Raw Energy Records

04/25/2024

01/13/2024

OG Raw Energy.

Those Rotate shows in that little room was epic.

10/02/2023

Thanks Julie.

at The Bovine S*x Club on Sept. 23, 2023

01/19/2023

Raw Energy started with ska and ended with reggae ten years later. This comp just re-surfaced, and it's a pretty unique historical statement of the scene in Toronto in the 90s, surely overlooked for its diversity. A 1,000 copies were pressed and each act got a box to either give away or sell to fans. It was promoted heavily by Hedley Jones aka Deadly Hedley on his Rub-a-Dub radio show, online via VCBN, which also aired The Raw Energy Radio Show in the latter part of the decade.

This was the last album released by Raw Energy, an independent label, based in Toronto that also produced and distributed five other "On The Road" compilations of unsigned acts. Please go to the Wiki

01/05/2023

Not too many people know this fact, but the very last album released by Raw Energy in 1999 was a 21-track comp featuring reggae artists (mainly from Toronto), which was called On The Road to Amsterdam and was also "brought to you" by an online radio station, Rub A Dub, owned at the time by VCBN who also streamed The Raw Energy Radio Show each week. The CD was mastered at Slamm by Fergus Hambleton and Sam Weller.

04/07/2022

Turn it up to 11.

https://youtu.be/L5HZWgxa9Qw

Hey!!! How ya doin'? This was Wally's idea. Don't blame me. We record our 2022 set for fun, stick the old Raw Energy logo on it and put it on YouTube. (...

04/06/2022

As promised, young Wes from Three Impotent Males has been doing some recording and re-recording (in a basement) with Wally and Mike lately, and shortly will be releasing the sum of their collective activity. DIY. Punk as f**k.

These are the tracks....

1 -Wasted punk 2022:
2 - Rodeo Drive 2022:
3 - Compassionate 2012
4 - RJB 2012
Wes: "Johnny Beaumont helped us immeasurably in the 90's. He booked tours, shows, got money, basically managed us. Tragically he took his own life. He is missed. RIP W***y wa**er. That's him singing live wire. Probs 1994 or 5."
5 - World go Round 1997
6 - He**in 1994
7 - Exploit 1997
8 - Slow 2012
9 - Soul for sale 2004
10 - LIFE 1992
Wes: "Graeme used to tell me this song was good. I never felt the same. I do now. But my life has improved immeasurably since then… it it disingenuous so still sing it? Don't care."
11 - Fading 1993
12 - T.V. 1993
13 - Days to Come - 1997 (Scott's Song)
Wes: "I didn't write this one. Scott Harbinson from Five Knuckle Chuckle (another band I play in periodically) did. He sang it to me sitting on his bed in his room in his childhood home. Scott and his family have always been very good to me over the years. Wally asked if we could record it. He loves to play it. Blows my mind that Scott only plays drums. Made this up in his head that day. It's exactly how he described that day.
Guitar, vocals, melody, changes. Scott's song."
14 - I won? 1997
15 -Smart Phone 2012
16 - Song with no Name 2012
Wes: "Just like Furnace face said.
There's still nobody to vote for."

04/04/2022

Coming soon: News from Three Impotent Males.

01/19/2022

At some point in the mid-90s, Raw Energy was approached by Robert Roche, who pretended to be an investor. For those of you now in the film business, it'd make a great movie.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/unpaid-wage-claims-rob-roche-1.6319288

More than a dozen former employees of Toronto businessman and convicted fraudster Rob Roche have filed complaints over unpaid wages at his PPE supply company, raising questions about how his firms managed to obtain government pandemic support.

04/05/2021

On Wednesday, May 3 1995, this article appeared in The Toronto Sun featuring Chris Black "of Toronto's infamous punk record label, Raw Energy" promoting the use of the Internet on his 386dx with which he had launched our first website. It was Chris who convinced me to get a computer, in fact he wanted "a computer on every desk" and, by the end of the year, we had.

At the time, I was still typing letters and press releases on my trusty IBM Selectric. But, in reality, Doom changed everything. Chris did a lot more around the office, and for the bands, working with promoters and retailers. In the article, he mentions our ad in Details and the responses it was generating - being sent to us by email. I'm sure we were still on dial-up at the time. Thanks, btw, to Earl Epstein and his crew at Passport for online access and our first domain!

Most people don't know this, but all the bands we signed upon his arrival required his approval - because as the drummer of Sons of Ishmael he really knew his music - and the bands signed really needed to know how to play if they wanted onto the label.

Chris put together both shows and tours and, in the vein of MRR's Book Your Own Fu**in Life, eventually assembled the listings and published - along with Linda Cook - our own useful book called A Cultural Industry Directory (ACID). He was integral to our growth as a brand, not just a label, especially with the launch of Raw Energy Radio, as well as Raw Energy Promotions and a whack of other new divisions as we headed toward 1999. I don't know if you can read the article, but the last quote - his Computer Confession - is "I love my computer...when I go away, I miss it."

