The founders of RPM Magazine

» Walt Grealis
» Stan Klees

Walt was born in Toronto on February 18th, 1929, about eight months before the onset of The Great Depression. His father was a fire captain and the family’s ancestry was a mixture of Irish, Spanish and Cree. Walt attended Central Commerce High School in Toronto and dropped out after grade 10 to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1952, he joined the City of Toronto Police. In 1957, Walt became the Social Host and Sports Director for the St. George Hotel in Bermuda. Maybe he couldn’t stand so much beautiful weather, or maybe, as Stan says, Walt was homesick, but it wasn’t long before he came home to take a position with O’Keefe and then Labatt's brewery.

His success as a sales rep meant that Labatt’s sent him out on the road almost constantly, wherever sales were lagging, so he could work with local reps. But as Stan recalls, “Walt hated travelling and wanted to enjoy his cottage....He asked me to get him a job in the record business, but Walt hated the record people and knew nothing about records. Never owned a record player, never bought any records.

“So I coached him and phoned George Offer at Apex and told him about Walt. Walt's approach had to be ‘name dropping’. He didn't talk about records, but he told George how connected he was. (During Walt’s days as a brewery rep) whenever I had asked he would drop off a case of beer, so he knew Sam Sniderman (Sam the Record Man), Art Collins, Matt Kinner (A&A Records), Millie Moriak (CHUM librarian), Ed Houston (CKEY librarian), George Wilson (CFRB) and on and on. He knew all of them socially. Walt was connected. Offer was impressed. (Funny how a free case of beer makes you a friend of anyone.) He hired Walt on the spot.”

In 1960, Walt entered the record business in a promotions role. He began with Apex Records and later moved to London Records.Walt must have been distressed by the low profile of Canadian musicians and artists in their own country and of Canadian content, or Cancon, on the so-called public airwaves.

At the same time, he’d been steadily building an impressive roster of contacts in the music biz thanks to his positions at Apex and London. It was with a fair bit of momentum and determination, then, that he made a decision to make Canadian radio stations and concert venues more user-friendly to home-grown talent. Pressed by Stan Klees, Walt decided to start a small weekly tip sheet (confidential newsletter) designed for record companies and radio stations. This was RPM Magazine. It was 1964.

One of the first things the magazine did was to launch a music poll to gather votes for
Canada’s top recording artists. The music poll was a precursor to the Juno Awards as we know them today. They went on to become an award presentation in 1970 and the awards were nicknamed The Juno Awards after the CRTC’s then-chairman, Pierre Juneau.

The magazine naturally made the promotion of Cancon its mandate and Walt campaigned to boost the level of Canadian content on radio. Walt’s efforts represented a major contribution to the 1970 CRTC ruling that radio stations must incorporate 30% Canadian content into their programming.

		RPM Magazine also adopted the MAPL symbol, created by Stan Klees, to identify Canadian content on records. This was a milestone in developing the Cancon industry and the symbol is still used today to identify Canadian content. In 1984, The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS), which was by then organizing the Juno Awards, established the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award to honour Walt’s accomplishments.
Walt received this surprise award during the 1976 Juno Awards, at Ryerson Theatre in Toronto. The inscription reads: “To Walt Grealis You were always there when we needed you” and is signed from “The musicians of Canada”.
The annual award is given to an individual who has contributed to the advancement of the Canadian music industry.

Although RPM and its associated activities were said, by some, to be Walt’s whole life, it’s obvious there was much more to his life than that. He was also a backer of charities and in particular, Toronto’s Variety Village, which he began supporting during the 1950s. In 1989, as Stan tells it, the industry held a banquet in the Centennial Ballroom of Toronto's Inn On The Park to celebrate RPM's 25th anniversary. As the speeches and tributes ended, two enormous doors opened. Preceded by a piper, a $50,000 coach drove into the room between the tables of diners. On the sides were the words “Donated by
WALT GREALIS of RPM MAGAZINE”.

Walt's friends in the industry had chipped in and bought Variety Village its first full-sized coach with a hydraulic wheelchair lift, air conditioning and stereo. It would be used to transport Variety kids to their therapy and back to Variety Village. The bus would be repaired and maintained and used for many years and Walt often saw it drive past the RPM building on Brentcliffe Road. Walt was honoured many times for his efforts on behalf of this charity that was so close to his heart.

