Life after: Alberta's Canadian Idol finalists reflect on the impact of reality-TV's, often fleeting, fame

In 2015, Theo Tams was working as a butcher in Toronto when someone recognized him.

Tams wasn’t in the witness protection program or anything, but being identified on that day was not a particularly comfortable experience. For those acquainted with his past, he was living a very different life than they would have expected.

In 2008, Tams – a kid from Coaldale, Alta., with a beautiful voice – bested the competition and became the sixth and final winner of Canadian Idol. The CBC declared him “possibly the best artist who has ever appeared on Idol.” He scored a record deal with Sony. He even cemented his place in TV history as the first openly gay Idol contestant after accidentally outing himself during a live broadcast in the early goings of Season 6.

Yet, seven years later, here he was mopping the floors of a little butcher shop.

“Someone came in and wanted to pick up this last-minute order,” says Tams, in an interview with Postmedia from his home in Toronto. “They recognized me. It was like ‘Oh my God … you’re Theo from Canadian Idol!’ How are things going?’ Before I could even answer, they looked at me with the mop and it was like, ‘I guess that says it all.’ ”

Tams insists his experience with Canadian Idol is not a sob story. After his win, he stayed in Toronto and, other than that brief period, has remained in the music business. He evolved as an artist and continues to put out music regularly. But briefly stepping away from music in 2015 and 2016 was hard. For those two years, Tams went back to school. He managed a restaurant. He became a butcher. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course, unless you are the pride of Coadale and under the watchful eyes of supporters who assumed you would become a pop star.

“I remember going in and handing in my resume and just carrying this weight of so much shame and embarrassment,” Tams says. “I felt like I had failed.”

In the years since, Tams overcame alcohol addiction, and self-doubt and reinvented himself musically. He is a successful singer-songwriter who continues to release music on his terms. He doesn’t regret his time on Idol but admits it’s complicated.

“It was such a transformative time in my life,” he says. “It was hard, too. I was young. I was 22. I’m from a town of 5,000 people. It really was just a lot of pressure and felt overwhelming at the time. There’s been a lot of personal growth since then.”

Compared to its American counterpart, Canadian Idol may pale in the star-making department. But it did last for six seasons from 2003 to 2008 and thrust many newbie Canadian singers into the glaring and bewildering spotlight of instant stardom. Most signed record deals and most toured. Of the six winners, three were from Alberta: Tams, Medicine Hat’s Kalan Porter and Calgary’s Melissa O’Neil. Other contestants from the province placed in the Top 3, including Calgary’s Billy Klippert in Season 1 and Drumheller’s Jaydee Bixby in Season 5. Postmedia attempted to track down as many as possible to see what became of them after their starry-eyed time in the spotlight. Some, like O’Neil and Tams, still have a public profile and publicists working for them. Bixby and Klippert were contacted through Facebook. Kalan Porter, on the other hand, seems to have disappeared from the public eye altogether. Attempts to track him down through social media and publicists didn’t work. Eventually, a publicist who was attempting to contact him on behalf of Postmedia concluded, “he isn’t in music anymore.”

Porter’s rise from skinny unknown to fleeting superstar seems to fit perfectly with the premise of Idol. This subset of reality TV is largely based on the notion that it is possible to be plucked from small-town obscurity and turned into a star. It was aspirational TV for those who dreamed of hitting it big and also allowed audiences to feel a sense of ownership of a career they followed from the beginning and even contributed to through voting for their favourites every week. But there is another side to reality-TV success.

“For sure, there is an attitude about the fame that comes from a reality-TV show as being less authentic, as being more staged and manufactured and that these people get more instantaneous attention and support than they would if they were making it through more traditional routes,” says Dawn Johnston, an associate dean for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary who teaches a course on reality TV. “But it’s also coming with a lot less preparation. The kind of fame that comes with reality-TV is quite instantaneous and folks aren’t necessarily well-prepared with how to manage a career, things they might have learned along the way if they were following a more traditional route.”

Being unprepared was a recurring theme in the conversations Postmedia had with the Alberta contestants.

Other than current folk-pop sensation Carly Rae Jepsen, who placed third in the fifth season of Canadian Idol, the show’s biggest success story may be Calgary’s Melissa O’Neil. Granted, these days she is known more for acting and her seven-season run as Officer Lucy Chen on the hit American police procedural The Rookie. But she first entered the spotlight in 2005 at the age of 16 as an Idol contestant in Season 3. She went on to become the show’s first female winner. Twenty years later, she says she “wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Canadian Idol was the “seed” that eventually led her to Broadway, where she played Eponine in Les Miserables, and then television success with The Rookie.

That said, she still has regrets.

“When I look back, I really feel like there should be an age limit to be on a show like that,” O’Neil says. “They should be done school or already be in a different situation. It was, in a lot of ways, incredibly destabilizing for the part of me that might have benefitted from continuing and finishing school with my classmates and having my proper graduation and maybe knowing myself a little bit more.”

Instead, O’Neil hit the ground running. She turned 17 while competing on the show but didn’t return to Lester B. Pearson High School in Calgary, although she did eventually get her diploma through correspondence. Within a few months of her Idol victory, she released her self-titled debut album with Sony BMG. It was recorded in three weeks. O’Neil co-wrote one of the songs, but the rest were provided for her by outside writers. She toured the album but says she began to feel doubts about whether she was well-suited for a solo career in music. She seemed to be on top of the world, but some of the memories from that period are actually quite painful, she says.

“They were very much tied to body image and also not having the performance skills to be commanding the venues that I was being placed in,” she says. “While I wasn’t aware of how to fully make those leaps in how to be a professional, I am sensitive enough and was sensitive enough to be aware that I was missing something.”

