Randy Bachman Read online

  After the two weeks, we came home to Winnipeg with our tails between our legs. We kind of snuck back into town and tried to avoid the humiliation of explaining what had happened, which was basically that nothing had happened. The one thing we had to boast about was that we had recorded in London.

  Our other saving grace was that we brought back the latest sounds from the U.K. by groups like Cream and Jimi Hendrix. I took the first Hendrix record up to Doc Steen at CKRC and told him that this was what was happening over in England. He listened to it and then told me, “I can’t play this on radio.” But we brought 1967 England to Winnipeg. We started playing this wild psychedelic stuff around the city and smashing our equipment like the Who. People thought we had lost our minds. Initially, audiences didn’t like the music, but within a few weeks they were coming back to hear it again. We had smoke bombs going off, and I would ram my guitar through a fake Garnet speaker cabinet that our road manager, Russell Gillies, would re-cover the next day. The kids never knew because it all looked brand new when we started the night.

  Gar Gillies, Russell’s dad, owned Garnet Amplifiers in Winnipeg and built me a special pre-amp unit so that I could get all the distorted Hendrix and Clapton sounds. I named it the Herzog, and I’d put it on full blast so that it would make howling feedback noises. Gar also made me a custom whammy bar for my guitar that was longer than the normal ones, like a propeller, and that allowed me to do the Hendrix sounds. The Herzog became my sound, the sound of “No Time” and “American Woman.” Over the years many guitar players have asked me how they could get a Herzog for themselves.

  Soon deejays were hyping us on the air and there was a buzz going around about our new sound. “They’re back from England! Come hear their new English sound!” We went from a few hundred curious people a night to thousands trying to get into the tiny little halls to see our incredible show. We were hip again because, just as years before in the Silvertones and Reflections, we were ahead of the pack in having access to English music before it hit these shores. Burton backcombed his hair like Hendrix, I had my Herzog and my whammy bar on my guitar sustaining and bending feedback notes, and all of a sudden we were heavy. Winnipeg had yet to witness any psychedelic music. Once again we were the trendsetters.

  LET’S GO

  Faced with an enormous debt from our U.K. trip, we got an offer to serve as the house band on the weekly CBC-TV after-school television show Music Hop. With the Guess Who as backing band and our former lead singer Chad Allan as host, the Winnipeg edition of the cross-Canada series was renamed Let’s Go.

  Before we got the CBC gig, the show’s producer, Larry Brown, asked if we could read music. The routine was that each week the show’s musical director, Bob McMullin, wrote out the music charts for the musicians to play. Bluffing, I said, “Yes, of course!” Garry Peterson and Burton Cummings could read music, but Jim Kale and I couldn’t. As a band we learned everything by ear from records. That’s the way every band did it. A few days before our scheduled audition, I called Bob McMullin and asked him how he was progressing with the charts. He was nice enough to tell me both the titles he’d finished and not yet finished. So now that I knew the songs we had to play, I promptly went out and bought the records and called a band rehearsal, and we learned all the songs by ear. Two days later, when the music charts were placed in front of us at the CBC audition, we smiled at each other and began to play them. Not only did we play the songs perfectly, we sounded exactly like the records. Larry Brown came up to us and told us we had the gig.

  It was hard work those two years. We even played the entire Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in one episode. But the $1100 per week pay went directly towards our debt from London, and in the end, every penny was paid back. There was another great benefit from doing the show, though.

  At the start of the second season, Larry Brown approached Burton and me with a proposal. “This is the perfect opportunity for you guys to perform some original material. Why don’t you write some songs, and if I like them, I’ll let you do them on the show.” That’s all the encouragement we needed. Burton and I would work at the piano in Burton’s front room, putting our ideas together to create songs. At two in the afternoon Granny Kirkpatrick would bring us cookies and 7-Up, and we’d be done by four. A few hours later I’d swing by and pick him up for the gig that night.