Near the end, Walt declared, “I've lived a good life. What I did for a living, most people would like to do for fun.”

Walt Grealis was a Mountie, a Toronto police officer, a pilot, a skydiver, a publisher, an editor, a writer, a comic character-inventor and a mentor. Stan, who would be the authority on the subject, says Walt was a wonderful friend and support to many, and much more besides.

ANNE MURRAY PHOTO GOES HERE Legendary Canadian artist Anne Murray paid tribute to Walt at the 2004 Juno Awards, held just weeks after his death. The tribute named Walt recipient of the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences

Walt Grealis fuelled the beginning of the Canadian music explosion. Affectionately known as ‘Canada’s Music Man,’ Walt was indeed a hero to Canadian recording artists and, Stan would argue, a hero to “the other craftsmen of the allied arts which he called Cancon. He dedicated his life to creating the Canadian music explosion...the sound heard 'round the world. His goal was to open the door for all artists and build a star system in Canada.”

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Stan Klees: Canadian music industry ‘pioneer, innovator, visionary’

By Susan Tolusso

On Jan. 17, 2004, three days before he died, RPM founder Walt Grealis rose from his bed in the home of his lifelong friend and business partner Stan Klees, crossed the room and sat at the computer. Both men had been spending time in the preceding days reading emails, advertisements and essays submitted to their good friend Sean LaRose as LaRose prepared what turned out to be a 92-page tribute to the life and work of Walter Grealis. True to his custom in all the years he had been running RPM, Grealis wrote the defining editorial for the tribute.

Also true to his custom, what he wrote was a salute to the contributions of others including LaRose, the doctors and nurses who cared for him as he battled cancer, and especially Klees. As Stan recalled in June, 2004, what Walt wrote was, as usual, impeccable. “Everything was spelled correctly, the grammar was correct. He was so sick, but you’d never know. He was very sharp, right up to the end.”

Technical merit marks are one thing, but Walter’s summary of gratitude also deserves full marks for graciousness, heart and simple eloquence. Keep in mind that you should read Walt’s thank-you note as if he had prefaced each section with ‘Thanks also to’ and continued from there. Here is what he wrote about Stan Klees:

"My lifetime friend who was always there for me and who was another hero of Cancon. We came up with the idea of the first award presentations which eventually became the Juno Awards. He suggested the first music industry conference and put them all together. Together we started the Big Country Awards and made them the success that they were. All along he financially supported my publication (RPM) and was devoted to “the artists.” While he looked after the interests of the magazine and the industry, he neglected looking after himself. I have never known such an unselfish human being.
If there was a new innovation to promote in the industry, he would think of it and make it happen. His crowning achievement was the implementation of the MAPL symbol that identified Canadian content so that Cancon would get airplay. He was proud of that and called it “his baby” and in my mind it was the catalyst that made playing Cancon easy.
Many of today’s successful artists may not know who Stan Klees is, but they are all benefiting from his work and his effort. I hope the industry will honour my memory by affording Stan Klees the credit and rewards that he is due. How lucky this industry has been to have such a pioneer, innovator, visionary and above all Canadian to admire and respect and he should be an example to the young people who enter our industry. Because of him, this country is a better place.”

Canada’s country music industry honoured Stan in 1995.

Arguably, one reason ‘this country is a better place’ is because Walt and Stan took RPM, which started as a four-page ‘tip sheet’ that listed the hottest records of the week, and used it to address the larger issue of the absence of Canadian music on Canada’s public airwaves. Walt has said, “Stan was the pioneer of the whole Canadian content (Cancon) movement.” While Walt kept RPM running, writing much of the content on artists, music industry and radio station activities and charting the hottest foreign and Canadian songs, Stan helped out on weekly coverage, layout duties and special projects, and also wrote analysis on problems facing the industry.

	Stan rounded up a group of independent record producers and formed the Canadian Independent Record Producers Association to advocate for this struggling group. He led a delegation to Ottawa to sit down with Ross McLean and Pat Pearce of the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG), before it became the CRTC.
These gentlemen promised that Canadian content regulations were coming, but admitted it would take a few years.

