business the vancouver sun, thursday, april …€¦ · business the vancouver sun, thursday, april...

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D5BUSINESS THE VANCOUVER SUN, THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2005 B RYAN ADAMS and fellow pop star Michael Bublé sell millions of records and have their fame carry them around the world. But they couldn’t carry a tune three decades ago, when their manager-to-be, Bruce Allen, became Sam Feldman’s business partner. The circumstances were hardly auspi- cious. Feldman was a cabaret bouncer — “I’d like to say maitre d’ ” — when Allen, a tough kid from the right side of the tracks, curtly invited him to drop by the following morning. “I had had a rough night,” Feldman recalled. “And in the 1970s, a rough night was a rough night.” So when Allen suggest- ed they be partners and split the revenue, with Allen paying all the expenses, “I though he was on acid,” Feldman said. Although many believe the truculent Allen and the more sage Feldman split years ago, they’ve been joined at the hip ever since. “What we did together was build the biggest agency in the country,” Allen said. He meant their A&F Music’s spinoff S.L. Feldman & Associates, which, via Feldman and Steve Macklam’s Macklam/Feldman Management firm, handles the likes of Diana Krall and her husband Elvis Costello, Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, and, most recently, Leonard Cohen. “Now,” Allen continued, “Sam has built it into the third or fourth in North America.” As for Allen and his Bruce Allen Talent firm, “I am just a manager now and — you know — I like it.” A manager, that is, whose stars — Adams, Bublé, Randy Bachman and Mike Reno — sang Happy Birthday at Allen’s recent 60th-birthday bash. Adams, who has given Allen Corvette sports cars at past anniversaries, also handed him a four-legged walker. Veteran deejay, ad-agency principal and former music-biz manager Red Robinson said of Allen and Feldman: “These guys should get the Order of Canada. Look at the money they’ve brought in to Canada — millions.” Robinson also said: “If you thought Bruce Allen invented [the world’s most common four-letter expletive], the answer is no.” Feldman may dispute that. His drop- dead impersonation of Allen has more effs in it than my old report cards. Recalling a long-ago day when Allen was yelling, “I’m the f***ing king of Vancouver,” Feldman said: “I should have asked myself: ‘Do kings have partners?’ ” Shtick that might have come from The Odd Couple TV series sits easily on a chap who often resembles Walter Mathau. Look- ing outside their personal sitcom, he said of Allen’s forceful management style: “He kicked the door down for a lot of people.” Not only opposing doors. “It is truly amazing that Bruce can offend so many people and still be respected,” Feldman said. Then, after a pause: “And most of the offendees are our clients. I have had a brilliant career as a professional apolo- gist.” Praising Allen “for making a lot of people better — a lot better,” Feldman summed up their three-decade relationship thusly: “Having been his partner and his friend for this long, believe me, you don’t want to be his enemy.” KYLE WASHINGTON, the Washington Marine Group (Seaspan, etc.) local head, married Janelle Jarvis recently and has an offspring on the way. Time to start driving an anonymous family car, you’d think. In fact, the billionaire-clan scion’s new jalopy is black. And it is safe, with six airbags and carbon-fibre underpinnings with four times the energy absorption of steel. But it’s no Volvo wagon with a Baby on Board sticker. It’s a $725,000 Mer- cedes-Benz McLaren coupe, with a 617- horsepower V8 engine that can rocket it to 97 km/h (60 mph) in 3.8 seconds and a top speed of 335 km/h — 207.5 mph. Still, there’s no room for a baby seat on board this Formula One-derived slingshot for two. AMIR and MAHIN MALEK jetted in from Paris’s home-of-the-rich 16th arondisse- ment recently to see sons Peter and Shahram launch their Water’s Edge project on the site of West Vancouver’s now-razed Park Royal Hotel. Site models and display units were unveiled in an upper Ambleside storefront across Marine Drive from the long-gone West Vancouver Billiards Academy — a pool hall anywhere else. Designed by our town’s Lawrence Doyle and Manhattan-based architect Robert A.M. Stern, the three-building complex’s 79 residences are priced from $500,000 to $3.5 million. Lori Young, the serious race-car driver whose late husband Ira developed Bowen Island’s Cowan Point, flew from Malibu to turkey-talk with sales- meister Bob Rennie, but opted to stick with the Howe Sound sunsets her West Van home affords. The Maleks’ Millennium Group is also building L’Hermitage at Robson and Richards Street. It’s a 31-floor tower with 205 condos, two floors of commercial space, a boutique hotel (they’re negotiat- ing with potential operators) and an adja- cent four-floor structure containing 46 non- market housing units. Meanwhile, the company expects to build low-rise and mid-rise residences on a 20-acre special-study area above the Park Royal North shopping centre. There’ll be a public hearing in early May connected to their rezoning plans. JOEL BERMAN saw 9/11 bring his $6- million-a-year business crashing down. That was especially irksome since Berman’s staff of 60 designed and installed large glass sculptural works and manufactured kiln-cast “art” glass. The sculptural business — 20 per cent of it in airport terminals — “disappeared entirely,” said Berman, who founded Joel Berman Glass Studios Ltd. in 1980 and likened the setback to that of carriage- makers when automobiles came in vogue. But Berman, 53, gambled that the taste for carriages would return. And, paradoxi- cally, it was local gambling that helped get his Granville Island-headquartered