Joel Raymond, an entrepreneur, radio DJ and lifelong music and film obsessive who for more than 50 years brought an eclectic array of bands and artists to venues across Maine, died last week at age 69.
Raymond was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer while visiting family in Colorado last month and passed away five weeks later, a few weeks shy of his 70th birthday, according to his brother, Jack Raymond.
Raymond was born to rock. The youngest of three sons of John and Georgia Raymond that included older brothers Jeff and Jack, he initially worked for the family business, M.A. Clark, a greenhouse and supplier of mail-order Christmas wreaths. He organized his first shows in the late 1960s, putting on teen dances at roller rinks and town halls.
At age 16, while traveling through Europe with his family, he watched Jimi Hendrix’s body being loaded into an ambulance in London, from a hotel across the street. A week later, he went to see the Rolling Stones in Paris, and afterwards befriended the girlfriend of a crew member, who got him backstage. He sat on one of Keith Richards’ amplifiers for the next show. A Stones diehard, at the time of his death Raymond had tickets to see the band at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts in May.
After graduating from Ellsworth High School in 1972, Raymond began promoting shows both big and small throughout Maine. He was 18 years old when he booked Jethro Tull at the Bangor Auditorium. In 1973, he booked Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker at the Portland Expo. He booked Todd Rundgren’s experimental band, Utopia, in 1977 at the Bangor Auditorium. The opener? A then-unknown Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
He was one of the first, if not the first, people to bring punk rock to eastern Maine, hosting bands from Boston and New York at his family’s rambling Victorian house in Ellsworth in the late 1970s, while his parents were out at camp for the summer.
“Nobody in the Ellsworth area even knew what punk rock was, but Joel was going to CBGB and the Rathskeller in Boston and finding these bands and bringing them up,” Jack Raymond said. “He was always ahead of the curve. He was always one step ahead of the latest thing.”
In the 1980s, Raymond still booked plenty of shows but also started a business based on his other passion in life: movies. In 1983 he opened Video Video, a movie rental shop in Bar Harbor, which later had locations in Ellsworth and Blue Hill. Just as Raymond loved every type of music on the planet, he also loved every genre of film, and watched every movie in the book “1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die.”
“He put the date he watched the movie on every page in the book,” his brother Jack said. “He didn’t go to college, but he put himself through his own version of film school.”
When Video Video closed in 1996, Raymond kept on booking shows, including long associations with the Grand Theatre in Ellsworth and the Camden Opera House. He regularly brought artists like Richard Thompson, Alejandro Escovedo, Shawn Colvin, Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Terrance Simien to those stages.
He also managed popular Maine band the Beatroots and brought them to the local music stage at The Great Went, Phish’s massive three-day festival at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone. Mike Bennett, a member of the Beatroots for a number of years, became instant friends with Raymond when they met in 1995.
“We really connected on our sense of humor as well as the music,” said Bennett, who plans to organize a memorial concert for Raymond later this year. “He was just an encyclopedia of rock. He had some totally incredible stories. I’ve never met someone so dedicated to rock n’ roll. And he was really easy to be around. Nobody didn’t like Joel.”
Raymond delighted in showing his artists a little Maine hospitality. He booked songwriter James McMurtry at Maine venues many times, initially at the request of his super-fan, Stephen King. McMurtry, an avid hunter and fisherman, was happy to oblige. In 2000, Raymond booked Wilco at the Camden Opera House. Before the show, he took the band sailing through Camden Harbor, complete with a lobster dinner.
And that sense of warmth and generosity extended off the stage and into the audience. Bennett recalled that for years, Raymond would go to Hannaford and buy big boxes of bananas and apples to hand out to the crowd after the show.
“He wanted to make it feel kind of earthy and organic. It was a way to say thank you to the community,” Bennett said. “He just made things feel really personal.”
One of Raymond’s longest associations was with WERU-FM, the community-supported radio station in Blue Hill. Raymond hosted the Friday broadcast of “On the Wing” for nearly 30 years, where he played a suitably eclectic assortment of artists and endeared himself to generations to DJs at the station. He also instilled a love of music in his children, Faith and Josh, and grandchildren, Scarlett, Georgia and Josephine, as well as many other friends and family members.
Raymond maintained his enthusiasm for music and the people that make it right up until the very end. Whether it was for a packed house or a small crowd, it was the experience that mattered in the end.
“He took such joy in it. His fervor for it was infectious,” Jack Raymond said. “He had an eternal optimism. I never saw him put on an act that he didn’t love. And you felt that love, every time.”
