Terry David Mulligan has spent over fifty years at the intersection of Canadian music and broadcasting. He worked in radio in British Columbia during the era when FM stations were first defining a new relationship between rock music and the listening audience. He was a VJ at MuchMusic during the network's most culturally significant years. He hosted television music programming and conducted interviews with some of the biggest names in rock music across multiple decades. "Mulligan's Stew: My Life So Far" is his attempt to gather those decades into a single coherent narrative, and it largely succeeds on its own terms.
The memoir is not a conventional music-industry tell-all. Mulligan writes with a candor that comes across as genuinely earned rather than calculated for controversy. There are stories here that music fans who grew up in Canada during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s will recognize from the cultural landscape of the time, now told from the perspective of someone who was in the room when they happened. The book moves at a brisk pace, organized roughly chronologically but willing to digress into thematic tangents when the material calls for it.
The Radio Years
The early chapters cover Mulligan's entry into broadcasting in British Columbia during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period when rock radio was developing its personality as a distinct format. For anyone who has spent time studying how Canadian radio established itself as a cultural institution during this era - the CRTC's Canadian content regulations, the emergence of FM rock formats, the battles for station licensing - these chapters offer useful texture.
Mulligan does not pretend to have been a dispassionate observer of these developments. He was an active participant, and the memoir's first-person perspective gives the institutional history a human scale that more academic treatments of the same period tend to lack. He is honest about mistakes made and opportunities missed, which gives the narrative a credibility that purely triumphalist music memoirs typically lack.
MuchMusic
The chapters covering Mulligan's time at MuchMusic are among the book's strongest. MuchMusic launched in 1984 and quickly established itself as a distinct cultural entity from its American counterpart MTV - more improvisational, more locally focused, less polished in ways that became defining strengths rather than weaknesses. Mulligan was part of the on-air team during the years when the channel's identity was being formed in real time, and his recollections of that period have the quality of someone who understood, while it was happening, that something significant was being created.
What Mulligan captures best in the MuchMusic sections is the sense that no one quite knew what they were building - they were making it up as they went along, which is often how the most durable cultural institutions begin.
The artist encounters described in these chapters will be familiar names to any student of rock history - Canadian acts that built their audiences during the 1980s and 1990s alongside internationally recognized names that passed through Toronto during their promotional tours. Mulligan writes about these interactions without the reflexive name-dropping that weakens many music memoirs; the anecdotes are included because they illuminate something about the period or the person, not simply to demonstrate access.
The Later Career
The book's final third covers Mulligan's work in wine journalism and his continued presence in Canadian broadcasting culture, interests that developed alongside his music career. Some readers may find this section less compelling than the rock-radio and MuchMusic material, but it rounds out the portrait of a person whose professional life has been defined by genuine enthusiasms rather than a single-minded career strategy.
"Mulligan's Stew" is a useful document for anyone interested in the history of Canadian music media. It is also, more simply, a readable and often funny account of a long career spent at the center of Canadian rock culture. Recommended.