firm gal- loping again. That was a million-dollar order from Edge- water Casino’s Gary Jackson and Len Liven for a hanging sculpture, glass balustrade and outdoor sculpture Berman says “is cur- rently Canada’s largest art-glass project — and we’d like 20 more like it.” Berman also furnished an 80-foot glass wall for a Donald Trump casino in Indiana, and is negotiating on another Trump gig. Ditto for a huge work to hang in Time-Warn- er’s Manhattan headquarters building, its hundreds of glass elements to contain laminates on which video images may be projected. Meanwhile, prudent economic moves have brightened Berman’s own picture. He paid $1.3 million for a Railway Avenue building — it’s worth considerably more today — that not only gave him 26,000 square feet for production “but made us look more grown-up to the banks.” The Business Development Bank and HSBC “treated us differently when we had real- estate behind us,” said sole-proprietor Berman. He also contracted out the production of Editions-series pressure-formed glass he says cost $2 million but may well result in his firm grossing $25 million by 2008. He won’t say which European glass plant accepted its first outside commission in 150 years. But Berman says he orders in 150,000-square-foot lots, and sells in contractor lots for $35 per square foot instead of $80. He has distributors throughout North America, Germany and Spain and is “closing in on the U.K. and Australia.” The price break has enabled him to install a 6,000-square-foot curtain wall in Germany, undertake a large Kansas City mall project and regain budget-conscious office and hospital business. He’s also made supply deals with such furniture manufacturers as Haworth, Knoll and Dirtt, has décor contracts with all U.S. Movado stores, Range Rover dealerships and American Dental Association offices. Decor-biz Metropolitan Home magazine has also ranked his firm 45th in its annual Top 100 edition. Not bad for a Winnipeg kid who was exposed to glass by a watch-making grand- father. Had it been the other grandpa, maybe he’d have done as well in the kosher butchering business. [email protected] 604-929-8456 Better to be a partner of the ‘king of Vancouver’ TRADE TALK I Sam Feldman reflects on three decades as Bruce Allen’s ‘professional apologist’ and business partner Sam Feldman and Bruce Allen have been partners for 30 years while building separate stellar enterprises. MALCOLM PARRY VANCOUVER SUN COLUMNIST Kyle Washington (left) and his new ride: If you’re good for $725,000, the Mercedes-Benz McLaren is bad for 335 km/h. Joel Berman found how to make more art glass less expensively after 9/11 shattered his business. Multi-million record sellers Michael Bublé and Bryan Adams sang Happy Birthday to manager Bruce Allen. Amir, Peter, Mahin and Shahram Malek launched their Water’s Edge project on the site of the now-razed Park Royal Hotel in West Vancouver. BY MARKE ANDREWS VANCOUVER SUN Standing among a bank of TV screens at Future Shop’s West Broadway store, Tim Walker rais- es his keychain and hits a button. Half the screens go black. He then strolls out of the store, leaving a confused sales staff wondering what happened. “It works pretty well,” says Walker, campaigns manager for Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine which stages guerrilla campaigns against everything from over-consumption to media concentration. The device Walker used in the store is called TV-B-Gone, a small remote-control that dou- bles as a key chain. The contrap- tion, made by U.S. company Cornfield Electronics, is basical- ly a mini-universal remote-con- trol device capable of turning off (or on) TV sets across the land. Adbusters has sold 2,500 of them to consumers in preparation for next week’s TV Turnoff (Mon- day through Sunday), an annual week-long event started in 1994 to protest television consump- tion. This year marks the first time Adbusters has introduced a cul- ture-jamming element to TV Turnoff. Other activities include parents and teachers getting stu- dents to go without television for a week and recording their thoughts in a journal, a “zombie walk” in Washington, D.C., and a television-smashing fundraiser in New York City where people pay to destroy a TV set, the proceeds going to media literacy educa- tion. In addition to selling 2,500 TV- B-Gones (at $10 US), Adbusters gave away 100 of them to culture- jamming groups, who plan to use them in malls, bars, banks and airports to shut off televisions in public spaces. Why target television? “It is still the most powerful form of communication,” says Walker. “If you look at the per- suasiveness of a 30-second TV spot, this is why companies spend billions of dollars using it. It hits so many of your senses.” Walker says that North Ameri- cans spend, on average, seven- and-a-half hours per day in front of computer, videogame and tele- vision screens. “You could say that some of that is productive in front of a computer, but if Albert Einstein spent that much time watching a screen, would we have relativi- ty?” asks Walker. “It’s a big waste of our potential and our mental activity.” Walker says he isn’t totally against television, stating that there are good things on the CBC and some of the cable channels. But he objects to the non-inter- active nature of the medium, where consumers cannot raise their voices, like they can on the Internet. “It shouldn’t be up to the cor- porations to be doling out this content to citizens,” says Walker. “It should be citizens who are in control of it.” Keychain device can zap masses of TVs undetected CULTURE I Adbusters sells them for upcoming ‘TV Turnoff’ week STUART DAVIS/VANCOUVER SUN Adbusters’ tiny TV-B-Gone device closely resembles any ordinary key chain, but it can remotely turn off just about any television set.

