Bruce Cole
“I grew up in the flower child era – we were taught as teenagers that, you can be whatever you want to be, and there is no obstacle you cannot overcome,” says Bruce Cole, who was a student at the University of Buffalo in 1970, “the year after the riots.” After graduation and in the absence of a job, Bruce returned to Toronto and started taking pictures for an underground newspaper. “I decided I enjoyed it, so I offered my services to the record companies for PR photography,” he says. “Back then, you took four guys, you throw them together, you gave them a name and you took a picture and all of a sudden you’ve got a band to market.”
Before long, Bruce’s reputation was growing and he landed a couple of good contracts, including for Gordon Lightfoot, Bachman Turner Overdrive and Mendelson Joe. “A lot of the pictures I took for the record companies went to Billboard, RPM or Record Week – the rags that covered the music industry in Canada.” In 1972 he set up his first company, BIC Photography. “BIC – the initials of my name,” he says. “It was just myself and a full-time assistant darkroom technician.” It was BIC that got the call from SRO, for some publicity shots that would eventually make it to the cover of ‘Rush’ as well as a number of live sessions, at gigs and in the studio. “I was just a young photographer, I was learning my craft just as much as they were learning their music craft,” he says. “We had a good time.” It didn’t last however – at quite a young age, he discovered the vagaries of the music business. “When Canadian bands signed with US companies, the A&R guys would say, oh, you gotta use my photographer, you gotta use my album designer,” he says. “When Rush signed with Mercury I was kicked out the door!” Sometimes an artist would fight Bruce’s corner however, such as Randy Bachman from BTO. “Randy said, you know what, we’ve got a photographer in Toronto. We’ll let you pick whatever image you want for the front of the cover, as long as I get to pick the images for the back of the cover. So they hired a photographer from California to shoot the front cover, and Randy called me up and I did all their liner note photographs.”
In October 1977 BIC changed its name to Plum Studios, and Bruce’s photography business was going well. Despite being the official photographer for the Juno awards however, by the early eighties he could see the writing was on the wall. “I remember I walked into the office of the new Ontario promo guy for Polygram, and he said, aren’t you kind of too old to be doing this? I just told him the reason I had grey hair was because rock ‘n’ roll made it that way! He couldn’t have been a day over 19…” It was time to think of something else to do, and he turned his hand to conferences and trade shows. “I learned the hard way, made a lot of mistakes and spent a lot of money the wrong way,” he says. “But I’m a firm believer – as long as you only make a mistake once and you learned from it, and as long as you make more right decisions than wrong decisions, then you’re going to get ahead!”