OTTAWA’S IDOL MAKER
Relentless pitchman has become Ottawa’s least likely pop impresario
Pesky. Relentless. Driven.
Think what you will of Eldon J. Fox, but the man behind Ottawa Idol is hard to ignore.
ELDON J. FOX
Music promoter
Eldon J. Fox is holding on line 1 — everywhere in town. He wants the radio station to play the kid’s song. He wants the Senators to let the kid sing the anthem. He wants the paper to give his Ottawa Idol event some publicity.
They can ignore him, if they like, but he was a salesman for years. You think he gives up easily?
Their inboxes will soon be stuffed with another of Fox’s emails, this one, perhaps, all in capital letters. What’s with you people, anyway? We’re talking about very talented kids here. One day, you’ll be begging for access.
At Ottawa’s 25th Century Fox Promotions, Eldon J. Fox is the principal. He is also the only. His emails conjure the image of a relentless, small-time promoter desperate for a big break, hustling every minute, which he is —
‘I find the best. There’s no doubt about it ... I push it to the limit. ... (Other singing contests) are a one-day competition. They get a tin cup and they go home. (With my program) they can take that all through life.’
if he thinks you can help the aspiring teen singers he keeps tucked under his wing.
Really, Eldon Fox is a retired home renovation contractor who promotes the singing talent as a kind of volunteer work, a do-gooder with an Internet connection and a fondness for music.
And yet over the past decade, thousands of young singers have auditioned for his Ottawa Idol singing contest. About 100 of them have spent time in a program he’s developed, where they are given voice coaching, practice time with professional musicians and, in some cases, time in a recording studio. They also receive the benefit of having one of Ottawa’s pushiest men behind them. Which is no small thing — because somehow, through sheer willpower and imperviousness to rejection, Fox has become the city’s least likely pop impresario.
Jordan McIntosh, whose songs can be heard on Ottawa radio station Country 101.1, is one of Fox’s alumni. The same is true of Amanda Nantsios, who has had recent airplay on Ottawa’s Hot 89.9. Some of Fox’s former Idols have ascended higher still, like Alex Lacasse, who was signed by major-label Universal Music four years ago (although he has since moved on).
And long before Sony Music star Kira Isabella was named female artist of the year at the 2013 Canadian Country Music Awards, she won the 2007 edition of Fox’s contest.
By his own reckoning, Fox has positioned himself such that any major young singing talent that emerges in the city of Ottawa is almost certain to pass through his program.
“I find the best,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it.”
On the day he meets a Citizen reporter, Fox, 71, is wearing black — not fancy on this occasion, but sharp.
His Cadillac, 19 years old, is adorned with custom plates “EJ FOX.”
He’s 5’10”, 220, and walks with a slight limp, a relic of a car crash when he was 15. The crash, which left him in a body cast for a year, was caused by a drunk driver, but he tells that without bitterness. He’s been through worse.
In the little home office on the second floor of his house, the world headquarters of 25th Century Fox, a picture on the wall shows an old farmhouse, the home of his birth. A second shows the very large and expensive home he once owned — his “monument,” as he calls it. Together, they frame his story, and help explain why a man like Fox would trouble himself to play benefactor to a group of fameseeking teenage vocalists.
Fox grew up near the village of Sheenboro, in the Pontiac, on a small, non-specialized farm — the type that used to have a little bit of everything. His father was disabled and unable to work, so Fox and his five older siblings had to fill the gap.
“I knew what hard work is,” he says.
He had one year of high school before the car crash ended his education, at least the formal component. When he finally recovered, he came to Ottawa and worked at the Canadian Tire on Kent Street, a stock boy on roller skates.
Then came a big break, a job selling suits at Gerald Preston’s menswear shop on Sparks Street. The politicians used to have their suits made there, men like Paul Martin, Sr. and then-prime minister John Diefenbaker. It was this experience, between the racks of clothes, that made the man. In dealing with these accomplished statesmen, and measuring their inseams, he learned that they were just people; when he spoke to them, they spoke back. From then on, he’d never be afraid to approach anyone.
After six years with the tape measure, he began selling home fuel for Gulf Oil, then went into the siding business, first as a branch manager with Alcan, and later starting his own company, which installed doors and windows.
He expanded into general home renovation, and made a modest success.
Then he got divorced, started drinking heavily and lost everything. But he hauled himself up, went for treatment and dried out.
“It was die or quit,” says Fox, who has now gone three decades without a drink.
After his detox, Fox took a job selling advertising while plotting the reopening of his renovation business. He was staying at his sister’s house in Britannia, and the empty lot across the street created a goal in his mind.
“I said to myself, I’m going to buy that lot and build a house on it — and I couldn’t buy a pack of cigarettes then.”
Fox got his business going again, became more successful than he’d been before, and was able to buy the lot. With stones he gathered himself, he built a 4,500-square-foot house. It was the peak of his financial success.
