Randy Bachman Read online

  I called the record label the next day because they’d been bugging me to get a name that had my name in it. They liked it but said that it was too long for people to remember, that we needed a one- or two-syllable name like Byrds or Beatles, something like that. So I said, “Well, there’s the initials BTO …” They thought that was fabulous. So we got the name to go with our sound.

  THE RADISSON AND GROSEILLIERS OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL

  During the time of glam rock and platform boots, BTO weren’t wimps or pretty boys. We looked like mountain men in furs, fringe, flannel, and long beards. We were the Radisson and Groseilliers of rock, two hearty voyageurs who lived in the woods and never shaved. We were perceived by some as the lumberjack rockers from Canada who’d blow the windshield out of your car. The media picked up on that rustic image and really ran with it. Fred was a big guy like myself and had this flaming orange hair and beard. He even had a coonskin hat and these big, fringed jackets with beads. Fred looked like Mike Fink, King of the Keelboaters, right out of Davy Crockett. We were rugged men from the northern wilds of Canada. We’d come out on stage and the music was full-tilt stomping with Fred screaming at the top of his lungs over sledgehammer guitars and drums that sounded like falling trees. So our image matched the sound coming out on the records. We were a “Tim Allen’s Tool Time” guy’s band. Guys loved BTO. I remember on our whole tour of the U.K. we didn’t see one woman at the shows. We appealed to the ordinary Joe kind of guy.

  We dressed like Neil Young: farmers’ flannel or denim shirts, jeans with patches, lumberjack boots. The difference was that while Neil looked frail with a twenty-eight-inch waist, we were size thirty-eight, soon to become forty-eight. He was a young tree while we were mighty oaks. The legend that surrounded us in the early days, and I remember actually reading this in a magazine, was that we were lumberjacks living in the forest who found guitars abandoned in an old car. We didn’t eat a peanut butter sandwich, we ate a loaf of peanut butter sandwiches. We didn’t eat a piece of apple pie, we ate the whole pie. We didn’t live in houses, we slept outdoors in the snow.

  My Picks

  “AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH” by Ashford and Simpson

  “DUNROBINS GONE” by Brave Belt

  “FLYING ON THE GROUND IS WRONG” by the Buffalo Springfield

  “FLYING ON THE GROUND IS WRONG” by the Guess Who

  “HEY HO (WHAT YOU DO TO ME)” by the Guess Who (with Ashford and Simpson)

  “HIS GIRL” by the Guess Who

  “HURTING EACH OTHER” by the Guess Who (with Ashford and Simpson)

  “JUST LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET” by the Reflections

  “LIGHT MY FIRE” (Jose Feliciano version) by the Guess Who

  “LIGHT MY FIRE” (the Doors version) by the Guess Who

  “NEVER COMIN’ HOME” by Brave Belt

  “SLEDGEHAMMER” by BTO

  “THIS TIME LONG AGO” by the Guess Who

  Lenny, Neil, and Me

  The two musicians who’ve had the most direct and enduring impact on my life and my career are Lenny Breau and Neil Young. I came in contact with both growing up in Winnipeg, and both continue to inspire me.

  LENNY BREAU

  Jazz guitarist extraordinaire Lenny Breau mentored me in my early years learning guitar, and his lessons remain at the core of my own style of playing. Lenny was the ultimate technician of the guitar, incorporating elements of classical, flamenco, rockabilly, and jazz into a unique approach that few others have been able to master. There was only one Lenny Breau.

  He was born in Auburn, Maine, and moved to Winnipeg as a teenager. He was only a few years older than me. Lenny started playing guitar at age seven and left school at age ten. There was no point in him continuing at school. All he wanted to do was play guitar, and so his parents, Hal and Betty Breau, let him quit. By the time he was twelve, he was playing full time in his parents’ band, the Lone Pine and Betty Cody Show, and travelling. Lenny was truly a music guy. He could barely read or write. He couldn’t even balance his cheque book. But he would practise his guitar fifteen to sixteen hours a day. He just played guitar all day because he wanted to master it all.

