Stephen Stohn will release The Orange Sessions with his group, GTA Rhythm Section.
by Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
He’s the chancellor of Trent University, an Order of Canada member, a former top entertainment attorney to the stars and has served as executive producer for most of the run of the “Degrassi” TV franchise.
And at 76, Stephen Stohn just added a new accomplishment to his impressive résumé: recording artist.
As GTA Rhythm Section, Stohn, who acted as producer, arranger and conductor, and several musicians — including Matthew Jardine, singing son of charter Beach Boys member Al Jardine — will release a six-song EP called The Orange Sessions next month that includes “Opus 42 — Ode to Summer,” a nine-minute track that came to Stohn in fragments while he slept and was released Dec. 1.
“I had a whole series of dreams where I was performing music,” said Stohn, who was learning to implement the music-creation software program Ableton when the dreams occurred.
“I would be called up on stage, and it would be the most natural thing in the world. I’d just get up and I’d play, and I’d sing. There would be a band. It was great!
“Then I’d wake up and I would still have this melody in my head.”
He’d sing the melody into a microphone, and after a while, patched together pieces that eventually became the song. But it wasn’t until he recorded the demo — “me playing the piano very badly,” with a singing voice he calls “the croak” — that Stohn felt he finally had something.
“It’s a very Beach Boys feel,” Stohn explained from the lakeview condo he shares with his wife of 29 years, “Degrassi” co-creator Linda Schuyler, and their three cats: Boris, Natasha and Rocky.
“I love Brian Wilson. He’s my hero. I’ve flown many places to watch him, even when he couldn’t sing, just out of homage.
“But I’ve been able to get out what I was hoping was inside — and it’s this stupid song that’s nine minutes long and nine fragments. They don’t make any sense. They change time signature. They change tempo.”
If the way Stohn speaks about his creation seems somewhat whimsical, it’s because he never planned to release it for public consumption.
A breakfast meeting with veteran manager Jeff Rogers, who has worked with Honeymoon Suite, The Pursuit of Happiness, Crash Test Dummies and Randy Bachman, convinced him otherwise.
“I played it for him because he and I go way back,” Stohn recalled. “I described it as the song that should never have been written for all the obvious reasons, including that it’s written by a 76-year-old, and if written, should never be recorded, and if recorded, should never be released.
“And he said, ‘Absolutely! It should never be recorded and never be released. When are we going in the studio?’”
Stohn and the musicians booked time at the Orange Lounge, the downtown studio he co-owns, and recorded “Opus 42 — Ode to Summer” and two other songs, “Falling All Over Again” and “Once in a Longtime,” both sung by Will Bowes. The remaining three tracks are Stohn’s piano-and-vocal demos for “Opus 42” and “Falling,” and “Black Velvet” songwriter and former VJ Christopher Ward’s version of “Once in a Longtime” resurrected from one of his solo albums.
Stohn has no expectations that the EP is either going to sell any copies or get played on the radio, and says he’s not planning any promotional appearances.
Then why release it?
“We should celebrate the fact that it just doesn’t matter if you’ve got some art inside of you — even if the word ‘art’ is too highfalutin an expression for what I do.
“If you’ve got something inside of you, well, don’t hesitate to just bring it out.”
Stohn also has a more elaborately philosophical answer.
“I’m intrigued with artificial intelligence, and it will probably be the extinction of the human race,” he said. “If that’s what it is, that’s what it is. But certainly, it will cause chaos. It will cure cancer, solve the energy problem and do a whole bunch of wonderful things.
“It will also do a whole bunch of negative things — and one of the negative things is unemployment. There is just going to be massive unemployment. So what are people going to do?
“I’m retired. I’m on a whole bunch of boards and the chancellor of a university. It’s not like I’m doing nothing. But I’m in a situation that a lot of people are going to be in, although they’ll be 20 or 30 years old. And what do you do? I think, in this society, we all have to really redefine what it means to be successful.
“And this whole Hollywood ideal of money, looks and power and celebrity just doesn’t cut it. What people are going to have to do is say, ‘If I’m not working, I can be charitable, I can help people across the street, I can do that.’
“But why not do some music? It doesn’t have to sell Taylor Swift numbers. It doesn’t have to sell at all. It doesn’t have to make any difference. And in my case, I’ve been surrounded by music all my life.”
The Denver-born Stohn says music became a big deal for him when he saw the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1964. He even formed a band with Christopher Ward that toured Europe.
He also wrote — with Jim McGrath and Jody Colero — the theme song for “Degrassi: The Next Generation.”
When Drake — who, as Aubrey Graham, played Jimmy Brooks on the show — staged an impromptu cast reunion for his 2018 video “I’m Upset,” that theme was tacked onto the end of the clip and has since been viewed on YouTube 116 million times.
Stohn remembers Drake, who appeared in seven out of 14 seasons of “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” having “charisma and a charm” from the beginning.
“Somewhere, I still have the early mixtapes that he did, and I tried to talk him into letting us use the songs for ‘Degrassi,’ but he’d insist, ‘No, that’s my separate career,’” Stohn said. “We talked him into a few things — one episode where he does kind of a moonwalk and some singing. That was the closest we could get him to perform his music. We knew he was talented.”
Drake would also use the Orange Lounge for sessions that would last all night, and Stohn would receive reports about his conduct.
“I’d talk with the engineers in the morning, and they’d say he was the sweetest guy in the world. He’d come in and make tea for them and rub their shoulders.”
Over the years he practiced entertainment law, Stohn represented such acts as k.d. lang, Alannah Myles and Cowboy Junkies and produced many Juno Awards shows.
He recalls seeing lang at the Brunswick Tavern on Bloor during her first Toronto visit in 1984, even though he had to be persuaded to attend.
“Three people had begged me to go,” he said. “On the Saturday night, I got a call from someone who said, ‘Stephen, you live four doors away. If you’re not over here in five minutes, I’m coming over and breaking your legs.’
“So I went over and I was just so amazed. On Monday morning, I called all the major record companies plus Quality Records and just left a message saying, ‘I have seen the future of music and her name is k.d. lang.’”
Lang’s manager at the time, Larry Wanagas, tracked down Stohn a few weeks later and hired him to negotiate her first deal with Sire Records.
Strangely, although he’s advised and represented hundreds of Canadian acts, Stohn never intended to practice law.
He got there by producing a couple of films in the early ‘70s, while in his 20s, including “The Clown Murders” starring John Candy.
“It was our lawyer who said to me, ‘Stephen, you have to be a lawyer — you’re doing a lot of negotiating.’”
The lawyer then handed Stohn five dollars and commanded him to apply to the law school at the University of Toronto.
“I applied because I knew I wouldn’t get in,” said Stohn. “But then I got in and thought I could go for a little bit.”
In his third year, he attended a cluster of courses on business planning.
“It was super-advanced tax planning, corporate organizations, all these business things,” he said.
“Everyone said, ‘You’re an idiot. You want to be an entertainment lawyer. Why are you learning all these advanced business techniques?’
“And I said, ‘Exactly. I want to be an entertainment lawyer — and now I see how I can really help my clients.”