I first met Richard about five, maybe even six years ago through a singer/song writer I was closer with at the time, Jadea Kelly. How I know Jadea is a long story that doesn’t need to be told. As most folk artists in Toronto do, Jadea played the legendary Cameron House on Queen West and eventually took up a weekly residency there. This must have been when I first met Richard who was acting as Jadea’s publicist. Though from observing how others would interact with Richard it didn’t take long for me to acknowledge that for this older gentleman, helping young artists was more than a hobby.
At the time I was managing an art gallery and though loved working with visual artists, I was always interested in the music industry. Music has been the main focal point of my life and being a curious brat, I wanted to know everything and everyone. I struck a conversation with Richard and eventually asked him if he were interested in getting a coffee with me to talk more. He suggested brunch instead at the early hour of 8am. A few days had passed when we met at Toronto’s infamous 24-hour diner, Fran’s on College St. This is where our friendship and our brunches began.
Richard is easy to pick out of a crowd, he is always in black, has shoulder length white hair with a matching mustache and (especially if you catch him at a gig) usually has a huge smile on his face and charms the ladies with his British accent that hasn’t left him after residing in Canada for 50+ years. Richard grew up in England, his parents were part of the upper middle class, which allowed him to attend private school. At the age of 16 he began apprenticing at a local paper in hopes of becoming a reporter. While he was learning to become a journalist, he was at the same time growing into what he describes a “music freak” remembers, “By now I’m a big music freak, I’m deeply into music that now hardly exist. Early American jazz and the British attempt to play it which for the most part were pretty awful but there were some pretty fine music to come out of it. That genre of music was popular in the 50s through to the early 60s”.
Richard’s love for American jazz became so strong he was frustrated that there was no way of him to see these acts in England. That is when he started looking to America as a place to reside. As Richard explains, “the blues boom had yet to happen and I left Britain in ’57 or ’58. I tried to go to the states but they were very worried. You know they were having communists freak outs, [asking me] “oh my God, is your grandmother a communist?” … [And I would reply] “I don’t know, I don’t know that” so that’s when I went to the Canadian office.” Toronto as now was the biggest city in Canada and not a long way from Chicago, where Richard initially was hoping to stay. His first time to Toronto was enough to make him stick here. Richard is very nostalgic of the moment he arrived, “Toronto was an amazing town, it was dull, Presbyterian, boring, and the second tallest building was the Royal York hotel. There was a great music scene because black American musicians could come here all the time and not worry about where they could stay, or where they could eat. So there was always an on rush of black jazz and R&B musicians, just general entertainers, whatever and that made Toronto a really good music town.”
Even though he was in the wrong country, Richard never forgot about his goal and why he left England, he wanted to be in Chicago. He was able to see many great jazz and blues musicians in Toronto, people like Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino and Earl Hines, but he still wasn’t at the source. He would make it to Chicago and make a splash when he did, telling me “later on I did go to Chicago and I did meet Muddy Waters and I did meet Howling Wolf, went to recording sessions with musicians, I became friends with the black Buddy Guy and all of this- then I started bringing these people to Toronto”. He continues, “we did Muddy Waters for a week here, in a small venue. We did lesser-known names. Robert Nighthawk, a wonder player who nobody hears of anymore, and I got this rep, like I’m the blues expert. So then I was invited to something called a folk festival, I had no idea what that was but I was asked to host a workshop”
This was the turning point for Richard’s career, having devoted years to American jazz and blues and allowing Toronto fans to enjoy the music live, he was now about to enjoy the same satisfaction with folk music. Richard elaborates on when this career shift happened. “In 1965 I met Leonard Cohen, Gordon Light Foot, Ian and Sylvia, Phil Ochs, all of this was new music to me. And it was like “wow,” like being hit in the head, I discovered gravity. So that sort of sent me off on a path. In 1970 I was editing trade magazines to make a living, wood working, electrical contracting, whatever because I couldn’t get a newspaper job… So I started doing publicity for the Mariposa Folk Festival then I got a job with Cap Act which was one of two organizations at the time who merged and became SOCAN (which is the organization that collects royalties for song writers and music publishers) and I worked for them on a half time basis for 23 years through which time I met and did stories about, you name it, everybody from classical composers to Gordon Lightfoot, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Burton Cummings, did them all, met them all, wrote stories and still got’em”.
Richard has his own publicity company and keeps very busy working in Toronto with emerging artist with a passion that hasn’t faded over the years. Though as he says “I have a theory and I’ve been doing this from 1965 till, what… are we getting up to 50 years now, nearly? That during this time, during any period for that long, if you don’t have any stories you’ve wasted your time.” So with that I will continue on with my favourite stories as told by Richard from his lasting careers.
