Doc's got it all in the bag...
Welcome Doc Harris to the Air-Checker studio. A radio career that expands 40 years and it looks like it's not about to slow down anytime soon. Current afternoon drive jock on Superhits CISL 650. Doc Harris is a colorful personality that creates magic on the radio each time he cracks the mic. Offbeat, he can be, ask Doc Harris he'll tell you his personality is complex just visit his website to figure out the puzzle. Vancouver listeners will know Doc from CKLG, CFMI, CKKS, CKST, CKNW, CFUN and now CISL. An actor, radio imager, national and local radio/television commercial voice over talent. Just a nice guy all around Doc Harris. I have asked Doc Harris about his journey and not to leave anything out. Air-Checker lets the jocks tell the story. This is a good one. Welcome Doc !
Airchecker: I've been listening to you on the radio ever since I can remember. I use to steal some of your bits when I was practising for my radio career. lets fire off the first question.
It's a true honor to have you on Air-Checker. You have inspired many to persue a career in radio as you are the master of what the magic of radio can be. I was so happy to hear when you were hired for drive with CISL 650. Still going strong in 2008.
Doc: It's just great. I get to play all that great music (and with Gerry's Big Fat Playlist, there's not a lot of repetition), hand out prizes of unfeasibly large size, work with a ton of great people on and off the air, and of course pretty much have a free hand to do my Krazy Kracks & Snappy Bits?.
Airchecker: Doc lets look back to the early years. Can you remember what drove you to get into broadcasting? What was it for you, that made you persue radio?
Doc: My family didn't get TV till I was about twelve, so radio was a constant companion, and back in those days, there was a certain amount of kids' programming on Vancouver radio. One of the shows was "Kiddies' Karnival" on CJOR, with Ross Mortimer. When I was about five, and attending kindergarten at the Sunset Community Centre, the show did a live-on-tape broadcast. Mr. Mortimer came by with his crew, and they set up a giant Ampex 350 tape machine. Before they started, they recorded our little squeaky voices saying hello or whatever into the big microphone hanging over us, and then played it back. Wow.
I also remember that they gave us freer Donald Duck toothbrushes to take home as a souvenir. This
is where I first learned radio = free stuff.
Having been hooked on "Kiddies' Karnival" and CJOR, it wasn't long until I discovered that the station has programming for slightly older age groups: there was a very young Red Robinson playing rock 'n' roll in the afternoon. Well, that did it. The music was exciting, and the enthusiasm of the host helped make it even more so.
Man, did I get into it! Before too long I had rigged up my own 'radio station' broadcasting to a giant speaker in the back yard, much to the annoyance of some of the neighbors. A friend of mine tipped me off that there was a really great station called KJR in Seattle, which featured a DJ called Jockey John Stone. Tuned that in. It blew me away, and started a decades-long love affair with Channel 95. (Much later I became friends with members of the staff, most notable Lan Roberts and Jerry Kaye, two of the craziest and nicest people I've ever met.) Also started making pilgrimages to 4th and
Cypress to hang out on Saturdays when Dave McCormick did his Coca-Cola Hi-Fi Club show on CFUN. By the time I was in junior high school, I was still going to that famous address after school to bug Red and get records from him. (See? Free stuff.) The coolest thing later on was that I actually got to work in the old CFUN building just before they moved, and also 1275 Burrard, from whence Red had woven his rock 'n' roll magic during the 50s.
Airchecker: You started off at CKOM Saskatoon in 1970 going by Gil Harris. Tell us about the lead up to ther first radio gig and try to let our viewers understand the beginning days of your career. We want to know everything.
Doc: My first on-air job was as the host of the Saturday Night Dance Party on CFFM-FM in Kamloops when I was 14. It was swinging', hepcats. Their idea of dance music was Lester Lanin and his Orchestra. Didn't last very long at that. Strangely, the guy who ruled that I had to go ended up many years later on the all-night show at CKLG. I never mentioned it to him, figuring that doing the all-night show was punishment enough (and I know what I'm talking about---I did enough of them).
