PART ONE: DJ ELLIE O’DAY WAS THE FIRST

KURATED NO. 238

CANADA’S FIRST
MAJOR MARKET
FEMALE DJ: Ellie O’Day

Part One of a 2-part feature by Connie Kuhns

Ellie O’Day made Canadian radio broadcast history when when she became the first woman DJ at a major market radio station. She joined Vancouver’s CKLG in early 1978.

CONTENTS

• PLAYLIST
Over decades of following her passion for music, O’Day’s ears have been wide open, headphones on and instincts tuned to popular music’s shifts and changes. Combined with astute personal tastes from 50s’ Top 40 radio, the cool jazz and blues of the 60s, 70s’ punk rock, 80s’ New Wave and all things reggae to her current obsession – Cuban jazz – she’s put together an informed, succinct and eclectic musical survey. Here’s her 33–song Playlist – DJ Ellie O’Day’s Decades of Favourites on Spotify and YouTube.

• ONE SONG Be Your Own Light by Linda McRae

• RADIO CLIPS
Here are some of Ellie’s radio blurbs from back in the day.

• ABOUT CONNIE KUHNS
A brief biography of the award-winning writer, photographer and founding radio host of Co-op Radio’s Rubymusic, her women’s radio program which ran from (1981-1996).

Introduction: Everyone has a story

I met Ellie O’Day in August 1988. We were invited to emcee a small women’s music festival in Vancouver. By this time, everyone knew who she was and what she represented. I remember being slightly taken back by this slight, yet powerful woman who had achieved what was at that time impossible. She had inserted herself into the very male world of radio, specifically rock radio, and as a music journalist she had distinguished herself with her insightful and passionate interviews.

Very recently, musician and songwriter Roy Forbes told me about meeting her in 1979 at the Prince George Rock Festival and how her open spirit put him at ease, and how in 1985 she helped him research Christmas songs for his album with Connie Kaldor, and how moved he became reading the obituary she wrote for Muddy Waters in the Georgia Straight in 1983. He recited the last line from memory: Bless your deep blue soul.

This is the kind of reaction I got whenever I mentioned that I was writing about Ellie O’Day for Kurated. Even over dinner one night, musician Tom Upex had a memory of Ellie coming by the rehearsal space when he was playing with Art Bergmann in Poisoned. Everyone has a story.

As for what is written here, I’ve had to resign myself to ending sooner than she deserves. But know that it is not the end of the story. Since leaving the music business exclusively, she used her knowledge and skills to work with art and multi-cultural festivals, theatre groups and venues. She’s served as a mentor, teacher (she developed a music business curriculum), as well as sitting on the Board of Directors for at least 20 different organizations including many outside the music sphere.  As a resident of the Performing Arts Lodge in Vancouver, she is currently on the executive of the PAL Canada Foundation.

When I express my admiration for her and her mind-blowing career, she says, in her self-deprecating way,  “I guess much like the grass-is-always-greener effect for so many artists, I’m too close to it to appreciate. Sure, some stuff I’m proud of. But so much of it I blundered through. Like many of us.” ~ CK

Ellie O’Day backstage at Vancouver’s Savoy with Janet Forsyth and k.d. lang on New Year’s Eve 1984

LONG LIVE ROCK AND ROLL

The Story of Ellie O’Day, Canada’s First Major Market Female DJ

by Connie Kuhns

PART ONE

The music came first.

Ellen Claitman was barely four years old when she began listening to music on the family Victrola. Her mother had a 45rpm of Bolero and an LP of Peer Gynt Suites, with Carnival of the Animals by St. Saens on the flip side. She already loved Lenny Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts – pretty sophisticated tastes for a small child – but then again she did become a director of the BC Branch of Mensa Canada later in life.

With her first allowance at age six, Ellie saved enough to buy her first single – Charlie Gracie’s Butterfly and a year later she started a fan club for the Everly Brothers and the Kalin Twins. She described her early tastes as rockabilly lite.

