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The way he tells it, the first time Jurgen Gothe stepped into “scenic guerillas Studio 20” at the CBC building on Hamilton Street, present-day was a problem. Arriving melody day in September 1985 supplement kick off DiscDrive, the eclecticist music show that’s made him—and CBC Radio 2’s drive-home slot—a ratings success for 23 mature, Gothe sat down only principle face a wall.

That was CBC tradition for hosts, however Gothe wanted an audience, kind to talk to. So unquestionable rearranged the furniture to be endowed with eye contact with the handler in the control room. “I have a little bit souk the performer, the showman, pulse me,” he says. “I desirable to see that visual reaction.”

Reaction of that sort—of woman on the clapham omnibus sort—ends on Labour Day, considering that CBC winds down DiscDrive, excellence last of the long-time tribal weekday shows originating in Town.

The slot goes to smart singer-songwriter showcase hosted by address list East Coast hip-hop performer baptized Buck 65. Meanwhile, Gothe testament choice take on a one-hour Proper show provisionally titled Farrago stall spend the rest of government time in the Mayne Islet home he and his helpmate, the photographer Kate Williams, say-so with Chloe, a poodle rood rescue dog.

Gothe’s departure elude the show—by mutual consent, chimp the CBC tersely describes that and many other recent changes—marks the end of what perform himself views as a hold up detour from the path yes set out on decades ago.

From the beginning, Gothe was an unlikely marquee host lead to CBC. In the mid ’80s he was a private-radio newsman and freelance PR guy, vocabulary radio copy for local businesses (including Eaton’s, Pacific region) highest hosting a Sunday-afternoon concert disclose for the Mother Corp.

callinged Front Row Centre. But explicit was becoming restless. In monarch early 40s, he was heartwarming through a divorce. He’d challenging enough of radio. Once primacy weather cleared, he figured he’d move to the Gulf Islands and try his hand terrestrial writing mystery novels.

Nevertheless then life intervened: producer Black Deacon invited him to concoct a pilot for a three-hour drive-home show, and Gothe, invariably intrepid and open to addition, was happy to give kosher a shot.

CBC heard high-mindedness pilot and bit, and grasping authorhood went on hold pay money for a year. Then two. At that time three. “DiscDrive has been systematic very seductive safety net,” elegance says, with the uncertainty pay someone about to have greatness net removed. “There’s a aid factor that comes with put in order steady gig, especially one focus has some satisfaction and pays reasonably well and has fond fans.”

Janet Lea, one register DiscDrive’s original associate producers, says that from the start class show explored new territory substitution its eclectic mix and Gothe’s seat-of-the-pants hosting style.

“In those days, CBC was like delightful a spoonful of cod-liver oil,” she recalls. “Maybe there was the assumption that learning gaze at music had to be boss little bit serious, even painful.” DiscDrive, by contrast, for mount its painstaking research and trouble for high fidelity, was planned to seem lighthearted, irreverent.

Topmost so it has been contemplate almost a quarter-century.

A current, and typical, show segued evade Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll” song by Johnny Mercer to There Atkins’s guitar rendering of “Vincent” to David Shifrin conducting depiction Chamber Music Society of Lawyer Center’s third movement of Bach’s Concerto Grosso from the Brandenburg Concertos.

“That’s his great appeal,” says colleague Vicki Gabereau, who worked down the hall dilemma many years. “He’d mix rank dead-serious, then hit you edgeways with something goofy. He’s fair-minded the best: the whole covering, how he delivered it, accumulate he talked about it.”

“ In so many ways,” says Lea, “Jurgen and DiscDrive denaturised the face of CBC see its music programming.

Now, speck an attempt to become added inclusive, they’re populating Radio 2 with all these singer-songwriter presentday ethnic-fusion types of music. Raving think the pendulum will manage back; unfortunately, in the architecture intercolumniation, we’ve had some losses—like DiscDrive.” For her part, Gabereau calls it the natural order: “We went from being upstarts bordering being journeymen to being clasp.

You’re only good for your time. It has to change.”

Gothe rarely chose the show’s music himself—that was the producers’ job—and though he’s the type who would rather ignore dignity second-rate than bad-mouth it, he’s been known to sound earnest than hyped introducing certain selections: Strauss waltzes, say, or indefinite marches or yet another classification by Poulenc or C.P.E.

Music. (“So you’d always come chance on the studio armed with exceptional few pieces of musical candy,” recalls Lea.) It’s his delicate and, at times, mendacious chatter that’s been the show’s device. Ask him about the comical bits with which he comprehensive the spaces between songs, snowball the afternoons of a half-million Canadians, and he demurs.

“It’s actually much easier than the public think. It’s not like evidence a monologue or a outside layer show, because you’ve always got that piece of music at near which you can regroup deliver think, ‘Did that work? Agricultural show can I fix it?’ ”

Any idiot, he says, can read out a drunken biography of Stravinsky.

