Chris Pottage, Production Director, Rogers Radio, Toronto, Ont., Canada
By Jerry Vigil
A glance at RAP Awards winners from the past several years will give you an idea of the quality of imaging and commercial production that emanates from north of the border. Canadian radio continues to put a great emphasis on quality production, and Toronto is perhaps one of the most competitive Canadian markets in this regard. In the midst of the Toronto production wars is the Rogers Communications group of stations, a cluster of four including their powerhouse AC station CHFI, and the recently launched Jack FM. Heading up the rather large (by US standards) production department is Chris Pottage, an extremely talented producer with an interesting background in the biz. Check out Chris’s demo on this month’s RAP CD, and then read on for a remarkable peek at Canadian radio at its best.
JV: How did you get started in radio?
Chris: I grew up not too far outside Toronto in a place called Kitchener. During high school, which would have been early to mid ‘80s, I did a lot of work with the Kitchener Waterloo School Board. They had a three-camera television studio and a guy there named Doug Gerrard who was sort of my mentor. He taught me a lot about television and broadcasting and was just an outstanding guy. Out of the thousands of high school students in that region, there were two or three of us who just sort of had the run of his TV studio, and we took full advantage of it. We went in there quite a bit and tried to learn as much as we could, in addition to the courses he gave. I finished high school, and he had hired me somewhere in this time to do a little soundboard operating for the Waterloo Region School Board meetings. So that and the TV experience gave me a little background in broadcasting.
Doug Gerrard later hooked me up with another student of his, who had been a student of his about 10 years earlier, and his name was Bill Reimer. Bill owned a company called Image Corporation. The Image Corporation was basically a small communications and advertising company that did a bunch of everything. They gave me a gig there based on Doug’s reference, and I did everything from video editing to video photography and some multi-image editing with multiple slide projectors all linked together at one time. I did that for a little while but always knew I wanted to go back to school, so I went to Toronto to go to a place called Ryerson to get my degree in broadcasting. I think I was in first year when somebody from the school office came looking for a student who would be interested in and capable of operating an on-air console at Q107, a pretty big radio station in Toronto at that time and still now. I guess I was one of the few students who had some background in doing something related to broadcasting, so they sent me up there. I went up there in my nice suit and brought my briefcase and my resume and everything I needed for the interview, and when I got there, the secretary of the General Manger just said, “You start tonight. There is no interview.”
JV: Not bad. Your first radio gig was at a top station in a major market! When was this?
Chris: That was in 1989. And I remember that being a stressful time trying to learn an on-air console at a big radio station. It sort of freaked me out, but it was a terrific place to work, and they had some great producers back then. Actually the same producers still work at Q107. I learned a boatload working with them.
JV: So you started out as a board op. What happened next?
Chris: Maybe a year and a half into it I started to ask about doing some real production, multi-track production. And the Creative Director there, Dave Barker, gave me a shot. They had one 8-track studio, which was already going 16 hours a day. I was there from midnight until 8:00 a.m. helping out for a bunch of weeks. I got my feet wet, but I remember being really jazzed about having that opportunity to be there and hopefully to prove myself.
I did a bunch of work with that 8-track machine, and right about that time is when they were starting to get into Pro Tools. I was also doing some work at another studio down the street, and the guy had a Pro Tools system. So when Q107 got their Pro Tools system, I said, “Hey, if you need anybody to help train your guys, I’m the guy to do it.” So, sure enough, they got the Pro Tools system, and I remember their Production Director coming in — and I don’t think I’ve ever told him this — but he came in one day and asked me if I could give him a demo on Pro Tools. I didn’t know Pro Tools. I’d used Sound Designer, which came before Pro Tools; and it was a 2-track editor, which I knew like the back of my hand, but I knew Pro Tools wouldn’t be the same thing. So I remember stalling and thinking, “Oh, man! I've got to figure out how to use this system if I want to keep myself in a gig.” I told him I’d come over later that night to the studio and show him. I went over later, and he was too busy to do anything, and I’m thinking, “Oh, thank God!” because I had no idea how I was going to talk him through it. So that night I went to the other guy’s studio that I did work with. Rob Rettberg was his name. I remember that night leaving Q107 and going straight over to Rob’s place, and I grabbed the manuals and started reading. Rob said, “Go ahead, spend as much time as you want.” So I think I spent the next 16 hours straight learning Pro Tools so that I could go back to Q107 and start training their guys. And though you wouldn’t think so, that sort of turned into a three or four month gig, just training the regular guys at Q on how to use Pro Tools. All those guys were analog, and some really weren’t too keen on going digital. Some were thrilled, but some weren’t. So I got a lot of work out of that, and from that I got into a regular freelance production position with Q.
