Randy Bachman Read online

  He even had his own record label at the time, Tartan Records. So when Bobby asked us, Chad Allan and the Reflections, to be his backing band, it was a big thrill and a big deal at the time. He was a great singer and wrote his own songs. He was a smart cookie. We played the Calgary Stampede and Klondike Days with Bobby. He even had a sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola, so we played the Coca-Cola Teen Tent with him. Bobby recorded the first Coca-Cola rock ’n’ roll jingle, something the Guess Who did a few years later. But Bobby was the first. When we backed him up, the girls used to scream like crazy for him. Amazingly enough, recently we were in the Bay out here on the West Coast buying a watch for my daughter Callianne’s birthday, and the woman who sold it to us said that she remembered seeing me playing with Bobby Curtola at the Teen Tent back in 1963. How’s that for a memory!

  LES PAUL

  I remember in the late 50s hearing that the great Les Paul was coming to Winnipeg to play the Rancho Don Carlos out on Pembina Highway in the south end of Winnipeg. I’d heard all those wonderful Les Paul and Mary Ford records like “Vaya con Dios” and “How High the Moon” with all the multi-tracked guitars, and I loved what he did, although I didn’t know how he did it at the time. And every guitar player was well aware of Gibson’s line of Les Paul solid-body guitars. I knew I had to see him live just to see how he was able to get those amazing guitar sounds. It was a two-hour bus ride from West Kildonan, and when I finally arrived at the club they wouldn’t let me in. I was under age; the drinking age then was twenty-one and I was still a teenager. So I was sitting outside the Rancho on the lawn, despondent, when a big Cadillac pulled up. Out comes Les Paul, Mary Ford, and their son (who played drums). Les came up to me and said, “Hi, kid … What’s the matter?” I told him I’d come across town on a couple of buses to see him but I was under age and couldn’t get in. He talked with the manager, and I was then allowed to stand in the kitchen and watch the show through the big round windows in the swinging kitchen doors, with waiters coming back and forth with trays of food and drinks. But I got to see the show.

  Right beside me in the kitchen, stacked on top of each other, were six single-track Ampex tape recorders with a giant cable going out to Les’s Gibson Les Paul guitar. On his guitar below the Bigsby tremolo arm were a bunch of switches that he used to stop and start the tape recorders. I stepped out of the kitchen to watch Les as he demonstrated to the audience how he got his sound, this big multi-guitar sound. Nobody in the audience knew what multi-tracking was. They just thought it was some kind of magic. Les explained to them how he used his “Paulverizer” to work the tape recorders and play back what he had played. He’d then play live over that. I was amazed.

  After the show, as he was coming back out for another bow, he said to me as he passed by in the kitchen, “Here kid, hold this,” and I held his Les Paul guitar. Man, was it heavy. When he came back I asked him if he could show me the lick he played in “How High the Moon.” It was a very simple run down the high E string. So he showed me how he played it.

  Leap ahead a lifetime and I’m with BTO. It’s the 1980s and we’re opening for Van Halen on the 5150 tour. We’re at Meadowlands Coliseum. Les Paul came to see the show and came backstage to meet everyone. So I went up to him and said, “Mr. Paul, I met you when I was a teenager in Winnipeg.” He looked at me and then said, “Oh yeah! The Rancho Don Carlos, right?” I couldn’t believe he remembered. Then he looked at me, smiled, and said, “Here kid, hold this,” just like he’d said way back when. I was blown away that he recalled that moment in Winnipeg and the kid in the kitchen, me. He went on to tell me that while everyone else was drinking, eating, or just listening to the music, I was intently watching everything he did, so he figured I was a guitar player. Then he said, “Do you still know the lick?” I did and played it for him in the dressing room.