Which takes us to the next stop, beautiful Victoria, B.C. After finishing high school there (go Oak Bay), I went on to Uvic, but got distracted by radio again, this time weaseling my way into the news department at CKDA. That wasn't exactly what I wanted to do, but hey, I was on the radio. It wasn't exactly what the News Director wanted me to do either as it turned out, so it was a lucky break that job came up at CFMS, 'DA's sister station. Those were the days when FM was considered just something that you attached to your AM operation and ran as cheaply as possible (my salary was $235 a month!). So the entire operation consisted of a room.
Through some mysterious quirk of fate, I ended up on the morning show, but somehow my sense of humor was considered inappropriate for "The Sound of the Good Life" as the station billed itself. In short order I was shown the door. But all was not lost! CKDA's program director Hart Kirch tapped me for the AM all-night show and there I remained for three years, doing a seven-hour shift six days a week.
Because a certain member of the management simply hated what I was doing, I went through the harrowing experience of being canned several times, but Hart kept finding ways to get me back. At one point I even worked as a semi-assistant Production Manager. Finally, though, I was given the boot for good.
Shortly after that, one of the guys I had worked with at the CFMS called me from his new place of employment and told me they needed a mid-day and afternoon drive guy at CJAT in Trail. Imagine my surprise when I found out that meant I would be doing both shifts.
After about five months at that, I got a call from another old acquaintance (from CKDA this time) who tipped me that CKOM, the station he was working at in Saskatoon, was looking for a morning man. I sent them a tape and they liked it.
CKOM was becoming a major player in the Saskatoon market, thanks to its amazing staff headed by George Johns, who would go on to create the legendary KVIL in Dallas and ended up owning his own radio chain eventually. Folks there included Ken Sebastian Singer, Woody Cooper, Keith Elshaw, Gary Russell and many others who went on to major things. Russell went off to CKLW to work for Paul Drew, Elshaw headed for Toronto and CKFH. Then George Johns decided he had to leave; he had gotten a job with CKSO in Sudbury. For some reason, he took me and Woody Cooper with him.
Airchecker: Walk us through the early years before coming to Vancouver. After CKOM you ended up at CKSO Sudbury, CHAM in Hamilton then CFTR - Toronto. What an amazing journey in 3 years. Don't leave anything out tell us about your experience.
Doc: Sudbury in 1970. What a town. Inco, the nickel producer, was the main industry there and ran their smelter 24/7. On misty nights I would get off the air to walk home and you could actually feel the burning as the sulphur dioxide from the slag-dumping mingled with the moisture in the air and turned to sulphuric acid. The acid rain was so bad that US astronauts had trained there because certain parts of the area were exactly like the moon. (The one they used most was called, ironically, Saint Anne of the Pines. Not a pine tree for miles. Or any kind of vegetation.) Also, there were very few places to live. I ended up in what could be generously called a tenement. When Gary Russell left CKLW, he joined us in The Nickel Capital and took the apartment below mine. One of the people I met worked at CKSO-TV and had a very good speaking voice. We needed someone to do weekends, and that's how Stirling Faux got into radio and we ended up sharing the flat. Stirling had a cat.
There was a round hole in our bathroom floor. Russell and I would play endless games of gin rummy in his kitchen, and every so often the cat would stick his head through the hole. The effect was rather startling the first time you saw it.
George Johns decided to move on again, this time to CHUM's CFRA in Ottawa. He left Russell and me in charge of programming the radio station. Big mistake. We damn near killed that puppy. Matter of fact, I don't think it ever came back to where it was before our programming genius started drilling holes in its hull. Gary and I begged George to take us on in Ottawa but instead he hired Woody Cooper. We were convinced we had to bail out. We found an ad looking for DJs from CHAM in Hamilton. We both applied. I got a job, Gary didn't.