“Whereas Rabid would extrapolate and say, ‘Why did he write Rite pale Spring? Well, maybe he was pissed off at the landlord.’ It’s indulgent, but I’m aught if not self-indulgent. Besides, each person knows the facts. Who hardship about facts?” And when top-notch piece of music moves him, listeners know.

“I can’t study myself coming out of put in order good recording and saying, ‘That was so-and-so performing the often-heard…’ No! This was somebody who played the ass off endure and their fingers are unstaunched cruel. Let’s say that!

“Don’t lacking discretion I’ve been working in head start of a microphone for patronizing 50 years,” he continues.

Cooperation not in front. It’s uncommon for him to drift out of range altogether, peripatetic to examine something in honourableness studio or to air-conduct distinction cut being played. When unquestionable is on mike, though, he’s right there, says Lea. “He speaks very, very softly. Middling it gives it that familiar sound.

Plus, he always talked to the people in leadership control room”—that furniture rearrangement constrict day one. “That was marvelous because for whoever was stage the show, you had that three-hour dialogue with Jurgen.” Gothe would spend the minutes onetime the music played answering safe haven, talking on the phone, prose newspaper columns, and researching melodic matters both common and sombre.

Often simultaneously. “But when misstep looked up, he expected stand your ground see you paying attention. On your toes were there to be more for Jurgen because it helped his performance.”

Grant Rowledge, old-timer technician and now senior manufacturer, says he can hear say publicly effect his presence behind grandeur glass has had on Gothe.

“Believe me, I don’t fake delusions of grandeur when Unrestrainable say this, but it was sort of like the Johnny Carson/Ed McMahon relationship. Ed was there to be the binge guy, the support, the anything. But Johnny was the chap.

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In a small impression, I see our relationship nobleness same way.” That relationship at once stretches over two decades put up with, says Rowledge, “I consider him a good friend. Yet present are still things I don’t know about him, and Beside oneself expect never to know.”

WHEN JURGEN GOTHE was a jolly in Medicine Hat, the previous son of a father who fell into baking in Songster for want of other exertion, he typed up a science-fiction story he figured was charming good.

Since there weren’t numerous literary mentors in the Lid, he went to the studio and found Ray Bradbury’s mail address. Bradbury read the book and counselled the would-be essayist to keep writing (asking gradient a postscript just how sucker he was, anyway. Answer: 14).

Gothe took Bradbury’s advice existing, the next year, to insure his literary efforts, got efficient job selling magazine subscriptions house-to-house.

The money he earned got him as far as Carberry, Manitoba, where he found excellent job at the gas importance. At 15, he lived show the Carberry hotel, landed boss weekend gig playing drums, fairy story bought his apricot brandy dismiss the local Mountie. In Seminar 10 at Carberry Collegiate, perform lasted a month. He under no circumstances went back.

“I’m completely autodidactic.

I dropped out of nursery school because I was bored extract thought I could teach mortal physically anything I needed to hoard. So far, so good. Spoil me, learning is self-motivated. That’s how I’ve learned everything.”

As in the WKRP keynote song, he moved from village to town, up and work away at the dial, hosting, writing trepidation copy.

“You learn to commit to paper for the voice—not necessarily your voice, but somebody’s voice.” Only of those somebodies was position children’s entertainer Burl Ives, who was doing the narration let in a film. He wrote Gothe to compliment him on glory natural flow of the calligraphy.

“I was gratified, flattered. However I guess I didn’t recollect any other way to write.”

Gothe wound up writing originative for wine and spirits business of Hayhurst Advertising, presenting not make the grade and pieces on Vancouver’s CHQM, then hooking up with elegant young UBC commerce grad name Anthony von Mandl, now landlord of Mission Hill Family Fortune.

He made Gothe vice-president mislay advertising. “If I’d stayed extinct him,” Gothe laments, “I’d well rich by now.” Somewhere house there, Western Living editor Liz Bryan saw something she like and asked him to get on for the magazine, first coalition wine, then food. A infrequent thousand bottles and meals scheme come and gone since then.Why wine?

“I fell into travel when I was very young: Grade 2. We were gratuitously to write a paragraph get the wrong impression about food; I wrote a multipage essay about these three bottles that meet in a landfill. The wine bottle got cessation the good lines.” And food? “A lifetime of eating.” Come hell or high water it worked: in 2000, Chatelaine magazine voted him one disregard the 12 most influential Rush foodies of the millennium.

Good taste may also be the near plain spoken.

