Let It Be: Inside A Canadian Music Empire Built On Selling Rock ‘N’ Roll Nostalgia Note For Note

Craig Martin has built a Canadian music empire by walking in other’s musical footsteps.

Craig Martin was hunched over his Yamaha piano on a dreary April morning, working out some chord changes on Bruce Springsteen‘s mid-’70s classic Born to Run.

The thing most people don’t realize about the Boss is just how complex his music is, and playing it, without making a complete hash of things, can require intense concentration and dexterity, even for a well-seasoned professional musician.

“I harbour a secret dream of one day owning a piano bar where everybody sings songs together,” he said. “In my mind, I am always preparing for a Springsteen night.”

That night has not happened yet, but leave it to Martin and there is a pretty good chance it will, and an equally good chance the venue won’t be some cozy, piano-anchored nook, but perhaps Massey Hall, the historic Toronto concert venue Springsteen and countless other rock stars have visited over the years.

Martin has built a Canadian music empire by walking in other’s musical footsteps, and nailing the piano, guitar, bass, percussion, tambourine, orchestral and all the other parts note for note, as the founder of Classic Albums Live (CAL), which, as the name suggests, performs classic albums — live — at numerous venues in cities and towns, big and small, from coast to coast.

“I sell nostalgia, and I am not ashamed of it,” the 63-year-old said of his business, which has recently expanded into the United States. “Music takes us back to the prime of our lives and, for a lot of us, those memories can be pretty golden.”

It just so happens there are plenty of boomers and gen-Xers willing to pay $50, on average, to hear CAL perform a Pink Floyd record, which is about $400 cheaper than a ticket to see Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, age 79, during his current European spring tour.

Dan Williams, vocalist for Classics Album Live, performs Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in Vancouver in 2005.

“What CAL provides is the next best thing to the original artist doing the song,” Alan Cross, the popular radio host, music historian and occasional attendee of CAL events, said. “Everybody knows these albums front to back, and these guys do it well, and after a few notes you suspend your disbelief and just sink into the music and enjoy it.”

To get the job done, Martin employs a rotating cast of professional musicians, including himself when the classic album at hand is by the Rolling Stones or Creedence Clearwater Revival. If the Stones and CCR aren’t to your taste, how about Led Zeppelin II, the Beatles’ Let it Be, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell?

There are no flights of fancy afforded the musicians, and zero tolerance for new takes on old tracks. The goal of the evening is to be true to the original work, right down to any quirks, misplayed notes and recorded banter between the artists.

If going to a concert to listen to a record sounds pretty far out there as a business model, consider this: CAL doesn’t merely show up at Massey Hall, it sells the venue’s 2,000-plus seats out, while the business itself has been going strong, aside from being interrupted by a global pandemic, for 20 years.

The cost of hotels, gas, airfares, bus and equipment rentals, food prices, roadies, visas to perform in foreign countries and every other line item working bands must account for has become prohibitively expensive.

“From pandemic shutdowns to supply chain interruptions, from inflation to the challenges of traveling, it’s universally agreed by artists that it’s become exponentially more difficult and expensive to tour,” Jesse Kumagai, chief executive of the Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, said.

“Touring has become very difficult since COVID,” he reportedly said while musing that his band’s days of touring North America are most likely over. “We cannot get insured, and most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole.”

CAL isn’t immune to the impact of increased costs. But the business allows for some built-in cost-control measures. Martin is based in Toronto, but has established a network of 100 musicians Canada-wide, who, depending on their availability, work for him.

A typical scenario can involve flying a couple CAL mainstays from Toronto to, say, Charlottetown to hook up with some local East Coasters to perform Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. CAL regulars can count on a $2,000 paycheque per night, while someone called in on short notice to play horns can expect to go home with at least $500.

First among Martin’s business rules is “pay the musicians.” Well-paid musicians are happy musicians, while the albums, because they are classics, hold a certain nerdy appeal for contemporary pros, who pick them apart to the point where any music nerds in the audience, who listened to Led Zeppelin until the needle on the family record player wore out, are suitably impressed.

“I put CAL first, the loyalty is there,” Ryan Granville-Martin, a well-known Toronto drummer said after recently returning from a series of Let it Be shows on the East Coast.

