Randy Bachman Read online

  “Sure.” So I sat there while he played for two and a half hours. Eddie Van Halen played his heart out. He did things I’d never heard anyone play before. I wish I’d had a tape recorder with me that night.

  RINGO STARR

  I was such a huge Beatles fan that when A Hard Day’s Night opened at the Garrick Theatre in downtown Winnipeg in the summer of 1964, I was there the moment the doors opened and I stayed in that theatre all day. I must have seen it ten times or more. I loved that movie.

  Jump ahead some thirty years. It’s 1995 and the phone rings at my house in White Rock. Ironically, the night before I’d been watching The Making of A Hard Day’s Night on PBS. I pick up the phone and on the other end is this voice that sounds familiar. He says, “Hello, Randy. I’d like you to be in my band.”

  So I’m thinking, “Who is this?”

  When he said “This is Ringo Starr,” my reaction was like those old Jackie Gleason Honeymooners moments where he would go, “a hummina hummina …”

  He told me who was going to be in the band with him: his son Zach on drums, Billy Preston and the Rascals’ Felix Cavaliere on keyboards, Mark Farner from Grand Funk Railroad on guitar, and the Who’s John Entwistle on bass. Wow! What a great lineup.

  After I hung up the phone I shouted out to my wife, Denise, “Guess who just called me!” I phoned up all my friends and said, “You won’t believe who I just talked to!” I was like that same kid at the Garrick Theatre back in Winnipeg.

  We ended up having rehearsals in Vancouver, which was perfect for me. We toured all over America and went to Japan, and it was all fabulous. I was totally gaga the whole tour. Ringo knew I was a real fan, not merely one of the musicians in the band. I’d look over my shoulder during “Takin’ Care of Business” and grin from ear to ear because there was Ringo Starr backing me up on my own song. He was so much fun to be around. Me being a Beatlemaniac and an avid collector, I brought a stack of things to the first rehearsal for Ringo to sign—albums, singles, books. As he walked in he looked at the pile and simply said, “Pick two.” He just couldn’t sign everything for everyone or he’d have been there all day.

  Once the tour started, we could see how he was just a normal guy like us. Everyone called him Richie. No star trips and everyone treated equally. When he travelled first class, we all travelled first class. If he had a private plane, we all took it. If it was on a bus sweating with no air conditioning, he was there with everyone. He was so humble and down to earth.

  We celebrated Ringo’s birthday when we were playing in Chicago, and for the occasion we rented a big restaurant for a party. Beforehand I had called Denise at home. “What do I give a guy who has everything?” She came up with a novel idea.

  “Why don’t you buy Ringo his own star?”

  Some astronomers in an observatory near Chicago had discovered a cluster of new stars in the galaxy, and you could name one of them for a nominal fee. Denise took care of the details and a certificate arrived at the hotel from this famous observatory, along with a star chart identifying and circling the star you’d named. The certificate proclaimed that from henceforth this star would be known as Ringo Star. What a great present! Ringo was knocked out. This is what you get a guy who has everything—you get him his own celestial body.

  JOHN ENTWISTLE

  For the Ringo Starr tour we were all told to bring a small amp: fifty watts, maybe a hundred at best, and you could take a tube out or keep the volume down. Everything is miked through the PA and is loud out in front of the stage, but we don’t want a huge din of noise onstage. Felix Cavaliere showed up with a Hammond organ and a Leslie speaker cabinet, which isn’t that powerful. Billy Preston had an electric piano and a small amp. Mark Farner and I had small amps.

