Randy Bachman Read online

  “How can you make a song that starts with an ending? Won’t people think the song is over?” That was Lenny. The song was “Looking Out for #1.”

  I didn’t put a lot of deep thought into the lyrics. So many people have attached it to me and my own career, but I was just looking for something to sing over these chords and someone had mentioned something to me about sticking to your goals and following your dreams. I felt a little awkward at the end saying “I mean me,” but you can’t look after others if you don’t take care of yourself. The song has become associated with me, but not intentionally on my part. The funny thing is that when Mercury Records put out a BTO Greatest Hits CD, “Looking Out for #1” was the first track on it. People buy it expecting to hear all this hard rock and instead they get this jazzy number.

  THE THUNDERBIRD TRAX

  Burton Cummings and I got back together in 1987 to see if we could still collaborate. The tracks we recorded were very much of their time and sound pretty good years later.

  In the late 80s Burton Cummings and I had been invited to the BMI awards in New York. We walk in and there’s Yoko Ono accepting John Lennon’s awards, and Leiber and Stoller—the great songwriting duo for Elvis, the Coasters, and the Drifters— receiving awards. The room was full of all these great writers, and Burton and I looked at each other as if to say, “Do we belong here?!” Then we were up onstage and all these great songwriters we revered are giving us a standing ovation for “These Eyes,” our first big song. Afterwards everyone kept telling us, “Why don’t you guys get back together and try it again?” I’d been out with BTO touring with Van Halen for ten and a half months. Now, when you play every night and you’re doing sound checks and jamming with Eddie Van Halen, you really keep your chops up. I was playing really hot guitar at that point. So Burton and I decided to see if we still had the magic.

  We got together at his place in L.A. and wrote a couple of songs, and then he came up to my place in White Rock, B.C., to write some more. He drove up from L.A. in this 1965 black Thunderbird. He pulled into my driveway in that cool car and I just went “Wow! Cool!” We spent our days in my front-yard tool shed—I’d had it converted in order to get away from my kids and write and record—working on songs and recording demos of them. We recorded ten songs. I played all the guitars, Burton did all the keyboards, and either I added bass or Burton played keyboard bass. We used a drum machine.

  We sent out tapes of these songs to all the major labels, people like Clive Davis, Mo Ostin, and all the big shots. The response was generally “We love you guys and we love your stuff but who’s gonna play it?” This was in the days before CDs and classic rock radio and all that. Everybody was saying, “Nobody wants all these classic rock dinosaurs.” So we didn’t get a record deal.

  I moved a few times after that and the masters of those tracks somehow got lost in the shuffle. I’d given Burton a copy on cassette, and he’d thrown it in the trunk of his T-bird and driven back down to L.A. A few years later Burton called me and said he was moving a lot of his stuff back to Winnipeg. He’d bought a house in the city’s classiest neighbourhood, Tuxedo. Then he said, “I’m selling one of my Thunderbirds. Do you want the black one?” Of course I said yes. When it arrived at my house I figured that instead of just driving it I should get it restored. So I called the Thunderbird Club in Vancouver and spoke to this wonderful guy named Bert who restored it for me. While he was doing the restoration, he handed me a box of stuff that he’d found in the car—stuff that falls out or is thrown in the back seat—and in the box among the pencils, tire gauge, manual, and candy wrappers was a little tape. I had mixed the songs on a Hi 8 movie-camera tape because at the time that was the only thing that was digital. I called my bass player, Richard Cochrane, who’d since bought my Hi 8 tape player from me, but he’d sold it to another guy who in turn had sold it. But finally we traced it back. When I got hold of it I put this little tape on, and it was the lost masters for those Bachman-Cummings sessions in my tool shed. For our 2006 Bachman-Cummings tour we released these tracks and called the CD The Thunderbird Trax. We quickly got some photos taken of the T-bird for the cover, Burton and I both wrote some liner notes, and we released it ourselves, no record label. We sold it at our concerts with the merchandise and it sold out almost immediately.

