A few years ago, pre-POSTCARD COMETS but by no means before my musical partnership with Buck Wilburn, he asked me to produce a CD for a band he was in. The band was the Altona Kahunas  and the CD was called Live Off The Floor. It was literally that, a recording of a 5 piece guitar band recorded all at once—instruments, vocals, harmonies and solos— all from a garage just East of Altona Road in Pickering Ontario.
The garage belonged to a friend called Tim Hewie.
To say that Tim was the leader of the Kahunas would be a purposeful misrepresentation of the vibrant chaos of those sessions and, I think it’s fair to say, of the band itself. However, Tim was, to my eye,  the driving energy behind the band, the rehearsals and the sessions themselves. He was the host, the cheerleader and the taskmaster of the enterprise. He even brewed the beer in the garage’s fridge, and when that ancient mechanism started contributing a noise more fearsome than the music itself, he was the guy who went out and bought a new one.
Buck wrote a lot of tunes for that CD and Tim wrote a couple as well. But among my favourites from the bunch was a tune of Buck’s called Must Be The Radio. It represented the breezy side of what the Kahunas did and much of its appeal was the lead vocal by Tim Hewie.
Tim is no longer with us. It’s been a couple of years now. I’ve wanted to do a Comets version of Must Be The Radio for a while but my reticence came from replacing Tim’s vocal. It wasn’t fancy, it wasn’t perfect but it animated Buck’s lyric for me, and really, what more can you ask?  Yes, it’s me singing this Comets version but I’m not singing it instead of Tim, I’m singing it for him, my nod to how he made the song speak to me as a listener.
We hope you like Must Be The Radio. We made it for ourselves and for you. But we made it for Tim as well.
David Partridge