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D5✰BUSINESS THE VANCOUVER SUN, THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2005

BRYAN ADAMS and fellow pop starMichael Bublé sell millions ofrecords and have their fame carry

them around the world. But they couldn’tcarry a tune three decades ago, when theirmanager-to-be, Bruce Allen, became SamFeldman’s business partner.

The circumstances were hardly auspi-cious.

Feldman was a cabaret bouncer — “I’dlike to say maitre d’ ” — when Allen, atough kid from the right side of the tracks,curtly invited him to drop by the followingmorning.

“I had had a rough night,” Feldmanrecalled. “And in the 1970s, a rough nightwas a rough night.” So when Allen suggest-ed they be partners and split the revenue,with Allen paying all the expenses, “Ithough he was on acid,” Feldman said.

Although many believe the truculentAllen and the more sage Feldman splityears ago, they’ve been joined at the hipever since.

“What we did together was build thebiggest agency in the country,” Allen said.He meant their A&F Music’s spinoff S.L.Feldman & Associates, which, via Feldmanand Steve Macklam’s Macklam/FeldmanManagement firm, handles the likes ofDiana Krall and her husband ElvisCostello, Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell, and,most recently, Leonard Cohen.

“Now,” Allen continued, “Sam has builtit into the third or fourth in North America.”

As for Allen and his Bruce Allen Talentfirm, “I am just a manager now and — youknow — I like it.”

A manager, that is, whose stars —Adams, Bublé, Randy Bachman and MikeReno — sang Happy Birthday at Allen’srecent 60th-birthday bash. Adams, whohas given Allen Corvette sports cars atpast anniversaries, also handed him afour-legged walker.

Veteran deejay, ad-agency principal andformer music-biz manager Red Robinsonsaid of Allen and Feldman: “These guysshould get the Order of Canada. Look atthe money they’ve brought in to Canada —millions.”

Robinson also said: “If you thoughtBruce Allen invented [the world’s mostcommon four-letter expletive], the answeris no.”

Feldman may dispute that. His drop-dead impersonation of Allen has more effsin it than my old report cards. Recalling along-ago day when Allen was yelling, “I’mthe f***ing king of Vancouver,” Feldmansaid: “I should have asked myself: ‘Dokings have partners?’ ”

Shtick that might have come from TheOdd Couple TV series sits easily on a chapwho often resembles Walter Mathau. Look-ing outside their personal sitcom, he saidof Allen’s forceful management style: “Hekicked the door down for a lot of people.”

