When one is asked to write about one self what does one say?  I like music? What albums do you like? I like a ton of things, especially classic rock. Well, name one specifically…Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull …What’s your favorite band then, I have three, Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and favorite artist?  Frank Zappa.

Music. I breathe it, I study it, I listen to it, I live it, and I play it.  How about talking?  Well if I didn’t like doing that I better do something else lol… Or, how about when people ask me, “You still a dj?” and I retort, “Yes, I’m still a dj!!” (on one of the GREATEST radio station on the planet.) But don’t get me wrong over the years I’ve grown fond of the term DJ because I didn’t like it much back then. Being a Disc Jockey, in my mind, was doing weddings and parties playing disco and Top 40 and talking like Rodney Radio into the microphone so when I started my broadcast career I wanted to get as far away from DJ as possible…I was now playing music of the ‘new wave’ which later evolved into alternative rock and fragmented into other genres including progressive rock and metal.

I wanted to be on the radio since age 8, listening to Toronto radio day night at home in the car just about anytime. “Sitting stoned alone in my backyard” listening to Sunny Days by Lighthouse on my transistor radio. I even had an epiphany ( I know could have been a number of things) that I was destined to play Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin a million times and NOT get sick of it. I have and I’m not. The fact is, I’ve been playing music on the radio since 1976, starting my broadcasting career as a founding member of CKLN at Ryerson in downtown Toronto, which was a student radio station like no other, back in the day. It was a place where I spun new music from Sex Pistols and The Clash to Foreigner and AC/DC. Canadian artists included FM, David Clayton Thomas and Max Webster. I’ve been there from the beginning of this exciting genre called classic rock and it’s my pleasure to be able to present it to you still, rockin listener on Q107 for the past three decades, yes it blows my mind too.

I heard Q107 come on the air in 1977, a new Toronto rock station, cool, and decided that’s where I wanted to work some day ( you take that dream away from me I’ll have trouble getting through the day) but it wouldn’t happen for another 10 years.  During that time I worked at various radio stations including CKAR in Oshawa, then went west  to Calgary Alberta in 1981 to rock radio stations CJAY 92 and 107 KIK FM (which is now Q107 Calgary). I spent 6 years in Cowtown, honing my broadcast skills (read: make mistakes), spinning vinyl on the air until it was time to return to my hometown Toronto in 1987 and that’s when I started at Q107 a year later in 1988 and I was good to go until 2001 when it was time to leave the Mighty Q, for now. I started a video/film career taking film courses leading to directing a music video and being on a crew of a couple film productions. But I missed radio too much and got back into it eventually returning to Q107 Toronto on June 6, 2006 (6-6-6). Fitting huh?

Thank you for listening, tell a friend!

AJ