Thirty per cent. From 18 January 1971 every AM station in Canada had to fill that share of its music with Canadian records, judged on a four part test of music, artist, performance and lyrics, and for the next two decades the rule decided which Canadian heavy metal bands the country actually heard. It made careers. It also drew a line at the border that no regulation could move.
A curling stone thrown down the sheet travels only as far as its own granite weight will take it unless two sweepers run ahead of it, scrubbing the ice with their brooms until a skin of meltwater lies under the stone, and a well swept throw slides several feet further than it had any right to and smashes an opposing stone clean out of the scoring rings. The quota was the sweeping. It carried the loud bands the whole length of the country, and at the border it let go of them.
The radio bands and the arena
The Toronto trio that crossed the border and found an American audience waiting, a drummer who sang, a bassist who ran the business and a guitarist with a classical technique and a tenor voice, was Triumph, formed in 1975 by Gil Moore, Mike Levine and Rik Emmett. It was a hard rock band with a heavy metal guitarist inside it, and it never pretended otherwise.
Recorded in the band's own Metalworks Studios in Mississauga and released in September 1981, Allied Forces took "Magic Power" to number 8 on the American mainstream rock chart and the album to number 23 on the Billboard 200, the national album chart, while "Fight the Good Fight" gave arena crowds a chorus built for twenty thousand throats. It is the point where Canadian radio rock and heavy metal touched. Rush, the other Toronto trio, stands further off, on the progressive side of the same border.
The rule was deaf to volume and blind to genre. What it rewarded was a record a programme director could slot between two American hits without losing the audience, which around 1980 meant a big chorus, a clean production and a guitar solo short enough to fade under the news. So the other bands it carried furthest were arena rock bands with the odd heavy riff in the set, April Wine out of Nova Scotia and Montreal and Loverboy in Vancouver among them. The genuinely heavy records had to find their own way out.
The Kitchener band whose singer Brian Vollmer has outlasted every other member since 1974 is Helix, and Walkin' the Razor's Edge, released by Capitol in 1984, carried "Rock You", a chant spelled out letter by letter over a riff that stamps rather than swings. The record sold a hundred thousand copies at home and four times that abroad, where the chant did the recruiting the radio quota never had to.
Further west, the Regina quintet that signed to Pasha, the Los Angeles label of the producer Spencer Proffer, whose Metal Health had just put Quiet Riot at the top of the American chart, was Kick Axe. Vices came out in 1984 on the back of the single "On the Road to Rock", and the band toured behind Quiet Riot, Judas Priest and Scorpions. The songs were built for the same arenas as Triumph's. The arenas were in the wrong country.
Around them stood Lee Aaron, whose Metal Queen came out in 1984, and in Vancouver the bodybuilder Jon Mikl Thor, who bent steel bars and blew up hot water bottles on stage between songs. Both were on the radio's side of the line. Neither sold abroad on the scale of their home following.
The last of them, the Oshawa four formed in 1981 around the singer Russ Graham, who worked under the name Russ Dwarf, were the Killer Dwarfs, and Dirty Weapons, cut in Hollywood with the producer Andy Johns and released by Epic in 1990, reached number 151 on the Billboard 200 on the strength of "Doesn't Matter". A good record, a year too late. Grunge ripped the whole shelf off the wall within eighteen months.
Canadian heavy metal bands without a radio
Beneath the quota ran a second Canada, the one no station would play at any percentage. Between 1981 and 1985 its bands went through the decade like a dentist's drill through a back molar, a thin high whine that set the whole skull ringing and never once registered on a chart, and every one of them had to find its label somewhere other than the radio.
The Toronto four that pressed its debut itself in early 1981 under the name of its singer and guitarist, Lips, and then handed it to the independent Attic Records to be reissued under a new name, were Anvil, and Hard 'n' Heavy is the attested starting point of Canadian heavy metal played for its own sake, with no radio format in mind. The speed came on the next record. The attitude was already there.
Ottawa's Exciter, named after a Judas Priest song, sent its speed metal to the Californian label Shrapnel in 1983, and the thrash bands that followed, Razor in Guelph, Sacrifice in Scarborough, Annihilator in Ottawa and Voivod in Jonquière, belong to the thrash story, where their records are told.
Quebec and the Montreal label
The Saint-Bruno quartet that Rick and Dan Hughes formed at the turn of the 1980s, signed in 1984 to Aquarius Records of Montreal, the independent that had built April Wine, was Sword. Metalized, in 1986, is the hardest traditional heavy metal record the province produced in the decade, all downpicked riffs and a singer at full stretch, and the same year the band opened for Metallica on the Master of Puppets tour, before Sweet Dreams in 1988. Quebec's other great band of the period went somewhere nobody could follow: Voivod.
The nineties emptied the arenas here as everywhere else. Helix kept playing the bars of southern Ontario, Anvil kept releasing records that sold to the faithful in Europe and barely at all at home, and the quota, which had never cared what a guitar sounded like, was raised to thirty five per cent at the end of the decade and filled with other music entirely. The underground outlived the rule that had ignored it.
The songs were built for the same arenas as Triumph's. The arenas were in the wrong country.
The revival from Toronto to Edmonton
When the old style came back, Canada was in the spearhead. The Toronto trio that formed in 2006, signed to Earache and released Chained to the Nite in April 2009 was Cauldron, and "Chained Up in Chains", from Burning Fortune two years later, runs a single riff out of the early eighties at a march and lets the chorus do the rest. Skull Fist answered from the same city. 3 Inches of Blood, from Victoria, had already taken twin guitars and a falsetto to Roadrunner with Advance and Vanquish in 2004.
The Edmonton band formed in 2007 that started close to thrash and grew into the melodic heavy metal of its later records is Striker, and in 2020 Play to Win won it a Juno, the national music award. Behind it march Traveler and Riot City in Calgary and Smoulder in Toronto, a garrison with no shortage of recruits. The pedigree is forty years deep.
| Band | City | Start with | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|
| Triumph | Toronto | Allied Forces (1981) | Put a heavy metal guitarist in an arena rock band |
| Anvil | Toronto | Hard 'n' Heavy (1981) | Heavy metal with no radio format in mind |
| Helix | Kitchener | Walkin' the Razor's Edge (1984) | The chant that outlived the decade |
| Kick Axe | Regina | Vices (1984) | Arena songs sold through a Los Angeles label |
| Sword | Saint-Bruno | Metalized (1986) | Quebec's hardest traditional record |
| Killer Dwarfs | Oshawa | Dirty Weapons (1990) | The last of the radio bands |
| 3 Inches of Blood | Victoria | Advance and Vanquish (2004) | Twin guitars and falsetto on a major metal label |
| Cauldron | Toronto | Chained to the Nite (2009) | The early eighties, played straight |
| Striker | Edmonton | Play to Win (2020) | A Juno for heavy metal |
Where these bands sit among the British, American and continental founders is set out in that part of the story. What Canada adds is a split no other country shows so plainly: bands the law put on the radio, and bands that had to be louder than the law could reach.
Anvil, Exciter and the thrash bands that followed them measured themselves by volume and speed rather than by airplay, which puts them closer in spirit to the heaviest heavy metal bands than to anything Triumph or Helix ever wanted. The radio bands sold. The others lasted.