It was followed by another wipeout. An expansion into the restaurant business in the late 1980s, in the form of Foxy’s Pizza Den at Carling and Woodroffe Avenues, ended in abysmal failure, and in the financial ruin he lost the huge stone home. Setback number three. But he stayed both on the wagon and in his new long-term relationship, with a woman named Janet Maloney, with whom he still lives.
In his final working years, he returned to the renovation business. He didn’t make as much money as he once had, and didn’t get the stone house back, but he did OK before finally retiring three years ago.
Now he works full-time volunteer hours, and pours tens of thousands of dollars of his own money into his 25th Century Fox project, where all of that failure-earned toughness and thick salesman skin is being brought to bear in service of his young singers. That’s him still holding on line 1.
“I push it to the limit,” he admits.
Since he started his program about a decade ago — known as Kiwanis Idol until he changed the name to Ottawa Idol this year — about 2,000 singers between the ages of 13 and 21 have auditioned.
Other cities have big singing contests, but they’re not like his, Fox says.
“They’re a one-day competition. They get a tin cup and they go home.”
Fox takes the 10 best performers in his contest and works with them. A group of volunteers he has put together provides voice coaching, practice opportunities, studio recording time and promotional photography. There are still plenty of incidental costs, though, which Fox picks up himself. Over the past decade he estimates that he has put something approaching $50,000 into the program.
Fox recently arranged a photo shoot for 17-year-old country singer Ally Mayson (formerly Alexandra Maheral), the 2012 Idol winner. He gets music for her from songwriters he has connected with in Nashville and Los Angeles. He has managed to get Mayson’s music onto radio stations in Montreal and Renfrew — though not Ottawa, yet. Somehow, he has even swung radio play for her in Nova Scotia, Switzerland and Germany.
Mayson is one of two singers for whom Fox has begun to formally act as agent — he says he isn’t opposed to the idea of earning back some of the money he’s put in, although he isn’t holding his breath.
The exposure Mayson has received has included appearances on CTV Ottawa’s morning show and on Rogers TV, arranged by Fox.
“He is very persistent. That’s putting it mildly,” says Derick Fage, host of Rogers’ daytime Ottawa, and a longtime recipient of all-caps Fox emails railing against the injustice his singers face in their lack of airtime.
“We’ve certainly had our words over the years,” says Fage, who nonetheless concedes his admiration for Fox’s determination on behalf of the kids.
“Things like this can be a really tough sell,” Fage says.
Mayson appreciates that, too.
“He’s my everything,” she says of Fox. “We all owe him a lot. My mom loves him.”
Kira Isabella is a different story. By far the most successful graduate to date of the Eldon J. Fox school of pop stardom, Fox says the two are no longer in touch. It bugs him a bit, he says, that his 2007 winner no longer returns his emails. While it’s true Isabella’s career really took off after she left his program, he believes Idol was a necessary link in the chain that moved her forward.
Isabella’s co-manager David Corey told the Citizen the singer was in Nashville to work on her new record and was too busy to do an interview about Fox. He said Isabella’s email address has changed and the singer wasn’t aware Fox had been trying to reach her.
Corey also said that while Isabella was grateful for the opportunity Idol gave her, she was only involved with Fox for a brief time, six years ago.
“She doesn’t really know him that well,” he says.
Corey adds that Isabella has “nothing but nice things (to say) about the program,” but as her manager he sees Idol as more of a footnote than a chapter in her career. “She did 200 of these things from the age of nine to 15,” Corey says.
Fox doesn’t see it quite that way. He believes he was a necessary bridge for her — one of many, perhaps, but no less essential for that.
If not for Idol she’d still be singing “in Orléans, in her basement,” says Fox.
But he says he’s happy for her success all the same. Fox can be lavish, and
is most so when it comes to giving his charges an opportunity to perform in a “big-time show.” Six years ago, he started producing an annual “Red Carpet Event.” He gets the kids professional hair and makeup artists and has them dressed in designer clothes and driven to the show in a limousine. In 2012, he convinced Ottawa designer Richard Robinson to outfit the girls in $5,000-$10,000 dresses.
That was the year he held the event at then-Scotiabank Place. It was overkill, certainly, since he couldn’t sell many tickets — especially, he says, after his tentative deal to have Justin Bieber headline the show fell through. But Fox wanted the kids to feel like they were part of a “real Hollywood production.” Whatever happens in the future, they would always be able to tell people they played Scotiabank Place.
And it’s this “can’t take that away from me” approach that speaks most directly to the question of why a man of modest beginnings who slogged for so long in the non-glamorous world of small business to make something of himself — and worked harder still at keeping the drink from ruining him — is interested in encouraging starry-eyed teenagers and their dreams of music celebrity.
Fox says all, or almost all, of the kids that come through his program will have to move past those dreams sooner or later and accept a life without legions of adoring fans. In the meantime, he is there to help them believe in themselves.
“They can take that all through life,” he says.
Scotiabank Place, says Eldon J. Fox, will be their stone house framed on the wall. Even if their time there proves fleeting, it’s something they will always have.