Music journalism, books and more

No single artist is more closely connected to Massey Hall than Gordon Lightfoot. Beginning in 1951 and ’52, as a pre-teen with his first place wins in two Kiwanis Festival singing competitions, Lightfoot has made over 165 appearances (and counting) on its hallowed stage. The Orillia native returned in ’55 with his Teen Timers quartet to take second prize in a barbershop singing contest. Lightfoot’s first concert as a featured singer-songwriter came in March 1967, which one critic described as a “country-and-Lightfoot parade of Canadiana.” Two years later, Canada’s folk star recorded his first live album there, Sunday Concert (his second was 2012’s All Live, drawn from material recorded at Ma...

Many fans have made pilgrimages to Toronto’s Massey Hall to attend the Canadian legend’s annual concerts. This album is a Lightfoot lover’s dream: 19 songs recorded in the hallowed hall between 1998-2001—exactly as they were performed. Includes such early classics as “Sundown” and later favorites like “A Painter Passing Through.”

It resembled the historic Live Aid concert of 1985: a global jukebox featuring some of the world's top musicians performing for a cause. And like the original world benefit for African famine relief, the event was broadcast to an audience expected in advance to number one billion viewers in more than 100 countries.Last Saturday's multinational concert, titled Our Common Future, also reflected the new activism in rock music by focusing on an urgent global issue: the environment. The performers included Elton John in Edinburgh, Diana Ross in London, Herbie Hancock and John Denver in New York City, Midnight Oil in Sydney, Sting in Rio de Janeiro, along with artists in Los Angeles, Norway, Tokyo...

If you were a musician on Yonge Street in the 1960s, chances are, you had your suits made by Lou Myles and your hair cut by Sandy Bozzo. Together with his brother Frank, Sandy began cutting hair not long after arriving in Toronto as a 14-year-old from Cosenza, in Calabria, Italy. Born Santino and Ignazio, the brothers set up shop in 1958 at 413 Yonge. For the next 63 years, Frank and Sandy cut hair, always on Yonge Street—and, for 40 of those years, always on the east side of Yonge, between Gerrard and College.  Sandy’s first experience with show business was the day two boys from Arkansas sauntered in, looking to get a wash and a haircut. “We told them, ‘We can cut, but we can’t afford...

Creative versatility came naturally to Don Cullen. Writer, actor, comedian, producer and impresario, he could apparently do it all. His talents first surfaced at high school, where Mr. Cullen’s flexible physical features and talent for vocal impersonations made him popular with his classmates. “I became the funny kid,” he once recalled, “by capitalizing on the angularity of my frame and the rubbery quality of my face.”  Mr. Cullen took those attributes onto the stage and across the airwaves, voicing more than 1,500 radio programs and appearing in nearly as many theatrical reviews and television shows. He starred in a production of Beyond the Fringe which was performed more tha...