The Creationists

As a member of the Canadian rock trio Triumph, Rik Emmett has sold millions of records and toured the world performing for millions more. Since leaving Triumph in 1988, Rik has enjoyed a successful solo recording career and, until recently, spent two decades as a faculty member at Humber College in his hometown of Toronto where he taught Songwriting, Music Business, Creative Development and Directed Studies. Writing has always been a part of Rik's life whether as a songwriter or as a regular contributor to Guitar Player Magazine. In 2001 he self published Bric-A-Brac, a book of short stories, poems and unreleased lyrics but now he has taken a unique approach to writing a memoir as a book of poetry called Reinvention.

How did his music get to one billion streams?
Why is he not interested in signing with a record label?
Why won't he show his face in photographs?

People are motivated to create for many different reasons. For some, it’s merely self-satisfaction and an escape from the rest of the world. Some people use creativity as a way to find new solutions. As a teenager, Florida based rapper and producer Josh A turned to creativity as an outlet to escape the harsh realities of a troubled home life. With it, he found the kind of success that he hoped would take away the pain he felt inside, but he discovered that success wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

If you been listening to The Creationists for a while, you know that I like to ask my guests about the inspiration for their creations. Sometimes it's a lightning bolt of imagination that gets a creation started, but sometimes it comes out of the tedium of a slow work day.  

Not much in life beats the combination of music and food and both have been passions at the centre of Roger Mooking’s life. 

I first met Roger Mooking when he was a member of Bass is Bass and I worked at Warner Music Canada. Bass is Base was the hot independent hip hop group at the time and were being courted by all of the major labels. We didn’t sign the band but they did go on to enjoy a successful run of records before eventually splitting up with each member of the trio following alternative paths. I eventually worked on a solo music project with Roger but by then he had already become a star as a celebrity chef on the Food Network. The two of us sat down for a conversation about his career and the intersection of food and music in his life and we started at the beginning. 

Imagine if you worked with a team for several years on creating a thing and then that thing couldn’t even be tested properly until almost a year after it was completed.  And now, imagine that you can’t even see if your creation works in real time because it’s on another freakin planet! Well, that is exactly the experience of my guest Taryn Bailey, a mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California.  Taryn is a part of the team that built Ingenuity, the helicopter that proved that controlled flight on another planet is possible.

Up until now, I’ve interviewed a variety of guests about their creative process and the road they travelled to get to where they are.  As a change of pace, I thought that it would be interesting to explore our brain’s relationship to creativity.

In their book The Runaway Species, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt explore what makes human creativity unique among the animals of earth and how our greatest creators always borrow from the past to move creation forward.

I’ve been a music fan for most of my life but I didn’t really get into rock music until the mid seventies and the seventies were a great time to be a rock fan.  You not only had your favourite bands but you also had your favourite magazine and there were so many to choose from. There was Circus and Creem and Hit Parader and Rock Scene and Rolling Stone, of course. And, if you were a little more intellectual, you might read Crawdaddy or find an article in Mother Jones or even spend a little extra money on something from the UK like the NME. And, as you read each article, you got to know and become a fan of writers like Sylvie Simmons, David Fricke, Lisa Robinson and, of course, the late, great Lester Bangs.  These were the names of the people that turned us onto the music that became indelible in our lives.

In part two of my interview with Ira Robbins, we talk about the creation of his latest book, Marc Bolan Killed In Crash.

Honey Jam began its life as a concert to celebrate the launch of a magazine issue. Now, 25 years later, Honey Jam provides opportunities for female artists to get invaluable access to mentors and performance coaches, as well as the chance to showcase their talents for industry insiders. In the beginning, though, there was no way that Ebonnie Rowe could have dreamed that Honey Jam would still be around a quarter of a century later.

Wide Mouth Mason singer and guitarist Shaun Verreault has long been recognized as one of Canada’s finest blues rock guitarists. His long spidery fingers allow him to play incredible fiery riffs with casual ease.  The exploration of the guitar’s possibilities has been his lifelong pursuit but even his closest friends weren’t prepared for Shaun putting aside everything he knew about playing guitar and covering his fingers with metal tubes.

When Steve Jordan first introduced the concept of the Polaris Prize to the Canadian music industry, the idea was generally welcomed, though the artistic community was still a little sceptical going into the first show in 2006. Despite the scepticism, the Polaris Music Prize has flourished into and internationally recognized award.