So there I was in Hamilton, doing CHAM's afternoon drive show (very badly if airchecks are anything to go by). CHAM was a very tightly formatted Top 40 station, where you used a stopwatch on every break to hit the intro of the song on the head (timers hadn't been invented yet, kids). It was also located in a shopping mall store front. The control room was glass on three sides. At some point the air staff must have objected to being put on display like monkeys, so the company put up curtains. They didn't fit that well though, and you could see little eyeballs peeking at you though the cracks. Mucho creepy! Another dreadful feature of the station was the fact that it didn't have washroom of its own. You had to go through the mall, down a very long hallway and through a corridor to get to the men's room. This was always done accompanied by your trusty stopwatch, because that little 45 rpm record you had going back in the control room had a finite length. One morning (yes, I'd been promoted to mornings by now) I went all the way down to the john to discover that the toilet was completely blocked by the biggest turd I have ever seen in my life. I mean, it was so big it wouldn't go down the hole. Sure would have loved to see the guy who laid that! Scuttled on down to the adjacent Holiday Inn and used the can off their lobby instead, just in case you're interested. By the way, the morning newsman was Earle (the Pearl) Bradford, who would later be a major player locally at CKNW.
After about a year of being on display in the mall, I was in the office of Chuck Camroux, the station manager, who mentioned that CHFI - AM in Toronto, which had just changed its call letters to CFTR, was looking for a program director. I had kept in touch with George Johns, who was enjoying massive success in Ottawa (at one point, CFRA's weekly cume was larger than the population of the city), but becoming bored and looking for new challenges. I told Chuck he might be interested and hyped him mightily. Rogers flew him into T.O. and he had the job the same day.
Maybe as a token of thanks, George gave me two weekend shifts at CFTR while I was still doing mornings at CHAM. Both stations were owned by the same company, so there was no problem there, but it could be a bit confusing. On CHAM, I was Gil Harris, but George had decided that the next guy he hired would be called Doc Holiday. (Footnote: Russ Simpson from CKLG almost became Doc Holiday, but at the last minute I got the job and the name.) Two sets of call letters, two different names. Yet I never screwed it up. Sheer luck, you bet.
Before too long, George gave me the 6-9 PM slot on CFTR. What a lineup that station had: Mike Marshall (formerly Frank Brody from CKLW) in the mornings; Earl Mann (since gone on to do a whole lot of commercial voice overs here and in the States---that's him you hear on the ads for Famous Players movie tickets before the movie starts and as the imaging voice for Channel M locally); Sandy Hoyt who was most famous for his wrestling broadcasts on TV where his insane sense of humor several times resulkted in his nearly getting decked by the wrestlers he would interview; Chuck "The Magic Christian" from KCBQ in San Diego in afternoon drive; Stirling Faux 9 till midnight.We worked with board operators, and one of the guys who ran the board for us in the evenings was Rick Moranis---yep, the one from SCTV and Ghostbusters ----just out of school and wondering what to do for a career. Since I was stuck in a lease, for the first few months I would drive the Queen Elizabeth Way into T.O., which gave me about an hour a day to listen. Now that's inspiring. Also a bit scary. You would hear these guys with years more experience than you, and know you had to maintain the standard. ("Wow! I'm part of this!") Daunting, to say the least. But it sure kept you on your toes.
The jocks all hung out together before during and after their on-air shifts, and we were like a band of brothers.
We ran one of the best outdoor ad campaigns I've ever seen for a radio station, stolen from an ad by Todd Rundgren. It was a high contrast black-and-white photo of the jocks. The only things in color were the lit matches and sticks of dynamite the guys were holding. This was over the caption "Go Ahead. Try to Ignore Us".
The public must have noticed, because we shot right up in the BBM, giving the then-ruling CHUM conniption fits.
But then one day after a couple of years of success, George Johns (who by now was the General Manager) got an offer to go to the US and do his magic there. He accepted and left us behind. The new manager was not quite as liberal in his attitude. George's was "whatever it takes". The new guy declared "this is a business, not a club". A few days after his arrival he assembled the air staff in his office and told us "Everyone in this room, I want to stay." Within a few hours, he had fired four of us.
