Ed Torres chuckles whenever someone tells him they don’t like blues music.
He hands them the proposed playlist for his company’s six planned FM blues stations across Canada and points out that, among familiar names like B.B. King and Buddy Guy, the list also includes early Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, George Thorogood, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac and ZZ Top – it’s almost endless.
“We showed the list to one of the CRTC folks out here and her reaction was, ‘Wow, I never realized I was such a blues fan,’ ” says Torres who, along with his brother and partner Frank, is trying to make Edmonton one of those blues radio homes.
It’s been a constant refrain since the Torres brothers, owners of the Skywords aerial radio traffic service, started their quest to give blues a mainstream chance last year. Both were casual fans and Ed Torres realized it was ever-present in pop culture commodities, like car commercials and film scores, from Nick Lachey hawking body spray with Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s Gangster of Love, to Torontonian Paul Reddick’s I’m a Criminal selling Coca-Cola, to Chrysler using Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Pride and Joy to move cars.
He did a little research and found hundreds of thousands of hardcore blues fans perpetuating a festival circuit worth millions of dollars. And he realized the last five live acts he’d seen were all blues acts. Then he wondered why he never heard it over the radio.
“So we sat down with a bunch of radio consultants who have years of experience. And normally in a situation like that, they’d come back and tell you what was commercially viable, and that’s the format you’d go with. But we looked at what they were suggesting and that was all out there already,” Torres explains.
Torres had a hunch about blues; the consultants disagreed, theorizing there must be an economic reason why the blues isn’t sold as mainstream music. So the company surveyed radio listeners across the country.
The result?
Blues was the No. 1 choice for adults in both Vancouver and Edmonton, and was either second or third in every other market.
“When we put our format together, the research showed it would get strong support and so we did some ground level work, going to bars and contacting blues societies. And we quickly realized that, in terms of its fan base, blues is extremely popular music, with a dedicated society in just about every part of the country. And for every other type of music act, there were five or 10 blues bands in every city,” says Torres.
Within weeks of the initial application, relatively high-profile Canadian artists like JW-Jones and Jack De Keyser were offering their help at the hearings.
Torres had stumbled across something blues fans had known for years: The genre was shut out of the market because it is eclectic, because it stemmed from years of racism and the days of Jim Crow and because, unlike much of the mass-produced pop available, it was harder to package.
In addition, blues acts were usually locally distributed on 45 rpm records in urban America for years – with no national distribution connections required to make the big time – and it was relegated to smoky back rooms and the festival scene.
“Radio has become very formulaic and that’s a label that is very difficult to attach to blues. With no commercial radio support, it can’t get distribution and it becomes a vicious circle holding it back,” Torres notes. “The second problem is this public perception among people who frankly just don’t know any better than blues is an old guy wailing on a broken instrument about his dog, when, in fact, it can be very uplifting. Yes, it can be melancholy, but it can also be rocking.”
And it’s a viable business opportunity. For years, CBC’s Saturday Night Blues show – hosted by Edmonton’s Holger Petersen – has either won or come in the top three for its time slot across Canada, regularly beating much more commercial stations playing rock, pop and rap.
Other station applicants have taken notice of Torres’s research and most have since added a portion of blues to their application.
Now, he admits, he’s “feeling the weight of expectations. We’ve had so many blues fans come out to support this that we don’t want to let them down. We didn’t get into this to correct a historic wrong, we did it to grow our business. But it would be nice if that’s what happened.”
The application for 107.3 DAWG FM will begin hearings with the CRTC on May 27 and if all goes ahead, Edmonton could have its first all-blues station by the end of the year.
For more information on the proposed station, visit www.bluesincanada.com
