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FYI

Stan Klees Reflects On Planting The MAPL Seed

Record producer, co-founder of RPM magazine and one of the chief proponents of Pierre Juneau’s CanCon policy, Klees gives a rare interview to Julijana Capone as part of an NMC profile series.

Stan Klees Reflects On Planting The MAPL Seed

By External Source

(Walt) Grealis founded RPM Magazine in 1964, on the advice of (Stan) Klees, who was also a contributor. Devoted to reporting on Canadian record companies and Canadian radio charts, the weekly trade periodical was the only publication of its kind at the time, becoming the loudest defender of Canadian releases when their homegrown industry supporters were few.


“That was why I talked Walt into starting RPM,” says Klees. “We had a friend from Buffalo, NY come up—George “Hound Dog” Lorenz—who was a famous DJ, and he said ‘You need an East-West dialogue in Canada as opposed to a North-South dialogue, and what you need is a trade paper, like Mike Turntable,’ which was his publication. We walked away from that thinking, ‘Could we actually start something like that?’ So Walt started with a single sheet just to see what would happen, and it started to take off.”

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Grealis, a former Mountie with little interest in music, reluctantly entered the record business, years later to be joined by Klees, who, as a friend, taught him the ropes of the industry.

“He hated record people because all they talked about was the record business,” Klees says. “He wasn’t interested at all. When he started RPM all he had written were police reports, so those were his only skills in writing.”

But Grealis learned quickly and, in the early days, he often wrote the whole publication…

–Excerpted from the feature story, Stan Klees: The man behind CanCon and why it had to happen by Julijana Capone, NMC Amplify

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Sobeys Stadium
Courtesy Photo

Sobeys Stadium

Concerts

Toronto's Bowl at Sobeys Stadium Concert Venue Goes Quiet in 2025

Jeff Craib of The Feldman Agency confirms that the venue at the site of the National Bank Open will "hit pause" for summer 2025.

Last year, a new concert venue was unveiled. In summer 2024, The Feldman Agency opened The Bowl at Sobeys Stadium, located at the site of Canada's biggest tennis tournament, the National Bank Open. It was a partnership between Tennis Canada and the Toronto-based talent and booking company.

Now, after one summer of shows, the venue has gone quiet.

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