When Shauna de Cartier wanted to start Six Shooter Records, she found that it was going to be difficult to secure funding from outside sources. She didn’t have the track record to secure government grants and banks weren’t interested in lending her the money. And, when she approached the major labels, she found very little interest there too. So she had to find another way to get her artists in the studio and her label off the ground.

In 2002 Darryl Hurs created Indie Week Canada, which has since become an annual event held each Fall in Toronto filled with music showcases by and a conference for independent artists. In the years since its inception Darryl has also helped mount similar events internationally. When Indie Week was first established though, Darryl needed to be able to articulate to sponsors what set his event apart from other similar conferences.

My interview with Darryl took place while this year's conference was still in the planning phase. By almost any measure, the event was a huge success.  The final count had over 1000 participants from 40 countries who were able to network and attend seminars featuring a wide range of industry experts and special guests. 

Over the past 40 years, Ron Mann has produced and directed a dozen films focused on Canadian and American culture. His wide ranging subjects include comic books, jazz, beat poets, the war on marijuana, environmental activism and film director Robert Altman.  In 2018 he turned the camera lens on Carmine Street Guitars, Rick Kelly’s cramped music shop  in Greenwich Village. The result is a critically acclaimed film that documents a week in the life of the store and the characters that walk in and out the front door including long time customers and some brand new strangers. 

Rick Kelly has been building and selling guitars out of his current location on Carmine Street since 1990.  What makes Rick and Carmine Street Guitars so compelling is Rick’s search throughout New York City for reclaimed wood from the Big Apple’s historical buildings which he then turns into custom instruments. The film doesn’t smash you over the head with a lot of action but is, instead, sort of like a sweet lullaby.  As a film buff I was curious as to how Ron approaches the task of making a documentary and as a guitar nerd I wanted to ask him about how he came to discover Carmine Street Guitars. 

Prince fans will instantly recognize the name Susan Rogers.  She is the stalwart engineer that worked beside Prince during the commercial peak of his career from Purple Rain through to Sign O’ The Times. 

Rush's Geddy Lee called Gordon Lightfoot a timeless songwriter. Robbie Robertson of The band calls Gordon Canada’s national treasure. His longtime friend, Bob Dylan, inducted Lightfoot into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame calling him one of his favourite songwriters and has often been quoted saying that when he hears a Gordon Lightfoot song, he wishes it would go on forever.

Early Morning Rain, The Canadian Railroad Trilogy, Carefree Highway, Sundown, If You Could Read My Mind, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  The list goes on and on and on.  Gordon Lightfoot is Canada's greatest songwriter. Period. His professional career began over 6o years ago and he's influenced countless popular artists over the years and he’s still at it.  In 2020 he released Solo, his twenty-first album and he’s hoping to get back out on tour as soon as the COVID pandemic is taken care of. I reached Gordon over the phone to see if I could get some insight into his songwriting process and given how long he’s been at it, I thought that the most obvious first question was "Is songwriting still fun for you?"

Gordon Lightfoot: Yeah, you know, it’s fun if you see that it's going somewhere that you like.  Then you think about ‘how would this go over in a crowd.’ And so, you think about that for a while and if it seems like it might have a chance that it might bite, you go ahead and finish it.  And some of it you don’t finish. But you’ve got to at least know that they’re going to like it.  That they’re going to be able to make sense out of it. And even then you’ll only use one or two songs off an album. You get the best ones.  The ones that have the best forward momentum. 

Pretty much anyone who’s ever had a conversation with me about my favourite bands knows that my Mount Rushmore of seventies rock are KISS, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick and Starz. So imagine my surprise when I discovered a new book called They Just Seem A Little Weird that discusses the influence these four bands have had on rock and roll. I mean KISS, Aerosmith and Cheap Trick, okay, but I didn’t think that anyone who wrote about seventies rock would have included Starz. 

I don’t know about you, but I love reading books about music, it’s influence on popular culture and the bands that changed our lives.  As a former editor of Spin Magazine, I would have thought that Doug Brod would be an unlikely candidate to write a book arguing on behalf of bands like these.  Of course I soon found out how wrong I was to make that presumption. 

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Steve Waxman:  How did this whole idea of writing about these four bands begin for you? 