  Those Saturday songwriting sessions were something we both looked forward to, getting together with scraps of songs. It was the excitement of creating our own music that spurred us on. We both wanted to be songwriters like Brian Wilson, Jagger and Richards, Bacharach and David, or Lennon and McCartney. Even with the differences in our personalities, we still connected. There was just a chemistry that happened, and the result was some great music. I became McCartney to Burton’s Lennon, the missing piece to his puzzle and he to mine. I’d bring a nearly completed song to him and he’d play me one of his song fragments. Then we’d take the strengths of each and piece together a completed song. From that came the Bachman-Cummings songwriting team.

  GO NORTH, YOUNG MEN

  We did a northern tour of Canadian air force bases in early 1968 that was sponsored by the Department of National Defence and broadcast live to remote communities above the 60th parallel. We thought it would be a cool experience, and the money was good, so we agreed to go along. We were booked to perform alongside Ted Komar and his orchestra. Ted played accordion, and the other players were well-established local jazz musicians. Headlining the tour was CBC singer and ex-Winnipegger Juliette, star of her own long-running television series. Her show followed Hockey Night in Canada for decades. A magician and a comedian rounded out the troupe. We were the token pop act.

  We were told to wear our warmest clothes. It was the middle of winter, forty below in Winnipeg, and we were heading north towards the Arctic Circle. I had this cool sheepskin coat that was bulky but warm, and we all wore scarves, toques, mitts, and boots. When we showed up wrapped up in our winter wear these air force guys proceeded to give us even more clothes to put on, telling us, “Where you’re going you’ll need these extra clothes.” As big as my feet are, size thirteen with big winter boots on, they put them into another pair of sheepskin-lined boots with galvanized rubber on the outside. With six pounds on each foot, I could barely walk. They then gave us parkas to be worn on top of our parkas. As he was handing me mine, the officer told me, “By the way, the buttons are made of compressed, dehydrated soup, and inside the hood is aluminum lining. If you take it out, put some snow in it, and place it in the sun, you can heat up the buttons and eat the soup. In your pocket is some Sterno and matches to start a fire.” This coat was a walking survival kit. I thought to myself, “What have we gotten ourselves into?!”

  We boarded an air force cargo plane called an Atlas, the kind where the entire front end lifts open and trucks drive right on in. In the middle of the fuselage they had a couple of rows of theatre seats bolted to the floor. It was freezing onboard, so we were glad to have the extra warmth of the survival coats.

  Our first stop was Churchill on Hudson Bay, then we headed off to places like Inuvik beyond the Arctic Circle. For the crowds, seeing Juliette live, watching a magician make rabbits disappear, and listening to a real live rock band that appeared on television was a real treat. The whole community would come out to the shows—old, young, Moms and Dads, Native and non-Native.

  The guys in Ted Komar’s band were real partiers. They were being paid well and the music was a breeze to play, so they were drinking pretty good. It soon turned into high school hijinks all over again. One night at another one of these remote outposts somewhere, Juliette was onstage performing, backed up by the Komar band guys who were half smashed. Burton decided to have some fun. He proceeded to make this huge cardboard sign three feet wide. On one side he printed “Applause” and on the other he put “F… You.” In the midst of one of Juliette’s numbers, he strolled right across the stage between her and the musicians. The crowd saw “Applause” and erupted. Juliette was all
smiles because she figured it was for her. She couldn’t see Burton. Meanwhile, the band cracked up and fell over in hysterics because they saw the other side of the sign. The music momentarily fell apart as these guys cut up. Juliette turned around to see what was happening to her accompaniment, but by then Burton was already offstage. When we completed the tour, the Canadian Armed Forces gave each of us a plaque showing a map of the North and little flags where we’d stopped.

  THE MARVIN POLANSKI TAPES

  I’ve served as unofficial archivist for the Guess Who, releasing our early recordings, including the group’s first three Quality Records albums and a double CD compilation entitled This Time Long Ago. Over the two years the group appeared on CBC-TV’s Let’s Go, only two of the shows had been preserved on videotape. A lot of musical history was lost, including some of the earliest attempts at songwriting by Burton and me.

