #1 at Canadian alternative radio. Despite being a unit for 20 years, the band still finds a strong kinship within the band and maintains an amazing relationship with their fans. Guitarist James Shaw called the 519 office to check in before coming to London. You’re back in Canada in April for a good-sized tour. It’s been a while for an in-depth tour like this - visiting places like Saskatchewan and Manitoba. It’s true. You gotta’ do it every three years or so and certainly once an album cycling. There’s not really any other way to do. Once you get to the arena level you have to stay there or else it looks like you’re taking some weird dip or whatever. We just like being able to do what we want to do and not really care what the industry thinks and just keep it cool, keep it fun and keep it interesting for us. It’s been a while since the last time we did the arena thing. This will be arena tour number three and maybe we’ll do something weird and different. On this tour you’re heading to London, which is the area of we’re chatting about today. You were here with the Smashing Pumpkins last year. Do you have any good memories of London from that to tour? I have some great memories of London. I don’t know if they really came from that tour. That tour was long and extensive and because London is so close to my home in Toronto, I literally, I was home the night before I drove myself to that show. I walked on stage play for 45 minutes and then got back in my car and drove home. So my only memory of London was in a giant dark room playing my instrument which basically could be swapped with 40 other places on that tour and it would be hard to tell the difference. I have many good memories of London though. One of them one involves the guy who built our studio with us. His name is Tim Glasgow - he’s a sort of London underground legend of the tech world. I learned a lot talking with him and hanging with him. It’s definitely part of our past and history. This tour you’re playing with a bigger set list than you did with the Smashing Pumpkins. So you get to pull up some good nuggets for the diehard fans? Sure, the Pumpkins set list was about as small as it could possibly be. They decided that a three hour plus set was going to be the best thing for their life. That gave us virtually nothing and no time. But, it’s really nice for us to do this kind of tour where we can pull out whatever song feels right. We have lots of time, space and stage and we can bring a whole package with us. It’s a very different thing and we’re always honoured to tour with a band of their stature, but at the same time it’s much more artistically friendly for us to be able to do our thing - play whatever songs we want, the length that we want. For a Metric fan, it’s probably a much more rewarding experience. It’s definitely more rewarding for me. Are you guys still friends after all this time? Oh, yeah, absolutely. The four of us hang out constantly when on tour. We go for dinner together every night that we can. It’s almost like impenetrable. It’s kind of a wonder of nature, I think. I don’t think any of us thought it would last this amount of time, let alone the four of us being so close. Having seen so many bands become dysfunctional and not be able to really do it anymore because of personal stuff or still be able to do it despite the fact that there’s not a lot of personal relationship happening anymore. For the four of us it’s really the opposite - the personal stuff just keeps growing stronger than ever. It’s quite fascinating to us as well as anybody else. You can sense that vibe of closeness because you give the song writing credits to the band rather than the individual. Once Queen did that they became a closer unit. That unity doesn’t happen too often with bands. It just always felt like the four of us are here and roles are indefinable a lot of the time. Sometimes one person has the steering wheel, while one is fixing the carburetor and another is making a sandwich. It doesn’t really matter who’s doing what, it’s just that we’re all taking part of it and we’re all playing the roles that have sort of has been so slowly defined overtime. We are very interchangeable and also malleable. It’s funny, we’re on tour with July Talk and they’re on quite an amazing journey, but they haven’t been around anywhere near as long as we have. We’ve had a lot of parking lot conversations about this and that and one of the things that I really love about Peter and Leah is that they’re so inquisitive - they’re hungry to know whatever they possibly can. One of the things that we have been talking about is that a successful group happens when everyone knows what their role is and being aware that the roll often shifts and changes. It’s just being aware what your role is today and filling it perfectly without trying to overfill it or under fill it, but at the same time knowing that tomorrow might be different. That can really lead to a group that can tackle anything, be successful and deal with whatever it is in front of you. In this musical life, it’s like getting to a city and you don’t know what the temperature is - you don’t know if it’s sunny, you don’t know which way is north, you don’t know where to eat, you don’t know anything, Being malleable is kind of like the trick of the whole game and when the whole group can do that together, I think you’re setting yourself up to succeed. Justin Broadbent
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519 Magazine - April 2019

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