  My Picks

  “AMERICAN DREAM” by Bachman-Cummings (on The Thunderbird Trax)

  “BLUE COLLAR” by BTO

  “GIMME YOUR MONEY PLEASE” by BTO

  “HEY YOU” by BTO

  “LET IT RIDE” by BTO

  “LOOKING OUT FOR #1” by BTO

  “TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS” by BTO

  “YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET” by BTO

  Close Encounters of the Six-String Kind, Part 2

  FESTIVAL EXPRESS

  I was back home in Winnipeg in the summer of 1970 after leaving the Guess Who when the Festival Express came to town. It was a tour of the hottest acts in rock music at the time, who were travelling across Canada on a specially equipped Canadian National Railway chartered train. The lineup included the Band, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Mountain, Ian and Sylvia, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and Eric Andersen, among others. The whole thing was organized by promoter Ken Walker and backed by Thor Eaton of the Eaton’s department store dynasty. The train stopped in Winnipeg for a concert on Canada Day, July 1, 1970. I wasn’t booked or anything, but I played Festival Express in Winnipeg. I just walked onstage between acts while they were setting up equipment and did a brief acoustic interlude. No one really announced me. I just came out assuming people in Winnipeg would know who I was. Unfortunately, I don’t think they did for the first few minutes. Then someone shouted out, “Hey, it’s Randy Bachman.”

  I was so nervous that I ended up spelling “American woman” wrong. I was doing the “I say A, M, E …” and I missed a letter. I was going to do a whole mini set, but I got so flustered by that flub that I walked off halfway through. I was just out of my element. I wasn’t a solo acoustic performer and I didn’t have a band. It was embarrassing. But I’m not sure anyone really knew who I was, so when I left I don’t think anyone noticed or cared. I came back out later and joined Delaney and Bonnie onstage along with Leslie West for their big jam at the end of their set.

  I also jammed on the train in this elegant parlour car. I was sitting there with Jerry Garcia and other members of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Delaney and Bonnie and their band, guys from the Band, Leslie West from Mountain. Players would wander into the room, pull up a chair, plug into one of the little amps they had or sit at the drum kit in the corner, and just join in the flow of the ongoing jams. I played all this rambling blues rock music. The smoke was so thick I opened a window and sat beside it. Guys were passing joints around, but I’d just say “No thanks” and it would get passed to the next guy. As the drugs and booze circulated around the room the playing got slower, lazier, and sloppier. But I was so charged to be playing with these people that my adrenaline was pumping. I just wanted to play with anybody, and since I’d left the Guess Who I hadn’t played with anyone. I overheard someone say, “Who’s the guy by the window with all the energy?” I was pumped while they were stoned.

  THE BEE GEES

  Way back in early ’73, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (me, Fred Turner, and my brothers Tim and Robbie) was just starting to happen. Our first album was out but we didn’t have any hits yet. So we were thrilled to be invited to play on The Midnight Special, a Friday late-night rock ’n’ roll concert-type show. The Bee Gees were hosting that night. So we arrived with our gear for the load-in during the night only to have the guys from the show tell us, “Okay, you have to be back here by six-thirty in the morning.”

  “What? I thought this was a late-night show?!”

  So they tell us, “Yeah, it is. All the kids come in around five-thirty in the evening and the stars come soon after. But all the lesser-known artists have to come in a lot earlier and tape their spots. Then they edit it into the show and
make it look like it’s live in front of the audience.” A lot of people don’t realize that sometimes what they’re watching is fake. I’ve been on television shows where we’ve had to lip-synch our songs on contrived sets in front of a fake audience. I’ve learned to expect anything in the entertainment business.

  Then they add, “Oh, and by the way, there won’t be anybody else here, so just come in and mime to your songs and we’ll tape them.”

  So we get to our hotel, catch maybe three or four hours sleep, and come back to the television studio for six-thirty in the morning to tape our songs.