  Fast-forward again to September 2001. This time I was in New York to play with the reunited Guess Who with Joe Cocker as the opening act. I was invited to the Iridium Club where Les Paul played every Monday night. It was amazing to see him again. Halfway through his set he says, “There’s a dear friend of mine out in the audience who I’ve known since he was a kid.” I’m wondering who he’s talking about. Then he says, “This kid grew up to be a bit famous, and I’m going to invite him up to play a few songs. Would Randy Bachman please join me onstage.” I was stunned. The crowd applauded as I made my way up to the front where I was handed a black Les Paul guitar. Together with Les and his drummer, we played “How High the Moon” and I did the lick he’d shown me way back in Winnipeg so many years ago. Then he said, “Okay, kid, let’s play one of your songs.” So I played a bluesy shuffle version of “Takin’ Care of Business” with Les Paul playing licks that brought the house down.

  After the show he invited me out to his place in Mawpah, New Jersey, the next day. I was all set to go the next morning when all hell broke loose. It was 9/11 and the Twin Towers were destroyed and New York City was closed down. So I never got the chance to visit Les Paul at his home and see all his gadgets and gizmos. I regret that tremendously, but cherish the memories I have of this great guitar player, inventor, creator, and all-round nice guy.

  DION AND THE BELMONTS

  Dion and the Belmonts were the most successful of the white doo-wop groups out of New York, with hits like “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” They were also the most suave-looking guys. They had cool hair and wore nice suits, and Dion diMucci was a very handsome guy with an incredible vocal delivery. In the summer of 1965 the Guess Who were working out of New York and we were invited to play on the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” tour. On the tour with us were Dion and the Belmonts. It was a re-formed Belmonts, with some of the original members. I remember a Carlo and a Danny and, of course, Dion.

  I thought Dion was the coolest guy. He had a Martin acoustic guitar and they would sit at the back of the tour bus and sing doo-wop songs, snapping their fingers and singing stuff like “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love.” I hung around Dion all the time and watched him. He had such a smooth voice.

  Now, when I say tour bus I don’t mean the luxury land cruisers that stars have today. Those are like suites at the Hilton Hotel on wheels. Back then it was literally a regular Greyhound bus with bench seats and you tried to sleep on those. Not very comfortable.

  I actually got a guitar part that I later used in “Undun” from a Dion song called “Soft Guitar” written by singer/songwriter Kenny Rankin and sung by Dion. It’s a cool little turn around two-chord pattern that I used at the end of the verses in “Undun.”

  THE CRYSTALS

  In the fall of 1965 we were still working out of New York for Scepter Records and would travel from Winnipeg to New York to record or play gigs. We’d back the Shirelles, the Ronettes, and the Crystals at gigs and then play our own set. We were there in New York around American Thanksgiving, which, as all Canadians know, is a month later than our Thanksgiving. Someone said to us, “Where are you going for Thanksgiving dinner?” For us, Thanksgiving was already over. So Dee Dee Kinniebrew from the Crystals invited us over to her house to have Thanksgiving dinner with her family. We didn’t know where the girls from the Crystals lived. We were just five white guys from Winnipeg. So they took us to where they lived, a largely black area of New York. I think a lot of the black kids hadn’t seen many white people, certainly not Canadian white guys. When we got out of the car the kids in the neighbourhood came over and stared at us. But we went into the house and her parents were very nice to us, and we had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner.

  I remember when the Crystals’ big record was first released and I was at CKRC radio with Doc Steen. He’d gotten the record but hadn’t heard it yet. So he announced it as “Here’s the Crystals with Duh Do Run Run” instead of “Da Do Ron Ron.”

  THE WHO

  I met the Who in 1967 in London. I’d gone there with the Guess Who, but as I talked about earlier, we ended up not doing any gigs there. We heard that the Who were playing the Marquee club in Soho a
nd decided we’d tell them to stop using their name because we were the Guess Who and who did they think they were? The Marquee is a famous London club where Cream and the Stones have played, but it’s about the size of a living room. They jammed a hundred and fifty people into it every night shoulder to shoulder. We came in and sat at a table. It was during the day and the Who were filming a television spot, so there was no one else in the club. They had gigantic amplifiers the size of giant refrigerators, these hundred-watt Marshall amps six feet tall with hundreds and hundreds of watts of power blasting out. We could hear them clearly outside on the street before we went in. They were so loud that they had to keep playing the songs over and over again because the excessive volume kept making the film in the cameras flutter. The director kept telling them to turn down. So, of course, the band would turn up just to be defiant. Our ears were ringing as if someone had fired a gun next to our heads. We didn’t want to look rude or uncool by plugging our ears, but it was painful. So we were sitting there being blasted over and over by these songs, and by the time they’re done we were all deaf.

