Richard Harrow

Richard Harrow started out behind a drum kit. He played drums in bands all through junior high and high school in Red Deer, where his friendship with drummer, author and filmmaker Harley Hay began, and in the early 1970s he moved to Calgary to study drama and music at the University of Calgary. There he picked up the guitar and started writing songs, and before long he was working as a songwriter and musician.

His first record came out in 1973 on the small Crow label, credited to Richard Harrow and Buckstone County, with John Vold on slide and lead guitar, Paul Robinson on bass and Ken MacAulay on drums. It was cut at EK Recorders in Calgary on June 4, 1973, and the sleeve already lists Ken Kanten, credited with "personal mismanagement & guidance". The A side, 'You're So Rude', was a sly cover of a Faces track, backed with a version of the traditional 'Circle Round The Sun'.

That same year Harrow wrote a cycle of songs about Jerry Potts, the nineteenth-century Métis scout and guide who led the North-West Mounted Police into what became southern Alberta. With his business manager Ken Kanten he pitched the songs to Opportunities for Youth as a touring musical, and OFY came back with a $32,000 grant, reported at the time as the largest in Western Canada. Calgary writer Glen Mundy wrote the script and directed, and dance instructor Vicki Adams handled choreography. The money arrived weeks late, the crew went unpaid in the meantime, and the first performance in Fort Macleod was cancelled after protests. The show went on anyway. At its Calgary premiere at the Factory Theatre West, Herald writer Eugene Chadbourne called Potts "the Monty Python of the great wild west", a free-wheeling satire in which Colonel Macleod, Queen Victoria, Sitting Bull and Crowfoot share the stage with rock and roll and Howdy Doody gags. Harrow played Potts himself, backed by his own tight country-rock quartet. Looking back, he says they were young and innocent and glorified things in a way nobody would now, though he remembers that the Native audiences who saw the show enjoyed it.

The soundtrack LP, Potts, was released in 1974 on CVGP Records. Harrow sang lead and played acoustic guitar with Glen Mettlewsky on electric guitar and banjo, Rudy Skapin on bass and Dennis Davies on drums, and Mundy turned up among the nine background singers. The album was recorded at Sound-West Studios in Calgary, engineered by Dave Mitchell.

The Potts sessions led straight to a job. Harrow joined Sound-West as an audio engineer, and the work there ranged from local sessions to Robert Altman's film Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Through 1975 he also cut a run of 7-inch singles for History On Record, a Calgary imprint built around local history and tourism. Skiing Lake Louise paired him with keyboardist Julian Kerr. The Fort Normandeau Story was made with the restoration committee for the Red Deer fort, with Harrow's 'Build Fort Normandeau' on one side and a narrated history written by Kanten on the other. The Legend Of Three Valley Gap, for the restored ghost town near Revelstoke, came wrapped in a full booklet of local history and maps, with Barry Bergh narrating Kanten's script. A fourth single that year, 'Build A Balloon' backed with 'Flagpole Sitter', came out on PLP Records under the name the Richard Harrow Group.

One Sound-West job changed his performing life. The Original Caste, the Calgary folk act behind 'One Tin Soldier' and 'Mr. Monday', had come home with a deal from K-Tel to re-record both hits. K-Tel wanted the new versions to sound like the originals, which had been cut in Los Angeles with top session players, so the young engineer had to match them part for part. Harrow was playing at night with Julian Kerr and Glen Mundy, and when the sessions were finished he joined the group. He performed with the Original Caste for several years, and played on the 1977 Westmount single of 'One Tin Soldier' featuring Dixie Lee Innes.

In 1976 Harrow opened his own studio in his Calgary home and called it The Living Room. It ran through the 1980s and into the early 1990s and became one of the city's busiest independent rooms, serving a long list of Calgary artists from folk singers to the new wave bands of the early 1980s. Harrow's wider recording, engineering and mastering career also brought work with artists including Gordon Lightfoot and Ry Cooder. He started Living Room Records as an outlet for local releases, including singles by the Unusuals, Rikki & The Rokkits and Five Day Trial, and he played in both Rikki & The Rokkits and Five Day Trial himself.

His own albums came out of the same room. Amateur Night (1979) gathered a who's who of Calgary players, with Gaye Delorme on lead guitar, Julian Kerr on piano and Jack Hiles on percussion among close to twenty musicians, and included a cover of Eric Von Schmidt's 'Joshua Gone Barbados'. The self-titled Richard Harrow (1981) went the other way: Harrow wrote, played, sang, produced and engineered almost all of it alone, and the single '(You Can't) Rob A Bank' backed with 'This Old Love' was pulled from it.

His best-known engineering work was with Ian Tyson. Harrow engineered several albums for him, including Old Corrals and Sagebrush, recorded out at Tyson's ranch on an eight-track machine under tight conditions. He remembers those sessions as the most fun of the lot, and the album still sounds remarkably good. The self-titled Ian Tyson followed, then Cowboyography, which eventually went platinum. His work also contributed to two Juno Award-winning albums: Dance and Celebrate by Bourne and MacLeod, the Edmonton duo of Bill Bourne and Alan MacLeod, and Proud Like a Mountain by children's entertainer Peter Puffin (Peter Lenton). Along the way he also handled sound for the Calgary Folk Club for more than 18 years.

Potts kept calling him back. In 1987, with funding from the Alberta Foundation for the Performing Arts and Alberta Lotteries, he and Glen Mundy re-recorded the songs, mixed digitally, and released them on cassette as Songs From The Musical Potts, with 'Long Time Laying Down' and 'Killer Than The Killee' issued as a single.

In the early 1990s Harrow's work shifted from recording to mastering. For the next 16 years he ran audiomastering.com, a mastering facility operating as a division of Canada Disc & Tape in Calgary. His own releases carried on in parallel: the cassette Light At The End Of The Tunnel (1993), then a run of CDs including Best Before/Meilleur Avant (2002), packaged as a grocery product with a CD ingredients panel and a "Guaranteed Fresh" sticker, and 11 Songs For 10 Bucks!!! (2004). In October 2005 he returned to Potts again, making a new recording of the song cycle at the studio formerly known as The Living Room; he produced, performed and engineered the project and mastered it through audiomastering.com. Tools Of The Trade (2006), 40 Minutes (2007) and It's Out There Somewhere (2009) followed.

In 2010 he formed HB Media Services, and his son Jamey took over the mastering side, starting his own division, Thunderous Mastering, in 2012. Harrow turned increasingly to film. In 2013 he was handed a hard drive of unlabelled concert footage from a 2009 tribute to Bentley, Alberta's Dick Damron, and with Harley Hay as co-producer and cinematographer he turned it into The Long Green Line, a feature-length documentary built around long interviews with Damron at home, including his account of using music to recover from a stroke. He has also worked with Lenny Breau's daughter, Emily Hughes, adding new material to a revisited edition of the documentary The Genius of Lenny Breau.

For about 17 years Harrow has taught audio and video in the continuing education program at SAIT in Calgary. He co-hosts the SoundWaves Folk Club, still masters, works on Dolby Atmos mixes from the studio in his house, and turns out for benefit gigs with Harley Hay. Richard and his wife Lynn have been married since 1980. Asked about retirement, he says he doesn't imagine he ever will.

-Robert Williston