The Dave Calder Mentor & Life Coach Award

Dave Calder

“In the late 1960s, Bruce Fairbairn had a band called Sunshyne and I became their drummer. The success of Sunshyne got us signed to a lot of demo deals and that is how my recording career started.”

Dave

Dave Calder was working as a VP of marketing at the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park. He had become a television producer at some stage in his career. I gave Dave a call and arranged to meet with him at the Aquarium, the following Thursday, at four in the afternoon.

At three fifty-five, on Thursday, I arrived at the back door of the aquarium. I stood and looked in awe, for a moment, at the beauty that surrounded me. Stanley Park is a national treasure. Revered for years, as the jewel in Vancouver’s tourist crown!

“What a place to come to work every day,” I thought, as I gazed at the tall two-hundred-year-old fir trees, that skirted the perimeter of the aquarium’s parking lot. Once inside, I approached the reception desk and asked for Dave. In a couple of minutes, a rather boyish, fifty-something-year-old appeared. It was my old friend ‘Dave’ whom I had not seen in forty years!

Before settling down for the interview, Dave took me on a ten-cent tour of the new Aquaquest/Canacord Gallery wing of the aquarium, which had just opened a couple of months earlier. Afterward, back in Dave’s office, I asked,

“What is your role with the aquarium?”

“I am the vice president of marketing and communications. I thought when I took the job, that I would be mostly involved in dealing with various areas of public interest, such as our position on keeping mammals at the aquarium but there is so much more to the job. The aquarium is the only one of its kind in Canada. It consists of two entities, there is the attraction side and then there is the conservation; education, and research side. Because we are non-profit, all the money we raise goes back into funding our projects, whether it be a new physical feature, such as the wing I just showed you, or funding research projects such as determining alternate food sources for sea lions or the warming effect of the ocean on its inhabitants. We can contribute to a wide variety of aquatic research that will help our grandkids enjoy the bounty of nature we enjoy today.

The public only sees a small part of our operation. For instance, there is only one sea lion in the public viewing pool but we have another eight in our research pool that the public doesn’t see. This is why we have the attraction in the first place; to amaze, engage and inspire people. It is really an amazing organization!”

“So how does a former TV producer end up with a gig like this?”

“Oh, that’s easy Chris, the same way I got my last position with Intrawest where I was also a VP of marketing. Both jobs were designed around my strengths in the media industry.”

“Let’s go back to your days as a TV producer.”

“Okay let’s, that was quite a ride, I tell you, Chris, quite a ride. First, though, let me tell you about my studio days because that is really where it all began. It all started back around 1968. I had always wanted to be a professional musician. When I was twelve or thirteen, I was already playing professionally on weekends, around town, for weddings, banquets, and other special events, anything I could. When I got back from the 1968 Kits band trip to Europe, my parents wanted me to go to UBC. So, I enrolled in first-year arts. I went to classes for five days and spent the rest of my time in the music faculty building. I met a lot of great musicians there, like Tom Keenlyside, Dave Pickell, and Bruce Fairbairn. Bruce later went on to be probably, the most successful heavy metal rock band producer of all time, producing bands like Aerosmith and Bon Jovi. But in those days he had a band called Sunshyne and I became their drummer. The success of Sunshyne, got us signed to a lot of demo deals and that is how my recording career started. We recorded at Mushroom Studios, Little Mountain Sound, Psi Chord, Pinewood, and even did CBC television and in Seattle, at Kay Smith Studios, where we worked with Jim Gaines, the producer of Tower of Power.

In order to achieve more radio success, Sunshyne evolved into a commercial entity and morphed into the successful local rock band, “Prism.” When Sunshyne ended, I managed to get into jingle recording with Griffiths /Gibson and also with Kokoo Productions. I even went to LA for a time, where I played in a band called ‘Hamlet.’

Michael Omartian was their producer. He also produced Christopher Cross, who became very successful. ‘Hamlet’ did not, except in the southwestern U.S. After L.A., I returned to Vancouver and continued playing on soundtracks for shows for CBC. In the late seventies, I wound up back at Little Mountain Sound, with Bob Buckley, Peter Clarke, Brett Wade, and Dave Sinclair. I was part of a band called “Straightlines,” which managed to get signed to a record deal, only to find myself again replaced, by a drummer, who could sing lead vocals. That is when I started to look further afield. I did a little touring after that with Denise McCann and then with Jane Mortifee and I played with Wayne Kozack for a while in an incredible band called, ‘Mad Ivan and the Hornets,’ at a local club.- We were a regular feature at Fred Xavier’s ‘Rohans,’ here in Vancouver. But I had pretty much decided to explore other career ideas. It was my dad actually, who suggested I go into TV production. He had seen me playing on soundtracks for TV shows and thought that it might be a good fit.

In 1980, I enrolled in BCIT’s, TV production school. They also offered broadcast journalism and radio but I opted for TV production. I spent one year in the program here in Vancouver and then as the result of a school tour of small broadcasting stations around BC, I found a small station in Prince George, where I thought I could learn a lot, in a short time. After talking to my department head, he said he would co-op my entire second year if I could secure a position at the station. I secured the position and he co-opted my second year at New Caledonia College in Prince George.

In 1981, I found myself in Prince George as a writer/producer for the TV station CKPG. At the end of my first month at CKPG, I received two cheques. One was for my salary at the station and the other was a residual cheque from a Labatt’s jingle, I had played on back in Vancouver. My residual cheque was larger than my salary cheque. I remember looking at the two cheques and wondering if I had made the right decision but it worked out great. Seven and a half years later, I was assistant general manager of AM/FM and TV and had two sons born in Prince George.