  Once they were finished filming they came over and we talked, and we told them they couldn’t continue using their name.

  “We need to straighten out the name,” I told them. “We’re the Guess Who and we’re getting confused with you guys.”

  John Entwistle, their bass player who was known as the Ox, looked us up and down and simply mumbled, “Oh, bugger off. There’s the Byrds and Yardbirds so there can be a Who and Guess Who, so bugger off.”

  That became a running prank between John Entwistle and me. Years later we were staying at the same hotel as the Who, and Jim Kale and I went up to Entwistle’s room and knocked on his door at three in the morning. He was in deep sleep and we woke him up.

  “Who is it?” he shouted from behind the door.

  “It’s the Guess Who. Bugger off!” And we ran off laughing. Later we’d phone his room and do it again.

  The Guess Who were checking into the Continental Hyatt Hotel in Los Angeles sometime in 1969, and as we were signing the register, the manager asked us the name of our band. We told him “the Guess Who.” Moments later two security guards confronted us.

  “Unless you pay this outstanding bill for damages, you are not allowed into this hotel and we will prosecute you.”

  “No, you’ve got the wrong band,” we told him. “We’re the Guess Who.”

  If we had been the Who, the hotel would have required us to post a $10,000 bond in case of damages. The group had been banned from just about every American hotel.

  “It’s not us. We’re Canadians.” We showed them our passports. So they let us stay.

  In the 1990s when John and I met for the Ringo Starr All-Starrs tour, I went up to greet him and said, “I’m Randy Bachman from the Guess Who. Bugger off.” He roared with laughter.

  After rehearsals with the All-Starr Band in Vancouver, John and I went to the opening of the new Hard Rock Café in Gastown and got to play “Shakin’ All Over” together. John was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken guy and we got along great on the tour. I loved playing “Boris the Spider” every night with John.

  JEFFERSON AIRPLANE

  I’ve known the guys in the Jefferson Airplane a long time. We were both signed to RCA Records. The band was formed in San Francisco by Marty Balin, who was a folk singer, but he wanted to rock out more after the Byrds had created folk rock. So he found some other folk players, including Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen, and formed Jefferson Airplane. The Airplane were kind of the ultimate drug band and epitomized that San Francisco hippie drug scene. They were the troubadours of the drug culture.

  In November 1967 the Guess Who were booked to open two shows for the Jefferson Airplane. Burton Cummings and I and the rest of the band wanted to be our utmost psychedelic selves. We’d been in England earlier that year, so we thought we would do all our freakiest stuff. I had my Herzog pre-amp unit and my whammy bar and I’d make all these weird feedback sounds. We did Hendrix and Cream songs.

  My father was an alderman in West Kildonan and a member of the West Kildonan Legion. The Legion had just acquired a new flag, so he brought the old Union Jack flag home. This was a huge flag. I asked if I could have it, and my dad figured I was just going to hang it on my wall. When we did the first show with the Airplane in Minneapolis they were all wearing these cool kaftans and Nehru clothes, necklaces and beads. We wanted to dress cool, too. So I took the flag, cut a hole in it, and wore it as a poncho on stage at the Winnipeg Arena. I thought I was being pretty cool. I didn’t even realize that the next day was Remembrance Day. We played our opening set and I did my psychedelic-sounds stuff while Burton pretended to bow down at my feet. The next day there was all this fuss in the papers and on the radio about this alderman’s son who had desecrated the Union Jack by wearing it on stage. I had managed to earn the indignation of war veterans and monarchists throughout the city. My father was furious with me. “What were you thinking?!”

  We went out there and pulled out every trick we had. No one in Winnipeg had heard Hendrix or Cream, and we did our own psychedelic songs like “When Friends Fall Out” and “Friends of Mine.” We just wanted to blow away the crowd before the Airplane came on stage. But the minute they set foot onstage we were an afterthought, a speck of dust on the arena floor, because they had the hits and we didn’t. They had “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” and they just blew us out of the park. We were out-psychedelicized.

