The students call it “Fri-Yay,” and on November 15 there was certainly an air of excitement in the Chateauguay Valley High School (CVR) auditorium. The school’s performing arts program had invited Jason Rockman to give two back-toa-back talks.
As the second crowd of 60 settled in, Rockman leaned casually against the auditorium stage, microphone in hand, and addressed the listeners like friends. He is a podcaster, a spokesman for Comicon in Montreal and Ottawa and for Heavy Metal Montreal, an entertainment correspondent for CTV’s The National, and more. But he is perhaps best known as “The Rockman,” the late-night DJ on CHOM-FM in Montreal.
At age 53, Rockman seems to have lived many lives and taken on many roles; but he says, “I went through the school of hard knocks. I took the hard way.”
When he was 14, Rockman’s parents divorced, and he moved in with his grandmother. “Between the ages 14 and 21 I was really lost. I was on my own from the age of 16.” He didn’t do well in school; he attended Dawson College but was failing. He was in a bad place with drugs and alcohol.
It took a tragedy for Rockman to turn his life around. When he was 21, he saw a friend drink and drive and get in an accident that killed a family of four. “This was a massive wake-up call,” he says. He checked into Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), has now been sober 32 years, and still attends AA meetings. “I wouldn’t ever trade my best day drinking for my worst day sober,” he says.
In 1993, shortly after becoming sober, Rockman started a heavy metal band called Slaves on Dope. He toured Canada for eight years in an old van, then made the move to Los Angeles. The band toured with Pantera and Black Sabbath and performed at Ozzfest in 2000.
Rockman admits that it was scary to take that first step on stage, but “The fact that I did it opened all these great doors for me. I moved to L.A.; I ended up getting a record deal; we became the first band to sign on Ozzy and Sharon’s record label, Divine Records.” His advice to young musicians is, “Play anything you can … When you are onstage, play like it’s your last show. You never know who is in your audience.”
Rockman says that it’s normal to feel anxious about something. “When I was younger, anxiety was something that you had to push yourself through and work through; nowadays they just want to put a label on it and say, ‘You’re anxious, so it’s ok; you don’t have to push your way through this’.” Rockman speaks with conviction: “If you don’t face your fears, you don’t get to grow … I would not be able to do any of this if I had one, not got sober; and two, not faced my fears.”
In 2004, Rockman’s son was born, and he quit the band. He admits, “I liked interviewing people more than being in a band,” and soon started as a DJ at CHOM-FM. He then had the opportunity to meet many more musicians. “CHOM was a calling card,” he says.
Rockman remembers that as a teenager he loved Simple Minds. “They were bigger than life. Fast-forward 30-something years later, I was backstage at MTelus waiting for Simple Minds to come down to interview them. If you had told my 14, 15, or 16-year-old self that I would be doing that one day, I would have told you you are f-ing nuts! And it’s all because I took risks and tried things, and I didn’t let fear ruin my life.”
Rockman worked at CHOM-FM for almost 14 years. Then, just over a year ago, he was let go. He was told that the “Toronto office” didn’t want to pay for a night DJ.
He laments about the people who tuned into his show during night shifts: “You are like a lifeline for them, a buddy who hangs out with them at night.” And being let go felt very public. “Every time that I would go somewhere, people would ask why I got fired. Everyone would ask what happened.” But Rockman has changed his trajectory so many times that he knew that there was something else waiting for him.
He is now very invested in his podcast. “I started the podcast two years before I left radio, or radio left me,” he quips. On the podcast, he interviews people from many different walks of life: “influencers, actors … there is no format,” he says.
“I don’t romanticize about the past; I’m all about forward motion.”