Some of the artwork discussed in this episode can be seen on The Creationists Podcast on Facebook and Instagram.  

Hugh Syme is easily Canada’s most successful and recognizable album cover designer.  If, for some reason, you don’t know the name, you will definitely know the work he’s created for some of the world’s biggest artists including The Band, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Earth, Wind and Fire and Celine Dion, to name just a few.

Over the course of a career that has now spanned 45 years, Hugh has been nominated for 19 JUNO Awards (winning 4) and much of his work has been featured in volumes of coffee table books that highlight many of the world’s best album covers. But, it’s his relationship with Canadian rockers Rush that solidified Hugh’s reputation.  He has designed every Rush album cover since 1975’s Caress of Steel.  Hugh and I spent some time going over many of his career highlights and we began at the beginning…

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Steve Waxman: How did your relationship with Rush begin?

Hugh Syme: I was in a band on the same label and with the same management as Rush and Max Webster and the Larry Gowan project was on at the same time, I think. And, I was doing covers for Max and Ian Thomas, my band, and I was called into the principal's office.  Ray Daniels was the manager and he called me in and asked me if I’d like to do a Rush cover.  And I remember distinctly thinking ‘Well, they’re not Genesis or King Crimson or anything but, yeah, why not. I’ll give them a shot,’ not realizing that 42 years later Neil Peart would coin the phrase “serving a life sentence” which became the subtitle of my eventual book called The Art of Rush. It was some kind of unwitting commitment that turned into a beautiful friendship and musical friendship, artistic collaboration and a lengthy, loyal alliance. 

Photos and video of the project discussed in this episode can be found at The Creationists podcast on Facebook and Instagram.

When Canadian-born-San Francisco-based Gisela Schmoll shifted career paths from industrial design to architecture she knew that there would be challenges but she never anticipated that finding a contractor to bring her unique designs to life would be one of them.

Do you remember the Palm Pilot? That often copied piece of tech was designed at Gisela’s drafting table. After several years as a junior designer she shifted lanes and started studying architecture and has been building a strong portfolio and reputation ever since.  For the past few years she’s been working with home owner Ed Stellar to design an L-shaped home that incorporates the landscape of his property in the California Hills.

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Steve Waxman: Alright,  I want to start with talking about the Stellar house by asking what was the brief that you got from the client to start this whole process?

Gisela Schmoll: Basically, I got a list of spaces that he wanted. And then we also discussed the relationships of all the spaces to each other and how he planned to use the house. This client was pretty green. He didn't really understand architecture at all. So I had to, I had to kind of tease things out of him.

You know, the things that were most important to him. One of the other things he talked about is capitalizing on the view, cause it's perched up on a little hill and it has a fantastic view. So he wanted views from every single room in the house. And he also wanted to be able to go outside from every single room of this house.

But essentially that was the brief.

One of the things I wanted to explore in this series of interviews was how to create a TEDx Talk.  Coincidently, one day I got an email pitch from Greg Hemmings, a filmmaker in Saint John New Brunswick. As I researched Greg I discovered that not only does he weave social consciousness into his work but he’s also created not one, but three TEDx Talks.

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Greg Hemmings: It’s interesting because I never thought that I would become a public speaker.  You know, that’s just not something you grow up thinking that you’re going to do. But, as I was growing my business, Hemmings House PIctures, we started producing a lot of interesting documentaries that had a lot of social impact baked in to them. And, when you’re doing filmmaking that has some kind of impact on the community there’s a good chance that the community is going to pay attention and the media might cover you in a little different light. And I started to see a trend of the more interesting things we put out that had a positive impact on the community, the more attention we were given. It turned into one of those things where universities and community colleges would call me and ask me to speak to the classes about storytelling. And that gave me a good bit of confidence about, well, I see all of these other entrepreneurs doing TED Talks and sharing stages at large conferences and as long as I’m speaking about something I know and am passionate about I have no fear of getting on stage. As you know, I’m a musician and have spent many hours on stage playing music in front of people so there’s no issue there. But, after a couple of years of saying “yes” to whatever came my way, I started putting my eyes on the TEDx scene because I’m a huge fan of TED. And you realize that TEDx is a theater into the large TED Conference and most local communities have a TEDx experience.  So, when the University of New Brunswick had a TEDx I immediately jumped up and said ‘Hey, if you guys are ever looking for speakers I’d love to participate.  And they asked me to come do a little bit of a try-out and right after that they said ‘Yes, let’s do it.’ Since then I’ve done three TEDx’s as well as all of the public speaking I’ve had the privilege of doing at conferences and workshops.