  FRANK ZAPPA

  One of the first big-time rock ’n’ roll shows we got to do outside of Winnipeg with the Guess Who was in late 1968 at the Retinal Circus in Vancouver with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and Alice Cooper. We toured with these guys in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. I had my 1959 Les Paul by then and Frank Zappa was in love with it. It was such a rare guitar and had a great sound. He tried to buy it from me every night; he loved Gibsons. I let him play it at sound checks, but I’d never sell it to him. I had no idea at the time how rare that guitar was, nor could I have known it would become the “American Woman” guitar.

  Frank’s band was a collection of jazz musicians, really motley looking guys, and he led them all like an orchestra conductor. He wrote all his music out on charts and gave them to these guys to play. And they would all watch him like a hawk all night because he could change things up at any moment. He’d run around waving his arms and his hands like a symphony conductor. He was quite an amazing guy. He was like a modern-day symphonic composer and conductor, a real genius who elevated the music to a whole new level.

  He was also goofy. He named his kids Dweezil and Moon Unit—it’s like calling your kid Meatloaf. Actually, I remember walking into the dressing room on New Year’s Eve at a gig and Meatloaf was sitting there in his underwear. I said, “Hi, Meat!” and he replied, “Hi.” What else are you going to call him? Mr. Loaf? So I guess if you met Moon Unit Zappa you’d say, “Hi, Moon!” Frank was a totally straight guy like me. No drugs, no drinking, no smoking. Just music.

  Just last year (2010) I played the High Voltage Festival in London, England, and met Dweezil Zappa there. I told him some stories about his dad. Dwee is a great guitar player and is carrying on the tradition of his dad’s musical legacy with a show entitled “Zappa Plays Zappa.” It’s amazing music.

  VAN MORRISON

  When we played around Toronto or southern Ontario, we used to get asked to cross the border and do television shows there. There was a show called Upbeat out of Cleveland and we did that a few times. It was kind of like American Bandstand, with kids dancing. So, early in 1968, we were there doing the show with Van Morrison. We were over the moon because we loved “Van the Man” from the days of Them and “Baby Please Don’t Go,” “Gloria,” and “Here Comes the Night.” We’d done all those songs in our sets.

  We approached his dressing room, star-struck, only to find him almost in tears. We went inside and there was the one and only Van Morrison with his head down, looking really
dejected. We asked him what was wrong and he said he had the #1 song in the country, “Brown-Eyed Girl,” but he had no money because of a bad contract he’d signed with his record label. On top of that he had no luggage because the airline had lost it, including his guitar. So he couldn’t even go out and lip-synch to his big hit. At the time I had an endorsement deal with Yamaha back in Winnipeg to play their guitars, so I had a couple of them with me. I gave him one of my Yamahas. I actually have a video at home of Van lip-synching to “Brown-Eyed Girl” on Upbeat with that Yamaha guitar. He wanted to give it back after the show, but I said, “Keep it.” He was very pleased. He was going from there to New York. He probably had no idea who we were.

  Years later, Denise and I saw Van Morrison perform at Hampton Court Palace in the U.K. It looked like a medieval palace, and inside the castle court they have bleachers and chairs set up. We waited, and sure enough he did “Brown-Eyed Girl” at the end of the show. “Sha la la la la la la.” I borrowed that little bit of scat singing for the end of “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Hey You.”

  Musicians will generally help each other out. I remember the time the Stampeders lent the Guess Who a helping hand.

  I’ve known the guys in the Stampeders for many, many years and have played a number of shows with them. They formed in Calgary and took their name from the annual Calgary Stampede. The group was a six-piece before moving to Toronto in the late 60s, where they trimmed down to a trio: Rich Dodson, Ronnie King, and Kim Burly. The Stampeders enjoyed a string of Canadian hit singles in the late 60s to early 70s, including “Sweet City Woman,” which went on to become a U.S. hit as well.