Video Killed the Radio Star
By Glen Lamont
So, a while back, I had the amazing opportunity to join some of Vancouver’s radio Royalty for a long overdue reunion of The LG Morning Zoo, of which I was lucky enough to have been a small part of, way back in 1986. At the time, Scott Shannon had brought a whole new sound to morning radio with the launch of the Z100 Morning Zoo at WHTZ out of Secaucus, New Jersey. Meanwhile up in Vancouver, BC, another radio legend, the late, great, Gary Russell, decided to adopt the format at LG73 just down the hall from The World Famous CFOX at the infamous 1006 Richards St. He convinced Dean Hill, who had just recently returned from traveling around Southeast Asia, to take the wheel as Zookeeper and proceeded to recruit Stu McCallister, Merv Conolly, Samantha (Kathy Hill who later married Dean) and myself, who at the time, was a young stand-up comic, as a writer for the show. For the next 3 years I got to be a part of what would become a piece of Vancouver Radio history and a recipient of the 1988 ACTRA award for best Morning Radio Show in Canada.
Currently Vancouver, BC is the second most expensive city in Canada with the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment being roughly $2600 dollars a month and the average cost of a detached house is $1,801,300. It has become a playground for the wealthy and has one of the worst homelessness problems in North America. We are one of the easiest places in the world to launder money and we are known internationally as the “Vancouver Model” for money laundering. However, the Vancouver I knew in 1986 was a far different place. The area around 1006 Richards Street, reminded me of a Raymond Chandler novel. It was, for lack of a better word, gritty. At the bottom of Nelson Street was a great café that we all used to eat at, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. We just used to affectionately refer to it as the Green Slime, but it wasn’t anything to do with the food, the food was great. They also let us run a tab.
Heading west from the radio station up Nelson Street you would hit, Seymour Billiards (I lost many a game there to some of Vancouver’s best hustlers) and then the Nelson Place Hotel, which was home to a very questionable establishment known as Champagne Charlie’s, down in the basement. Champagne Charlies was also my unofficial office. What I mean by that is if you could not find me at 1006 Richards St., then I was most likely shooting pool at Champagne Charlies. The cast of characters downstairs in the Nelson Place Hotel were just as eccentric as the characters on the Morning Zoo, only they were real. There was “One eyed Bob” the DJ, Avner the jeweler, who was a dead ringer for Phineas Freak, Louise the waitress, who was our version of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi and other assorted riff faff that populated the dark recesses of that subterranean tavern that occupied the corner of Nelson and Granville.
The south end of Granville Street, just before you hit the bridge was not much different then, than it is now. One of the few remaining establishments that we used to frequent, is The Penthouse Cabaret. The Penthouse is a piece of Vancouver history and has been around since 1947. Originally, the Eagle Time Athletic Boxing Club, it later became one the city’s most iconic speakeasys run by Vancouver’s original gangsters, Joe and his brothers, Jimmy, Ross and Mickey, the Fillipone brothers. Over the years it has hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Louis Armstrong. While other great entertainment venues such as The Cave, The Starfish Room and Pantages, became the victim of developers and gentrification, The Penthouse somehow managed to survive. I consider myself fortunate enough to have worked for Joe Fillipone for a week as an MC in the main showroom downstairs. Although at the time, I did not consider myself all that lucky. Gone were the days when big names like Harry Belafonte or Gary Cooper would drop by, by the time I was performing there, the audience was made up of Johns, the working girls and various street level criminals who were less than enamoured with me trying to make them laugh while they were waiting to see women take their clothes off. Not my finest hour as a comic but Joe was a pretty nice man who treated me well. The Penthouse is now included in a couple of different Vancouver walking tours and has been the subject of books and documentaries and is probably most famous for Joe’s murder.
In September 1983, Joe was murdered at the Penthouse, following a bungled robbery. The killer had been falsely told that Fillipone had $1 million in his Penthouse safe. He made away with less than $1,300 and was later caught and convicted of first-degree murder. Filipponi’s funeral was attended by close to 800, including business owners, Supreme Court justices and exotic dancers.
The Penthouse remains owned by the Fillipone family today, one of the longest running family businesses in the city, and is managed by Joe’s nephew, Danny Fillipone.
The Vancouver of the 1980’s was a pretty great place. It still was still a big city with a small-town attitude and there was only about six degrees of separation between you and anyone you knew. There was corruption everywhere you looked, Hells Angels ran the strip joints and the docks, the Police Department was so crooked they made Donald Trump look like an honest man and there wasn’t a Starbuck’s in site.