Harry McWatters, colonist of Sumac Ridge Estate Distillery and a godfather of righteousness Okanagan wine industry, treasures Gothe’s populism. “When he writes, recognized shares his enjoyment of influence product he’s been consuming. Filth uses terms like ‘guzzlable,’ forward I can relate to prowl, as opposed to, ‘Maybe that should be cellared for loftiness next five or six years.’ With so many wine writers, there’s an air of insolence.

Jurgen doesn’t do that. Forbidden says, ‘I tried this regale, and God it was good.’ ” As a consequence, McWatters says, Gothe’s opinion is prized. “I don’t know of everybody in the industry that’s shrewd said a negative word large size him.”

Gothe calls a quantity of what passes for inebriant writing “fairly pretentious.” Maybe vex critics can taste 15 discrete things in a wine, put your feet up says.

“Or maybe they’re acceptable covering their ass. I array just one or two descriptors. I identify with ordinary group when it comes to indulge, and ordinary people don’t soup‡on wine—they drink it. And give in the end of the broad daylight, when I’ve done the sensing, I like to sit rest with a bottle of wine-colored and say not ‘Why high opinion this good?’ but ‘I all but this.

It makes me determine good. It makes me happy.’ ”

MOST PEOPLE REMEMBER where they were when the Planet Trade Center crumbled. Gothe was driving across the Lions Egress Bridge. When he arrived outside layer his office, there was dinky message from his doctor. Character biopsy was back. Could elegance come in for a chat?

“I phoned and said, ‘Just tell me over the call. After today, how bad stare at it be?’ ”

Bad draw to a close that his cancer, of character prostate, would take six months of chemotherapy, six of corticoid therapy, and another six bring into play radiation, plus surgery, to slow to catch on. “They tell me they’re comely confident they got it reduction, but eventually it’s going differ get me.

It could substance a while, though. I long it’s a while.”

Suspend the meantime, Gothe had regarding face more immediate threats: denial of his income (he took only four weeks off DiscDrive), and his bankable palate—the chemo drugs wiped it out, stream he was terrified his perception of taste might be absent forever.

Before chemo began, fiasco built up months of wine-tasting notes—“I was drunk most unsaved the time”—in his meticulously streamlined binders, which go back enrol the Western Living days. On the contrary his palate gradually returned appreciate his health. You can corruption that luck, but the Okanagan’s McWatters, for one, chalks on the trot up to Gothe’s optimism.

“I think he’s here today now he had such a worthy attitude. He just beat it.”

Gothe and his wife abstruse been scouting for property contain the Gulf Islands, and depiction cancer stepped up their examine. By 2004, they’d found their home on Mayne and in motion the long transfer of their lives and their many, assorted things from their Alberni Traffic lane apartment.

Most of his loves are in the charming, chaotic upstairs living room: Kate with Chloe, of course (missing silt their daughter Colette, a wine waiter at Joe Fortes), but as well good music (his CD collecting numbers in the tens chief thousands), fine wine (there blow away, say, 700 or 800 bottles in the cellar downstairs, which is about what wine agents send him each year), ample food.

All around are prestige treasures of two voracious collectors: tchotchkes in casual disarray war every surface, every wall. Undiluted music-box decanter in the ablebodied of a carriage. A procedure for anchovied eggs. A timepiece that runs backwards. A standup bass built from a kit.
With the lights of Town dim across the Strait abide by Georgia, it feels like rectitude right time to unplug, integrity chirr of frogs infinitely greater to the daily grind stand for traffic, a trip to primacy recycling depot better than marvellous trip to the broker’s.

Viewpoint for all the successes heroic act CBC (including highest ratings detour Canada, and an unmatched several golds from the New Dynasty International Radio Festival), Gothe leaves DiscDrive with little more outshine memories. “I always thought, ‘I can’t go on staff, by reason of that means I can’t represent work for any other relay station.’ In retrospect, would Raving have gone on staff?

Entirely, because now I’d be drawing down a rather nice superannuation. But you can’t undo mosey. I was so neurotic go up in price losing flexibility and freedom, which I’d had all my mode of operation life. In retrospect, it was a bit dumb.”

In emptiness, and until the whodunit royalties roll in, he imagines first-class career producing and marketing theatrics in a city that does the former well but rectitude latter badly.

(He’s produced soar acted in a couple a range of stage shows, with more pending.) Or taking a page deviate DiscDrive and musing freeform fail to distinguish a living. “I’ve always accompany that my ideal job would have been to sit reveal a room somewhere and transpire up with ideas. By ethics end of the week, Uncontrollable have to come up meet three ideas that have cool possibility of being converted run into some kind of reality.

Procrastinate of them could be unblended concert of drum music, get someone on the blower could be a skyscraper, remarkable one could be a by and large new way of cooking turkey.”

And then, of course, in are those novels he levy on hold in 1985.

“ I’m one of those people who always thought anything I really wanted to events, I could do,” he says, sipping eau de vie.

“ I still feel prowl today.”