31, 1993 ~ North Shore News

PSEA A TAGOO ESPEN L IT STE ATT RT RP TIT!

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DAE CIR TNS ETT A ETI PATER

Actor has a nameless job and a familiar voice

JIM CONRAD is something of an electronic ghost: his
disembodied voice is known to tens of thousands of radio
and TV viewers across Canada and as far south as Tampa
Bay, Florida, and yet none of us would recognize him even
if he were to stare us in the face.

Conrad is the voice of Kokanee
Beer, the super husky gravel-pit
announcer of ‘‘the Fox rocks’'
and other short station IDs, and
the sober, officious spokesman
who reminds B.C. residents night-
ly that the News Hour with Tony
Parsons is about to begin.

It’s an anonymous,
chameleon-like existence, but the
North Vancouver announcer or
“voice actor,’’ as he prefers to
call hims<:f, doesn’t mind the
nameless nature of his job.

“It doesn’t bother me. To me,
it’s more satisfying to be

By Evelyn Jacob
News Reporter

recognized by my peers, to hear
my three-year-old say, ‘That's
daddy’s voice on TV!’ than to
have someone stop me on the
Street,”’ intones Conrad, who
broke into the voice business at
age 17 as an on-air DJ for a Med-
icine Hat radio station.

And what do his peers think of
his magic skills?

On a press release accompany-
ing his bio, Stan Feingold of
MultiMedia Productions offers
these thoughts:

“After a particularly exacting
session, I fell asleep and had the
strangest dream. God was lectur-
ing on the chief benefits of later-
al-effect diodes. Then Gabriel
tapped my shoulder and
whispered: ‘He sounds convincing,
but he’s no Jim Conrad.’ "

Conrad’s leap into voice-over
followed a satisfying career in
radio. Quickly working his way up

NAME: Jim Conrad

BORN: Medicine Hat, Alta.
EDUCATION: McCoy High grad
RESIDENCE: North Vancouver
OCCUPATION: Commercial
voice-overist

FAMILY: Married; two children
HOBBIES: Golf, skiing, softball

; . : photo N Lucente
COMMERCIAL BROADCASTER Jim Conrad at his North Van home

studelo where he produces voice-overs for such corporate

clients as Labatit’s, 8.C. Credit Unions, Mazda Canada, Boston
Pizza, CFMI, and CKNW. His voice is recognizabie on Kokanee
beer ads and intros for CFMI as well as from Front Page
Challenge. ; ‘

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the electronic media ladder, he
graduated from ‘‘CHAT in the
Hat” to assume more prestigious
positions at CFAX 1070 in Vic-
toria — where the station brass
convinced him to drop his sur-
name Anhorn for the more familiar
sounding Conrad and the
mighty CFOX, from which he was
fired after only one year.

The program director who fired
him hired him back the next year
to work weekends,

Being unemployed for a year,
he says, forced him to be more
creative, and in 1986 he kissed the
DJ life goodbye forever after
discovering he could make a suc-
cessful living selling his voice to as
many businesses as possible.

Today Conrad’s is one of the
most sought-after voices in the
country.

Working from his North Van-
couver home in a state-of-the-art
digital recording studio he built
himself, Conrad dubs everything
from one-liner promotions to in-
volved narrations for corporate
clients such as McDonald’s, Gen-
eral Motors, Sharp Electronics
and Kokanee Beer.

Sometimes people accuse him of
having an easy time of it — after
all, he doesn’t have to get up in
front of a camera — but Conrad
says it’s not as simple as it
looks... I mean, sounds.

“When I got my first freelance
thing doing TV spots for B.C.
Tel, 15 people were in the control
room watching me.’

So how does a client tell.a good ©
from a mediocre:

voice-overist
one? :

According to Conrad, the an-
swer lies in flexibility and the abil-
ity to express what the writer is
trying to convey.

“You want to convey the
message as clearly as possible and

' take directions from the director.

“Some directors are specific
about what they want: they may
ask for a warm, friendly voice
with an underlying forbidding
tone. Others are quite nebulous,
so you have to interpret it in your
own mind.”

Most of Conrad’s missions have
been to imitate the voices of
famous people or stars, but he
does get unusual requests on oc-
casion, like the time he was
questered by Sun-Rype to play a
fictional detective named ‘Ham
and Eggs’? for a series of ads
promoting a new cereal.

His latest coup is a contract
with CBC’s most venerable TV
quiz show, Front Page Challenge.
Conrad replaces the late veteran
announcer Brian Cowan, who
narrated the program for 37 years.

The documentary nature of the
work is a bit of a departure for

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the bespectacled father of two,
but he relishes the variety his
golden throat has provided him.
“My particular calling card is
the large range | have in my voice.
It can be stern, rock-and-rollish
or warm and friendly,’ he ex-
plains, breaking into an impromp-
tu performance. ‘‘I use my voice
like an instrument, much as a

acting, the rewards of a job well
done, he says, are just as mean-
ingful.

And what does the man with:
the voice of God say of his power
to persuade?

“| did a one-hour thing the
other day with Vancouver Genera}
Hospital and the B.C. Heart.
Association. [ was telling people

se- -

how to take care of ‘themselves.
That kind of thing is great. People
believe what 1 say. Now whether
that’s good or bad depends on
your philosophy towards advertis-
ing, but it’s not up to me to make
judgment calls. 1 just make other
people look good.”

trumpet player or a_ singer
would.’’

It’s no surprise then that Conrad
sees voice-over as an art, an in-
nate talent that, for the most part,
can't be taught.

And though the profession may
not come with all the allure of

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