Radio was also different. I was coming onto the scene at the tail end of some serious madness. I am speaking of the days when certain morning show hosts would come into the studio with a case of beer and a gram of coke and proceed to pontificate for the next four hours to an audience of commuters who still listened to the AM band. Announcers were still called DJ’s and the overnight show was still live.
I spent my teen years listening to guys like Racoon Carney, Doc Harris, Daryl B and Russ Mcleod and not in a million years did I ever think that I would wander the hallowed halls of 1006 Richards Street and rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in radio at that time. My buddy, Barry Kennedy had been doing some writing and some on air bits with the Zoo crew and I ran into him at Punchlines comedy club in Gastown one night and he told me to give this guy Dean Hill a call as they were looking for writers. Barry was off on tour shortly and didn’t want to leave them high and dry. I was also a road comic and didn’t particularly want to be tied down either. I made the call and the next thing I knew I was a part of what would become the most popular morning drive show in the city.
Now let me be the first to say that the 80’s was, one of the worst decades for music known to man. We had just emerged from two decades that gave us rock super groups, blues icons, punk, reggae, ska and the list goes on. Yes, I am aware that disco also came from that time but hey, nobody’s perfect. Now, we find ourselves in the era of the “Pop Star”. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Tiffany. It was the “me” decade and the focus was on the individual artist rather than the band. I lost track of the number of times I had to suffer through Karma Chameleon at 06:10 in the morning with a bad hang over. George Michael, The Eurythmics and Rick Astley, all tormented me Monday to Friday from 6 to 9. This was also the decade that gave us MTV and up here in Canada, Much Music.
The LG morning Zoo made me a comedy writer. Specifically, Dean Hill, who was the host and as we referred to him the Zookeeper. He pushed me and cajoled me and there were days when I hated him for it but, in the end, I churned out a lot of comedy in those three years and I developed discipline and structure as a writer. Our Program Director, Gary Russel once said to me, “enjoy it while it lasts because these are the good old days, right now.” He was right. The LG Morning Zoo was pretty much the pinnacle of my radio career.
Much of what I learned in my time with the Zoo would influence a lot of what I did in comedy after that. Also, the people I met during that era were enormous influences on me. Everything from what I read to what I listened to. Les wiseman, who at the time was writer and editor with Vancouver Magazine and who also contributed to a host of periodicals, introduced me to Hunter S. Thompson. We were having beers at the Austin Hotel one weekday afternoon, and he asked me for the time, which I couldn’t provide as I didn’t wear a watch. Les says, “wow you really took that whole Easy Rider watch scene seriously”. I laughed and then we got onto the topic of bikes and bikers and the next thing you know; Les is hopping across the street to a used bookstore on Granville Street and comes back with a copy of Hunter S. Thomspon’s “Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. I read that book and my mind was blown. The fact that someone could write like that was astounding. I devoured everything he wrote and after that, discovered Richard Brautigan, Jack Kerouac, and Charlies Bukowski.
When Expo 86 came to the city, I got a press pass, got drunk on a regular basis at the beer garden at the German pavilion and rode the roller coaster. What I didn’t realize at the time of my young existence was that Expo was going to change Vancouver forever. They sold Vancouver as the place to be. They invited the world, and the world showed up and stayed. They kicked everybody out of the SRO’s and raised the rents. They knocked down the old classic buildings and replaced them with unimaginative towers of glass and steel. It didn’t take long before radio changed as well. The mighty Moffat only enjoyed a few more glory years. The beginning of the end was when Moffat sold their controlling interest in the Winnipeg Jets hockey club, who moved to Arizona and then they slowly but surely sold off their radio stations to the highest bidders. I was long gone at this point, but everyone I started with were still there. Eventually everything got bought up by Bell Media, I think. Either way, radio has never been about the music. It was always about those guys and gals who spun the records and kept everyone company in the middle of the night. Those amazing performers who made your drive to work bearable in bumper-to-bumper traffic or who kept you company on the night shift.
They made us laugh and they made us feel special when they played our songs with a dedication. They inspired us and they introduced us to the soundtracks that would accompany our lives. Nothing can ever replace that.
In this day and age of music streaming services and podcasts, smartphones and AI, who listens to the radio? I do. When I get in the car, I still go up and down the dial. I don’t really care about the music (I have Spotify for that) it’s the voices, the personalities, and the hype. It’s the show and I am grateful to have once been a part of it.