  In the late 50s Lenny was touring the Prairie provinces, playing shows with his parents. In the middle of their sets they would say, “And now we’re going to turn it over to Junior, who’s going to play you a song. Take it away, Junior!” Junior was Lone Pine Jr., and when he’d take over it sounded like a whole band playing. I could hear bass and chords and a melody all at the same time. I thought Junior was a band.

  Once at the end of their show, Lone Pine announced that next week they’d be playing live in the car lot at Gelhorn Motors on North Main across from Kildonan Park in West Kildonan. That wasn’t very far from where I lived, so the following Saturday I hopped on my bicycle and rode over to Gelhorn Motors to see what Junior was, because I loved the music. I’m watching the band and Lone Pine and Betty perform when Pine says that they’re going to take a break and turn it over to Junior. I’m waiting to see this little combo come out, and instead this little guy steps forward and starts playing all by himself. He’s really young, about my age, very slight and fragile looking, sporting dapper clothes and a string bow-tie, with hair well groomed and a pencil-thin d’Artagnan moustache. He was playing the most beautiful guitar I’d ever seen, an orange Gretsch Chet Atkins model 6120 almost bigger than him. And as he’s playing, I’m hearing bass lines and chords plus a melody lead line, but he’s doing it all by himself. That was my introduction to Lenny Breau. That day he played “Caravan” and covered all the parts simultaneously by himself. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen or heard.

  Afterwards, as the band was packing up, I approached Junior.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “Sure, man,” Lenny replied in this hushed, hipster-sounding voice.

  I asked him what that style of playing he did was called. I was still a beginner, but I’d had years of violin so I had the finger dexterity.

  “It’s called Chet Atkins,” Lenny replied.

  I thought it was one big word, like flamenco. Chedatkins. I’d never heard of Chet Atkins and thought it was just a particular style of playing. Nonetheless, I wanted to learn it. He told me to get a “chedatkins” record and get that style into my head first before I could learn it.

  “Go to Eaton’s record bar and ask for a Chet Atkins record,” Lenny directed me.

  So one day after school the next week, I took the bus down to Eaton’s department store on Portage Avenue and said to the woman at the record bar, “I need a ‘chedatkins’ record.”

  “You mean Chet Atkins?”

  “No. Chedatkins. It’s a kind of guitar style, like flamenco.”

  She grinned at me and replied, “I think you mean Mr. Chet Atkins. He’s a guitar player.”

  She went behind the counter, pulled out an album, said “Listen to this,” and put it on. “That’s Chet Atkins.”

  So I bought the record, took it home, and learned “The Third Man Theme” all by myself, figuring out first the bass line and then the melody and putting them together.

  A couple of weeks later, the CKY Caravan played another car lot in the North End. After their set, I approached Lenny again. He recognized me, so I asked him if I could come over to his house sometime and learn a few things from him. To my eternal good fortune, Lenny had moved across the street from two schoolmates of mine, the Schmolinger twins, Carol and Karen, on Airlies Street in the North End. What was further cool about Lenny was that even though he was still a teenager, barely sixteen, he didn’t go to school. The guitar was his life. That’s what I wanted to do, quit school and play guitar all day.

  I went to school the following Monday morning, but at lunch I made my way to the Schmolingers’ house. After lunch as they returned to school, I went over and knocked on Lenny’s door. He was in his bedroom with his guitar and a record player. I showed him what I had worked out, “The Third Man Theme,” and he show
ed me what I was doing wrong because I didn’t know the proper chords.

  From that moment on I was the hunger and Lenny was the nourishment. I visited his house many times over the next couple of years. Everything I wanted to learn I would struggle at and then have Lenny show me what I couldn’t get. He would show me the simpler way of playing it. And he had an incredible ear. Lenny could literally hear something once and play it, invert it, solo over it, everything. No formal lessons, just Lenny and me in his bedroom with a guitar. I have no tapes, no notes, no pictures of him and me together, only my memories of this gentle, soft-spoken young man sitting in his bedroom showing me where to move my fingers. It was probably the greatest couple of years of my life in terms of my learning curve, and it gave me the foundation for my playing style today because I started integrating those ideas and styles into my stage playing soon after.

