Pioneering Party Promoter, Montreal's Rickey D (in orange)

party/concert promoter/pioneer

interviewed by Scott C
Montreal, QC
2010
Ricardo Daley, aka Rickey D, aka the Mayor of Burgundy, has been a fixture in Montreal’s club and party promotion scene since the early ’80s, making sure Montreal had hip hop and R&B shows to go to for years. Although most of his attention these days goes into catering to Montreal’s “mature clientele”, this family man is every bit the hustler that he’s always been. Rickey D was responsible for booking many of Montreal’s first hip hop shows along with Gary T, and changed the game promoting parties and concerts in Montreal. Here are some of his reflections on days gone by.

Where it all started….

“I was 12 in 1979, and I was in love with hip hop and what we called soul music back then, and lot of my friends parents used to do parties at dancehalls in places like the NDG Black Community Center, Lasalle Black Community Center, and the NCC or Negro Community Center. They were basically bringing in New York style parties to Montreal. This was my earliest introduction to this kind of thing in Montreal, and its because of those community based events, and guys like DJ Dr. Jamm and Fabian ‘Kickin’ Ash that it was able to grow like it did. These guys lived in the same city housing block that I did, and as we enjoyed the first wave of breakdancing, pop-locking and rapping in Montreal, I was trying to figure out how I fit into all of it. I couldn’t figure out DJing, and I couldn’t dance that well or do any those phenomenal moves, but I knew I loved music and knew that I wanted to be involved in the scene in some capacity. Promotion took a lot more work in the early days because you had to introduce yourself to people, they had to like your character, they had to believe in what you were doing, and you had to like what you were doing and want to support it. This is where I felt most comfortable. I started off promoting parties for Fitz and Fabian in the early 80′s, and they were the first ones to bring hip hop, soul and reggae into the downtown core of Montreal, parties that until that time had been confined to a dancehall or house-party kind of thing. Downtown clubs in early 80′s Montreal played zero hip hop, but we realized that if we booked parties on long weekends, we had something going. The clubs loved it because back then people never did anything on long weekends, and they saw the place packed with people they had never seen before. Places like Salsa Plus and Club Business were seeing a lot of business from us, and we weren’t even bringing in guests DJs. We didn’t have that direct relationship with New York yet, although a lot of Montreal’s early promoters and DJs caught the vibe from there and brought it back to MTL. That wouldn’t develop until the late 80′s, and while DJing was still in its infancy, we were able to carve out a place for ourselves. We used to listen to Club 980 on CKGM with Michael Williams (formerly of Muchmusic), where Butcher T and a few other local DJs played, and that was the one of the first radio stations in Canada to play hip hop and r n’ b. We were getting our information from there, and a lot of new music was coming out of that show.”

Keep on movin’ don’t stop….

“I was bringing in literally thousands of people to events doing party promoting for quite a while, and it was Gary T who realized that it was me behind the promotion success. I was the first promoter to hand out flyers for parties and shows at the movie theatre, and it sounds silly, but nobody had done that before. Nobody had gone into the CEGEPs and passed flyers to people before either. Promotion was very primitive back then, and even going to hand out flyers in front of another club that wasn’t housing your event was something that wasn’t done. The first show I did with Gary T was Public Enemy at James Lyng High School in 1988. It was a beautiful thing because everybody came out for that show. White kids and black kids and anybody that was into hip hop in Montreal was there that night. We also did Chubb Rock and Big Daddy Kane at James Lyng. James Lyng High School was one of those places where they really let us do our thing. We also used to do parties at Marymount Academy. You had to go to the place where hip hop was back then, because it wasn’t really on the radio or TV, or in mainstream clubs. The general public didn’t understand us. They didn’t understand the appeal or the popularity of hip hop and there was a lot of resistance, but we kept going.

Tags: Big Daddy Kane, Chubb Rock, Michael Williams, Montreal, Public Enemy