Then in January 1993 I got an offer from Rawlco Communications, which had just gotten a new license in Toronto for an FM station, CISS. They were going to launch a country radio station. I got an offer from them to be a fulltime producer there, and I thought, “Oh, perfect. At least it gets me out of my 4:00 – 10:00 p.m. shift at Q107. Q made a counter offer, which was very flattering and nice, but in the end, the hours were just way too attractive, and I went to the country station. As it turned out, at Rawlco I ended up working longer hours, but I didn’t know that before going over there. I would say my shortest day would have been 9 or 10 hours, and there were days when I wouldn’t leave until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.
JV: Were you doing both commercials and imaging for them?
Chris: I started out doing a little bit of both, and it was about three months in that they gave me all of the imaging responsibilities. My old boss was certainly a better producer than me, there’s just no question about it. But I think the PD just got along with me better. So, that was sheer luck. And from there on, I pretty much have only done imaging since 1993. And boy, I learned so much at that country radio station. It just about killed me, mind you, but it was the best learning experience I think I possibly could have had anywhere. At one point in time, I believe it had the largest country music listening audience in the world. It was a pretty big radio station, and they did a lot of things right.
JV: What was one of the foremost learning experiences you had there?
Chris: They had a feature called “Live At Five.” And Live At Five wasn’t actually live; it was pre-recorded. But country music artists would come in, either by themselves with their acoustic guitar, sometimes with their entire bands with full blown amp systems and drum sets, and they would perform usually two or three songs. And over the six years that CISS Country was on the air, we recorded about 900 songs. My predecessor probably recorded about 300, maybe 400 of those, and I did the other 500 or 600. And it was just the single best radio experience I’ve ever had. I got to record Alabama and Blackhawk and The Band and Carlene Carter, and you name it. If they came to Toronto, they usually would come and do Live At Five. And the radio station did it the right way; they invested enough money and built a studio that was appropriate for it so that these people would want to come in for the show. We would not do what most radio stations would do back then, which was to bastardize and completely butcher their product. We wanted them to be impressed; we wanted them to listen to it before they left and go, “Wow. That really sounds good. We’ll come back next time we’re in Toronto and do this again.” That was really the rationale behind it — hopefully they’d come back and do it again. And I’d say mostly they did.
I remember the first time I had to do it, it was with one of the first big bands, The Mavericks. And my boss, who had been doing all of these, didn’t really share too much of his knowledge with me. So I really had no idea what I was doing. I’m an imaging producer being asked to mix and produce the music for The Mavericks. So we multi-tracked the songs to a digital 8-track, the WaveFrame, and then mixed it down after they were done. I remember all the guys being in there, and we had brought in an audio engineer from another company in town so a real experienced engineer who knew a lot about mixing and recording music would be there. We brought him in at whatever, $50, $100/hr. to come and help me out. That’s all he’s there for, just to help me out so everything goes smoothly. We also have our Chief Engineer there to help me out if there are any technical difficulties, and we’re on a timeline. The band comes in around 1:30, and I have to have the thing mixed down for 5:00 that night; that’s when it actually goes to air. I have to mix down three songs one at a time, then put the three songs back into the interview, and then lay down the whole thing, which will be about 25 minutes long, back down to tape and into the system for it to be played back.