  I blew a lot of time and a couple of years of high school because I wanted to play Chet Atkins–style guitar and later rock ’n’ roll, and Lenny was teaching me. He was developing his own style of playing, a combination of lead on top, the chords in the middle, and a walking bass line all at the same time, as well as mastering harmonics and clusters of chords. When I put a Lenny Breau record on today I get the same feeling I had the first time I ever heard him on the radio as a teenager: One guy alone can’t be playing all those parts.

  Lenny moved to Toronto and became a great jazz player, the greatest ever. From time to time I’d run into him. I’d be telling him about our success in the Guess Who, and he’d reply in that hipster whisper of his, “Yeah, man, that’s cool, but are you playing any jazz? You gotta do a jazz thing, man.” Lenny went on to become a true guitar genius. Guitar players would travel thousands of miles to see him play and beg for a lesson. All I’d had to do was knock on his door.

  After Lenny’s tragic death in 1984 I began thinking about the debt I owed him for what he did for me and my career. I remembered his words, “You gotta do a jazz thing, man.” But while rock ’n’ roll was always way easier for me, jazz was frightening. It had all these weird notes in it. I could play all those rock ’n’ roll songs with one hand tied behind my back, but I had fenced myself in. Jazz was like jumping over that fence and going out into the world and finding out what it’s like to do something different. It was a huge, gigantic step for me to make a jazz album, but by the new millennium I was ready to take that leap. There was an element of danger for me, an artistic danger. I was a rock ’n’ roll guy. I could fall on my face. But it was good for me to be challenged, and attempting to play jazz was certainly a challenge for me.

  For years, fans, friends, and other guitar players had been telling me to do an entire album like “Undun” or “Looking Out for #1,” but I never felt confident enough. Once I made up my mind to do it, though, I took some jazz guitar lessons and practised for several years to be able to tackle that style of playing and its musical language. I wanted to be conversant in that language, and so I immersed myself in it. I didn’t have the jazz vocabulary and had to learn it. I would use one lick from Tal Farlow one night and another from Barney Kessel the next night and Lenny Breau the next and integrate these into my own playing style.

  I didn’t want to do a lot of instrumentals because that’s what people would be expecting from me. I did an instrumental album, Axe, back in 1970 and it sold maybe twelve copies. Now I wanted to write jazz songs. I wanted to write a new jazz standard. I think “Our Leaves Are Green Again” is that kind of a song. I wrote it with Stephan Moccio, who’s written songs for Celine Dion and Josh Groban. I worked real hard for three years in between Guess Who reunion tours, getting jazz musicians together and writing these songs with some of the best songwriters. I think my instincts were right.

  I also tackled reinterpreting some songs on the album. One in particular came from my earliest experiences on guitar. The first three chords I ever learned were the chords to Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” on my cousins’ big Gibson guitar. The song is really a love song, but he never says “I love you” anywhere in the lyrics. It’s got no chorus, no bridge; every verse just ends with “Because you’re mine, I walk the line,” saying that to his woman. It’s very moving. I wanted to arrange it in a jazz style. I was fooling around with that song one day, and when I tried it in minor chords it sounded even more haunting and beautiful. I really like the way it came out on the album.

  One of the thrills for me on JazzThing was getting to do a duet with Lenny. We never recorded together when he was alive, but through the magic of digital technology we were able to play together. I had some candles lit in the studio, and I’d found a song that I felt I could comfortably sit in on called “Breau’s Place.” It felt just like jamming with him live. I also did the Gershwin standard “Summertime” with Lenny on tape. I made it as though we were in the studio together; I trade my vocals with his guitar and I scat with him and against him. The experience was almost seance-like. I could certainly feel his presence. When it came time to title the album a year later, I just figured I’d call it JazzThing because Lenny would always tell me I needed to do a jazz thing.