  Then John Entwistle arrives. With him he’s brought a three thousand–watt stereo amplifier with two speaker cabinets the size of giant refrigerators that he places on either side of the drummers. Turns out he’s actually pretty much deaf from all his years in the Who, and to him he’s not loud. Except that Mark Farner and I can’t hear our guitars over his thundering bass, and so we turn up to be heard over all this booming bass. This causes everyone to turn up. Ringo’s out front trying to sing “With a Little Help from My Friends” and all of a sudden he can’t hear himself singing. He keeps turning back and telling us all to turn down. John Entwistle just wouldn’t turn down. He played an active bass, and I don’t like those because they boost the sound of the bass too much. He had a nine-volt battery powering active pickups, one pickup for each string! He would touch a string as you would tickle your own finger or flick a hair off your sweater, just barely caressing the strings, and it would go BOOOOOOM Budda BOOOOOM Budda BOOOOOM! Thunderous. He was a wonderful guy, very nice, polite and gracious, a true British gentleman. But he played excruciatingly loud, and there was no way we could get him to turn down.

  Mark Farner and I lost our hearing on that tour. We had tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, afterwards. While playing with John Entwistle, we discovered that because his hearing was so shot after decades playing in the loudest band in the world, he needed to feel the pressure of the bass sound coming from his speakers. He had to have the rush of air from these incredibly loud speakers hitting him in the back in order to play.

  RINGO’S WIFE’S BIRTHDAY PARTY

  A year after the tour, my wife Denise and I were invited to Ringo Starr’s wife Barbara Bach’s fortieth birthday party in Beverley Hills. She was an actress, and the two of them had met on the set of the movie Caveman and married in 1981. It was fabulous. The long, long driveway to the house was covered in a long red silk canopy, and at every turn there were tables with chocolates and sometimes a magician. The pool was covered over with Plexiglas with coloured lights under it, and that served as the dance floor. A big stage had been set up nearby with various instruments and amplifiers, and as the party wore on people would get up and do their songs.

  At one point I got up on stage with the great bass player and producer Don Was as well as Brian Wilson, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, and Hank Ballard. Hank’s the guy who wrote and first recorded “The Twist.” Chubby Checker covered it and made it a hit. So here we all are doing the Twist on the Plexiglas pool in Beverley Hills. Can you imagine that, me, a kid from the North End of Winnipeg? It was the most amazing party I’d ever been to.

  B.B. KING

  Back in the early Guess Who days, we played a college bookers’ showcase in Memphis, Tennessee. This is where all the state-college bookers in the region come to check out bands or performers, and if they like you they block-book you for a month or so in all the colleges nearby. You get fifteen minutes to go out there and do your best stuff, all your tricks, to impress these bookers, who are mostly college kids.

  We were on this showcase sandwiched between Roy Clark and the great blues guitarist B.B. King. Roy Clark is a great guitar player, even though he does all these goofy things and plays up the country hick image. We followed him and did our little shtick as the Guess Who. We all shared a dressing room, which was simply a classroom where you laid your coats and stuff on the desks. So everyone is in this same classroom-cum-dressing room. After our set B.B. King comes up to me and says, “You’re a really great guitar player, but you make it look too easy.”

  And I said, “What do you mean?”

  So he told me I should be making a face or grimacing when I hit the big notes. “You need to wince like you’re feeling that note in your soul, the pain and the anguish in that note.” He scrunched his eyes up and played a note to show me what he meant.

  I can play a solo with a dead straight expression or a smile on my face, but ever since then I make that “guitar” face. It’s kind of like acting, but you’re putting more into that note and audiences can feel it, too. Your whole body is into it, not just your fingers. Eric Clapton does the same thing.

  After my time with Ringo Starr’s All-Starrs, Ringo went back to England. NorthWest Airlines was opening up a bunch of new routes, including more Canadian
ones. So the airline hired the All-Starr band to play all these parties and gigs, letting people know that NorthWest had these new destinations. We became the NorthWest All-Stars. Our final gig was at Cobo Hall in Detroit opening for B.B. King.

  We go out and do our set. Mark Farner does his Grand Funk songs, Felix Cavaliere does his Young Rascals hits, John Entwistle does “Boris the Spider” from the Who, Billy Preston does his thing, and I do my BTO hits. After our set, B.B. King comes on, but before he starts to play he tells us not to leave. Meanwhile all our gear is being packed up because we’re shipping our stuff back to our homes since the tour is done.