So the band’s sitting in there, and we’re getting a little bit of a phasing problem in the headphones, and I can hear it too. I must have spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what this was, and I swear to God, the sweat was literally dripping off my face. And I could feel my face was just beet, beet red. Our GM even came in and said, “Are you going to be okay?” And I said, “You know, I have what is going wrong here, and I don’t know how to fix it.” I said, “I know that when this is going to tape, it’s sounding fine, but I know that right now in their monitor, in their cans, and here in my speakers, it doesn’t sound right. I don’t know how to fix it, but I know it’s right going to tape.” I remember the guy in the band, the lead singer, finally just said, “You know what… just forget the headphones. Let’s do it without the headphones.” And they all throw their headphones on the ground, and you can tell they’re not real pleased. And my stress level? I thought I was going to have a heart attack. And right there I was thinking, “I don’t ever, ever want to do this again. This is way too stressful. This is not what I do. This is not my area of expertise. They can get somebody else to come and do this freelance, because I’m done with it.”
I remember getting done with that day, and I still felt that way a week later. But they weren’t going to hire anybody else. It was left to me. And one session at a time I got a little bit better, and I would say about eight months later, it was the thing that made me hop out of bed in the morning. It was the thing I just got so excited about, to go in and have a conversation with Clint Black about how to mike his guitar and have him sing two inches away from a window in the studio because he’s telling me, “If I sing right here, I’ll get a little bit of a bounce off the window and back into the mike; it will be a real nice kind of echo reverb thing you’ll get out of it.” It was just a cool experience. And I would say the country music artists, with very few exceptions, were the nicest, most accommodating, interesting people you could ever meet in the music world. No attitudes.
JV: What did the phasing problem turn out to be?
Chris: Oh, that… I was sending everything into the WaveFrame editor, and I’m bringing it all back from WaveFrame so I can monitor WaveFrame. So it’s all coming back from WaveFrame into my console, but at the same time, I’ve also got the left/right pushed on every microphone input that’s going into that console. So it’s going back to the mains twice — going into the mains from WaveFrame and also directly from the microphones, and they’re offset by a millisecond. Just enough to drive everybody in that room insane, including the guy I hired to come and help me out. Nobody could figure it out. However, it was a pretty crude setup. We had two consoles that were attached together and wired into the WaveFrame in sort of a makeshift way just to make it work.
JV: How long were you at CISS and what happened next?
Chris: I was there six years total. During that time, they launched Country Music Television Canada. I tried to make a jump from radio to post audio in TV, and they sort of convinced me that they really needed me at CISS Country. But they knew how excited I was about the possibility of doing post audio for television, so they arranged it so that me and whatever people I would have to hire at that point, would do all the post audio for the television network. It was really great. They let me and the Chief Engineer research and purchase and implement the equipment and software that we needed to carry out all of that business. Then they sort of made me Post Audio Production Manager for the network. I’d have to schedule and coordinate production for the CMT while juggling and balancing their needs against the day-to-day requirements of the radio station. It was almost like a small business being operated inside the radio station. I would keep timesheets, which were basically bills, and send the bills off to CMT. And then they’d pay the radio station, even though it was all the same ownership.
JV: How did you wind up as Production Director for the Rogers group where you are now?
Chris: I did CMT for a few years, and then after Country Music Television eventually got sold, CISS Country was sold to Rogers Communications here in Toronto. Rogers bought CISS Country in 1999, and I worked my butt off on the new format that they launched the exact same day they bought us. They sort of came in and said, “We purchased the radio station. CISS Country no longer exists, but what does exist is Power 92,” a new CHR station in Toronto. I remember… boy, there’s nothing worse for a producer than going through all your hard drives for the main file server, the on-air server, and deleting everything you’ve done for the last six years. You just watch it all go, and a little tear rolls down your cheek.
So I deleted everything out of the system, and they’re running DAT tapes of CHR music live on the station. And right then and there, literally at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday night, we started producing new splitters for a CHR station and loading in Top 40 music. And that went on for a while. I’d say I worked 7 days a week, 13, 14, 15 hours a day, for probably 3 or 4 weeks, and then 11 or 12 hours a day, with weekends off after that, for the next 3 or 4 months for lots of different reasons, not the least of which was, of course, if you’re a producer, you really want the station to sound hot because it reflects on you, and partly because our company had just been sold, so there was no guarantee that I had a job.