  As we arrive, to our surprise, the Bee Gees, the hosts that night, were there to meet us. We met them all and shook hands. Here we were, the Bachman brothers—Randy, Tim, and Robbie— meeting the Gibb brothers—Barry, Robin, and Maurice. So I asked them why they were here so early, and they told us that they thought our band was great and that we were also a brother band like them. We became good friends from that point on.

  After Maurice died, the other two Gibb brothers kind of went into hibernation. But in recent years we started running into Robin Gibb in the U.K. He was coming out of his shell a lot more, and we’d see him at various songwriter events. At the twenty-fifth anniversary of Saturday Night Fever at the BBC, he came out and sang a few songs. And I recently heard that Robin and Barry were reuniting to do some live dates. If you get the chance, go see them. They’re incredible. They’re like the Beatles, having written hundreds of great songs.

  DICK CLARK’S ROCKIN’ NEW YEAR’S EVE

  Here’s another example of the “magic” of television. BTO got the call to play Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve in 1976. It was with Dick Clark himself as host, and disco diva Donna Summer was one of the guests along with us. Now, they don’t actually film these things on New Year’s Eve. They film it in September in Los Angeles at the old Copacabana club. They get all the kids from UCLA and get them to dress up as if it’s a New Year’s Eve ball in their ball gowns and suits. It’s like a movie set, and the whole thing is filmed like a movie. Meanwhile outside it’s hot and sunny and still summer. I used to watch it every year before that and never knew. On the show with us was the Miami Sound Machine with Gloria Estefan singing, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Donna Summer.

  THE STRANGELOVES

  Sometimes even the band itself can be a fake. I remember we played with this group called the Strangeloves once when we were touring the U.S. with the original Guess Who back in 1965. They were all hype. They claimed to be three brothers, Miles, Giles, and Niles Strange, who were sheep herders from the bushes of Australia and who played these big drums made of sheepskin. But they were just a bunch of guys from New York, songwriters/record producers Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer, who used to be studio musicians. “I Want Candy,” “Cara-Lin,” and “Night Time” were great pop singles. The only problem was that there was no such band as the Strangeloves. These three guys had concocted the elaborate story about the band and put a hired group of musicians on the road as the Strangeloves. They would start by beating these giant drums on stage, then they’d play their hits. There’s always an element of hype and myth in rock ’n’ roll, and these guys were able to milk it for a while.

  TROOPER

  BTO’s manager, Bruce Allen, and his partner, Sam Feldman, had a pet band they’d been working with in the local clubs around Vancouver by the name of Applejack. The band had a lot going for them: singer Ra Maguire and guitarist Brian Smith did the writing, and they were a great team. Sam Feldman asked me if I’d like to check them out to see if I might be able to help them. By this time BTO were so huge that I’d been given my own vanity record label. Applejack had reached a level where their next step was to record.

  They were playing the Royal Arms Hotel in New Westminster a couple of blocks from my house. It was an easy stroll from my place, so I went and met the guys and liked what I heard. They already had some original material. I suggested they drop the Applejack name because I remembered a British Merseybeat group of the same name. So they came up with Trooper.

  We got Trooper signed to MCA Records, and by that time they were ready to go into the studio. We had run through their original numbers so often I knew them backwards and forwards. I took them down to Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle, where I knew everybody from recording there with BTO. We banged out the tracks over a week only to discover that the tape operator—the person who rolls the tape machines while you record, making sure the sound is captured on tape—had altered the tape heads. They were not aligned properly, so the recordings were unusable. That meant a week’s worth of work was unusable. I was under the gun for time because I was due on tour with BTO, so the manager at Kaye-Smith gave us free time to complete the album. I said to the guys in Trooper, “Remember how you used to run through all your tunes back to back for me in rehearsals? Well, guess what? We’re doing them all again on Monday.”

  So on Monday we recorded all the songs again, the entire album. Tuesday we added overdubs and Wednesday I mixed the tracks. We had their debut album ready to go by the end of the week. The album took off when it was released.

