JAIMIE VERNON – DEAR MUSIC AUDIENCES…I’M BREAKING UP WITH YOU

As that plastic surgery-inflicted old country crooner likes to sing: “You gotta know when to hold ‘em…know when to fold ‘em”.

This week I was invited back to play the International Pop Overthrow Festival in Toronto. It’s the sixth annual event thrown by the inimitable David Bash. Back when David decided to expand the traveling festival to make it truly ‘international’, I stepped up to help him co-ordinate and facilitate talent and musical equipment for Toronto. It’s an amazing showcase of pop music talent that invades Toronto every year for four days in November. For five years it had a home at The Rivoli on Queen Street but this year it will be held at C’est What? on Front Street from November 21 thru November 24.

JAIMIE VERNON – EVERYTIME I SEE YOUR PICTURE I CRY

I’ve been around this music thing a loooong time. Three quarters of my life in fact. I started in bands when I was 17, I started my own label when I was 22 and have had a roller coaster ride of sweet success and monumental failures. But in all that time I never lost sight of being professional in every aspect of promoting my career. There was always attention paid to improving production, songwriting, musicianship and, especially, presentation (WEA Records once offered me a job to put press kits together for them after one of mine wound up on an exec’s desk). The public visage of my image and that of my music projects was toiled over, debated and deliberately calculated. Not all of it worked (see Crime Exhibit #1 above), but all of it was done with the aid of like minded people who had similar goals of putting our best face foreword.

JAIMIE VERNON – I Like the Beatles And My Baby Loves The Rolling Stones

Bob Segarini’s song is an apt musical metaphor for “Men are from Mars, Women are from Anywhere They Damn Well Please”. But in my case, the title means exactly what it says. I’m a Beatles fan. My wife, Sharon Vernon, is a Rolling Stones fan. In our household that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a well balanced diet of charm, wit and brilliant pop sensibilities vs. machismo, grit and bad boy sexuality.