Posts with the Ritchie Yorke tag

Barris Beat

How do I get to Yorkville? Practise!

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment

Friday afternoons in the mid-1960s had a special rhythm for me. While most of my high-school pals gathered in the corridors to plot their party plans for the weekend, I left class early to catch the Sheppard Avenue bus west from Agincourt. With my trumpet case in hand, about 5 o’clock I caught the southbound Yonge Street bus, then the subway from Eglinton to Bloor. And then I walked west on Yorkville Avenue into what everybody called “the Village.” There, just before Avenue Road, I climbed up a back-alley fire-scape staircase to a third-floor rehearsal studio.

“Hi, Donny,” I’d call out to my trumpet teacher Don Johnson.

“Come on in and warm up that horn,” he’d tell me.

It took me a few visits in 1965 to discover I had climbed to the top of a Yorkville landmark, and an even more important music mecca. (more…)

Barris Beat

Charting the sound of Canadian content

Written by Ted Barris on . 1 Comment
CHUM Chart from July 1963.

It was a Friday afternoon ritual. In the mid-1960s, when everybody’s definition of “hip” was knowing which rock ’n’ roll songs were the best in the land, we all raced downtown after school. We disembarked from the relatively new Yonge Street subway line at St. Clair and ran a block south to the window adjacent the front door at 1050 CHUM Radio. There, we each grabbed our own personal copy of CHUM’s Weekly Hit Parade.

“Who’s tops on the CHUM Chart this week?” was the first question blurted out. “The Beatles? Leslie Gore? Bobby Vinton? Jan and Dean?” (more…)

Barris Beat

Creating for nothing. Not!

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Magazine publisher Ritchie Yorke, left, hobnobbed with the biggest rock stars, including John Lennon of the Beatles. He wasn’t nearly as friendly with his writer-contributors.

I’m often asked what it’s like being a freelancer – someone who creates often without knowing whether the work will ever be published. Suffice to say, it’s a speculative jungle out there. I know. As a newspaper and magazine writer for some 40 years, I’ve been eaten alive whole more than a few times. A bit of background:

In the late 1960s, I enrolled at Ryerson (before it was a university) in the Radio and Television Arts program. While working towards my diploma (1968-1971) I craved a taste of the real writing world, so I began submitting ideas for features to magazines and newspapers.

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