Ken Tobias died on Oct. 2, at Saint John Regional Hospital. He had battled brain cancer for two months. He was 79.Tony Tobias/Supplied
The Saint John singer-songwriter Ken Tobias was working out of Montreal in 1969 when he received a phone call. His new manager, Kevin Hunter, was on the line, telling him the Righteous Brothers were in town and that one of duo’s star singers, Bill Medley, was interested in hearing what the young artist had to offer.
Minutes later, Mr. Tobias and his manager arrived at the nearby Holiday Inn where the Righteous Brothers were staying and knocked on the door, a little out of breath from the run down the street and a jog up the stairs. The bandleader and keyboard player, Michael Patterson, opened the door wearing a fancy suit jacket, a frilly shirt, a pair of boxer shorts and socks held up by garters.
“In show business, you don’t put your pants on before you go out, because you’ll wrinkle them,” Mr. Tobias told the podcast The Atlantic Indie RoundA’Bout.
He played a couple of songs for the bandleader, who smiled and phoned Mr. Medley, telling him to pop over from his room. After playing for the You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ celebrity as well, the upstart Canadian was invited to the Copacabana that night for the show.
As special guests, Mr. Tobias and Mr. Hunter, were given a private table. Halfway through the performance, Mr. Medley stopped the show and said, “Ladies and gentleman, I’d like to introduce you to an up-and-coming star of Canada.” A spotlight flooded Mr. Tobias’s table.
“I’m sure you know who this is, Kenny Tobias,” the singer continued. “Stand up, Kenny!”
Mr. Tobias had passed the audition. He signed a deal with Mr. Medley’s company and moved to Los Angeles, where Mr. Medley produced his first single, You’re Not Even Going To The Fair. Though the New Brunswick native never broke it big in the United States, a dozen of his top-shelf soft-rock singles in the 1970s charted in Canada.
Mr. Tobias died on Oct. 2, at Saint John Regional Hospital. He had battled brain cancer for two months. He was 79.
Carried by a pure and pleasing tenor voice, Mr. Tobias’s adult-contemporary music offered melodic escape and mellow distraction from the day to day. Highly crafted and earnestly human singles such as I Just Want to Make Music, Run Away With Me and Lady Luck were lyrically concerned with love and the love of song.
Ken Tobias, in 1970.Mitchell Rose/Supplied
Musically, Mr. Tobias’s material was geared to middle-of-the road (MOR) radio. “Ken’s songs were part old-school showbiz and part hippie, that same midway point Neil Diamond found,” music writer and broadcaster Bob Mersereau said.
Mr. Tobias was a gentle, philosophic soul serious about life, art and the world. He wrote and recorded Nature’s Song, the eight-minute Save the Forest (An Ecology Suite) and the children’s song Let’s Clean Up the World. His metaphysical side was expressed in Dream #2 and Fly Me High.
“Ever since he was a boy, Ken had dreams about flying,” Tony Tobias, his brother and business manager, told The Globe and Mail.
His most popular composition by far was Stay Awhile, an international hit in 1971 for the Bells. The Montreal band recorded it as a sexy, saccharine duet that topped Canada’s weekly RPM chart, landed in the Top 20 in New Zealand and Australia, and reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. Mr. Tobias’s own version of the song in 1972 was less mawkish.
Working in Los Angeles at the time, Mr. Tobias was oblivious to his song’s initial success with the Bells in Canada. Once aware, his brother called royalty collection agency BMI Canada and hesitantly asked for a $300 advance on the song’s earnings.
“I was inexperienced back then, and had no idea about the money involved,” his brother recalled. “Soon after, Ken received a letter from BMI. I didn’t open it, because it was addressed to him, but I could make out a three and a couple of zeroes through the envelope. I was happy we got what we’d asked for. When Ken opened it, we were surprised to find the cheque was for $3,000.”
A promotional image from 1973.Jennie Anderson/Supplied
His first album, 1972′s Dream #2 on MGM/Verve, was produced by Michael Lloyd, the whiz kid who produced the Osmonds’ hits Down by the Lazy River and Crazy Horses in the same year. The elite studio musicians backing Mr. Tobias included guitarist Larry Carlton and members of the famed Wrecking Crew.
After two stints in Los Angeles, Mr. Tobias relocated to Toronto in 1972. His country-rock second album, The Magic’s in the Music, was recorded in London at George Martin’s AIR Studios.
In a room next to where Mr. Tobias was working, Mr. Martin and Paul McCartney were recording the orchestration for Mr. McCartney’s Live and Let Die for the James Bond film of the same name.
“We’d watch those sessions, standing next to George Martin,” Mr. Tobias’s brother said. “Paul would occasionally come over to check out what Ken was doing. We got to know George.”
Mr. Tobias released four albums in the 1970s on the Toronto-based indie label Attic Records. While he had a highly successful career by any reasonable standard, he never became rich from his music. In that era, aside from Gordon Lightfoot, folky Canadian singer-songwriters generally received less airplay than their rock counterparts.
The troubadours who did succeed, such as Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan and Ron Hynes, were edgier than Mr. Tobias, with political viewpoints and social messages that bordered more on the interests of FM rock audiences.