Born a city kid in 1950 in Pittsburgh, PA, Ellie and her family moved to the suburbs when she was nine. It was in elementary school that she would cross paths with another student whose talent would give her new ideas. The boy had been hospitalized for some time after being hit by a car. In 6 th grade, when they finally met, “he sat at the piano and blew my mind. He played Rachmaninoff’s Piano Prelude in C# Minor and I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get home and beg my mother for a piano.

“It took a few months of nagging. I took piano lessons for a few years, but I was older than most of my teacher’s beginning students, and I found the selections she had us play, other than Fur Elise and a few other standards, puerile. At home I was trying to learn that cool new song, “Take Five” (I still have my LP) while searching for a simplified arrangement of the Rachmaninoff. (He had huge hands. I don’t). That week at the start of my lesson, I closed the usual folio, and attacked the opening chords of the Rachmaninoff, which I played to the end, having memorized it. And quit piano lessons.

“Another thing that happened in suburbia was in ’63. This new girl arrived from the UK and I asked her if she was into music and she brought over one of the first Beatles singles! (I think Love Me Do). I found a new buddy to listen to singles with. I loved Motown and doo-wop. I had at least two dozen singles before high school – Ruby Baby, All I Have to Do is Dream, Fingertips – Part 2, You Keep me Hanging on, Dancing in the Street.

“I did get into Elvis, but I soon bought mostly Black music. Not only did I know all the new releases, but I learned all the dance crazes. By the time I was 16 and driving, I was out several nights a week at teen canteens (with a side trip for beer).” Television was impressive then: Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, The Ed Sullivan Show (with his commitment to introducing all manner of young rock and soul musicians to his Sunday night audience) Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Show, Steve Allen, and finally Jack Parr on the Tonight Show. She watched it all. “I was an insomniac,” she says.

Radio was king

But for any teenager coming out of the 1950s, radio was king, especially the small hand-held transistor radio. Its power was amplified at night when all the local stations went off the air. For Ellie, early evening meant listening to tween-oriented music with Chuck Brinkman on KQV, but at night, with the radio under her pillow, she listened to Black station WAMO (D’Black spot on your Dial!) and the great Porky Chedwick – the Daddio of the Raddio, the Platter Pushin’ Papa, who is now in the rock and roll hall of fame.

“My tastes have varied over the years. I love jazz. And old school R&B and gospel have a special glowing space in my life. I’m a sucker for reggae, particularly good dub. Still, nothing, but nothing beats the feeling of being 17 and borrowing my dad’s powder blue Buick convertible, top down on a summer night, screaming along to the blasting radio and Satisfaction comes on!

Following her curiosity

Ellie’s 1967 high school graduation photo

In high school, Ellie formed an all-girl quintet The Poor Boys. On a one-off performance on Pittsburgh’s local television teen show she was impressed by the other group on set. In an act that showed her early instincts to follow the music, she tracked them down to their green room. She liked their song and wanted to know more. They covered My Little Red Book by a group called Love. But her curiosity didn’t end there. “Another time on that show I was one of three go- go dancers, and we got a pair of vinyl go-go boots which I wore throughout my freshman year at the University in Madison, Wisconsin.”

It was during her two years at Madison (1967-68) that she was introduced to Chicago’s first- class blues players at weekend dances. This included Walter Shakey Horton, who, she notes, was a major influence on music producer and long-time CBC radio host Holger Peterson who founded Alberta’s Stony Plain Records.

But there was a lot more to discover beyond the blues. “I camped overnight once to get a ticket for a BB King concert on campus, and my girlfriend and I – who loved the Doors – went to see them at the Coliseum. The band played well, but Jim Morrison was a mess. We had a cool club in Madison called The Factory where I saw Paul Butterfield several times, Jimi Hendrix, and Rick Nielsen’s early band Grim Reapers before they became Cheap Trick.”

Coming to Canada

After leaving U of M, Ellie finished her BA at the University of Pittsburgh. Her degree: Anthropology, specifically Folklore and Ethnomusicology. It was 1971. That same year she came to Canada as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Anthropology at Edmonton’s University of Alberta. Why?

