Paul Myers (musician)

Musical career

Myers was the front man and songwriter for the band The Gravelberrys, which had a Canadian alternative hit in the early 1990s with "Wonder Where You Are Tonight." The group, which took its name from a reference in The Flintstones, disbanded in 1995, after several complete lineup changes.

Myers continues to write, record and play sporadic shows, appearing since 2014 as The Paul & John, a duo formed by Myers and John Moremen, performing with drummers that have included D. J. Bonebrake and Dawn Richardson. The Paul & John have released one album, Inner Sunset (2014).

Broadcast journalism

Between 2001 and 2006, Myers was omnipresent in the media scene of Vancouver, British Columbia, holding a variety of positions during this time. Myers was the musician judge on the Canwest Global reality TV series, Popstars: The One, and blogged about his experience for the Vancouver Province.

Myers and Patrick Maliha were known to viewers of Shaw TV's Urban Rush as The Movie Guys, appearing in a popular weekly segment which ran from 2003 until 2006, when Myers left Vancouver for the San Francisco area. Myers was also briefly a regular cultural pundit on CTV's The Vicki Gabereau Show, a national daytime program which taped out of Vancouver.

For one year (from 2003 to 2004), Myers hosted a talk radio show on CHMJ (then branded as "MOJO Radio") in Vancouver. The show was first known as One, Two, Three with Paul Myers (after its 1:00 to 3:00 time slot), before being rechristened The Paul Myers Show. The show attained cult status, and Myers played host to diverse guests such as They Might Be Giants, Matthew Sweet, Seth MacFarlane, Errol Morris, Randy Bachman, and Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick, as well as local musicians and touring authors. CHMJ, a Corus radio station, abandoned broader talk radio in 2004 in favour of an all-sports format. Myers joked that despite his acquisition of a Vancouver Canucks jersey, his culture- and music-based topics no longer fit on the sports channel.

Writing career

Since the mid-1990s, much of Myers' time has been devoted to his journalism career, which began in 1995 in Toronto. Since that time, he has written for a wide variety of periodicals and newspapers, including Canadian outlets The Globe and Mail, The Vancouver Sun, The Vancouver Province, and Canadian Musician, and American publications including Mix, Electronic Musician, Crawdaddy!, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Myers' first long form book, in 2001, was the authorized biography of the Barenaked Ladies, Public Stunts, Private Stories, published in Canada by Madrigal Press and in the USA by Simon & Schuster's Fireside Books imprint.

His second book, a biography of Long John Baldry called It Ain't Easy: Long John Baldry and the Birth of the British Blues, was published by Greystone Books in Fall 2007.

While researching the Baldry book, Myers met Vancouver filmmaker Nick Orchard, who enlisted him to write the script and appear in his documentary Long John Baldry: In The Shadow Of The Blues. The film has received repeated airing on both the Canadian Bravo network and BBC 4 in the UK. In 2008, Myers was personally nominated for a Gemini Award (the Canadian Emmy) for Best Writing in a Documentary Program or Series, for his work on Orchard's film.

In 2010, Jawbone Press published Myers' third book, A Wizard, a True Star: Todd Rundgren in the Studio, a detailed history of the record production career of the Philadelphia-born guitarist and producer. The book featured interviews with Rundgren and many of his production clients, including Patti Smith, XTC, Meat Loaf, New York Dolls, Cheap Trick, Psychedelic Furs, Grand Funk, and Hall & Oates. The book was critically acclaimed and received four star reviews from the British magazines MOJO and Record Collector.