I learned a lot, about TV programming, sales, marketing, management, and operations. It was the right call because I had the chance to do so many things on both radio and television very quickly.”

“What was your day-to-day focus?”

“It changed a lot. When I started, I was primarily focused on writing commercials for radio and TV. The sales department would bring me clients and I would generate creative ideas. It was kind of an ad agency experience without the ad agency, you know, target markets, competitive advantages, selling propositions, a very creative time. My routine, after I came up with the creative ideas, was to work with our audio guys and video guys, in short, be a producer. One of the nice things, about being in a small market was that I got to do all the post-production work. It was just me and the cameraman. If I had gone to CBC in Vancouver, I would have spent my first year pulling cable or holding a clipboard, regardless of my background, so it was the right move for me. It was also a fast track to exposure to different people in the communications industry. I got to go to CBC affiliate meetings in Toronto and Montreal.

I got to program the television station. I was the one who went down to the US and purchased programming. I interacted with program distributors and got to know the programming opportunities to introduce new shows. I was the first programmer to bring Oprah Winfrey to a Canadian television station in B.C. I was the first to bring Star Trek, The Next Generation into Canada and I was the first to put the Wonderful World of Disney on five days a week in Canada instead of just Sunday nights. I could do these things because we were such a small market; we were off the radar so to speak.

However, I also still remembered that my residual cheque was larger than my monthly pay cheque, so I moved quickly into sales and management, where the money is in the media world. In 1989, I came back to Vancouver and became general sales manager for 1040 KICKS, a teen-orientated radio station, not a wise move. I had tried for programming positions at KVOS and BCTV but lost out to internal candidates. Unfortunately, I could not make the station profitable and parted ways with the owners, starting my own communications consulting company, Calder Communications.

Other jobs that were available to me were outside of Vancouver and I did not want to leave my extended family and friends. My early clients were the TV and radio stations that I had contacts with from my Prince George days. TV stations in Terrace and Kitimat and so on. I actually became quite a successful consultant because of those contacts, that was 1990-91.

I was working out of the offices of a radio and television representation company called Paul Mulvihill Limited. There I met David St. Laurent, which was a neat relationship. He was heading up their radio representation side. We wound up doing some research work with Vancouver ad agencies, on behalf of my clients, to find out if we could do a better job representing smaller market broadcast companies. As a result of that focus work it became clear to me that we were looking at a huge business opportunity. That business opportunity was to create a new media firm that did not just represent television or just radio but was an entity for all sorts of media including outdoor. It had never been done before. There had not been a new media company started in Canada for several years. It was pretty much a firmly entrenched old boys club. So, the game plan was put in place by one of my clients, Okanagan Skeena Group, headed by Brian Edwards, who was a huge supporter of mine and liked the concept. Brian worked hand in hand with me to develop the concept. I was not interested in the representation side. I wanted to consult with the stations. So Brian and I put the concept together and then we told David about it and ask him to come on board. Twenty-four hours later we left the offices of Paul Mulvihill and formed a new company which became known as Media Group West. C. S. Media Group West Ltd. was the legal name; C for Calder and S for St Laurent. Our silent financial partner was Okanagan Skeena Group. They helped fund us and allowed us to get a line of credit at the bank. They allowed us to plug into their benefits, accounting, and everything else. This allowed us the freedom to do our thing. We started with twelve companies and in

348 ~ Brian Edwards

BELOW:

1969 Sunshyne playing in the Kits Day Parade.

L to R, Dave, David Pickell, Bruce Fairburn, Peter Bjerring

BELOW:

c1970 L to R Dave Pickell, Bruce Fairbairn, Richard Christie, Tom Keenlyside, Dave Calder, Ralph Eppel.

one year we had over one hundred. It was a great success, stratosphere! It was quite a rush. By the mid-1990s we were extremely successful.

On the flip side, by the mid-1990s, Okanagan Skeena had become much larger and Brian Edwards ask me to become VP of sales and marketing of Skeena which I did. I started to move away from Media Group West. I still owned shares and was involved on a small scale in order to avoid any conflict of interest with my new position. One of my jobs at Skeena was to go into radio stations the company was purchasing and fix them top to bottom, and figure out how to improve them. So, my experience from the past fifteen years came into play. In the late nineteen nineties, a company called Telemedia purchased Okanagan Skeena. When that took place I had ceased to be an owner of Media Group West, so I became chairman of Media Group and a senior VP of Telemedia. I remained there through 2002 when Telemedia was sold to Standard Broadcasting and pieces of it were flipped to other corporations. When that happened I decided it was time to pack it in.

As I said Chris it was a great ride. It was an amazing experience with lots of building and expansion. I still do some consulting work from time to time, that’s when I ended up at Intrawest because I did not want to leave Vancouver, so I entertained the idea of a career change and even welcomed it. A family member had some contacts with Intrawest. They created a job for me based on my experience. Now, four years later, here I am still in the media world but really much more content and focused on contributing to a legacy organization that will flourish for generations to come.

As you know Chris, the Kits band is a fraternity of the highest order. The fact is you can run into alumni and you already know several things about them. They are disciplined, they are creative, and they understand the idea of working hard to achieve high standards. We were all exposed to success at an early age. Jimmy Pattison for instance does not have to see me work. If I applied for a position at one of his communications companies, if I tell him I was a Kits band guy that tells him a lot about what I bring to the table, character, discipline, approach, and so on. Jimmy is a good example. You have probably heard about him cutting his lowest-producing sales people. Well, Delamont didn’t keep guys around who couldn’t perform either you know Chris!”

“No, I guess not. I guess not!”