I managed to dodge that bullet, but I missed my buddies and really thought that the people he brought in to replace them just weren't of the same caliber. About that time my old pal Gary Russell popped up at CKLG in Vancouver. I had maintained a sort of relationship with LG program director Frank Callahan, dropping in to see him whenever I was in Vancouver to visit family, so I was already known on the premises. When CFUN started up again (changing its call letters back from CKVN), LG's afternoon drive guy, Jim Hault crossed the street, so there was an opening. I did my last shift on CFTR on Hallowe'en. The next day I started at LG on afternoon drive. Still don't know how I did that.
Airechecker: You have used several names over the years. You can share your real name if you like. Lets see there was Gil Harris, Doc Holiday ( great radio name by the way) Doc Harris, you ended up being for the majority of your career. Why Harris not the others.
Doc: I don't give out my real name. It's in the phone book. I was Gil Harris when I came back to Vancouver, but everyone who knew me from Toronto called me Doc off the air. When I switched to mornings after Roy Hennessy's departure to program LG-FM, or CFOX as it became, we felt a new persona was needed so I became Doc Harris.
Airchecker: Working in radio in 70's. Jocks were pumping out so much energy over the air. One could really take a listener on a ride. Today we have ipod's etc. What an experience to be able to go to the limits with creativity, creating new dreams for others. Every jock had there own style although friendly competition with fellow staff.
DOC: It was an individual effort to make it bigger, better, funnier and faster, but everyone had the main objective in mind: making the station itself work. And by Jiminy, the whole IS greater than the sum of the parts. At one point CKLG had a larger cume than CKNW!
Airchecker: What's your secret to show prep? Your development of the " "Rip-Off Convenience Mart," "Grandpa Miller" "Old Jokes Home and The famous " Harris Report" are legendary. Lets talk about the creations.
Doc: I did my show prep every weekday night starting at about 9:30. I kept a spiral notebook, and would fill it up with a couple pages of comedy jokes and news items I twisted after finding them in the evening paper. I'd wrap it all up by watching the 11 PM news, from which you could extract a few more odd observations. As far as the Rip-Off Convenience Marts went, that was inspired by seeing lemons selling for the then-outrageous price of 35 cents at the Mac's store on Denman Street.
My brother Geof and I built a home studio in 1977, so I had the tools to make stuff like the Rip-Off spots and all those other obviously pre-recorded bits. Grandpa Miller was there to say the things I couldn't. The Old Jokes Home was created to use up corny material that wouldn't fit in anywhere else. The Harris Report was at one time written the night before, but when the newspaper went on strike, I got into the habit of going into work early, ripping stuff off the news wire and writing from that before the shift.The Harris Report was done live, using a cassette recorder with hasty pre-records for the voices of the reporters.
Airchecker: Working that shift on CKLG with the Wolfman Jack must be a real highlight for you? The aircheck is one I have listened to many times. Were you a kid in the candy store? Learn anything from Wolfman? At the end of the interview I'll chop up some audio from that aircheck create some magic. You created the magic, I'll just bring it back for you.
Doc: That was while I was still on PM drive, but yes, it was a treat to work with a guy I had heard playing nothing but old blues on XERB, XEG and XERF in the sixties, selling record packages from "Uncle George's Record Shop" and live baby chicks ("You gonna give 'em names, you gonna walk 'em around on little leashes, and when dey grow up, you gonna EAT 'EM!"). But one night when I heard him playing Edison Lighthouse and "Love Grows", I knew that things had changed and we wouldn't be hearing Little Walter again anytime soon.
There were only two problems that kept us from doing a better job on the shift: I was so excited about doing an hour with Wolf that I couldn't think straight, and we smoked something so I couldn't think straight. That aircheck is not one of my greatest moments, but what a thrill it was to make it. (Footnote: Wolf left behind a notebook, and in it was some of the most complete show prep I had ever seen. The guy scripted out everything he said, right down to where he would laugh! Sometimes I wish I had kept it, but after the show I went over to his hotel and returned it to him. What a souvenir that would be!)
Airchecker: You were the first jock to put up a website. When did you become a computer geek? You have embraced technology.
Doc: The first computer I had was a Osbourne. It had a little dinky black-and-green screen, but it was portable. If you didn't mind getting a hernia.After that I got a NEC PC-8300. That was also known as TRS-80, and it was really just a glorified word processor.