Not only opposing doors. “It is trulyamazing that Bruce can offend so manypeople and still be respected,” Feldmansaid. Then, after a pause: “And most ofthe offendees are our clients. I have had abrilliant career as a professional apolo-gist.”

Praising Allen “for making a lot of peoplebetter — a lot better,” Feldman summedup their three-decade relationship thusly:“Having been his partner and his friend forthis long, believe me, you don’t want to behis enemy.”

•KYLE WASHINGTON, the Washington

Marine Group (Seaspan, etc.) local head,married Janelle Jarvis recently and has anoffspring on the way. Time to start drivingan anonymous family car, you’d think.

In fact, the billionaire-clan scion’s newjalopy is black. And it is safe, with sixairbags and carbon-fibre underpinningswith four times the energy absorption ofsteel. But it’s no Volvo wagon with a Babyon Board sticker. It’s a $725,000 Mer-cedes-Benz McLaren coupe, with a 617-horsepower V8 engine that can rocket it to97 km/h (60 mph) in 3.8 seconds and atop speed of 335 km/h — 207.5 mph.

Still, there’s no room for a baby seat onboard this Formula One-derived slingshotfor two.

•AMIR and MAHIN MALEK jetted in from

Paris’s home-of-the-rich 16th arondisse-ment recently to see sons Peter andShahram launch their Water’s Edge projecton the site of West Vancouver’s now-razedPark Royal Hotel.

Site models and display units wereunveiled in an upper Ambleside storefrontacross Marine Drive from the long-goneWest Vancouver Billiards Academy — apool hall anywhere else.

Designed by our town’s Lawrence Doyleand Manhattan-based architect RobertA.M. Stern, the three-building complex’s79 residences are priced from $500,000

to $3.5 million. Lori Young, the seriousrace-car driver whose late husband Iradeveloped Bowen Island’s Cowan Point,flew from Malibu to turkey-talk with sales-meister Bob Rennie, but opted to stickwith the Howe Sound sunsets her WestVan home affords.

The Maleks’ Millennium Group is alsobuilding L’Hermitage at Robson andRichards Street. It’s a 31-floor tower with205 condos, two floors of commercialspace, a boutique hotel (they’re negotiat-ing with potential operators) and an adja-cent four-floor structure containing 46 non-market housing units.

Meanwhile, the company expects to

build low-rise and mid-rise residences on a20-acre special-study area above the ParkRoyal North shopping centre. There’ll be apublic hearing in early May connected totheir rezoning plans.

•JOEL BERMAN saw 9/11 bring his $6-

million-a-year business crashing down.That was especially irksome sinceBerman’s staff of 60 designed andinstalled large glass sculptural works andmanufactured kiln-cast “art” glass.

The sculptural business — 20 per centof it in airport terminals — “disappearedentirely,” said Berman, who founded JoelBerman Glass Studios Ltd. in 1980 andlikened the setback to that of carriage-makers when automobiles came in vogue.

But Berman, 53, gambled that the tastefor carriages would return. And, paradoxi-cally, it was local gambling that helped gethis Granville Island-headquartered firm gal-loping again.

That was a million-dollar order from Edge-water Casino’s Gary Jackson and Len Livenfor a hanging sculpture, glass balustradeand outdoor sculpture Berman says “is cur-rently Canada’s largest art-glass project —and we’d like 20 more like it.”

Berman also furnished an 80-foot glasswall for a Donald Trump casino in Indiana,and is negotiating on another Trump gig.Ditto for a huge work to hang in Time-Warn-er’s Manhattan headquarters building, itshundreds of glass elements to containlaminates on which video images may beprojected.

Meanwhile, prudent economic moveshave brightened Berman’s own picture. Hepaid $1.3 million for a Railway Avenuebuilding — it’s worth considerably moretoday — that not only gave him 26,000square feet for production “but made uslook more grown-up to the banks.” TheBusiness Development Bank and HSBC“treated us differently when we had real-estate behind us,” said sole-proprietorBerman.

He also contracted out the production ofEditions-series pressure-formed glass hesays cost $2 million but may well result inhis firm grossing $25 million by 2008.