  NEIL YOUNG

  In the fall of 1960, not long after my informal lessons at Lenny Breau’s house, fifteen-year-old Neil Young moved to the south end of Winnipeg from Toronto. His mother, Rassy Raglan, was a celebrity on a local TV show called Twenty Questions, and my mother idolized her because she had a job and my mom was just a housewife. Neil formed his first band, the Jades, a few months after arriving in town. He later played in the Classics and the Esquires before he formed the Squires in 1963. That’s when I became aware of him. Neil used to watch me playing up onstage, and afterwards he’d wait around to ask me questions about things he’d seen me do on guitar. He was already writing and recording his own material. Like me, Neil developed an appreciation for Hank Marvin and the Shadows sound and even purchased an orange Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model guitar like I had. Neil’s distinctive guitar style is less about the technical virtuosity and more about the fire and intensity he brings to the instrument.

  The Squires recorded Neil’s first session at radio station CKRC in 1963, with deejay Bob Bradburn producing and Harry Taylor engineering. It was an instrumental called “The Sultan” backed with “Aurora.” The following year they cut Neil’s first vocal recording, a song he wrote called “I Wonder.” Afterwards he asked Harry Taylor what he thought and Harry replied, “You’re a good guitar player, kid, but you’ll never make it as a singer.”

  The first song Neil sang in public was at Kelvin High School in the cafeteria in early 1964. There was no microphone, but his manager, and my friend, Lorne Saifer, knew that the Shaarey Zedek synagogue nearby on Wellington Crescent had one. There was a banquet or something being held that night and a microphone had been set up at the head table. So Lorne and Neil “borrowed” it. Lorne says today that Neil “blessed” that microphone.

  I remember playing a dance at River Heights Community Club in the south end and being introduced to Neil Young. Lorne introduced us. Neil was a skinny, dark-haired kid who stood to the right of the stage, my side, and watched me all night. I’d heard of him because in Winnipeg you tended to know of other guitar players who were good. I’d run into him later at the Paddlewheel restaurant at the Bay where all the musicians hung out or at Winnipeg Piano checking out the guitars.

  Neil had ambition. Community clubs weren’t enough for him. He was already writing his own songs. Other than us, most bands in the city weren’t doing that yet. He had a dream and nothing was going to stop him from fulfilling it. When he left Winnipeg most people laughed at him. “We’ll never hear from him again.”

  But, of course, we did hear from Neil Young. After trying his luck in Thunder Bay and Toronto, Neil headed to Los Angeles. In a Sunset Strip traffic jam in April 1966, he met up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay, and together with Bruce Palmer and Dewey Martin, two Canadians, formed the Buffalo Springfield. With three singer/songwriters in one band, they were an instant sensa
tion in the clubs on Sunset Strip. The Springfield was one of my favourite bands. Although they were together only two years and released only three albums, their legacy remains impressive.

  Neil Young came back to Winnipeg in December 1966 to visit his mother, and while there he invited our band down to CKRC to play us the first Buffalo Springfield album. I remember Burton and I were kind of jealous. Neil had left Winnipeg and made it, and he was singing his own songs on the album. The Springfield was the coolest group around. We absolutely loved them.

  “You won’t believe this,” I remember Neil telling us at CKRC. “It’s recorded on eight tracks. You can record guitar after guitar.” We were in awe. We had only ever recorded on three or four tracks. As we were listening, we got to one track in particular.

  “Who is that singing?” I asked.

  “It’s me,” he replied. “It’s like Bob Dylan. People really don’t care what it sounds like. If you’ve got a really weird voice, somebody out there will like it as long as you deliver it with honesty.”

  I’ve never forgotten that. Neil took a lot of negative comments about his voice, even back in Winnipeg, but he was never deterred.

  Neil and I don’t have great singing voices like Burton Cummings or the Springfield’s Richie Furay, but our voices are distinctive.

  The Guess Who learned that first Buffalo Springfield album inside out. We played “For What It’s Worth” in our shows as well as “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong,” which we thought was a real gem from Neil. We later recorded it. When their second album, Buffalo Spring field Again, was released in 1967, on the back cover each of the guys in the band listed their influences. It was a big dedication, and when I got the album, boy, was I surprised to see my name among that list. It was an unbelievable thrill for me to be included with the Beatles, the Kingston Trio, Hank Marvin, Otis Redding, Ricky Nelson, the Ventures, Eric Clapton, Phil Spector, and so on. Neil had spelled my name “Backman” but that didn’t matter. It was still me.