And then I told them what I was interested in doing. I was the Production Director and Creative Director back at CISS Country, and I said, “I’d love to contribute as much as I can at Rogers, and if there is anything there...,” and I submitted my resume and my demo tape and worked my butt off. Then they asked me if I was interested in being Production Director for the 3 stations they had in Toronto. This was in 1999, and I’ve been here since.
JV: So Power 92 was the first station you dealt with, then came two more. Is that correct?
Chris: Yes. And now there are four. Power 92 was the first, and I should also tell you that Power 92 only existed for about three weeks. It was probably the shortest lived name for a radio station ever. They kept the same format, but they flipped names for a whole bunch of reasons, to KISS 92. So KISS 92 was the first station that I was involved with. And then the other two that I was Production Director for were 680 News and CHFI, which, for a long, long time was the biggest radio station in Toronto, an AC station. They had huge numbers forever and a day. I think that lasted for about 13 or 14 years. It’s only recently that they’ve fallen out of the number one position. So, there's CHFI, 680 News, which was Canada’s first all news radio station, and then the new station that we added on two years ago, The Fan, which is an all sports talk station.
JV: Are you doing the imaging for all these stations now?
Chris: I do a little bit of imaging for all of them. Primarily I do imaging for what was KISS 92, which is now Jack FM. I produced all the launch imaging for Jack FM in Vancouver a year and a half ago. Vancouver shortly thereafter sort of bolted to the number one position in the market, and I think they were close to the bottom before that. They had massive numbers. It wasn’t long after that that I did all the launch production for Jack FM in Calgary, and they too went virtually to number one overnight. And then I launched Jack FM in Toronto and did that with about 30 hours notice. Now I was lucky because I could reuse a lot of what I’d done before, just re-edit and remix for us. So it became Jack FM, about a year ago now, and I’ve launched a couple of other Jack stations in Canada since then. It’s been six total.
JV: Jack FM has a unique style of imaging, which readers can check out on the RAP CD. Are you also writing the copy for Jack FM imaging?
Chris: No. The guy who is the main imaging force for Jack FM, from a writing perspective, is Greg Stevens. I’ve worked with Greg now for about seven years straight. He was with me at CISS Country and then the KISS Top 40, and now Jack FM. He’s the main imaging guy in fact, not only for Jack, but for all four stations in Toronto. He also does special projects across the country for Rogers. I think Greg’s title is National Imaging Director, and he’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with. Of all the stuff I’ve ever listened to, he’s as good as they get.
JV: What’s the general concept or approach that Greg takes, that the Program Director takes, through him to achieve what you do with those promos and other imaging elements?
Chris: Greg and I have a lot of latitude when we’re doing the imaging for Jack, which is my focus. But for all the radio stations, including CHFI, when Greg Stevens writes this stuff, he doesn’t tend to write things straight. Most of the copy will be straight, but he wants to have some kind of throw away in there, some kind of reality check, you know, pull back the curtain and see the real person standing there saying, “What, are you kidding me? That’s the prize?” or whatever it happens to be in Jack’s case. Jack FM is a very irreverent kind of radio station. You’re always going for the gag on Jack. For example, “It’s the Dock Rock Long Weekend on Jack FM! Yeah, Dock Rock. We tried to come up with a better idea, but all the smart people took Friday off.” Or stuff like, “Hang on, hang on. I got an idea.” And then a splitter would stop down, and then there would be literally two seconds of dead air, and then the voice would come back and say, “Sorry. That wasn’t me.”
Everything on that radio station is playful, and Greg is particularly sort of gifted at writing playful stuff for the radio station. Maybe one of the funnier promos was “The top 1,257 songs of all time, played in no particular order, commercial free, with occasional commercial interruptions.” It was an entire promo about the philosophy of Jack FM, that Jack FM is a radio station that plays whatever it wants. It doesn’t have a top 40, a top 100 or a top 1,000. It plays the greatest music, and that’s that. So, enter the idea of having a top 1,257 songs of all time, in no particular order. And I think we actually had eight versions of the same promo, and each one had this countdown starting at different times during the weekend, just to see if anybody actually ever got the joke. And a few people e-mailed or called and said, “When does the countdown start?” when in reality, of course, there is no countdown.
