The Ninth House

On November 4th, when Americans like me are heading to the polls, a far fewer but no less ardent number of folks will be in Ottawa, Ontario at the Canadian Association of Broadcasters convention.  Some of those folks will attend the induction ceremonies for the CAB Hall of Fame, where one of the broadcasters inducted will be John Majhor.

If you lived in Toronto in the 70s, 80s and 90s and owned a radio or TV, you know who John Majhor is.  If you lived within broadcast signal range, you know.  I won’t attempt to describe here who John is and why his career makes him Hall of Fame-worthy.  If you Google his name, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly.  You can even see some terrific video of him back in the day here.

The only downside to John’s induction is that its posthumous.  He died on January 23rd, 2007 at age 53 of an extremely butt-kicking kind of cancer.  John was very frank about writing about it on his MySpace page, which is still up and running even though he isn’t, something I’m confident he would have found very funny.  This is, after all, the guy who posted his bone scan on the same MySpace page and titled one of his blogs “Dead Man Talking To Himself.”

I got to know John in Charleston, SC in late 2004, when he hired me to work part-time for a classic hits rock station he was programming then.  I won’t attempt to describe here our friendship, other than to say we got busy fast.  And it was more than two middle-aged old-school rock radio disc jockeys plowing common ground and calling one another on their bullshit, though that was certainly a big part of it.  I don’t feel like talking too much about it here, other than to say he was my good friend, and I miss him.

And now, thanks to the efforts of many and one woman in particular (yay, Andy), John Majhor’s in the Hall of Fame.  I think he would have liked that.  What broadcaster wouldn’t?  Its the kind of honor that both serves as the perfect coda to a remarkable life and career, and pisses off all the right people — namely, those who didn’t like you all that much when you were still alive.  And there are a good number of those, too.  That, I think, John would have found hilarious.

On Sunday, May 27th, 2007, John’s family and many of his friends and radio buddies gathered at Second City in Toronto to remember him.  I delivered his eulogy.  2,771 words.  I was going to post it here, but as I’ve been writing this, I’ve changed my mind.  Not because I don’t want you to read it, but because it was written for that occasion only, and it just doesn’t feel right to haul it out of the attic trunk and tack it to the wall.

The morning after John died, I wrote a comments post for his MySpace page.  Its in many ways a shorter version of his eulogy.  Its still there, if you care to read it.  If you do, keep in mind I have not yet been haunted by him, at least not as far as I know.  But if, as is sometimes said, the dead return to us in dreams, then John has paid me a visit at least once since his passing.  A wonderful dream, in which we were both at opposite ends of a broadcast console, on the air together — which we never were in life — laughing until our sides ached as we riffed on how frustrating it was, for one very specific reason, for a dog not to have an opposable thumb.

Don’t ask me why.  But if that’s not good enough to get you into the Hall of Fame, tell me what is?

Congratulations, John.  We still miss you.  Bastard.

TNH

UPDATE: 11/8/2008

Now that’s John’s safely ensconced in the HOF, we can post the tribute video that was created for the induction.  Enjoy:

John Majhor Hall of Fame Tribute

It was probably 1980. Although it could have been 1979. The album, Bombs Away Dream Babies, was released in 1979, and I was a college freshman in the fall of 1979, and that’s when I first remember hearing it. So it was probably around then.

I could have heard it on any number of radio stations, but I probably heard it first on WQDR Raleigh, back when it was one of the Southeast’s pioneering album rock FMs, the first station Lee Abrams consulted, the one that put the Superstars album rock format on the national map. ‘QDR was a glorious cliché, staffed by laid-back jocks who sounded stoned and probably were. When I think of it, I invariably envision Q-SKY, the fictional West Coast album rocker from the 1978 radio fairy tale FM. ‘QDR might have been nothing like that in reality, but who cares about reality?

I visited ‘QDR once, before the owners flipped it to country in 1984 while it was still at the top of its game. I don’t remember why or how I got in there, but there I was. Just a couple of years a jock myself then, and there I was, standing in WQD-F-ing-R.

All I remember is, the lights were low and the hallway walls were carpeted and hung with gold records – Clapton, Tom Petty, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Eagles, The Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan…

I swear you could smell the pot smoke soaked into the shag. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. It was cool as hell.

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I’ve been meaning to write this for a while now. The holidays got in the way, but maybe that was for the best. It gave me time to really think about what I wanted to say.

And here it is.

It is okay to like Dan Fogelberg.

Go ahead. You can say it. Here, watch me:

I like Dan Fogelberg. Some of Dan Fogelberg’s music, I loved. And still do.

Dan Fogelberg died of prostate cancer on December 16th, 2007. He was 56. His most recent publicity photos show a good-looking guy, clean-shaven and smiling, the kind of guy who makes middle-aged moms blush and their daughters giggle.

Unfortunately, his reputation didn’t weather the years as well as he. For some folks of a certain age, Fogelberg’s name has become the go-to punch line for jokes about 1970s-era granola-munching, Chukka boot-wearing Sensitive Guys. Many critics loathed him. Rolling Stone’s review of 1979’s Phoenix is so contemptuous, you can damn near picture the author spitting on the album cover.

It’s less troublesome to dismiss Dan Fogelberg, as have most eulogists I’ve read, as that “1970’s soft rock singer-songwriter” who scored a few hits than it is to set aside that fashionable prejudice and honestly consider his work. Or, more telling, his work’s popularity.

The fact that so many people evidently aren’t willing to do that – and worse, are dismissing Fogelberg as little more than a footnote to 1970s and early 80s pop – is really getting under my skin.

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