  B.B. King is doing his set and then, I think it was during his big number “The Thrill Is Gone,” he starts inviting us out one at a time. Mark Farner comes out first and picks up B.B.’s spare guitar onstage and starts to play. As each guy is called out to join B.B. in the song, his band members hand over their instruments or vacate their keyboards. I’m the last guy he calls and as I come out there’s no guitar. Mine are already packed away. So as I walk out one of B.B.’s two drummers stands up and hands me his sticks. I lean over to him and say, “I’m a guitar player!”

  He replies, “That’s okay. Just fake it.”

  Now, I can’t play drums to save my life. Anyone who’s ever played with me knows what a train wreck that is. So here I am sitting at the drums attempting to keep it together, all the while trying to look cool, when B.B. turns to me and yells, “Take it!”

  “What?!”

  So I start flailing away, smashing and crashing around like Keith Moon on acid. It was awful but it was hilarious. That was my big B.B. King onstage moment.

  BO DIDDLEY

  It’s the summer of 1969 and the Guess Who are asked to appear at the Seattle Pop Festival. Imagine these musicians all together: the Doors, the Byrds, Led Zeppelin, Ike and Tina Turner, Ten Years After, the Youngbloods, Charles Lloyd, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Bo Diddley. That was the first time I saw Bo Diddley perform. The Bo Diddley beat, that “shave and a haircut, two bits” hambone rhythm, was an important part of the early evolution of rock ’n’ roll. Just check out Buddy Holly, the Animals, or the Rolling Stones. His hits—“Hey Bo Diddley,” “I’m a Man,” “Road Runner,” and “Who Do You Love”—revolutionized rock ’n’ roll rhythm.

  Many, many years later I was invited to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, about ninety minutes south of Atlanta. They were hosting a show on Gretsch guitars because they have a large Gretsch display in the museum. The closing act was Bo Diddley. I had this handbill from the Seattle Pop Festival some forty years earlier that listed all the acts on the festival. They didn’t have posters, only handbills, and I’d kept one. So I had a copy made and I’d brought it with me to show Bo Diddley that evening. When I met him I gave it to him, and he was so excited. He said, “My grandkids didn’t believe I played with Led Zeppelin and the Doors, so now I can show them it’s true! This is fantastic.”

  After I did my set, I left my guitar in the stand and took a seat in the audience. Then Bo came out with his band, some really heavy-duty players like Chuck Leavell from the Allman Brothers and Vinnie Colaiuta from Sting’s band. Bo looks at my guitar on the stand and the empty seat beside it and asks, “Whose seat is that? Who’s supposed to be here?”

  “Me!” I replied from the audience.

  “Well then, get on up here.”

  So I ended up playing his entire set with him. What a thrill for me.

  GEORGE MICHAEL

  I knew of controversial British singer/songwriter George Michael from Wham back in the 1980s, but I’d never met him. I thought “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was a real fun song. Then one evening when we were still living in White Rock, south of Vancouver, my phone rang. I picked it up and the voice said in a very English accent, “Hello, this is George Michael,” and I said, “Really?!”

  He replied “Yes,” then asked me if I had any Gretsch guitars. Are you kidding? So I told him, “Yes, I have three hundred of them.”

  “Could you pick out four or five and bring them down to the Bayshore Inn? I’m staying here overnight and shooting a video tomorrow and I’d like to use one of your guitars in my video.”

  I was thrilled because Wham was a big band at the time and he was just launching his solo career with his album Faith. When it came time to film the video for the title song, George called me. Some of my daughters were teenagers at the time and were pretty excited that George Michael had called their house. So I took some Gretsches down and he picked one to play during the video. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I didn’t want him to take that guitar out of my sight. I was hoping he’d say “Come to the video shoot,” and he did. It was in a big old warehouse somewhere in Vancouver. I took some of my daughters with me and he was very cool with them. Callianne was maybe two at the time and I took a photo of George holding her. She looks like a little doll in his arms. So when he came through Vancouver later to do a concert, I called up and got tickets and took all my daughters to see him. He’s just a really great guy.