  Marvin Polanski, who worked on the show, had been in my grade 12 class at Garden City Collegiate. Years later I was being interviewed for Bravo TV’s Lenny Breau documentary and Marvin was the sound man. He said, “Do you remember me?” and I said, “Yeah!” He had replaced the sound man on the Let’s Go show back in the late 60s.

  So as I’m doing this interview outside at the Forks in Winnipeg, Marvin says to me, “I was so proud to be working on that show because I knew you and Garry Peterson from school.”

  I’m going, “Yeah, that’s cool,” but I’m trying to do the interview, so I’m not paying much attention to him.

  Then he says to me, “And I saved all the tapes from the show.” Now he had my undivided attention.

  CBC would erase the tapes each week and reuse them to save money, but Marvin had dubbed audio copies of the shows on reel-to-reel tapes and still had them some thirty years later.

  “Can you go home and find them and send them to me?”

  A few weeks later I received a box full of tapes, and when I played them I couldn’t believe I was listening to this stuff for the first time in decades. It was amazing to be hearing ourselves at that early stage in our career. We sounded so innocent. It’s incredible that this stuff wasn’t lost forever. The tapes became the Let’s Go album, with us doing cover tunes like “Along Comes Mary” and “White Room” plus some of our early attempts at “These Eyes,” “No Time,” “Minstrel Boy,” and “When You Touch Me.”

  BRAVE BELT

  In May of 1970, as “American Woman” sat at #1 in Billboard, I left the Guess Who and returned home to Winnipeg. The four of us had grown apart as people, as bandmates, and as friends, and we had different lifestyles. I didn’t party, do drugs, smoke, or drink; they all did. I needed to be home with my family for a while. But I wasn’t done with music.

  Between my departure from the Guess Who and the launching of Bachman-Turner Overdrive in late 1972, I put together Brave Belt. With me were Chad Allan, Fred Turner, and my brothers Robbie and Tim. Managing the group was my older brother Gary. The band’s sound was aimed at the growing country rock scene, but it was clear early on that the country rock thing just wasn’t working for us. Still, although a commercial failure, Brave Belt was an important transition for me from the Guess Who to BTO.

  People still expected Randy Bachman to be rockin’, not Crosby, Stills and Nash or Poco. We had done the first Brave Belt album, but it bombed, so I was looking to retool the engine. I knew we needed a harder sound and that Fred Turner’s voice was perfect for that. Unfortunately Chad Allan wasn’t onside with this and left the band. So we were now the Bachman brothers and a Turner.

  We still had some bookings as a country rock band, and one of them was at the Saddledome in Calgary with Ferlin Husky and Canada’s country music “Traveling Man,” CBC-TV’s Tommy Hunter. We all used to watch The Tommy Hunter Show. At the Saddledome, Brave Belt was the closing act after these country music legends. The crowd was a country music crowd. In our earlier incarnation we’d have gone down a lot better, but we were now BTO in everything but name.

  So we played our set, and when the lights came up at the end there was no one left in the arena. We’d emptied the place. Everyone had walked out on us. The next day the newspaper had rave reviews about all the other acts, but for us it had two lines at the bottom that said: “At the end of the show, four Vikings from Winnipeg came out and blew everybody’s face off.” The promoter refused to pay us. We couldn’t check out of our hotel because we had no money. Later that day we ran into Tommy Hunter in the hotel lobby. He told us that what had been done to us was wrong and that he was organizing the other acts to go on strike against this particular promoter unless he paid us. “It’s not your fault the promoter made a mistake booking you guys.” Thank you, Tommy. In the end we got paid.

  We ran Brave Belt on a shoestring budget. We had little money and often had to travel huge distances to play for only a couple of hundred dollars. I paid each of the guys a salary out of my Guess Who royalties. If I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have had a band. Often we had to travel way out west somewhere on a weekend, come home again, then go out west again the following weekend. It was becoming too expensive driving back home only to head out again a few days later. As well, I’d be flying out during the week to pitch our third Brave Belt album, which ultimately became BTO I, to record labels across the U.S. The other guys couldn’t afford to stay in hotels during the week, so they tented.