In the late 1960s, Stan launched a 10-part series of articles entitled ‘Legislated radio’. The series argued that since the airwaves are public property in Canada, Canadian musicians should have better access to them than they did in those days. Stan understood all too well how hard it was to get national airplay with a Canadian title: he had been a DJ as a teenager and had been a record producer and headed an American-owned record company in his twenties. He knew very few Canadian songs would ever get on air because DJs wanted proven material; that is, they wanted proven successes from the U.S. and later, Britain.

Stan and RPM continued to lobby, advocating 10% of music aired be Canadian. When CRTC Chairman Pierre Juneau announced the 30% requirement, which took effect in 1971, RPM and its supporters were delighted.

The next task was to help radio DJs identify Canadian content. Stan then invented the MAPL logo. The acronym indicates whether: the Music was written by a Canadian, the Artist is Canadian, the record was a Canadian Production and/or the Lyrics were authored by a Canadian. MAPL was a stroke of genius: simple, elegant, powerful. It was licensed by RPM for use on its charts, and by the CRTC. Record companies have used
the MAPL logo for more than 30 years to identify Cancon.

Along the way, Stan worked with Walt on the first industry polls, the awards show that evolved into the Junos as well as on building an association and an awards show, Big Country Awards, for the country music sector.

Grealis and Klees, Walt and Stan – they were like a brand name in the music industry that needed no further explanation. They worked so closely together as business partners, it was not always clear where one stopped and the other started. For this reason, Walt regretted that Stan was not honoured alongside him with an Order of Canada. Although Walt has said he worked with the great contralto Maureen Forrester to have that oversight corrected, it has not yet come to pass.

The men and their magazine provided coverage of Canadian artists when there was virtually none; they operated and financed RPM with private funds when no one believed the mag would survive. Instead, it grew into a glossy, must-read product that stayed alive – with one brief interruption – for nearly 37 years, covering the trade, charting singles, albums and CDs, tracing the progress of something they had helped to become an unstoppable force: Canadian music.

Getting it done: how Stan launched Walt in the music biz,
and how they launched RPM together…

By Doug Lounsbury

The two guys who made it happen...!

They were both born in Toronto, Walt in 1929 and Stan in 1932. Walt went to Central Commerce. Stan went to Central Tech. The schools were blocks apart and the two met briefly when Stan was a teenage disc jockey on CHUM Radio in l948.

In 1952 the two met again. Grealis was a Toronto Police officer after a stint in the RCMP and Klees was a Departure Control Operator with Trans Canada Airlines.

In 1957, Stan got a job in the record business with MacKay Record Distributors. The company was part of London Records of Canada. Stan looked after the promotion and the first 45s he took to CHUM were by Ricky Nelson and Fats Domino. MacKay had never had a promo guy before, so Stan was greeted with enthusiasm by Millie Moriak, the then Record Librarian at CHUM. From that time on, the door was wide open for Stan who, one way or another, got the hits in their hands even before they were released in Canada.

Dick Clark was the king of rock & roll in those years and Stan got a high school student to list all the names and artists of every hit that Clark played on American Bandstand. CHUM gave Stan a portable typewriter to give to the student so he could type the lists every day. A few years later, Klees got to know Clark and had a direct line to the U.S. market.

Small wonder that after only a few months in, Stan became known as the wonder boy of the business in Canada. “I had the job I had always dreamed of and my friends were people like Bobby Darin, Johnny Mathis, Duane Eddy and Connie Francis. I partied with people like Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Dion" he says.

In 1960, Klees was hired away from London to head up Astral Records. At 28, he was running a record company! Days after he started, he walked into CHUM with a 45 by Lonnie Donegan called “My Old Man's A Dustman”. As a favour, CHUM put it on the air immediately and the switchboard lit up. The record climbed to the top of the charts and was a Canadian hit. Did nothing in the U.S. Stan continued to be the wonder boy of the industry. He got it done.

In 1963, London tried to re-hire Stan. Stan declined the rather generous offer but promised to send them someone for the job. Stan sent Walt Grealis, whom Stan had earlier positioned with Apex Records, to take the London job. Walt was now entrenched in the record business and Stan guided his career day by day as Walt became better and better known in the business.

On February 24th, l964, Walt launched RPM Weekly (see also “About RPM Magazine” and the other buttons on this site). The rest is history. The Cancon explosion was on the way.

Over the next 40 years the names Stan & Walt became a brand name when it came to Cancon. No last names needed – it was only “Stan &Walt”.

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