Chords for Rosalie Trombley: The Girl with the Golden Ear | 2016 Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award

_ _ _ Rosalie was the program director of a little station in a small town in Ontario that happened to beam into the Metroplex.
So whatever they played had a huge influence.
My job, she would feel, is to find the best records for this radio station that the audience it serves wants to hear.
Her only life was, is it good or is it bad?
If it's good, we're playing it. _ _
_ _ [F] _ _ [Gm] _ _ And the hits just keep on coming!
_ [A#] CKLW, [F] the Motor City!
_ _ _ Hey, I'm Sekien Lee.
The Juno people [A#] called me up and introduced me to the story of Rosalie Trombley.
I had never heard of her before, but as I began to dig deeper into her story,
I [F#] became convinced that this is a person that more Canadians should know about.
She is an unsung treasure of Canada.
Started as [A#m] a receptionist and moved up to [F#] music librarian and then music director.
[A] People knew that she was [C#] a single mother raising [Em] three kids,
but it also became very well known in the industry early on that the only way you were getting on CKLW,
the Big 8, was if you had a legitimate hit record.
We were a pretty tight family unit because Mom was a single mom.
I was a latchkey [G#m] kid.
I had a [B] key and would come home and make myself lunch.
Fried bologna sandwiches or egg sandwiches or pancakes or meatloaf or spaghetti or something.
[E] We'd sit down and have dinner when Mom got home.
As a mom, she was just [F#m] like a lot of other moms.
She [E] had expectations of you and she was not afraid to tell [A] you what those expectations were.
She was just a very, very nice lady.
_ You could talk and have a [A] conversation with her.
[E] You might be nervous, but she would _ [A] sort of put your nervousness aside and talk [E] to you
and be very sincere about what you're up against.
Everybody knew that Rosalie got to pick [E] the hits.
She heard something in Alice Cooper.
She heard I'm 18 as a hit and started to play it.
And it became Alice's first hit record.
She was, [N] as they say in the trade, taking care of business.
There was a song I sang by accident.
It had a piano player that I didn't book.
He was a pizza guy who delivered pizza to the restaurant and said,
I want to play piano on this track.
We stuck _ it on the back of an album.
And she called and said, this song, Taking Care of Business.
It has two stops in the middle.
So take out one of the stops, move it up,
make it under four minutes long, I'll start to play it.
The guy who owns AM Radio is Mr.
Elton John.
This one song of yours with the piano, played by the pizza guy, Norman Durkee,
will get you Elton John real estate on every radio station
because it's a really great party song, but it's the piano
and it's not the ripping guitars over.
So what the heck, let's put out a song with the piano.
And blam, it's still the big party song today.
And every guy I meet in every band in every country in the world said,
I learned to play drum set, I learned to play bass set, I learned to play [B] guitar.
Let's get to the song, Rosalie.
Oh, yeah.
We were doing an album called Back in [B] 72
and we were down at Leon Russell's studio in Paradise, Oklahoma.
And I wrote it one day there and I said, you know, she'll get a [E] kick out of this.
But I couldn't help myself.
I'd known her so long.
You know, I just said, _ _ send her a song.
And I never [B] thought anybody would ever cover it because it was so [E] inside
between me and Rosalie.
It was so inside, no one's ever going to cover this.
Just another rock track for an album.
And [E] then Thin Lizzy did [B] it and it was really, really cool.
They'd done it so England heard it too.
The interesting thing about you is you never actually met Rosalie.
So how did [F#] you come to know of her?
Through the magic of Thin Lizzy and Bob Seger.
I think we first heard the Thin Lizzy version.
[G#] So like anything, you know, you like something, you start researching a bit about it.
You find out that, oh, they open up for Bob Seger on a [A] tour.
And it turns out [B] they covered his song.
And so, oh, what's this Bob Seger song all about?
Well, it turns out that it's about this woman who's an incredible tastemaker.
And so, you know, we [B] covered the song.
You know, we just thought it not only was it a cool tune
and paying tribute to two really cool bands that we like,
but also, you know, a great Canadian legend.
When you hear the lines like, you know, she knows music,
it doesn't seem like a love song.
It's obviously paying tribute to somebody that the writer of the song respected.
[F#] It's mildly actually critical of her.
Really?
But very mildly.
You know, she knows music.
I know [G#] music too.
_ It's kind of [F#] like a little backhand, but she got it.
She [F#] got it.
I just want to tell the world how much she meant to me
and how [B] good she was for my career.
And I owe her a lot, and I think she sure earned it.
_ _ _ [D#m] TKLW is still there, but it's a [G#] lot different from what it [B] once was.
But the fact is, [G#] what happened happened.
The [E] influence is there, [B] and [E] Rosalie [B] Trombley's memory and spirit lives on.
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She knows music.
She knows music. _ _ _ _
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