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.