2018 Inductee: Jim Tovey

Written by John Stewart

What Brian Smith remembers most about the fledgling Malton rock ’n roller he met while they played lacrosse together as teens in the mid-1960s was that “he had a hell of a scream on him.” Smith, a guitarist, lived in Westwood Village. Jim Tovey, a singer, lived in Victory Village. Smith had a band called The Soul System. Tovey had a band called The Grass Impact. The bands would get together to jam. Eventually, they would join forces.

“The reason we got Jimmy in the band – which was renamed The System – was because we heard him scream one night,” says Smith. Tovey was doing his best James Brown and really struck a nerve with his future bandmates. “We knew that anyone who could scream that good would give us a great added attraction,” Smith laughs.

Tovey’s next-door neighbour, Bert Mellen, played bass, Al Cairns was on drums, Smith was on guitar, and Mike Whitham, the only one from Brampton, was on keys.

Anyone who knew the enthusiastically independent Jim Tovey will enjoy the thought of him fronting “The System.” The band played Malton’s two community halls, local high schools, and shows at Bramalea Civic Centre where they were often double-billed with another young group named Rush. Rush bassist Geddy Lee often sat in the front row while The System played, keeping a sharp eye on the work of Bert Mellen to see what he could pick up.

The System’s repertoire of Rhinoceros and Steppenwolf covers, mixed with originals by Smith and Tovey, earned them a spot on the CBC-TV summer show Drop-In, where they played three originals.

Tovey auditioned to host another CBC show but lost out to some guy from Hamilton named Martin Short.

Jim at first appeared headed for a career as a visual artist – his primary arts passion in high school – before the magic of music carried him away. He quit high school to play full-time, a decision that didn’t sit well with his parents.

A farmhouse in the country on Airport Rd. where Jim and Bert lived was where the band rehearsed, partied, wrote, rehearsed, partied, and rehearsed, not necessarily in that order. Smith stayed there on weekends because his parents wouldn’t let him live there full-time.

“We played every weekend, then went back to our families,” says Smith. “That was the start of it all.”

Jim was a natural showman, who could contort his body in strange ways. He had a confident stage manner, loved to lean out into the audience, swing the mic out and pull it back in and use his very loud voice to full advantage.

Smith, who did imitations of other band’s singers to warm up audiences, couldn’t imitate his own band’s lead singer because he was always changing his approach. “He was born to be a frontman,” says Smith, who runs his own music promotion business in London, Ont. “He could quickly get people in the palm of his hand.

In a premonition of his future career as a carpenter, Jim cut up chunks of wood before one show, had The System’s name stamped on them and got the audience to play percussion, getting everyone involved — a collaborative style he favoured in all his careers.

He’d studied voice at the Ontario Conservatory of Music and made his singing debut around age 10 in the Christmas Eve concert at Our Lady of The Airways Church. He would prove to be a much better singer than altar boy.

After The System broke up, Jim was in several groups, including the regularly rotating membership of Bond. His late brother-in-law Dave Cooper recalled on his blog that “Jim had this idea for a show band called the Alpha String Band. We played Jethro Tull, Moody Blues, that type of classical-inspired rock. We had these coloured suits, pink, blue and white, a different colour for each set.” The group formed after Tovey met John Oglivey in the subway, lugging a huge case in which he carried his cello.

One can just imagine the conversation:

Jim: “What’s in the case?”
John: “A cello”
Jim: “Cool. Want to be in a band where you get to wear different-coloured suits?”

In his blog, Dave Cooper explains that Jim later lured drummer Paul Nixon – best known for his drumming on Downchild’s original “Flip, Flop & Fly” — to join him, Brian Smith, and “Shady” George Bland in Rockit-88. Most of the band lived together in a house in Westwood Village.

It was a bluesier band that morphed into a group called Live Jive and then transformed into Hott Roxx, the band which survived the longest and for which Jim is probably best remembered. It featured guitarists Dave Harrison and Papa John King and toured extensively showcasing the music of The Rolling Stones.

That ended abruptly when an explosion and fire at a Thunder Bay bar destroyed their uninsured equipment. Their many friends in the business held a benefit concert — but Hott Roxx never recovered.

Jim, with his wife Lee’s assistance, crafted a second career as a carpenter. They moved to Mississauga in 1989 and he started another career as Ward 1derful councillor in 2010.

Music remained a powerful force in his life. In 1994, Jim got up on stage with a band at the Grosvenor Exchange bar.

From the moment he nailed a Jaggeresque straight overhead kick to start off Chuck Berry’s “Oh Carol,” Andrew Dixon knew he’d found a fellow-traveller. It took about a month of convincing but Tovey joined the band known as The Primitives. It included Dixon on lead guitar, David Smith on rhythm guitar and backing vocals Bob Heinrich on bass and Dan Hill, later replaced by Stuart Hull, on drums. They’ve played together since, across the GTA but especially up-and-down Brown’s Line.

His political career slowed the band down a bit, but Tovey continued to co-write songs and the band performed periodically, including backing him at the Waterfront Festival for the song he wrote to celebrate Hazel McCallion’s 40th year in office.

The chorus he wrote perfectly captured the intersection of a disaster and a political coronation:

“When the train it went flying and the tankers were torn That was the moment the legend was born”

In the last few years whenever he felt people were giving him too much credit for one of the numerous projects he’d gotten rolling, Jim was fond of saying that nobody accomplishes anything alone.

It’s true that it often takes a community of people convinced to believe in a good cause before it can be achieved. But there’s usually a main instigator – somebody who hears “no” and translates that into “there’s still a chance.”

The truth is that Mississauga Music Walk of Fame would not exist except for Jim Tovey’s love of music and his insistence that local players – be they musicians or singers or promoters or composers, be celebrated in – and by – the community that fostered them.

When Jim and Lee visited a music walk of fame in Philadelphia, which was then recreating itself as a city of the arts, Jim saw many names he didn’t recognize. He realized that enshrining names in stone in a local park would educate the public and celebrate many worthy Mississaugans – famous and not so famous – at the same time.

He suggested a “pilot project” that – like so many of his temporary ideas – has turned into something pretty permanent. He recruited a committee and cajoled staff and council on board – using the charm that made his mother say that, even as a child, he could sell anything to anybody.

The rest, as they say, is history — our collective musical history celebrated. He even helped install the stones the first couple of years.

Jim Tovey was a dynamite package of passion, plans and persistence. Take, for instance, his idea to have some kind of physical recognition in Port Credit’s streetscape of the village’s rich music and festival culture. He had the bright notion of having the pedestrian crossing at a major intersection marked in the shape of piano keys.

In the city that Tovey’s piano hero Oscar Peterson called home for the last 35 years of his life, it seemed most appropriate. But the official answer was no. So Tovey went home and figured out – to scale – how it could be done, then went to the works yard to chat with the template maker.

The next week he got a call to visit the works yard to see the test strip of piano keys that had been painted on the parking lot. When they were installed at Hurontario St. and Lakeshore Rd., a photo of the “piano keys” intersection taken from on high from a nearby condo went viral on the Internet. That was the Jim Tovey that people in the musical and political communities shared – a man bursting with ideas from his hyperactive imagination with an infectious way of expressing them — so everybody sang along when it was time for the chorus.

The piano keys were just a quirky little dab on our landscape but they spoke volumes about the talent of the City of Mississauga’s musical frontman – James Michael Tovey. We welcome him into the place that clearly wouldn’t exist without him: Mississauga’s Music Walk of Fame.