After her debut record, there was a management shakeup at Sony BMG. Nevertheless, the company had picked up the option for her sophomore album. O’Neil says she had plenty of ideas for her follow-up but met with constant delays by the new team at her label. She finally contacted her lawyer who combed through the deal and told her if she didn’t produce anything for the company within a six-month window, they would not be required to pay her an advance.

“So we went in there and said, ‘If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine, but you’re not going to stiff us out of money,” says O’Neil. “That was my first foray into following my intuition and making sure I wasn’t being taken advantage of.”

Record label difficulties also played a role in the post-Idol career of Drumheller-born Jaydee Bixby. He was a baby-faced 17-year-old from a musical family that ran the local funeral home when he became runner-up in the 2007 fifth season of Canadian Idol. He lost to Hamilton, Ont.’s Brian Melo but placed ahead of second runner-up Carly Rae Jepsen. Now 34, Bixby still gives off the vibe of an earnest, small-town Albertan, peppering his conversation with Postmedia with the odd “by golly.” He still plays music but is now a father of four boys whose full-time job is selling Chryslers in Fairview, Alta. Music was his full-time gig until the pandemic forced him to change careers. It was a long ride that included releasing three albums and opening for Taylor Swift and Kenny Chesney. He says he fully enjoyed his time on Canadian Idol but went through some drama with his labels after the show. His first, based in Vancouver, declared bankruptcy and caused Bixby to lose a $50,000 FACTOR grant.

“I was young and my mom and dad sure knew how to run a funeral home but they didn’t know how to navigate the type of people we’d be exposed to or be working with,” he says. “A FACTOR grant is a huge thing and I was so lucky to get it. But the record company claimed bankruptcy and there was nothing I could really do.”

Years later, his experience with Memphis label Mid South Music was even weirder. He signed a two-album deal in 2015, but not long after that a newspaper expose was published about the company’s owner, TM Garret. It revealed him to be a former neo-Nazi and member of the Ku Klux Klan in Germany. Garret has denounced his past and now speaks out against racism. Nevertheless, Bixby was caught off guard and the album he was working on was shelved.

Like O’Neil, Bixby did eventually get his high school diploma, but not without a few hiccups. Not long before he tried out in open auditions in Calgary for Canadian Idol, Bixby and his family had moved from Drumheller to Red Deer. After the show, he attempted to return to Hunting Hills High School in the city. He says he was the same kid as he was pre-Idol except he tended to get a lot more attention, particularly from the girls.

“I wasn’t complaining or anything,” he says with a laugh. “I think it was a week, maybe two, and they brought me in and said, ‘Jaydee, it’s too much of a distraction for the other kids.'”

He was asked to leave and eventually got his diploma from Ponoka Outreach School.

Before Tams, Porter, O’Neil and Bixby, Alberta hung its hopes on 24-year-old Calgarian Billy Klippert. He made it to the finals and placed third behind Dartmouth’s Gary Beals and winner Ryan Malcolm of Kingston, Ont., in the first season of Canadian Idol. While Klippert was on the show, and for a few years after that, the Calgary Herald wrote copious amounts on the singer, even enlisting him as a guest columnist to write about the importance of giving as part of the newspaper’s Christmas Fund campaign.

He signed a major record deal, relocated to Toronto and eventually released two records. At 24, Klippert was a little older than his fellow Albertans who would go on to do well on Canadian Idol. He had already been playing in rock bands in his hometown and had busked on the streets. He idolized Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley from Alice in Chains and harboured a healthy cynicism about the sort of artists that American Idol had produced up to that point. He had to be convinced by his sister to audition.

After his Idol experience, he wanted to bring his Calgary band to Toronto to record his first album but his label wouldn’t let him. They set him up with hired guns, which Klippert admits made him feel lonely. The first two years after Idol were fantastic, he says. He made money playing concerts and corporate gigs. Unfortunately, he also spent most of it. Slowly but surely, he felt his fortunes changing. The machinery that had pushed his career after Idol seemed to lose steam.

Everything to Lose, a song from his 2006 sophomore album Naked and the Simple Truth, chronicled how quickly things changed.

“I had a lot going for me,” he says. “Then you started seeing less and less people at the shows or the money you were going make at certain events kept going down and down. Without a big engine behind you, you fade into obscurity. It was rough to deal with, for sure. I know a lot of my fellow contestants are in the same boat.”

Eventually, Klippert returned home. He became an electrician, got married and had a child. He now lives in Airdrie and says he is satisfied with how his life turned out, particularly as he watches his 11-year-old daughter grow up. He continued playing music in Calgary and opened Springwood Studios, where he produced sessions for other musicians. The studio is now on hiatus and he says he hasn’t touched his guitar in over a year and a half. But he still dreams of releasing a third record.

“I really did feel like it was going to be my life and I’ve had a lot of hardship getting over it,” he says. “… You’re never too old. If I could just get a little bit ahead – I know that’s what everyone says – I have the studio, I have the equipment, I’ve got good friends all over the map who are willing to help me produce and finish this record. It’s kind of a dark wall I need to get over to continue with it. I remember the feeling of being on top and to slip off the top is kind of crushing. But you’ve got to pick yourself up.”

When Theo Tams was crowned Idol champ in September 2008, his life changed forever. To this day, almost everything written about him mentions it. It opened a lot of doors. But, over the years, he says he has come to see it as more of a personal victory than a professional one. Up to that point, growing up gay in small-town Alberta did not lead to a lot of affirmation or personal victories.

“It was the biggest celebration, maybe for the first time in my life, of being really proud of who I was,” Tams says. “Unfortunately, post-show, I lost that along the way. I’m very proud that I’ve returned there. But I would say that’s the takeaway: Just being really, really proud.”