That’s the fun of Jack. CHFI is a little bit straighter, but still with a tiny bit of that Jack fun in there. It’s obviously an AC radio station, so it’s very family oriented, very family safe, and they wouldn’t say anything that would be disrespectful to parents or embarrass them around their kids, where Jack might walk that line a little bit more. The Fan, of course, is a sports talk radio station, so they can afford to push that line a fair bit more – “a station with balls.” They push that edge. And then there’s our all news radio station, 680 News. Their imaging, I think, is particularly sort of fun for an all talk news station. All talk news says to me, it’s going to be boring, it’s going to be conservative, it’s going to be dry with very basic generic intros to their programming, when in fact, a lot of their stuff has a fair bit of fun. One splitter was, “Of course it’s all true. We couldn’t make this kind of bleep up.” Or, “We’ll tell you where to get off. Excuse me! Traffic on the ones on 680 News.” There is just a bunch of those splitters, which I think sets that station apart from most news stations out there.
JV: How many producers and writers are on staff there for all four stations?
Chris: We’ve got six fulltime producers here, and we’ve got five fulltime creative writers who write nothing but commercial products. We have one fulltime imaging writer for the four stations, and now he’s added on a few more players on to his team so he can do more national stuff. Toronto is a great, great radio market. And I say that because there’s just great radio being done all over this city. There are some really extraordinarily gifted producers in this city. And what that means for everybody else is that everybody else will have to keep up. That’s the great thing about working in Toronto: because the competition is just so intense, everybody has to do the same thing. You couldn’t get away running your ship too lean in this city in production and creative, unless you want to get clobbered by your competition. There is just too much good stuff being done. So, we’re fortunate for that, to be sure. The people over at Corus do some great work, as does Standard Radio.
Our producers are Greg MacDonald, and he’s the main imaging guy for CHFI. Stan Matecki, he’s the main imaging guy for The Fan, or for Fan promos anyway. Stu Hammill is the main imaging guy for 680 News. Robert Brown is sort of my backup for Jack FM imaging. He does a fair bit of that as well. And Kyle Taylor does mainly commercials right now, but that’s only because we gave up the ghost on KISS Top 40. He’s a terrific CHR imaging guy. And the other guy who is doing a fair bit of imaging for The Fan right now is a guy named Ian Cunningham. Dylan Wowchuk is the full-time imaging producer of the CHFI Morning Show. He doesn’t report to me but I do spend a fair bit of time with him talking about how to best image the show. And every chance I get, I try to tell management how great these guys are because they save my butt on a regular basis.
JV: What’s one of the bigger promotions you’ve been involved with recently?
Chris: CHFI gave away $1 million about two weeks ago, $1 million [Canadian] to one listener, guaranteed.
JV: Was this a national contest or just for the Toronto market?
Chris: One market. And herein lies some of the fun that we’ve had over this. Regular people don’t think or talk about this stuff, but in terms of industry people, we, of course, promoted it as the biggest prize ever awarded by a radio station to one listener. And we got an e-mail from a radio station out in Edmonton saying, “We gave away $1 million back in 2001” or something like that, but it was one of those insured contests. Our claim is that it’s the biggest single prize we ever guaranteed to give away to one listener, because we said at the beginning, “One person will win $1 million cash, guaranteed, tax free.” It was absolutely huge, and it was the neatest thing for me, or anybody. It was one of those once-in-a career kinds of experiences. And the truth is that I didn’t do a whole lot in terms of the imaging for that contest. We have a bunch of producers here, and each of them are sort of responsible for the majority of imaging on each of their radio stations. I dabble in a little bit of each of them, but not a whole lot. And they did a great job with this $1 million contest.
To pick the winner, we had a breakfast at the top of the CN tower, which used to be the world’s highest or tallest free-standing structure. The breakfast went from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Being it was CHFI FM 98, they had 98 listeners on hand, and it was a reverse draw, where if your name is called, you get pulled out and you no longer are in contention to win. They kept drawing names all morning long until 8:20 in the morning, and then they had somebody win it. And for a big chunk of these people, they had produced profiles about them, about what their lives were like, what their kids were like, about the tragedies, the hopes, the dreams. It was just unbelievable radio. The Program Director for that radio station, she’s not only, I think, the youngest Program Director in Toronto ever, I think she’s the best Program Director in Toronto ever. Her name is Julie Adam. Smart, smart lady. I worked for her at CISS Country as well. So that was a real fun thing to be involved with and certainly the biggest promotion I’ve ever been involved with.