Photos and other content related to this episode can be seen on The Creationists podcast on Facebook and Instagram.

Are you one of those people who have fantasized about changing the course of your life? Of taking control and spending each day doing the one thing that you love the most? If so, then this is the episode for you. Pauline Loctin was a computer programmer in Montreal building and maintaining websites for musicians when she decided to learn the art of paper folding. And now, as Miss Cloudy, Pauline’s work can be found in art galleries and as installations in hotels and shopping malls.

When I say folded paper, you probably think origami. But Pauline’s art is much different from the folded paper animals we might normally associate with origami. So, naturally I started by asking “what’s the difference?

Pauline Loctin: First, I will say that there is no difference because what I do is origami but people think that origami is something that is very precise like animals.  Most of the time when I say I do origami, people don’t understand that it can be that but origami is a very large artform and there are a lot of different kinds of origami. It’s not just the animals.  You can do so much different stuff with folding paper.  It’s a large practice in Japan.  What I do is tessellation.  You learn how to repeat a pattern.  So the pattern is folding paper.  So it’s a technique of repetition out of paper.

Steve Waxman:  How did you learn this?

Pauline Loctin: I read and book and then after that, I just practiced.  So, I really taught myself how to do it. It was a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing.  So, it was all about that.

Steve Waxman: When did this start?

When I first reached out to Toronto based artist Alice Zilberberg, I thought that this would be a conversation about photography. I soon learned that what Alice does is so much more.

The list of awards Alice Zilberberg has received for her artwork is remarkable for someone so young. She most recently received first place in the International Photography Awards for her surreal portraits of wild animals in the series she calls "Meditations." One of the stars of the series and the place I wanted to start our conversation is a striking portrait of a bison. What I discovered is that Alice is not merely a photographer and a bison is not a buffalo.

Alice Zilberberg:  I just started out with going to different zoos and seeing which animals I liked. Just the ones that kinda worked out were the ones that first made it into the series. But I always kind of have a vision of what it's going to look like even though that changes sometimes a lot throughout the process. So, I just really like the bison. It's a bison. Actually, it's technically, so you could say buffalo.

Steve Waxman: I call turtles and tortoises the same things. I'm one of those cruel people.

Alice Zilberberg: It's not just you, it's everyone. They mix up the animals in the technical term. Secondly, the North American bison is nicknamed a buffalo, but it's more technical term is bison.

Thanks to his massively popular CBC program, Under The Influence, Terry O’Reilly has become one of Canada's most recognizable ad men. He has been a director and copywriter and has run his own multi award-winning agency as well as having written the books The Age of Persuasion and This I Know. And, his Under The Influence podcast has over 30 million downloads. What I’m trying to tell you is that when it comes to advertising, Terry O’Reilly knows what he’s talking about.

The Creationists is a podcast about creativity wherever it might be found.  Advertisements are one of the most visible forms of creativity in our everyday lives. So, I reached out to Terry to take us through the creative process of developing an ad campaign. We started with one of the most successful of his career, the campaign that helped the NHL’s Hockey Hall of Fame launch their interactive games exhibit.

Steve Waxman: What is the biggest mistake clients make when they come in to talk to an agency?

Terry O’Reilly: Well, that’s a very multi-layered question. I think not handing the agency and real strategic material to work with. It all begins and ends with whatever the product or service is that is being advertised and not handing the agency anything interesting to work with.  But I think the bigger sin is really not wanting creativity. Not wanting bold ideas. And expressing that in the meeting.  The best clients I ever had were the ones that said “Give me a big idea. Make my palms sweat.”  And those were the clients, in fact, that we did that with. We came back with big ideas.  They recognized them.  They approved them.  The bad clients think that creativity is quirky and wonky and that creativity gets in the way of the message. These are the clients that think that all you have to do is clearly state your proposition, put it in a commercial, put it out there, people will absorb it and run out to buy something. Which never happens.