“Money. They offered me $300 a month as a teaching assistant and that was decent dough for a student in 1971; and other than one US school (which put me on the following years’ waiting list) I only applied to Canadian universities. I was exiting the US; and subliminally, I’d been singing Four Strong Winds in a for-fun folk group in the previous year.”

But then she quit. She wanted something else.

“I never aspired towards radio, until I knew I was so close I could taste it”. When she moved to Victoria in 1973 she applied for a job moving A/V equipment. She was turned down because she was too small. And female. “I was handy, having worked on antique cars with my dad. I could sell cars, or stereo equipment.” Instead she found a job at a high-end camera shop. But even after becoming manager, she knew it was dead end. “I didn’t want to get into wedding photography.”

In 1975, Ellie enrolled in the Applied Communications Program at Camosun College on Vancouver Island to study film, photography, audio production, radio and TV. “Going in I hoped to become a TV floor manager.” It was here that an assignment got her instructor’s attention and changed her mind.

“Our first audio assignment was to write a 15-second public service announcement, record it, and replay it for Kerm, the instructor. Mine was on Greenpeace (it was 1975), and I knew how to operate a reel-to-reel recorder so I was confident.”

Kerm had her play it over and over, watching the UV meter each time. Her production held. Her voice was consistent and level. He noticed something else. She could talk. Her speaking voice was intimate, personable. One-to-one. He told her you can’t teach that. You either had it or you didn’t. He took her down the hall to the campus radio station where two guys from second-year were on air. Kerm introduced her and said teach her the board.

It was easy for her. She could slip-cue an album seamlessly. (“I recall using Bowie’s Station to Station and the Live in Philadelphia albums’). She also had a great record collection. “Kerm especially liked my Supertramp album. And between songs, I would either talk about the artist, or do some killer segues between tracks.” One of her student co-operators had a part-time gig at local radio station CKDA. He had a party in the control room and got fired. He recommended they hire her.

The first radio gig … and that next one

Ellie at the controls in 1978 at Vancouver’s CKLG

“My first paid radio gig was as Assistant Engineer for Fred Cole, the Chief Engineer at CKDA, who noticed I got an A in soldering. The job included small fixes on headphones, dubbing commercials to cart, and live operating the board for weekday jocks.”

After graduating from Camosun’s Applied Communications Program in 1977, she began work at smaller market CKOK in Penticton, B.C. But having spent most of her life in cities she wanted to get back. She began sending out demo tapes. This was how it was done. Cassettes.

She was also considering her style and her relationship to her audience. Back in Pittsburgh she had listened in the early morning hours to Ellie Dylan on WABC, and in Chicago the great Yvonne Daniels at WLS. “Dylan was okay. Daniels was wonderful but not ‘me’. I listened to my old instructor Kerm, and I talked the way I chat up music with my friends. No schtick. Just me. No jokes, but a sense of humour. And share the excitement, which was hard to muster when the Bee Gees produced half the Top 20.”

Just after New Year’s 1978, Ellie got a call offering her a job in Vancouver. “Want to come to the big city?” As it was her birthday, she thought it was a prank. The caller, Greg Heraldson, told her to call a certain number when she got off the air. At home, she dialed the number. The reply was “CKLG”.

On January 28, 1978, CKLG in Vancouver hired Ellie O’Day. The Vancouver Sun’s Denny Boyd wrote about her arrival in his column. It was an event. Ellie O’Day was the first woman to be hired in major market radio in Canada and among a handful of women on air in North America and the UK.

Charles Campbell, the editor and light behind the eyes of Vancouver’s entertainment weekly the Georgia Straight for over a decade, put it this way: “Ellie has impeccable musical taste, a gently dry sense of humour, a solid measure of wisdom, and a very sexy voice. Of course, in many universes, that’s not the formula for a perfect radio DJ. But in Vancouver in the 1970s, it certainly was.”

