The art of the deal
December 05, 2012
The legal power behind Rush, Bob Farmer LLB’75, has a few tricks up his sleeve
By Paul Cantin
Bob Farmer wants to make a point about the intersection of law and magic, so it’s no surprise when he reaches for a deck of cards.
He offered the deck for inspection, cut in four random cards face up and tapped the back of the deck. He then fanned the cards to show that his indiscriminate face-up cards were now, neatly, four aces.
For Farmer, this demonstration was more than a trick. It was an illustration of his two disparate passions – the law and magic. To him, the law is making a credible case; magic is making the case for the incredible.
“In magic, you have a series of events which are, to you, completely ordinary. There’s nothing unusual about them,” he said. “But you want the audience to interpret those events as impossible. But it is possible – because I just did it.”
Since he graduated from the Faculty of Law in 1975, Farmer has called on a deep legal knowledge of everything from copyright to cabotage as legal counsel to some of the most storied names in rock ‘n’ roll – Rush, Van Halen, Queensryche and Max Webster. As legal counsel to SRO Management and Anthem Records, he has helped the small Canadian company become a major player in the international music scene.
The Brockville, Ont., native – and current resident – also maintains an active presence in the international magic fraternity. His most recent book is The Bammo Ten Card Deal Dossier, a 400-page history of gambling and card tricks, published by Western Law grad and fellow magician David Ben LLB’87.
The two worlds serve him well, colleagues say.
“Magic is trickery – so are lawyers,” laughed Pegi Cecconi, Vice-President of SRO/Anthem. “Farmer has trickery. The magic is, he has a great command of the English language. He writes plain, but it is magic.”
Farmer learned sleight of hand from his parents – mom showed him a card trick when he was 5; dad hooked him on ropes and coins. He devoured books and mailed away for tricks to magic shops in the United States. Then, by his mid-teens, rock ‘n’ roll joined his list of non-scholastic passions.
At school, he concedes he was somewhat less dedicated. “I liked pulling pranks. I would end up for hours in the principal’s office,” Farmer said.
He studied philosophy, film, social science and game theory as an undergrad at Western. After graduation, a friend convinced him law school should come next as it offered balance for his sideline as a guitarist in a rock band.
“I got into law school for all the wrong reasons,” he said. “I had no intention of becoming a lawyer.”
The reality and discipline required by law school was a shock, but it didn’t curb his penchant for pranks. He once replaced all the law faculty building’s photos of prominent alumni with images he cut from a monster movie magazine (nobody noticed, he claims) and when a page from Mad Magazine he’d clipped to a bulletin board offended a faculty member, he says he snuck into the professor’s office and wallpapered it with copies of the cartoon.
As law school graduation closed in, he focused on bankruptcy and copyright law. The latter, he believed, might connect to his passion for music. Current Governor General of Canada David Johnson, who was then Dean of Western Law, wrote Farmer’s letter of recommendation for post-graduate studies in the United Kingdom.
“I was studying intellectual property law at the London School of Economics and University College, but I spent most of my time in magic shops, talking to magicians. It was like a post-graduate degree in magic,” he said.
Farmer returned to Canada and articled with a London, Ont. firm. By 1978, when he was assigned to handle the patent process for a dairy farmer’s cow manure machine, he knew he needed a change. Fate intervened when he learned a local band needed legal advice on their record first deal.
That group was The Demics, an early Canadian punk act.
The fun of that process drew him to Toronto, where he joined the practice of Canadian entertainment law legend Bernie Solomon. In that role, a contract negotiation for Coney Hatch, an up-and-coming heavy rock band, led Farmer into a meeting with the band’s label chief, Ray Danniels, who built SRO/Anthem on the success of Canadian rockers Rush.
“(Farmer) was the first lawyer that asked smart questions,” Cecconi called. “He understood the music business. He understood the record deal. He didn’t waste anybody’s time. He was a good lawyer that way.”
SRO/Anthem soon reached out to Farmer with another problem. A Canadian label had gone bankrupt, and the trustee was holding studio master tapes by SRO artist Ian Thomas. With his background in bankruptcy and copyright, did Farmer have any ideas about how to get the tapes back?
Farmer met with the trustee and, with a magician’s flare for the dramatic, offered to pay $1 for the treasured tapes. The trustee scoffed. Farmer says he told the trustee: “(SRO) owns the music publishing, but not the recordings. We are not going to give a license to anybody. If you sell it to anyone else, all they can do is cut the tape up and make it into guitar picks.”
The trustee consulted with his own lawyers and sold the tapes for a favorable price.
Soon after, Cecconi and Danniels hired Farmer as SRO/Anthem’s in-house lawyer in 1982.
“The fact he is a lawyer is secondary. He is just a very, very smart person. I don’t think he could hold a real job,” Cecconi said.
Farmer’s magician’s perspective may give him a leg up when dealing with sharp-elbowed American lawyers, too. In the days before computers, when he would submit an agreed contract for signing, he would mark the papers with invisible ink just to ensure the contract hadn’t been secretly rewritten with booby-trap clauses.
His work with SRO/Anthem led him into some unlikely scenarios, including accompanying Toronto police on an undercover raid of bootleg merchandisers outside a Rush concert at Maple Leaf Gardens. Both U.S. presidential candidate Rand Paul and talk radio host Rush Limbaugh have tried to co-opt Rush’s music to their right-wing political activities, and both have been on the receiving end of scolding legal interventions from Farmer. He has had to deal with everything from the intricacies of immigration law for touring acts to exploring the impact of new digital technologies.
“Is it glamorous? No. But it is really, really interesting,” he said. “With this company, it is never ‘fill-in-the-blanks.’”
He looks back fondly on his time at Western. But, he says, his professional experience has revealed a flaw in legal education.
“(The law) is taught in the adversarial model. If you are in court, you are already in trouble. The message there is one guy loses, one guy wins,” Farmer said. “In business, you can’t have that. There is no such thing as entertainment law. There is only law in the service of entertainment.”
