Al Mair was in his early 20s when he visited the New York’s World Fair in 1964. The exposition was officially dedicated to man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe. As a young man on the fast track in the music business, Mr. Mair later described the fair as “phenomenal.” Not even the skies were limits in the space age.
Mr. Mair, a titan of the Canadian music industry as a savvy entrepreneur and an indefatigable figure in the establishment and growth of independent record companies in this country,Terry Wilkins and Mr. Mair, right. Mr. Mair co-founded Attic Records, which became one of the largest and most successful indie labels in Canadian history.To friends and family, he was a Facebook enthusiast who believed in Buddhism and Hawaiian shirts.
“What about the terms?” Mr. Mair asked his boss. “No terms,” Mr. Lightfoot replied. “Write the cheque.” Mr. Mair then wondered about the rate of interest. “No interest,” Mr. Lightfoot insisted. “Write the cheque.” “The secret of survival for any record company is a steady flow of product,” Mr. Mair said this summer on the podcastThe fun stopped in 1999 when Attic was bought by a consortium headed by political pollster and Tragically Hip co-manager Allan Gregg and merged into a company that came to be called the Song Corporation. Mr. Mair still had a role with the Attic label within the new company, but he was soon pushed aside. “He wasn’t included in the meetings they had,” said Mr.
Post high school and after a two-year stint at Capitol, he worked at the Ontario branch of London Records for a stingy boss who was bizarrely reluctant to give the label’s records away to radio stations for airplay. In his week-long tenure there, a frustrated Mr. Mair was fired and rehired twice and finally quit.
Mr. Mair was a firm boss with a “curious” managerial style, according to Mr. Shea. “He would leave Post-it Notes on computer monitors that read ‘See me.’ We would laugh, but we were terrified. We didn’t know if we had done something wrong or if we were going to be congratulated.”