  My dad had a tent we used to take on camping trips as kids, so Robbie and I knew how to camp. The band would drive to Calgary, look for a suitable site to pitch the tent, do the gig, and return to the tent for the night, making sure no one was following us to discover our impoverished existence. We had a Coleman stove, and we’d bring a loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from home. Or we’d cook up some soup. I remember coming back from a trip to Los Angeles trying to sell Brave Belt III and finding the tent covered in frost and snow, Robbie and Fred huddled together inside trying to keep warm.

  Our battered old Econoline van was like a sieve on the highway. It had holes and cracks where the wind would whistle in. The heater and defroster couldn’t keep the windows clear of frost or fog. When it was forty below outside, it was forty below inside. So we had a big leather glove-like cover for the front of the van to keep the draft out and some of the heat from the engine in. My father-in-law, Bob Stevenson, would make us large Sterno cans from empty Empress Jam pails. They had a roll of toilet paper soaked in alcohol with a wick in the middle, and we’d put two of them on our dash to keep the windows clear and a couple on the floor to keep our feet from freezing. We would travel back and forth across western Canada like this in the dead of winter, sometimes all the way to Vancouver and back with these burning cans of alcohol all over the van. Hardly the glamorous life of a rock star! But what these experiences did was foster a strong bond between us. It was an “All for one and one for all” spirit. I called it Brave Belt Boot Camp, and it really helped us cope when the big success as BTO finally came.

  With Brave Belt we were trying to be like Neil Young and the Buffalo Springfield or Poco and do a cool kind of country rock like that. It was clear that it wasn’t working, though. People were confused as to what I was trying to do, and maybe I was confused, too. But with Chad Allan’s departure, Fred Turner stepped up as our lead singer, and overnight we had a different sound. Fred had what I used to call this Harley Davidson voice, gritty and strong, very similar to John Fogerty in Creedence Clearwater Revival. Having a different lead singer, a guy with a more powerful voice, I found I could write different songs, more powerful songs. And so we evolved from a mellow country rock band into playing pretty cool rock ’n’ roll. We played a lot of Stones, Who, and Creedence in our live shows. They all had that primal rock ’n’ roll beat. That’s where our sound came from.

  We were clearly not Brave Belt anymore. We’d had two albums out as Brave Belt, and it was time to change our name because we weren’t that band. My record label kept telling me, “You’ve got to put your name, the Bachman name, in the band so that people will recogniz
e the guy who wrote all those Guess Who songs. The radio stations will recognize your name and you might get some airplay.” From their perspective it made perfect sense. Why try to hide my identity? My brothers Rob and now Tim were in the band, so we had three Bachmans and a Turner, and for about two weeks we called ourselves Bachman Turner. This was the era of acts like Brewer & Shipley, who were playing acoustic folk– style music, and Seals & Crofts, who played acoustic guitar and mandolin. We were playing this heavy-duty rock ’n’ roll.

  But when promoters would hear the name Bachman Turner, they thought it was two guys with acoustic guitars playing folk songs like Seals & Crofts or Brewer & Shipley. So we got booked into these coffee houses with little tables. We’d come in and set up our big amplifiers and blow the cups off the tables and get fired. We needed a name that showed clearly that we played heavy music, not “Diamond Girl” or “One Toke Over the Line.”

  We were coming back from a gig in Windsor, Ontario, one night, and we drove across the border to Detroit. We stopped at a gas station, and as I was paying I looked right by the cash register and saw a magazine called Overdrive. I called Fred over and said, “Look at this magazine! It’s all about trucks!” It even had a centrefold, but when we opened it out, it was a picture of the inside of a guy’s truck cab with leopard-skin seat covers, a stereo, and a little rack to put a book on—these guys actually read pocketbooks as they’re driving these semi-trailers! I said to Fred, “This is a great name for an album,” and he replied, “This is a great name for a band!” No longer would people think we were a folk duo. It was a name that left no doubt we were a heavy-duty band: Bachman-Turner Overdrive.