“For Ken it was probably more about finding the right song at the right time with the right label and producer for that format to be able to break out,” said record producer and music publisher Frank Davies. “Ken had the voice and writing skills to achieve the equivalent success of a Jim Croce or John Denver to be sure, but timing above all else is everything in the music business.”
An article in The Globe in 1976 carried the headline, “Tobias close to fame and fortune.” He and his band were playing Toronto’s Queensbury Arms. “When your expenses for one month are $8,000, you have to keep doing these bars,” Mr. Tobias said.
Over his career, Mr. Tobias released eight albums on various labels, including Pangaea Records, co-owned with his brother. “The lack of continuity due to releases with different labels likely adversely affected Ken’s popularity and career,” veteran Canadian music journalist Larry LeBlanc said.
Carried by a pure and pleasing tenor voice, Tobias’s adult-contemporary music offered melodic escape and mellow distraction from the day to day.Tony Tobias/Supplied
Royalties from his catalogue earned him a modest sum each quarter – “not enough to live on, but it serves as a nice complement,” he told FYI Music News in 2022.
He lived in Toronto through the 1990s before returning to Saint John, where he produced, performed and continued to write music. He had headed back to the hometown where his career had begun in the early 1960s as a member of the folk group the Ramblers with his brother.
In 1966, he appeared on a nationally broadcast concert from Parliament Hill on Canada Day (then Dominion Day). The performance of his composition This is the Maritimes was introduced by young CBC host Alex Trebek.
From 1966-68, he was a cast member of Halifax-based, nationally broadcast CBC television program Singalong Jubilee. Also on the variety show were Catherine McKinnon, Edith Butler and a future superstar, Anne Murray, often a duet partner.
“He was a lovely guy and a very good singer” said Ms. Murray, who recorded Mr. Tobias’s Some Birds for her debut album What About Me. “What I remember was his enthusiasm.”
The show’s theme song was Farewell to Nova Scotia. Mr. Tobias left Singalong Jubilee and the Maritimes in 1968. Back in Saint John 40 years later, he released From a Distance, his final full-length album. On it was I Had a Dream, an acoustic rock number that told of his days travelling between Halifax and Saint John by rail.
“I had a dream of making it and when I was on the train I felt like I was mobile and on my way to my goals to the sound of the clickety-clack of the tracks,” Mr. Tobias said about the song upon its release in 2008. “Those were great times. I followed my dreams and reached most of my musical goals but I’ll never forget singing and playing my flat top and riding the trains.”
Kenneth (Wayne Paul) Tobias was born on July 25, 1945. The top pop hits at the time were Sentimental Journey and the train song On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe. His mother, Laura Violet Tobias (née Wright), was a homemaker. His father, Michael Frederick (Fred) Tobias, was the director of water safety in the province for Canadian Red Cross. He was Lebanese-Canadian.
“There was always somebody beating a chair and yelling ‘Dance the dabke,’ which was a Lebanese dance,” Mr. Tobias recalled in Dave Bidini’s book On a Cold Road.
At the age of 4, he won a bag of candy after modelling and singing on a stage at a Zellers store. “I thought, ‘Oh god, I want to do this,’ and I really liked the applause,” he said recently.
Because his parents could not afford to send him across town to study art at St. John Vocational School, he instead took a mechanical drafting course at Simonds Regional High School. He graduated in 1965 and took a draftsman job with an engineering firm in Halifax, while playing folk clubs at night. One day, the head engineer called him into his office and offered a big promotion – a job in Antigonish, N.S.
“I started to sweat blood, standing there, knowing that this was really a crossroad for me,” Mr. Tobias said recently.
Instead he joined the band on the local CBC Television show Music Hop, which led to his gig with Singalong Jubilee. The engineering firm sent him off with cuff links emblazoned with musical notes.
“I never looked back.”
His Stay Awhile crossed cultures. A popular song in China and other Asian countries, it was recorded and performed by Hong Kong stars Daniel Chan and Teresa Carpio. Canadian-American country music legend Hank Snow also recorded it.
In 1983, Mr. Tobias released Here You Are Today (Theme for Saint John). In 2013, he was honoured with Music New Brunswick’s first-ever Director’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ken Tobias was a self-taught artist whose works of acrylic on canvas – landscapes, seascapes, fantasy, still life and portraits – were shown in galleries in Toronto and Saint John.Sean McGrath/Edit Media
His other passion was painting. Integrated into the Queen Street West arts and cultural scene in Toronto, he lived for a time in the basement of Reaction Studios, a recording facility where a painting of his adorned the foyer.
The self-taught artist’s works of acrylic on canvas – landscapes, seascapes, fantasy, still life and portraits – were shown in galleries in Toronto and Saint John. Several of his paintings are currently hanging in the True North Gallery, in Waterdown, Ont., alongside works of other musicians, including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
Mr. Tobias married (and later divorced) the woman who inspired his 1975 hit Every Bit of Love. They did not have children. He leaves his mother, Laura; brother, Tony; and nephew, Conan Michael Tobias.
Editor’s note: This version has been amended to include Ken Tobias's mother, Laura Tobias, among his survivors.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.