  Trooper were a huge success across Canada because their singles were radio friendly and their albums and live shows really rocked. I was determined that they not be just a BTO clone. I wanted to make sure their sound was different. I think one of the reasons Trooper sounded different from BTO was the absence of a rhythm guitar. BTO always had a strong heavy rhythm sound that I took from early rock ’n’ roll. I added chunky rhythm guitar to BTO tracks almost like the horn-section riffs in those old Fats Domino/Little Richard recordings. A song like “Gimme Your Money Please” simulates horn parts on the rhythm guitar using heavy-gauge strings. That was an essential ingredient in BTO that wasn’t in Trooper. Trooper also had a more vocal sound than BTO.

  Trooper represents Canadian 70s radio rock at its best and most rockin’. I admit I was a little bit prudish and didn’t want them to record “Raise a Little Hell” on their first album. I actually tried to get them to change it to “Raise a Little Howl,” but Ra and Brian stuck to their guns, and they were right. “Raise a Little Hell” is the ultimate Canadian party song.

  I produced five albums with Trooper, but after that the band changed and announced that they were now ready to produce themselves. It was an amicable parting. I still see Ra from time to time and we talk fondly about those days.

  LITTLE RICHARD

  We had recorded the Head On album and I was in L.A. mixing it when I realized that a couple of tracks could use some boogie woogie–type piano on them. So I told our manager, Bruce Allen, to see if he could get Elton John. Turned out Elton was unavailable.

  “I need someone who can play rock ’n’ roll piano like Little Richard,” I told Bruce.

  “Why don’t you ask Little Richard?” was his reply. “He just played a club here in Vancouver. His brother Payton is his manager. I’ll give him a call.”

  Playing with Little Richard was like a dream come true. He was one of my first rock ’n’ roll heroes. A couple of hours later Bruce called me back.

  “Little Richard thinks BTO are great. He’ll play on your album.”

  So we set up the session for Monday at noon. I wanted Richard to play on two songs, “Take It Like a Man” and “Stay Alive.” The day before the session, Payton called me and asked what key the songs were in. So I told him they were both in the key of A. I could sense from him that there might be a problem. Then he said, “Can you change them to another key?” I told him the tracks were already recorded and all I was doing was adding Richard’s piano as an overdub.

  The next day it’s two-thirty before Richard finally shows up. I’m sitting in the studio killing time playing guitar, so as Richard walks through the door, I started playing “Lucille.”

  There he was, every inch Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll, decked out in a white ermine coat over a cape and an orange jumpsuit with a silver R on it and carrying a travelling makeup case. He had on the e
yeliner and mascara.

  I played the tape of the first song for him in the control booth and told him the chord changes. It was a simple number. “What key’s it in?” asked Richard. “A.” “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It’s just A, D, A, E, and an F#m.”

  As he’s looking at me, Richard spaces out when I say F#m as if I’m speaking in another language. I had him try playing to the tape, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t follow a simple chord chart. Payton called me aside and said, “Richard’s really embarrassed.” So I tried one more thing. I went into the studio with my guitar, plugged into a little Fender amp, and sat beside him at the piano.

  “Let’s warm up a bit and just jam.”

  So I played some of his songs and he starts wailing away. They’re all in G, C, or D. But the minute I said A or F#m, he was lost. I told my engineer, Mark Smith, to vary the speed of the tape, which slows it down and alters the pitch. Mark took a tuner and got the speed of the song a tone lower to G. “When I give you the signal, start rolling the tape,” I told him.

  With Richard thinking he’s only playing along with me on guitar, we tried “Take It Like a Man,” but now it’s in G. I gave Mark the signal to roll tape and Richard takes off, totally rockin’, pounding out 16th notes, 32nd notes, and 64th notes as I yell, “Play it, Richard!” You can actually hear that on the track. Afterwards Mark gives me the okay sign. He got it all on tape. So I said, “Richard, come into the control room and listen.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?”

  Mark brought the song back up to normal speed and now Richard’s looking at Payton.

  “Who’s that playing piano?”

  “You are!”