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| Influential Toronto broadcaster David Marsden, aka CFNY personality The Marsbar, has died at 85. Jaymz Bee shares his thoughts. |
DAVID MARSDEN 1941-2026
There are two kinds of disc jockeys. The first kind plays records. The second kind plays you. They reach through the speaker, grab you by the lapels of your imagination, and rearrange the furniture in your head. David Marsden was the second kind, and there were never many of those to begin with. Now there’s one fewer, and the airwaves feel a little more like air.
David passed on Friday, September 25th. He was 85, though I’d have bet money he was lying about that. As his friends at NYthespirit.com put it, borrowing his own phrase, he has put on his wings. It’s a good line. It’s the kind of thing a man says when he has spent his whole life believing that radio was a form of flight.
Let me tell you what he meant to me, and then let me tell you what he meant to everybody else, because the second part is bigger, but the first part is mine.
When Look People came along, we were not an easy band to understand. We were loud, strange, funny, and dressed like a thrift store had exploded in a planetarium. Most gatekeepers looked at us the way a cat looks at a cucumber. David Marsden got it. He was one of the first to get it. That’s the thing about true tastemakers: they don’t wait for the consensus. They are the consensus, six months early. When a man like that says yes to you, you walk around for a week feeling taller, and you keep a little of that height for the rest of your life. Because of him and CFNY, our album “Small Fish Big Pond” (recorded at Kensington Sound, produced by Mike Alyanak) had FIVE CASBY nominations! We played their awards show at The Concert Hall where Great Bob Scott and Don Berns became fast friends!
David had that effect on a whole generation of artists. He discovered so many of them that listing them would take up the rest of this page and half of the next. He didn’t just play new music. He believed in it, the way some people believe in God or the Leafs.
The Boy from Stratford
He was born David Michie in Toronto on March 2nd, 1941, and raised in Stratford, where the rest of the town was busy with Shakespeare and young David was busy with rock and roll. As a teenager he put on sock hops and managed a local band called The Revols. That’s the origin story right there. Most kids dream of being the star. David dreamed of being the guy who makes the star possible, which takes a rarer kind of imagination.
He knocked on the door of something like thirty radio stations before one let him in. CFCO in Chatham. Then CHLO in St. Thomas. Then, before anybody could stop him, evenings at CKEY in Toronto, where he was Dave Mickie and so outrageous on air that Marshall McLuhan mentioned him in Understanding Media. Think about that. The medium was the message, and for a moment, the message was Dave Mickie. He turned up on CBC’s Music Hop and CHCH’s Mickie A Go Go. He was a teen idol for people who wanted to be in the know rather than in the magazines.
Becoming Marsden
In the late sixties he went to Montreal and came back a different man, at least by name. David Marsden. CKGM, then CHOM-FM, then home to Toronto and the free-form days of CHUM-FM, where he talked promoters into booking Pink Floyd in this city for the first time. Somewhere there’s an alternate Toronto where that never happened, and it’s a duller place. Sometime around then he befriended John Finley, who went on to become a famous singer with Jon & Lee & The Checkmates, Rhinoceros and later as a soul singer under his own name, recording for my label, Vesuvius Music. John had fun stories about him. Apparently he was famous before he was famous.
Then, in 1977, Brampton. CFNY. Two years later he was program director, and the station became The Spirit of Radio. I don’t think people who weren’t there can quite grasp it. It wasn’t a format. It was an attitude. It was a station that assumed its listeners were curious, intelligent, and a little weird, and it was right. Rush wrote a song about it. You don’t get a song from Rush for being adequate.
CFNY didn’t just reflect the new music scene in this country. It built the stage and turned on the lights. David and his people took the U-Know Awards national with CBC as the CASBYs. He was Canada’s voice for the international radio broadcast of Live Aid in 1985. He took The Spirit of Radio to Vancouver’s CKST in the early nineties, came back to launch Canada’s first online radio hub at Iceberg Media in 1999 (when most of us were still figuring out dial-up), hosted The Marsden Theatre at CKGE in Oshawa for more than a decade, and then built NYthespirit.com to keep the free-form flame burning online.
He’s in the CAB Hall of Fame. He’s one of only two Canadians in the “Dear Mr. DJ” exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Those are honours. But the real honour is harder to hang on a wall: thousands of people who can tell you exactly where they were when they first heard a song on his watch.
The Redwood
I only really met him a few months ago. Isn’t that something? Decades of orbiting the same planet, and we finally sat down together near the end. We talked about aging and health, the way men of a certain vintage do once the small talk is exhausted, which takes about four minutes. He was articulate, charming, and, above all, grateful. That word keeps coming back to me. Grateful.
He gave a talk at the Redwood Theatre and about two hundred people showed up. He couldn’t believe it. Genuinely couldn’t. This is a man who changed the sound of a country, and he was surprised that people wanted to hear him speak. That’s not false modesty. That’s the real thing, and it’s rarer than a first pressing.
He showed a slide show and told stories about his youth, including going to Graceland as a teenager. I love that image: young David Michie from Stratford standing at the gates of Elvis’s house, taking notes. Even then he was doing research.
He had grown his hair long. He did not look his age, and he certainly didn’t act it. Some people get old. Other people just get more experienced at being young. David was the second kind, again.
Station Identification
It’s been said - something to the effect - that style is knowing who you are and not giving a damn. David Marsden had style, but he also gave a damn, deeply, about artists, about listeners, and about the idea that radio could be an adventure instead of a jukebox with commercials. That combination is almost extinct. We should put it on a list and protect its habitat.
The folks at NYthespirit.com say the station will keep broadcasting in his honour, and that a celebration of life will be announced in the coming months. I’ll be there. So will a lot of musicians who owe him more than they can say, and a lot of listeners who grew up with his voice in the dark, telling them that the world was bigger and stranger and better than they’d been led to believe.
It meant so much to see him recently. It means more now.
There was nobody like him. There won’t be again. But somewhere, right now, a kid is knocking on the door of a radio station for the thirtieth time, and I hope somebody opens it.
Fly high, David. The spirit of radio is you.
– Jaymz Bee
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