He won’t say which European glassplant accepted its first outside commissionin 150 years. But Berman says he ordersin 150,000-square-foot lots, and sells incontractor lots for $35 per square footinstead of $80. He has distributorsthroughout North America, Germany andSpain and is “closing in on the U.K. andAustralia.”

The price break has enabled him toinstall a 6,000-square-foot curtain wall inGermany, undertake a large Kansas Citymall project and regain budget-consciousoffice and hospital business. He’s alsomade supply deals with such furnituremanufacturers as Haworth, Knoll andDirtt, has décor contracts with all U.S.Movado stores, Range Rover dealershipsand American Dental Association offices.Decor-biz Metropolitan Home magazinehas also ranked his firm 45th in its annualTop 100 edition.

Not bad for a Winnipeg kid who wasexposed to glass by a watch-making grand-father. Had it been the other grandpa,maybe he’d have done as well in thekosher butchering business.

[email protected]

Better to be a partnerof the ‘king of Vancouver’

TRADE TALK I Sam Feldmanreflects on three decades

as Bruce Allen’s‘professional apologist’and business partner

Sam Feldman and Bruce Allen have been partners for 30 years while building separate stellar enterprises.

MALCOLM PARRYVANCOUVER SUN

COLUMNIST

Kyle Washington (left) and his new ride: If you’re good for $725,000, theMercedes-Benz McLaren is bad for 335 km/h.

Joel Berman found how to makemore art glass less expensively after9/11 shattered his business.

Multi-million record sellers MichaelBublé and Bryan Adams sang HappyBirthday to manager Bruce Allen.

Amir, Peter, Mahin and Shahram Malek launched their Water’s Edge projecton the site of the now-razed Park Royal Hotel in West Vancouver.

BY MARKE ANDREWSVANCOUVER SUN

Standing among a bank of TVscreens at Future Shop’s WestBroadway store, Tim Walker rais-es his keychain and hits a button.Half the screens go black.

He then strolls out of the store,leaving a confused sales staffwondering what happened.

“It works pretty well,” saysWalker, campaigns manager forAdbusters, the Vancouver-basedmagazine which stages guerrillacampaigns against everythingfrom over-consumption to mediaconcentration.

The device Walker used in thestore is called TV-B-Gone, asmall remote-control that dou-bles as a key chain. The contrap-tion, made by U.S. companyCornfield Electronics, is basical-ly a mini-universal remote-con-trol device capable of turning off(or on) TV sets across the land.Adbusters has sold 2,500 of themto consumers in preparation fornext week’s TV Turnoff (Mon-day through Sunday), an annualweek-long event started in 1994to protest television consump-tion.

This year marks the first timeAdbusters has introduced a cul-ture-jamming element to TVTurnoff. Other activities includeparents and teachers getting stu-dents to go without television fora week and recording theirthoughts in a journal, a “zombiewalk” in Washington, D.C., and atelevision-smashing fundraiser inNew York City where people payto destroy a TV set, the proceedsgoing to media literacy educa-tion.

In addition to selling 2,500 TV-B-Gones (at $10 US), Adbustersgave away 100 of them to culture-jamming groups, who plan to usethem in malls, bars, banks andairports to shut off televisions inpublic spaces.

Why target television?“It is still the most powerful

form of communication,” saysWalker. “If you look at the per-suasiveness of a 30-second TVspot, this is why companiesspend billions of dollars using it.It hits so many of your senses.”

Walker says that North Ameri-cans spend, on average, seven-and-a-half hours per day in frontof computer, videogame and tele-vision screens.

“You could say that some ofthat is productive in front of acomputer, but if Albert Einsteinspent that much time watching ascreen, would we have relativi-ty?” asks Walker. “It’s a big wasteof our potential and our mentalactivity.”

Walker says he isn’t totallyagainst television, stating thatthere are good things on the CBCand some of the cable channels.But he objects to the non-inter-active nature of the medium,where consumers cannot raisetheir voices, like they can on theInternet.

“It shouldn’t be up to the cor-porations to be doling out thiscontent to citizens,” says Walker.“It should be citizens who are incontrol of it.”

Keychaindevice canzap masses

of TVsundetected

CULTURE I Adbusterssells them for upcoming

‘TV Turnoff ’ week

STUART DAVIS/VANCOUVER SUN

Adbusters’ tiny TV-B-Gonedevice closely resembles anyordinary key chain, but it canremotely turn off just aboutany television set.