Like most new hires, Ellie was given the graveyard shift. CKLG was fully automated, meaning she had no creative input. The board worked much like a jukebox with a predetermined order for playing predetermined music, until the moment when the carousel would freeze. At that point she would play 45s until the engineer arrived and went behind a locked door to reboot the system. But when she convinced the station she could reboot it herself, she got the key.

“About 3 am, I’d sneak into the room with the music cartridges (like smaller 8-track tapes) and replace some of the current hits, which were mostly Bee Gees at the time, with great R&B: Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Fontella Bass. I’d get calls from people saying you should play this all the time, and I’d explain we had to keep this secret. Around 5am I’d restore everything and lock the door.“In the morning, the computer print-out would show that I played the required A2 and B4 and C3, etc. But I didn’t play that music.”

Ellie was rocking radio right away.

Tuning into the times

She was reading the UK papers by then, and on her first trip to London in 1979, under the banner of her newly formed O’Day Productions, she brought back records by Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, and Dire Straits. “The Stiff Records promo guys took me to the Hope & Anchor, and to a Lene Lovich rehearsal. I was smitten. I came home with a dozen or more interviews.”

Continuing to make London her own, she often stayed at the storied Columbia Hotel. “The cool thing about the Columbia was that it was the hotel new bands stayed at when they were in London to tape Top of the Pops. Breakfast was included at this hotel, and in the morning, I’d circulate in the breakfast room and introduce myself to bands, and ask would they be releasing in Canada? If so, could they fit in an audio interview. At night, I’d go to concerts and clubs”.

Starting O’Day Productions marked another savvy step in forging her way in the radio and music business. She caught the ear of CKLG veteran radio personality Doc Harris who suggested she set up her own company. He told her: “The station pays your company, and you get to write off expenses. Get yourself an accountant.”

Ellie figured out he knew about her record collecting addiction. Soon she was getting contract work from CBC TV, and column-inch small change from the Georgia Straight. The company flourished from 1978-2017.

As for the response to her on-air arrival, “Most of the guys were quite cordial, especially on AM. The program directors were hard on me. The pay was close to minimum wage. It was when I moved to CFOX where I seemed to butt a few heads – how much Led Zeppelin do you have to play? I was quite stoked about the new UK Music Invasion. To be fair, I was given two outlets at CFOX for the new music.”

One of those outlets was the 6pm to midnight shift. “11pm to midnight was called Side Show. One night was The Import Hour, sponsored by Quintessence Records (later to become Zulu), whose ads featured DOA and Pointed Sticks. My guest co-hosts were staff at Quintessence. Half of what we played were local tracks, rather than imported records. I also pre-produced a weekend morning show featuring interviews from the UK, especially those artists who were touring in Canada, plus phone interviews with other bands coming to town.”

Rodney Crowell sat for an interview with Ellie in the 80s

Following the musicians

Eventually the interviewing was pushing out the DJing. And word was getting out to the indie community to find her on CFOX. She loved radio – it was still about the music – but it was also about the musicians. She quit CFOX one weekend in 1980 when the boss was away and got a job at the new Phantasmagoria Records. At higher pay. This was the next step in a 45-year career dedicated to music, the performing arts and the cultural life of this country.

To be continued next week …

PLAYLIST + TRACKLIST DJ Ellie O’Day’s Decades of Favourites

Hear the playlist on Spotify and YouTube. There are some minor differences between the two. Some songs are unavailable on both platforms. The YouTube versions feature some videos.

In the chronology below Ellie outlines some milestones over seven decades.

1950s

• My first single purchase Butterfly Charlie Gracie
• Bye Bye Love Everly Brothers

1960s

• 1959 was a remarkable year for jazz releases: Kind of Blue, Miles Davis; Take Five, Dave Brubeck; Giant Steps, John Coltrane; Ah Um Charles Mingus
• I used to refer to this as early punk – Louie Louie and dozens of local and indie titles (The Witch, The Sonics)
• Then we became hippies! Piece of My Heart Janis Joplin constantly screamed out of our all-women’s university rooming house in Madison Wisconsin
• Madison was a regular stop for Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Walkin’ Blues (shared a doob with them once)

1970s

• Miles Davis, Bitches Brew Miles Runs the Voodoo Down (I remember the day we got this new double LP)
• Bruce Springsteen Rosalita (The Rolling Stone printed a letter I sent to one of their writers about seeing Bruce at the QET)
• Bowie! Jean Genie
• The Clash London Calling and I went!

