Chronicle of Experts - Music Special with Jake Gold & Alan Cross
From renowned thought and culture leaders, to members of our community, we learn about what gives meaning to what they do.
MYKIGAI is a dedicated space to maintain purpose and profit from career and life experience for an active 50+ community. In our newsletters we profile our Ambassador Experts to explore what makes their lives purposeful. For our week participating at Collision conference, we have two special guests, Canadian Idol judge and music manager Jake Gold, and Canadian Broadcaster and host of the Ongoing History of New Music Alan Cross. Friends and collaborators, they will talk about Gold’s 40 year career as a manager in the entertainment business. MYKIGAI Talks Music with Jake Gold & Alan Cross, Thursday June 25th, at 1 PM ET).
Interviews by Leanne Delap who has been both the Fashion Editor and Fashion Reporter for the Globe and Mail and was the editor-in-chief of FASHION Magazine.
Striking Gold, the Second Time Around
Quarantine has been a fruitful time for Jake Gold, and his good news is multiplying. His face is familiar from his six years as a Canadian Idol judge (he was on the full run of the early 2000s series, which is still the country’s top ratings’ hit). But it was back in 1986, at the age of 28, that Gold first entered Canada’s history books. That was when he discovered, and signed on the spot, a Kingston bar band called The Tragically Hip.
Gold was their manager for 17 years, ending just before his Idol run. Last week, a parallel 17 years after they parted ways, Gold re-signed with the surviving members of The Hip to go through their archives and release previously unreleased content. In addition, Gold and his company, The Management Trust, will handle late lead singer Gord Downie’s unreleased solo material on behalf of Downie’s family.
The band released a sweet statement to mark the occasion: “In the words of Peaches and Herb, ‘We're reunited and it feels so good.’ We are all very happy to be back working with our original dance partner and architect.”
Not one to understate, Gold calls the band Canada’s Beatles. He told Billboard Magazine: “I believe the kind of assets, masters, intellectual property that the band owns, including their name, needs to be cemented in Canadian history.”
On the phone from his home office loft, Gold expands on what reuniting means to him. “This is my legacy, too,” he says. “They fired me in 2003, and I’m the first to admit, I’m in a way better place now to do this than I would have been maybe 10 years ago. I’ve done a lot of work on myself, a lot of therapy, and I think I’m a better person. I’m better equipped to manage personalities now.”
This, he says, “is using my experience to find new purpose.” To dig deeper into that subject, the first-ever MYKIGAI Expert Talk on music next week pairs up Gold with his colleague and friend, radio broadcaster Alan Cross as moderator. Cross is a legendary radio broadcaster, best known for his nearly 30-year radio series The Ongoing History of New Music.
“A friend said to me recently, ‘Jake, you just keep bouncing back,’” says Gold. “Well, I think the reason is that I give a shit. What I’ve become really good at over the years is motivating people. When I started out I was more a yeller kind of motivator, the archetypal manager. I have more tools in my toolbox now. Over time you adapt, and you become better.”
Instincts, he says, get honed over a lifetime, and they grow better with time. He has kept to his original mantra as a manager, urging all his artists “to never sacrifice the long term for the short term.” That restraint, the courage to take it slow and steady, he says, is how you build a long and lasting career.
“Never get caught up in being famous,” he says. “It’s the work that matters.”
Alt Music’s Storyteller
Since 1993, Alan Cross has been a staple of Canadian Sunday nights, his rich, gravitas-laden voice warming our radios in the dark. That’s almost three decades he has spent meticulously decoding the alternative music scene on his landmark program, The Ongoing History of New Music produced by Corus Entertainmentand and syndicated across the country.
That’s an epic number of episodes: “896, actually,” he says. “And yes, it’s very surreal knowing that people have literally grown up listening to the program and that it’s become something of an inter-generational bonding thing.”
Cross is a storyteller at heart, his work is to create context around the tunes. “Streaming is fine, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the music. It’s just organized noise. Pleasant noise, but people let it go in one ear and out the other. If I can make you stop and think ‘That’s cool,’” he says, “then I’ve done my job.”
Has time and wisdom changed his attitude? “Absolutely,” he says. “I used to be terribly snobbish about what music was good and which music was bad. Now I realize that the best way to look at music is to respect all of it and listen to what you want. I’m now also able to tell stories about acts that I don’t necessarily like. But my job is to tell the story of alt-rock, regardless of my personal feelings towards the subject matter.
Cross has followed the Hip since their beginnings. And though he often waxes about international names, this subject remains close to his heart. He calls the Hip a standard-bearer for the country, “the first unabashedly Canadian band. And they were so Canadian in the way they conducted themselves. Very anti-rock star. Un-prepossessing. They loved hockey. They name-checked Canadian people and places and events.”
We loved them all the more, Cross says, because we felt we alone understood them. “The Hip catalogue became a course in Canadiana. And the country loved them for it. In fact, when it became apparent that the Hip wasn’t going to break in America in a big way, Canadians embraced them that much tighter.”
He sums up the love story this way: “The best way to describe the country’s reaction to Gord’s death was this tweet the day he died: ‘Canada closed. Death in the family.’
The MYKIGAI Expert Talk with Jake Gold and Alan Cross is Thursday, June 25th at 1pm ET. Sign up to reserve your space below or at MYKIGAI.com