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The man behind the airwaves

Matthew McBride building small radio empire with Pemberton roots
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Matthew McBride began airing Spud Valley Radio early this June with the song "Bud the Spud" by Stompin' Tom Connors.

He wanted to be a Navy diver, but fate has seen Matthew Gordon McBride swim through waves of a different kind.

McBride, 48, is the brains behind community radio stations that have begun popping up all across the province — and two of them have sprung up in the Sea to Sky corridor.

The most recent one, Spud Valley Radio, is Pemberton’s official community radio station, and has been on the air since early June, broadcasting all kinds of programming, from 1930s-era radio shows to good ol’ rock ’n’ roll.

The station hit the airwaves on June 6, 2008. Its first song? “Bud the Spud” by Stompin’ Tom Connors.

From Navy man to radio man

When asked why he loves the radio so much, McBride points to the intimacy that it has with a listener compared with other mediums.

“The problem with TV is the pictures aren’t very good in my mind, right, whereas radio’s a kind of whole fantasy world (where) you can be who you want to be, sound like you want to sound,” he says.

Comparing radio to print media, McBride says that newspapers are all about covering dead people, whereas radio is all about covering live people.

When reminded that radio also has to report on dead people, he responds, “Yeah, but we get to go dancing with the girls.”

Radio wasn’t always McBride’s main gig. Growing up in Stave Falls, British Columbia, he only ever had two dreams: work in radio or be a Navy diver. He pursued the latter dream first, leaving school early to join the Navy, doing rescue swimming and underwater hull maintenance. He served five years until he suffered a serious diving accident, effectively putting an end to his career in the armed forces.

His Navy dream dead, McBride’s comrades told him to follow his other path.

“If I was going to be a diver, I wanted to be the best diver I can be,” he says. “And in broadcasting, if I want to be a broadcaster, I want to be the best broadcaster I can be.

“That doesn’t mean I’m the best of the best, but it means this is what I can do.”

His desire to be the best took him to BCIT’s broadcast school in 1981, a program that has churned out such staples of the Vancouver broadcast scene as CBC anchor Gloria Macarenko and CTV weather anchor Tamara Taggart.

From there he got his first radio job at CKNW in Vancouver.

“You push buttons, and once an hour you got to go on the radio and do a time-check,” he says. “It was great to be on the radio, nothing like it.”

McBride’s career took him in a series of directions after his first job. He then went to an on-air job in Smithers in northern B.C., did a morning show in Prince Rupert, the afternoon drive in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and then finally back in Vancouver, where he worked at two prominent radio stations: Kiss FM and the now-defunct Z95.3.

Though Z95.3’s blend of pop, hip-hop and electronic dance music has been replaced by the softer sounds of Crave 95, McBride said he’s proud to have played a prominent role at the station famous as much for its bumper stickers as the pounding music you heard on the scariest rides at the PNE.

“At one time that was the biggest, most successful radio station in Western Canada,” he says. “I was their first music director, who built the music department for that radio station.”

Anyone who groaned at hearing Ace of Base three times a day in the mid-90s can thus direct their grievances to him.

Community radio

A lengthy career in a series of radio stations hasn’t dampened McBride’s passion for the medium. Today, he’s starting up stations of his own in smaller markets. He’s the owner of four radio stations, broadcasting in Pemberton, Tofino and Ucluelet and another that has yet to go on the air in Port Moody.

One of his earliest forays into radio entrepreneurship came in 2000, when he helped start a station in D’Arcy. Through contacts he had with First Nations broadcasters in northern B.C., he encountered the N’Quat’qua First Nation in D’Arcy and heard about their desire for their own radio station.

Today the small community at the northern end of the Sea to Sky corridor boasts its own 50-watt rock ’n’ roll station.

“There’s no content at all outside of the music and the DJ’s,” McBride says. “It’s too small to have a full operation.”

Though he had been to Pemberton before, it was during a pit stop on the way to D’Arcy that he discovered Spud Valley.

“The feel of the community is that it’s not a transient community,” he says. “It’s a community of people who really live and believe in where they live, and that’s good for the long term survivability of a small operation like a radio station.

“The problem with Whistler is there’s so many transients, people who sort of come and go through there, it’s hard to build loyalty.”

Starting a station is a long and expensive process, according to McBride, and not everyone can do it.

First you need to find a community that wants to do business with you — and not everyone does. He has a very simple way of doing market research.

“I actually go into the communities and I stand on street corners and I survey people,” he says. “I walked around and I talked to a couple hundred people in Pemberton and asked them, what radio station would you like?

“People will say, ‘I want a radio station that covers local news or carries local sports, talks about the local school board,’ things like that, and then they say, ‘can you play some Eagles?’”

From there, you need to do a technical brief, basically an engineering survey that determines what a signal would sound like if it was put over the air in a given community, and how it would affect other broadcasting operations.

That alone can cost up to $15,000, without any guarantee you’re going to get a station.

And that’s all without the license application you need to make to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. McBride says the application process for Spud Valley Radio began in 2005 and it took almost exactly three years before it went on the air. Once you get the license, you have two years to get the station on the air.

Spud Valley Radio has made it there, and is now broadcasting radio shows from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s such as The Shadow and Call of the Yukon with Sgt. Preston.

Gord Rutherford, stage name “Gordo,” does the morning show, while Cara Jenner, stage name “Pebbles,” handles sales and marketing but also does the afternoon drive show.

Saturday nights will soon be reserved for “Matt’s Disco,” a weekly revue of ’70s hits hosted by McBride himself.

“We’ll be putting that on probably Saturday nights, and we’re looking at developing a jazz show as well, and Sunday evening for the jazz show,” he says.

As for the station’s future prospects, people in Pemberton have come forward with the idea to have a teen show during the noon hour on school days, when students have their lunch break. It’s an idea that McBride is certainly open to.

“Kids and radio have gone together since there was radio, and if we don’t open the door and welcome them into our station, we can’t expect them to support us when they’re young adults.

“Plus, if anybody knows music and what’s happening today, it’s kids.”

McBride sees a bright future for Spud Valley Radio, so much that he’s put his development of a station in Port Moody on hold, a project for which he just obtained a license.

He says Spud Valley Radio will be broadcasting 24 hours a day during the upcoming Pemberton Festival covering all the events, though not from the site.

According to McBride, community response to Spud Valley Radio has been very positive.

“They’re quite happy to have a local radio station,” he says. “We’ve had ongoing and very positive feedback on what we’re doing and what we should be doing, and our on-air personalities have been warmly received by the community.”

Now that he’s conquered the airwaves in two Sea to Sky communities, is there any chance he’ll start a radio station for Whistler?

“If an opportunity arises for me to provide new original service to Whistler, I would be pleased to be there,” he says.