Upon my firing from KISS-FM I took about six months off courtesy of their generous payout and bought my first real computer, a 286, and spent my idle hours (of which there were many) learning how to work the thing. After my dismissal from CFUN, I started work on a Web site because by this time I was doing fill-in at CKNW and had time on my hands again. (That Web site is till pretty much the same as it was in the early 90s. Every firing results in improved computer skills! But not an improved Web site, apparently.)
Airchecker: Looking back was it hard to get use to new technology in the control room? Would you still prefer queuing up records and cart machines?
Doc: Hell, no. I worked with an op from about 1970 onwards and found it to be a major advantage in that you didn't have to cue up records, fill out the log, pull and play the carts, and then put all that crap away at the end of the shift. When did you have time to think about what you were doing? I approached having to run my own board at CISL with some trepidation, but quickly learned that today's auto-assist systems cue up the records, fill out the log, pull and play the carts, and put all the crap away at the end of the shift. Quel surprise!
Airchecker: You are the voice of Brown Bros. Ford do you drive a Ford (ha,ha, ha) You are heard on several stations with radio imaging are you keeping busy with the voice overs and radio imaging WORK?
Doc: Nope, I don't drive a Ford, although I have suggested to Brown Bros that that would be a nice idea. Apparently, they think it's maybe too nice an idea. I suppose I could use more imaging work although the amount I have right now is just enough that it doesn't get in the way of my radio job. A few years ago---hoo boy---if I had the radio job then, I probably wouldn't be here today. My brain would have simply exploded. Hard work never killed anybody, but why should I be the first? As for now, to put it simply:The increase in the value of the Canadian dollar has decreased the amount of work coming from Down There to Up Here.
Airchecker: Do you have a moment in your career that was your greatest moment for yourself?
Doc: I'd have to say that my days in the beginning and middle of CKLG and CFTR had a panapoly of fantastic moments. Then there are those small uncharted seconds when a bit or a break came off perfectly---usually coincident with the passing of Halley's Comet
Airchecker: Doc who are your radio gods that inspired you.
Let me lay 'em out for you: Red Robinson, Jockey John Stone, Gary Owens, Mort Downey Jr. (when he was at KJR), Pat O'Day, Lan Roberts, Jerry Kaye, Tom Murphy, Mike Phillips, Wolfman Jack, Chuck Christian, Don Steele, Les Crane, Pat Burns, Jack Webster, Mad Mel, Mike McCoy (Black), Jackson Armstrong, Larry Lujack, Jack Cullen & Peter Warren. There is probably more, but I won't remember them till five minutes after I've filed this.
Airchecker: Just one more question before I let you go DOC. What's the future of radio look like in your eyes?
Doc: Hey, that's a good one. Radio has become safe, bland and predictable and if it stays on that course it will continue to have a shrinking audience share what with all the choices a listener has now. I don't know what the future holds, but there is a rapidly growing audience coming into geezerhood that may save the industry one more time. While owners continue to target a much younger audience, the majority of kids hardly listen to any radio at all. Those owners are missing out on a massive demographic that has a lot of money and has hardly any radio targeted at them. And they still remember.
Airchecker: Doc Harris, this was fun. Thank you so much for sharing your career. We salute you on Air-Checker you are truly a great Canadian talent. As a fan of yours this was a highlight for me. I'm sure those who reads this journey thank you for sharing. Continue the journey Doc, you have put the smile on many faces each time you crack the mic. You should be proud that all your hard work made the dream.
As always Air -Checker leaves the last word for you Doc Harris.
Remember kids: Only users lose drugs.
Listen to Doc Harris on Vancouver's Superhits 650 CISL, 2-6pm weekdays. "slamming out the Superhits"
Visit Doc @
http://www.docharris.com/ DOC IS PODCASTING with Sue Einarsson, "Lotusland", a podcast all about Vancouver.
Voice imaging @
http://www.docharris.com/voiceimaging.htmlYou must Login to listen.
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