04/05/2021

Making friends and influencing people. Anyone who has had the pleasure of working in the music industry (or any industry) knows money buys friends. The people at A&M worked hard to get our albums stocked at record stores from coast to coast in Canada, but to nudge that decision along - augmenting live shows, interviews and album reviews, and airplay - were the slew of ads in various magazines we ran.

What was not being told to us was that a major label will distribute CDs to stores in boxes of 50, and your typical employee who sees a box of 50 CDs from Bryan Adams or The Police will take them out and place them altogether on a shelf. But, when that same person opens a box that contains a mix of titles that requires each one to be priced and placed in a specific area of the store - certainly not on a front-facing shelf - the box tended to be overlooked and shipped back as "unsold" product a month or two later.

Of course, we hoped that by placing ads, the people - our friends - at retail would do the bands justice and at least take their albums out of the box. Those that did, btw, then priced them at $25 each, based on industry-standard (corporate) quantity discounts. Live and learn.

04/05/2021

The story of how we signed a pretty decent deal with Black Mark is the stuff of legend. It starts off, oddly, because we were broke. Well, nearly, but sleeping in the office and living on "fingernails and spit" (in the immortal words of Mark from the Throbbin Hoods). So one day we ran a short classified ad in The Globe and Mail seeking new capital and, as a result, a chap by the name of Robert Roche waltzes through the door in the fall of '94. He posed as an investor - to be brief - and in early 1995 Chris Black and Graeme Boyce were on their way to the south of France to attend the annual MIDEM trade show. A year later, btw, the RCMP were knocking on our door looking for Robert - long story.

While in Cannes, we certainly met a ton of people from the music industry, but only two who understood the market we were now chasing: one was Brett Gurewitz, when not playing in Bad Religion was running a label called Epitaph, but was heavily in debt to The Offspring and admitted he couldn't afford to pay us even if he sold any of our albums; and the other was Borje Forsberg, the owner of Black Mark. Within 24 hours he had taken the time to listen to our library of sound and decided it was worthy to press and release a dozen of our titles, and whatever was coming down the pipe. A month later, he visited our office in Toronto to sign the deal, where we had a few photos taken and enjoyed a beer together. Black Mark was known as an "extreme metal" label and their retail buyers simply did not know what to do with our comparatively less noisy roster, knowing their customers would cringe.

(Speaking of noise, the one album that did do well for us - in Japan via JVC - was the Space City USA debut, because this particular album fell into a genre of "noise" over there, which apparently was appreciated by 1,000 adoring fans.)

Despite "skatepunk" being massively popularized by bands like The Offspring and Green Day, our Black Mark albums fell on deaf ears among their contacts from retailers to radio stations, despite our whack of new ads and promotions in magazines like Thrasher.

Nonetheless, we evolved as a brand and continued to acquire a roster of awesome talent through the 90s, and soon had parleyed our indie relationship with Page Music into one whereby Raw Energy truly became known for its quality across North America, and our bands soon thereafter were opening for many other similar touring acts from across the US in clubs and festivals, like Wakestock and the Warped tour.

04/05/2021

In addition to sending out free copies of our CDs to magazines and radio stations, we also ran promotions and contests - and in this copy of the ad we ran for Dead On The Road in Chaos Review, note the skill-testing question, and the numbers of total prize winners! Shortly after this campaign, and as you can imagine the reviews were simply amazing, we signed Trigger Happy and the next thing you know we were promoting the Summer of Hate, after surviving Highwood, and looking at and listening to the incredible array of "punk" bands that Canada had to offer, which led to several more On The Road compilations after separating from A&M in early 1995, and a slew of new releases via Page across Canada, Labyrinth in the US and Black Mark targeting the 90s skate, snow and wakeboard market.

04/05/2021

Once the concept had been approved by the boss, Random Killing, with help from Drew Gauley (who was also promoting his band Mundane from the office), put together Dead On The Road - Songs Without Keyboards - and what a great album it turned out to be.

So great that we also ran ads in French, which helped the A&M office in Quebec at the time getting the album stocked and on shelves at numerous retailers, because they surely didn't have a clue that any of these bands existed, nor that there was an amazing fanbase in la belle province, fuelled by EnGuard Records.

Comp fun facts: artwork by John Grove; inner sleeve pic is Drool from RK stagediving at a GWAR show, and the raccoon on the CD itself was "dead on the road" (and painted) near Winnipeg, if memory serves, while RK was on the road to the Highwood Festival in Alberta... another long story.

04/05/2021

By 1994, Raw Energy - from its offices on Richmond Street West in Toronto - was sending out hundreds of copies of each new release to magazines and campus radio stations around the world, though mainly in North America, and helping our distributors, such as Rotz and Labyrinth, with ads - such as this one in The Pit Report.

04/05/2021

While going through an old pile of papers, among many ads from our distributors around the world, was a photocopy of an ad that we ran exclusively in Details - a popular US-based magazine (owned and published by Conde Nast) that targeted the male demographic, with a focus on fashion and lifestyle - and was intended to stimulate CD sales at numerous retail outlets, esp at Tower Records, stateside. I think a hockey fight is on the tv screen. We were into our deal with Black Mark at this time, and possibly had launched our Summer of Hate campaign. More on that in a few more forthcoming posts.

04/05/2021