1980s

• I was a sucker for pub rock Hey Lord Don’t Ask Me Questions Graham Parker and the Rumour, Watching the Detectives Elvis Costello
• The post-punkers: Ever Fallen Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) Buzzcocks, Heart of Glass Blondie
• It Won’t Last (Art Bergmann and) Poisoned
• The Crawl Spirit of the West
• I was bitten hard by reggae and ska in the 80s – Stepping Razor Peter Tosh, Stir it Up Bob Marley (front row @QET, a year before he died)

1990s

• As ED of Pacific Music, my focus for the decade was on local; it also included the Fraser MacPherson Music Scholarship Fund and I had a copy of the union contact book for musicians to adjudicate the tapes and auditions – I got to know a lot of union players, and developed a love for big bands like VEJI A Trombone Freeabin
• Slow Have Not Been the Same
• Neko Case Timber from her first Mint album
• Carolyn Mark Not Another Other Woman
• Robbie Fulks She Took A Lot of Pills and Died (I have several of his oftren hilarious CDs)

2000s

• Loretta Lynn Van Lear Rose (I love this album! What a collab!)
• At the start of the 2000s I began working with Moshe Denberg in his goal to create, commission works for, and fund an Inter-Cultural Orchestra, and got to know more people in “world music” and those crossing over from jazz into world; I was also working with composer Mark Armanini, who wanted to pitch his inter-cultural compositions to orchestra in Europe
• Mei Han/Randy Reusche Tokyo Crows (a one-off album by two remarkable Vancouver musicians who improvise and are marked; I pitched a couple tracks to world music shows on campus radio stations)
• In the early 2000s I was doing publicity and tracking for a small label in Whitehorse; one of their releases was from Cuba’s Valle Son, who owner, David, brought to Whitehorse and then recorded there, and their thank you: Descaiga en Yukon
• Hard Rubber Orchestra, a big band, like Hugh Fraser’s VEJI, though with bandleader John Korsrud’s stamp Cruel Yet Fair (I still hardly miss a Vancouver show)

2010s

• I’ve kept track of Linda McRae since the 80s, from Terminal City to Spirit of the West, and then a string of great albums; though she married and lives in Nashville, she came back to Vancouver to record this – a whole bunch of us are singing in the chorus behind Be Your Own Light
• Obsessed with Cuban jazz now, Hilario Duran Contumbao

Tracklist

Scroll through the playlist below to see all the titles.

About Connie

Connie Kuhns has a 45-year history as an essayist, journalist, photographer and broadcaster.

For fifteen years (1981-1996) she was the producer and host of the innovative program Rubymusic on Vancouver Co-op Radio which focused on the then nascent women’s music scene. A selection of her interviews and essays, Rubymusic: A Popular History of Women’s Music and Culture was published in 2023 by Caitlin Press.

Other essays and flash fiction have been published in Geist Magazine, Creative Non-Fiction Magazine’s Tiny Truths, the Southampton Review, the LA Review, the NYT’s Modern Love 13-word love stories, and KuratedMusic. Her photography has been featured in solo and group shows and her photographs of musician Ellen McIlwaine were published in the UK Independent, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and Globe and Mail upon the musician’s passing.

Kuhns has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the LA Review Literary Awards, Prism International’s CNF Competition, the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize and the Best American Essays series.  She is the recipient of the Dan McArthur Award of Merit for Excellence in Radio News Broadcasting and Outstanding Salt Spring Artist in the Salt Spring National Art Prize.

 A selection of her essays can be found at www.geist.com/authors/connie-kuhns To read her previous work in Kurated search under Connie Kuhns.