  JOE PASS

  I was at a NAMM show back in the early 90s and jazz guitarist Joe Pass was scheduled to play at one of the booths. The NAMM show is the National Association of Music Merchants trade show, and it’s huge. Humongous. Every instrument company is repre-sented there. Lots of these companies will hire great players to be at their booth to demonstrate their new instruments—guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. I’d been listening to Joe Pass since Lenny Breau turned me on to him back in the very early 60s, before I was in the Guess Who. Joe Pass was a legendary jazz guitarist and I loved his playing. He’d worked with everyone from Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Oscar Peterson, and Duke Ellington to Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie.

  I got to the arena where they held the NAMM show early and went to where Joe was going to be playing. There were other guitar players there waiting with me. Joe arrives and I’m taken aback by how cranky he is. As Yogi Bear would say, “Sheeesh, what a grouch!” He was kind of short-tempered, curt and ordering people around. I remember at the time thinking, “Whoa, he could be a lot nicer to people.” But when he got up to play, the tenseness and the lines in his face melted away. He just transported himself, and everyone watching, myself included, to another place. It was magical. You forgot all about the grouchy guy.

  I learned soon afterwards that Joe Pass had cancer and passed away not long after that show. I was humbled that I’d had that moment with him and felt bad about the way I’d judged him. You should never judge people in the moment because there may be other circumstances they’re going through. I was touched by his playing and I miss him.

  RITA MACNEIL

  I was touring with my own band doing my “Every Song Tells a Story” show in 2002 and we were playing out in Cape Breton Island. This is Rita MacNeil’s backyard. She’s from Big Pond, Nova Scotia, and is a true Canadian superstar. There was a hush in the crowd just before we started and word came around that Rita and her son were in the audience. She’s like royalty in Cape Breton Island. So we did the show and I was really hoping I would meet Rita afterwards. She’s a great songwriter and a great Canadian. After our shows, once we’ve quickly towelled off, my band and I come out and sign everything people bring for us to sign: old vinyl albums or 45s, eight-tracks, CDs, photos, and maybe some of the merchandise we’re selling after the show. It’s kind of like the Garth Brooks thing or what Nashville country stars do: They stay until everyone’s got what they have signed or posed for a photo with us.

  Just as we’re sitting down to start signing and meeting the fans, one of my band guys comes up to me and whispers in my ear.

  “They’ve cleaned out the dressing room!”

  Now that can mean one of two things. Either the janitor has come by and swept up in the room or we’ve been robbed. Unfortunately, it was the latter. Some thieves had snuck backstage, and as we were starting our signing session they’d cleaned us out of our valuables—backpacks, wallets, watches, credit cards, iP
ods, cameras. I’d checked out of my hotel just before we headed to the gig and I had all my valuables in a plastic Delta Hotel laundry bag. I’d just thrown it all in the bag and checked out. So when we went back to the dressing room, all that was left was this Delta Hotel bag with my stuff. I had to leave the table to deal with the police, who’d been called by the promoter. They were able to catch the guys, but by the time I got back out front to the lineup I was told Rita had left. So I missed meeting Rita MacNeil.

  I saw her at the Juno Awards one year and she did her song about going down into the mines, “Working Man,” and brought out all these miners in their mining hats onstage to sing it with her. It was very reminiscent of the time I saw Paul McCartney do “Mull of Kintyre” and he brought out the bagpipers from the Black Watch. Rita brought them onstage in the dark, and when their lights came on it was a very moving moment for everyone in the audience. So Rita, if you read this, please come to my next show in Cape Breton because I would very much like to meet you.

  THE SIMPSONS

  I came home from a tour in mid 1999 to find a fax waiting for me from Sony Music, who controlled my song publishing. They were asking if I knew anything about The Simpsons television show wanting to license “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” I faxed them back saying, “Great, let them use them.” I just thought they were probably going to have them playing in the background in Moe’s bar. The next day a script arrived for me from The Simpsons. More than the two songs, they actually wanted Fred and me to speak on the show.