Creative people make the assumption that no one listens to advertising. If you make that your starting point then you’ll make something interesting because creativity gets a foot in the door. And if someone is enamoured with the creativity of a commercial they might be willing to sit through that commercial and then we can get to the selling proposition. So creativity is amplification. Without creativity, it’s like giving a speech to a stadium without a microphone. Only the first couple of rows will hear you.  But, if you add creativity to the message, it’s like being amplified throughout the entire stadium and you have a much greater chance of getting most of that audience to listen to you.

Steve Waxman: So then, what is the biggest mistake agencies make?

For close to 40 years, Toronto’s Now Magazine has been one of North America's preeminent and successful cultural guides. But it  wasn't always that way. 18 months after launching Now Magazine was struggling and founders Michael Hollett and Alice Klein were hoping to find new investors to keep the doors open. One of the potential investors was City TV’s Moses Znaimer who pulled Michael aside one night at a party and said that he might be happier if you didn't accept a second round of money from investors.

Of all the people that I've interviewed so far, Michael Hollett is the one person most likely born into his profession. So, it only made sense to begin our conversation talking about his family's background in publishing.

Michael Hollett: I've been thinking about this stuff lately because it's a reflective time. And the first Christmas present I ever got was a Toronto Star metal delivery truck - a shipping truck.The first Christmas party I ever went to was at the Toronto Press Club.  My grandfather was an editor at the Telegram. And my father was a writer, photographer and cartoonist at the Star. My mother freelanced at all of those papers and Maclean's. And my grandmother, my mother's mother, was also a freelancer. My parents met at a newspaper in Hamilton. And when I go to the Exhibition, I don't know if you know this but there's a building, a beautiful building to me called the Press Building. And my grandfather, conflict rules were a little different back then, also did P.R. for the Ex in the summers. I would visit him in the Press Building and there was a little balcony and I would stand there with him looking out over the Ex thinking this newspaper business is all right.

Steve Waxman: (laughing) So, were you conceived on a stack of Toronto Stars?

In 2017, the McMichael Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario debuted a unique exhibition.  Known as the home of Canada’s renown Group of Seven paintings, the McMichael gallery hosted the first showing of The Group of Seven Guitar project featuring seven early Canadian guitar builders paying tribute to the original Group of Seven painters.  The project was originally conceived and initiated by Linda Manzer who was featured in an earlier episode of The Creationists.  

Welcome to the Creationist, a podcast about people who create.

I think it's safe to say that we've all had a tendency to ignore the public art that is all around us in our daily lives. But as soon as we travel, our social feeds become cluttered with selfies in front of works of art that locals in that town otherwise ignore themselves. Glass artist David Pearl has been creating stunning works of art that have been incorporated into architecture and landscapes for several decades. David's artwork is affected by the environment, much like nature itself. 

You know that old saying that we all have a book inside of us?  Well, it turns out that hockey historian Kevin Shea has has seventeen books inside of him with two more on the way. In episode 3 of The Creationists podcast, Kevin reveals how a story about Bozo the Clown helped to turn his passion for hockey into an unexpected second career as an author.

In 1999, Kevin Shea was a die-hard Toronto Maple Leaf fan who turned an unusual Christmas gift into his first book deal.  In this episode of The Creationists, Kevin discusses the process of piecing together his research and interviews with authoritative voices to tell compelling stories about the characters that laid the foundation for the history of hockey and how he got Wayne Gretzky to write the forward to his first book?

Episode 2 of The Creationists podcast features an interview with world-renown golf course architect and restoration specialist Ian Andrew.  In this episode, Ian discusses the process of designing a golf course and how it incorporates fine art, strategic planning and environmental considerations.  Ian has long been an authoritative voice in the golf industry whose opinions have been deemed controversial from time to time and here he talks about why so many modern golf courses are disappointing.

Ian Andrew began working as a golf course architect in 1989.  In the early 1990's he became frustrated by the number of historically important courses being modernized.  He began to promote the idea of preservation and eventually the need for restoration of some of the most historically important courses in Canada.  The project that would change his career was the restoration of Stanley Thompson's masterpiece St. George's Golf & Country Club in Toronto, long considered one of the finest golf courses in the world.  It was so well received that it would lead to a series of significant restorations in Canada and the United States.  Ian was also a member of the team that built the golf course used in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.  In this episode of The Creationists, Ian reveals which golf course in the world he wishes he had designed.