JV: Back to the hundreds of artist songs you mixed back at CISS Country; did that experience influence the kind of imaging you do today in any way?
Chris: It’s hard to say if that was sort of the catalyst for anything I do now or not. Certainly, I love to do those song jingle things that I sent for the RAP CD. We certainly weren’t the first people to do them. We originally had bought the package from Z‑100. We had four of them produced for us, and I remember at the time I had said that I wanted the a cappellas to all the jingles. The full mixes they produced were good, but they just didn’t quite get to where I thought they would go. And I remember I had written out four pages of instructions of what I had hoped for for these particular songs. And so when I got them back I remember calling up Jam Productions and saying, “I really wanted the a cappellas, all of them, so that I could work on some of these myself,” because otherwise it just felt like an awful lot of money to spend for what we were going to end up getting. So they sent me the a cappellas, and I just started to play with them. I love doing that. I love sitting down with my little Mickey Mouse piano keyboard, which has the notes written right on it. I’m somewhat musically inclined; I took drums and bells for years, but really I can’t play a song on a piano if you paid me to. But with my Casio keyboard I can figure out the notes of the beginning of a song and then start to build the a cappellas on top of that, lay in maybe an artist saying our calls or saying something nice about the radio station or maybe take a little chunk of the chorus of the song and lay it in as part of the intro, sort of mixed together with these a cappellas and do something sort of fun and interesting. That might be one of the few places that I think some of that recorded music stuff has influenced what I do. I really love working with promos from a sort of musical angle. Sometimes it’s possible, sometimes you don’t have enough time or it doesn’t work, or sometimes I’m guilty of forcing stuff into promos or even into 30-second splitters that really is more about me than the radio station. Sometimes I need to stand back and listen to it again a day or two later and go, “You know what, it’s too much.” You've got to pull it back. It’s not right for the radio station.
JV: You have a large department to manage. How much time do you actually spend working in the studio?
Chris: Forty percent of my day is probably administrative. Sixty percent of my day I spend producing. That other 40% is spent dealing with clients, reps, PDs, GMs or distributing the 500+ pieces of work that come into my department each week to the other producers. And if not for these other guys, who are all so good at what they do, and so competent, I would never have time to do anything except for administrate. But these guys have all been doing this a long time, and I couldn’t have a better bunch of guys to work with.
JV: What advice would you offer to Program Directors who want to get more quality creative product from their imagers and their producers?
Chris: I think there are two things you need to accomplish great imaging. One is you have to find somebody who’s just got that imaging bug, and somebody with great ideas. I can listen to 50 demo tapes, and I’m going to know the one guy who’s going to be great at imaging. And it’s not because his is going to be the slickest or the most polished necessarily, but I’m going to hear ideas with sparkle in it. You need to hire that guy, and then you need to give him time to do it well. And you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the feeling that, stateside in particular, imaging guys have so much stuff to do, sometimes including commercial production, that they rarely get to spend enough time on promos. As it is, I spend probably 9 or 10 hours a day working here, and it’s because I need to. If I’ve got a project, and I think it’s got the potential to be great, I’m going to spend 4 hours on it, and sometimes that’s Friday night until 10:00. You just have to give what the project requires. A great director said once that films are never completed; they’re abandoned, because you run out of time or money or both. It’s the same thing in production. And to me, 50% or more of the genius in production is time. If you’ve got the time to spend on it, I think most good producers could do great work. Those are the two things.
As for a producer like me, all I do pretty much is imaging when I am producing. And you hope for the stars to line up. Everything I do is okay, or decent. Regularly I guess, they’re pretty good. And sometimes all the stars line up, and it’s great. And that happens once in a while, when you’re working on something and you just know everything is working the way you need it to. The writing is great, the voice did a great job and brought something to the table, and the production is coming together as good as you could have hoped for. You need all three of those things to happen in order to have a great piece of production. And if you’re having one of those lucky days, those are the days I live for.