Here’s another trade secret: Martin’s costs are not dependent upon ticket sales. CAL charges venues an appearance fee. Prices start at $10,000 and go up. How far up? “Very up,” he said. But for a venue such as Massey Hall, there is a lot less risk involved in booking CAL several nights a year than betting on a bunch of obscure up-and-comers.

“Venues will sell tickets to anything that works,” Cross said. “And it is a product that sells, people seem to really love it and there are plenty of classic albums that still need to be covered live.”

Despite all this successful rockin’ and rollin’, Martin seems an unlikely music mogul. Along with the Yamaha piano, the “office” in the living room of his red-brick, Victorian-era house in downtown Toronto is furnished with electric guitars, a laptop and several paintings done by the homeowner.

Upstairs in the kitchen, Martin’s bank card is sitting on a table next to a half-empty coffee cup and a $100 bill. A Bob Dylan album protrudes from a shelf lined with records; Max Webster is on the turntable; a book about the Rolling Stones is precariously perched on a windowsill.

He readily admits he knew absolutely nothing about business before starting his own. What he had, though, was an idea — one he believed couldn’t possibly fail — that had occurred to him while listening to a radio station on the road in the wee hours of the morning somewhere between Montreal and Toronto.

At the time, Martin was composing music for obscure cable shows — a lucrative, albeit soul-crushing gig — and rocking out on weekends as the front man for a Stones tribute band. But what appealed to him much more than preening around the stage as a faux Mick Jagger was the actual music: the Stones were a great band and too many cover bands, in his opinion, seemed more “concerned with putting on a show” than playing the tunes well.

And so it was, during that late-night drive, that fate intervened in the form of a DJ playing back-to-back cuts from the Stones’ classic Exile on Main St. album. Martin’s initial thought was, “We should play those songs,” a kernel of inspiration that evolved in the subsequent hours and days into, “We should play the whole album, note for note.”

Steeling his resolve were a couple of factors, one of which was the advice of his mother Maureen, an accountant’s assistant. She taught him to never “second-guess” himself. She also told him to only invest in things he understood, words her only son took to heart, and has profited mightily from thanks to a lucrative side hustle flipping Toronto real estate.

In the true spirit of swashbuckling entrepreneurship, Martin pursued his idea for CAL to the brink of financial oblivion. Credit cards were maxed out. Investments were cashed out. Times, as they say, were lean. But 20 years later, CAL is a staple attraction at concert halls across the country.

Martin is the sole owner, but your guess is as good as his as to how much CAL is worth. He has hired people to run the day-to-day operations, and describes himself as being mostly “retired,” a label that partly explains all the paintings around his house.

He took up a brush after his eldest son Lucas was diagnosed with terminal cancer. One day, his boy was 18 and healthy, and seemingly the next day, he was home, hooked up to an IV and preparing for the end. Martin bought a bulletin board to keep track of all the medications. The box it arrived in was his first canvas. He felt as though he needed to “get it out.” Lucas assured him that getting “it out” was good.

Seven years after his son’s death, Martin paints daily, prolifically, and he gives the finished works away to friends, family, musicians, neighbours and complete strangers, along with a request they consider donating to the Canadian Cancer Society.

“I don’t know where I’d be without painting,” he said. “With Lucas’ passing, you kind of get to the point where nothing can get you now. It is like a gift he left behind — you’ve been to the abyss, you have looked in — and so if a flight gets cancelled, or there is a problem with the road venue, who gives a crap.”

Make no mistake, Martin still cares deeply about CAL’s future, and he has some ambitious plans for the years ahead. Top of the list involves establishing CAL as an indispensable Toronto cultural institution. Classic albums are today’s version of classical music, he said, making CAL the rocker’s equivalent of, say, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Taken further, CAL’s shows aren’t concerts, but recitals of masterworks, and they should be treated with reverence, supported by government funding and promoted as an integral part of our lives.

Martin imagines an entire performance season’s worth of CAL productions — Led Zeppelin one week, Fleetwood Mac the next, and so on — that loyal subscribers can pick and choose from.

“I don’t see any difference between the Toronto Symphony and us,” he said. “They play cover music; we play cover music.”

And if that dream doesn’t pan out, there is always Springsteen, and a piano bar full of friends singing along to the songs of his youth.