When Miles Davis tried to buy Richard’s car after a show at Massy Hall:
“The limo didn’t show up so I had to just run him over to Jarvis street where the hotel was and he got in the car holding a bottle of beer and I just about crapped because there were cops seeing him in my car holding a bottle of beer. But you don’t tell Miles Davis you can’t drink in my car. So along the way he decided he didn’t want to go to Montreal for a sold out show the next night and he said ‘how much is this car worth?’ and I had an old crapper and he said ‘I’ll give you $2000 for it, I’ll drive it to New York tonight’”
Being a teenager and taking The Platters around town:
“Even as a kid as a newspaper reporter I remember doing a story on a group called The Platters. Nobody remembers them now, but they were a 5 piece vocal group who had a lot of hits “The Great Pretender”, “Only You”, very very good black vocal group and they were starting their very first European tour in a town I was working in, a city in the north bay called York. York’s a very historic place, so I called their management and said “why don’t I be your guide and I’ll take the guys around this historic city for a few hours and I’ll write a story blah blah blah good idea. So here is me, and these five black Americans. Me with my short hair and glasses looking particularly nerdy and nebbish-like and one of the places I took them was York Minster. York Minster is this enormous cathedral and I think it’s the second largest one in Europe. It’s huge, bigger than Notre Dame in Paris. And when you walk in, in the far end of the building, which is like a football field away there is this giant 6-story stained glass window with the light shinning through, sunlight shinning through it. And I walked these Americans into the building and the woman in the group gave me the hook, she said ‘we ain’t got one of these in Texas’.”
One of Toronto’s forgotten dive bars, Larry’s Hideaway:
“Well it was the most awful, dismal basement in a basically hooker hotel, um and there’s a couple of memorable stories. I remember a British band I loved called Steeleye Span, it was a folk band but they added drums, David Bowie produced one of their records. And so the lead singer, a women called Maddy Prior, a terribly proper middle class English lady who when the band came back to do their encore said “thank you very much ladies and gentlemen, we’ve really enjoyed our evening with you, but I do have to say that this is the first time our band has played inside an ash tray”. Best story of all, One of the Gary’s told me this, they brought in Allen Toussaint, the New Orleans pianist, composure, song writer, producer, amazing cat. They found out it was his birthday so they went to Loblaws and got a sticky cake, put some candles on it and “happy birthday Allen!” they were going to cut the cake in the hole that they called a dressing room. He said ‘oh no I’m on stage, we’ll do it at intermission’ came back in the intermission and the cake was a brown squiggling mess. Every cockroach in the building was having the feast of a lifetime. Larry’s Hideaway burned down, the whole building burned down, it’s now a part of Allan Gardens and if you go by you’ll see three sides… trees in a square by the sidewalk that marked the hotel. So you got the actual sight where the hotel was, it’s marked by the trees. Larry’s hideaway, I heard some great music there, but what a hole… what a hole.”
The first jazz musician he saw in Toronto:
“On my first day in Canada I walked down Yonge St and I saw this sign “Earl Hines and his all stars” well I went into the bar and I was gobsmacked and I said “Earl Hines, the piano player that worked with Louise Armstrong in the 20s” and all the jazz musicians in his band were all sort of names to me. You know from my addiction to early American jazz and he said “yeah” I said, “Oh, how much is it to get in?” he said it was free but you have to buy 2 drinks. I really thought ‘wow’ and that night I went to go see him and the next night I found a jazz club with a sort of local, Dixie Land-ish band which wasn’t bad and the night after that I found a place on King St. that is no longer there of course. Um and the Stanley cup hockey finals were on. It was on a black and white television set over the stage with the hockey game on, no sound, on stage was this black pianist from Montreal called Oscar Peterson, who I had never heard of, but my jaw was just on the floor.”
Richard Flohil is currently working on a new book that outlines all his wild stories from 50+ years in the music industry. As soon as you’re able, I would highly suggest picking it up. The final part of our interview sums up the flame that Richard still holds for music. As it went when the topic of vinyl came up he explained, “Oh Yeah. I mean I was saying the other day I did a radio interview and I played a Louis Armstrong record from the 20s and I said I rarely play this record because I can play it in my head any time I like. I know every lick of it; I’ve been listening to it since I was 16. And it still talks to me; it’s still a part of my life. If I finish this can I play you a couple of records that you’ve never heard of?” To which I obviously replied, “Yes, of course please” and then he ordered me to, “turn off your machinery”. The rest of the morning was spent listening to records fill the living room of his downtown home.