FINDING A ‘LOST ANTHEM’
Doc about old song "People City" takes Torontonians on a nostalgic and reflective trip.
“It should be the song of Toronto,” said Tommy Ambrose. “I don’t know what happened.”
Those are the singer-songwriter’s first words in People City: Toronto’s Lost Anthem, a new short documentary about a Toronto song that has been nearly lost to history.
“People City” was commissioned in 1972 by Moses Znaimer as the theme song for his then-fledgling television station, Citytv, then on Channel 79.
The original film that went along with the song, a kind of civic music video before there were music videos, captures Toronto in its peak 1970s’ macramé glory, celebrating the multicultural place it had rapidly become.
It was used by Citytv to sign off too; these were the days before 24-hour television, and stations would stop broadcasting sometime after midnight, usually saying goodnight with “O Canada.”
Despite its initial prominence, the song slipped into obscurity as Citytv switched to a more rock ’n’ roll sound for its theme songs and, as the documentary explains, efforts to get Toronto city council to adopt the song officially failed.
Other cities have unofficial anthems, and some, like New York, have more than one; depending on your preference or age, Sinatra singing “New York, New York” might raise your civic pride, or perhaps it’s “Empire State of Mind” by Jay Z and Alicia Keys, as bombastic as city love letters come.
Toronto’s “People City” anthem has slipped into obscurity, even though its earnest AM-radio sound is now ironic-cool again.
If the song, co-written by Ambrose and Gary Gray, reminds you of a commercial jingle from the late 1960s and 1970s, it’s because the two came out of Toronto’s ad industry. The documentary connects the song to that burgeoning Toronto industry then, as well as the youthful reform politics of the era with former mayor David Crombie reminiscing about those heady days. The documentary was made by Ed Conroy, a cultural historian and video producer who founded Retrontario, a project that collects, in part, video clips from the 1970s through the 1990s.
This earlier, pre-internet era of living memory is mainly captured on videocassettes. As a “vintage video sleuth,” Conroy has scoured garage sales and sometimes trash piles to rescue old tapes that contain hidden gems.
“Broadcasters didn’t keep everything,” Conroy explains. “If there’s a recording of something, it’s often off somebody’s home machine. In the early days of VCRs, tapes were quite expensive, so there weren’t many people who would just hit record and let it go.”
The Ontario, Toronto and even Buffalo TV gems that Conroy has found include old station identification “bumpers,” commercials, news clips and curiosities like “People City,” all of which he archives on his website retrontario.com, where you can also watch his documentary.
Just like archeologists love discovering old dumps because what people throw away tells us a lot about what life was like then, it’s the inbetween bits on old video recordings that are most interesting, the commercials and news clips cap- tured along with the hockey game or movie that were the real reason the record button was pushed.
The People City documentary is part of the “Music from People City” exhibition Conroy has curated, a citywide celebration of Toronto’s music history with exhibits and events that run until January.
It’s produced by Myseum, the Toronto museum project that is a “museum without walls” that has been producing exhibitions in locations across Toronto.
One of the exhibitions Conroy put together is called Moses and Music: from City to Zoomer, which opened this week at the MZTV Museum of Television, Znaimer’s rather magnificent collection of vintage TV sets. Some may remember the museum when it was part of the 299 Queen St. W. Citytv location, but it’s since moved to Znaimer’s Zoomerplex in Liberty Village, home to his media operations today. Apart form the permanent collection of TVs, the temporary exhibit traces the musical influence Citytv and its spinoffs like MuchMusic had on Toronto and Canada.
“Once you go down the rabbit hole of Channel 79 you realize everything came from there,” Conroy says.
Until consumed by other corporate broadcasters decades later, the early years of Citytv had an incredibly experimental spirit, a swashbuckling broadcast version of how independent media operates on the internet today.
Included in Conroy’s MZTV exhibition is one of the old portable Speakers’ Corner units, still in operation: YouTube before there was YouTube. There’s also a T-shirt from the Electric Circus program, when all of 299 Queen was turned into a discotheque and broadcast live on Friday evenings. Most interesting is a collection of one-inch reel-to-reel tapes under display glass that were recently discovered and contain old Citytv-produced shows and even some of the infamous “blue movies” that ran late at night.
Nostalgia alone is like a sugary drink: it feels good for a moment but has no nutrition. Certainly watching some of the clips included in this exhibition and on the Retrontario site will generate nostalgic feelings, but the People City documentary does a great job in showing how taken together they show us how the city was and how we got here today.
Music From People City runs until Jan. 12. Go to myseumoftoronto.com for details. The MZTV Museum is open Tuesday-Friday 2-5 p.m. (mztv.com)