The Kim Kastle Band #

Working with this band was a lot of fun and gave me a chance to introduce them to the many aspects of the music industry. I did become part of their management as I handled some aspects such as a personal manager to Kim herself. Some of the financial management and investments. They were renting a house in the west end of Edmonton where they would rehearse between engagements but were often on the road for 3 weeks and then back at the house for a week. I gave up my apartment and moved into the band house. There was this house that was about 2 doors down the same street where we lived that I always thought was a cool looking house. I think when we moved into our current house, there was a for sale sign on the property that went down shortly after we moved in. About 6 months later, I noticed that there was a for sale sign on that property. I was interested to know the details about that house so I called my friend Candice Klover who was a real estate agent. It had an assumable mortgage, and we would just have to come up with $10,000.00 cash and we could take it over without a credit check. I told Kim and Dave about this find, it turns out they too also thought that the house was cool. It just so happened that they had been approached by someone who wanted to invest in the band. Here was a perfect opportunity as they could even back up his investment with collateral property. They made the purchase, and I was successful in turning a rock ’n’ roll band that essentially played cover tunes into land owners. Years later, Dave would continually look for properties that had a large assumable mortgage and buy them up. Essentially he became a landlord and went back to playing and performing on the streets of Edmonton this was all in a span of six or seven years later.

I have a kind of funny story to share about this. I had gotten some free tickets to see the Edmonton Trappers (Minor League Baseball) and took my friend, Pastor Jim to see the game. The game was almost over, so we left a little early to avoid the crowd that would be coming behind us. Out on the parking lot we see this gruffy looking street musician with his guitar coming towards us. I remember Jim saying something about, now what and I looked and told him, “I think I know that guy”. Sure enough it was Dave. He had been a street musician before he started The Heat which then turned into The Kim Kastle Band. It was then that he told me he bought some more houses and was renting them out.

Another time they were playing in Calgary and that same weekend “The Alberta Recording Industry Association (ARIA) was holding a career fair and one organization I wanted to introduce them to was CAPAC which was one of two performance right societies in Canada. The two performance rights organisations later merged and became SOCAN. My agent that I always called and have had many, many conversations over the years was there so I got a chance to introduce the band to them.

I believe it was at this same career fair/ music convention that the band bought a special package deal with Round Table Studios for something like 100 hours of recording time. We had one song that they wanted to record and I am sure they thought they would come up with a bunch more as I am sure they heard this is how records are made, right? I was a bit frustrating as I was not involved in the production aspects of this and I knew this would happen. Sort of reminds me of my first early attempts at recording with my friends. There is a big difference between playing live and playing in the studio. To be truly effective and efficient you need to do some planning, coming up with parts takes some real skill, all these guys have been focusing on copying not finding new and original parts. To do this right I would not have used any of the musicians, probably not even Dave. After the recordings were done, the band could easily pick out the parts and make them their own. Over time they might have been ready but not now. They spent all 100 hours on that one song and it wasn’t all that good. Nothing that would jump out at you. I remembering the engineer asking me several times why aren’t you producing this, as he was the same engineer we used when I recorded “Hot Java” and “Need to Feel” and was really impressed with how we came in did our thing picked out the weak spots and pulling in solutions with overdubs and all in relative quicktime.

Back in those days, this was years before cell phone where even a thing, I carried around a pager. One time during these recording sessions, I was out for a cup of coffee and a donut at a donut shop just up the road from the studio. I get a page, so I just stepped outside to a phone booth on the corner of the street and the answering service says there is a radio station from Newfoundland on the line and they want to talk to you about the Kim Kastle Band. So, here I was in a phone booth with cars flying around the corner talking on live radio doing an interview about The Kim Kastle Band. It was an interesting time, a little bit of some good promotion and I was getting some great results, with a band that had no real original songs, no records of any kind just doing the B circuit of bars and lounges.

Around this time, the magazines and newspapers were finally catching onto my crazy headline hooks. As I mentioned earlier, my initial press release about the Kim Kastle Band was the headline “From Lead and Zinc to Rock and Roll”. City Magazine and I don’t know if this was the Calgary edition or the Edmonton one but they came up with the heading, “Kim Kastle is Mining for Gold Records”. I thought that this was a really great achievement where the media was locking in with the brand that I was creating for the band.

The band played about 90% of their engagements in the rural parts of Alberta and Saskatchewan. In the meantime we had stories being written about the band in the two newspapers of Edmonton and all the local magazines. There was a growing interest in this band and finally they got a one week gig in a lounge in the West End of Edmonton. I can’t remember if I did any additional promotion for this or not but we were packed to capacity every night and that includes Monday which is usually a pretty dead night. I remember someone from Grant MacEwan that was in the same music program that I was in and I admired but we never really talked to each other came up to me and congratulated me on what I was doing for this band, because no one else was doing the kinds of things that I was doing to promote and build an audience and interest like I was and here you could see the results.

One other weird thing that came out of the promotion and marketing work that I was doing, David Barns and I got invited to some open house shine dig where they wined and dined us telling us about the existing Advertising and Marketing Association that was in Edmonton and to join them. Weird I thought that the professional association in this area of promotion thought that we were worthy contenders for such a prestigious association.

David also became a board member for AIRA (Alberta Industry Recording Association) and he organized the first annual AIRA awards party and show. Most of the people that we worked with where there like Rita Miller, Kim Kastle Band. It was a fun night and although David was at our table he would often have to slip away to take care of some emergency that would come up.