Randy Bachman Read online

  Neil returned to Winnipeg again in January 1971 to play two solo acoustic shows at the Centennial Concert Hall on his “Journey Through the Past” tour. I was there for one of the shows and backstage afterwards. I had just formed Brave Belt with Chad Allan, and we’d recorded our first album but didn’t yet have a record contract. Backstage, I told Neil the name of the band and he thought it was cool. I played him some cuts from the album the next day, and he liked it. When I told him we didn’t have a record label, he told me to go see Mo Ostin at Reprise Records in L.A., which was Neil’s label.

  I did go to L.A. and play Mo Ostin the test pressing of the Brave Belt album, and he offered me a deal. I think they called Neil to verify who I was and if I was legit. That night I went with one of the Reprise Records people to see Neil give a fabulous show at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine that this kid who’d been at Kelvin High School just a few short years earlier was now onstage in Los Angeles, alone without a band. To my amazement, the audience sang every word to every song. Neil was their darling. I just sat there stunned and enchanted by this kid I used to know in Winnipeg, the kid who’d left town in an old hearse and who’d made a big splash in Los Angeles.

  After that I didn’t see Neil for a long time. In June 1987 we shared a stage together for the first time ever at the Winnipeg Convention Centre for the “Shakin’ All Over: Bands and Fans Reunion,” playing “American Woman,” “Takin’ Care of Business,” Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and “Down by the River.” That was a special night for me. But we didn’t get much time to talk or hang out.

  Then in 1993, Neil’s guitar tech and roadie, Larry Cragg, got in touch with me. He was looking for a couple of Gretsch switch tips for Neil’s Gretsch guitars. Switch tips are the ends of the toggle switches guitars have to change from one pickup to another, thus changing the tone of the guitar. The tip can fall off after a lot of use and you just screw it back onto the switch. If you put a little nail polish on them when you screw them in, they stay longer. Being the “Gretsch Guru” and owner of hundreds of Gretsch models, I did have some tips, so I faxed Larry back telling him I’d send him a few. In the package I also put in a copy of the lyrics to a new song I’d written about growing up in Winnipeg called “Prairie Town.” I had no other intention but to show it to Larry Cragg, whom I’d known for a long time. Amazingly enough, the next day a fax came through for me saying, “Hi Randy. I love the lyrics to ‘Prairie Town.’ I’d like to be part of this song. Call me. Love, Neil.”

  In the lyrics I talk about things like learning to drive in the snow, freezing at the corner of Portage and Main, how I grew up on one side of Winnipeg and Neil on the other side, Neil and the Squires playing the Zone, which was the Twilight Zone club on St. Mary’s Road he used to play at all the time. So Neil invited me down to his ranch, Broken Arrow, just outside San Francisco. I told him I had a slow and a fast version of the song, acoustic country and electric rock. That’s something he’d done with songs like “Tonight’s the Night,” “Hey Hey, My My” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.” He said he wanted to play on both versions, and so we did the slow version and the fast version of “Prairie Town.”

  When I came home I was so thrilled to have Neil Young on my solo album that I sent a copy of the song to my attorney, Graham Henderson, who had secured the deal for me with Sony Music in Toronto. The next night my phone rang and it was Graham, and he said, “Listen to this.” Over the phone I heard “Prairie Town” with me and Neil singing. But between our two voices I heard a female voice. Graham was married to Margo Timmins, singer with the Cowboy Junkies. Graham was playing my tape and Margo was singing live in the kitchen. “She doesn’t know I’m calling you and letting you listen,” he said. So I told him to please interrupt her and ask her if she’d like to come out and sing on the track. I was mixing it in two days. She flew out to Vancouver and added her voice to the track. Her beautifully ethereal voice is like the sweet icing on the cake.

  Years later, when I was visiting Neil’s ranch to record “Spring Is Nearly Here,” a song we recorded together for a Shadows tribute album, I told him about a song I’d written called “Made in Canada,” a real grungy guitar rocker. We were sitting at the dinner table and Neil said, “Why don’t we record it right now?” He’s a spontaneous guy, so I seized the moment and replied, “Great! Let’s do it!” My son Tal was with me on drums and Richard Cochrane on bass. We recorded it in a barn with farm animals roaming around outside. In fact, before the take, the recording engineer had to go outside and shoo away the goats and chickens so we wouldn’t pick them up on the tape.

  I ran through the song, showing Neil the chords. It’s pretty simple. We did it one more time and then Neil said, “Okay, let’s go.” As we got to the end of the song where he was supposed to solo, he became transfixed, like he was in a trance. His hair fell over his face as he kept going on and on soloing like a maniac.

  The three of us just kept following him. He was soloing with wild abandon, as he does in his song “Like a Hurricane” with Crazy Horse and the wind from a giant fan is trying to blow him over. It was incredible. He went from a double to a triple solo, stomping on his big red foot-pedal board as the sound suddenly swirled and swooped around us. He kept going: eight, nine, ten solos. It was like playing with Jimi Hendrix. Then suddenly it was over.

  “That’s it. We got it. Good night, guys.”

  I’d thought we were just doing a run-through, but he’d had his engineer rolling the tape. He always has the tape rolling to capture the moment. “Made in Canada” appeared on my 1996 solo album Merge. Recording “Made in Canada” was an incredible experience.

  My Picks

  “AURORA” by Neil Young and the Squires

  “BREAU’S PLACE” by Randy Bachman and Lenny Breau

  “I WALK THE LINE” by Randy Bachman

  “LOOKING OUT FOR #1” by BTO

  “MADE IN CANADA” by Randy Bachman and Neil Young

  “OUT OF MY HEAD” by the Buffalo Springfield (featuring Neil Young)

  “PRAIRIE TOWN” (fast version) by Randy Bachman and Neil Young

  “PRAIRIE TOWN” (slow version) by Randy Bachman, Neil Young, and Margo Timmins

  “SUGAR MOUNTAIN” by Neil Young

  “THIRD MAN THEME” by Chet Atkins

  “UNDUN” by the Guess Who

  Lenny Breau CDs for Further Listening

  Boy Wonder (Guitarchives)

  Chance Meeting (Guitarchives)

  Cabin Fever (Guitarchives)

  Live at Bourbon St. (Guitarchives)

  Live at Donte’s (String Jazz)

  Pickin’ Cotton (Guitarchives)

  The Hallmark Sessions (Art of Life Records)

  Randy’s 10 Favourite Neil Young Songs

  1. “Southern Man”—This song really captures a northerner’s impressions of the Old South and its prejudices and traditions. The lyrics are great and the guitar solo rips part of your heart out with its angst and attitude.

  2. “Like a Hurricane”—Again another combination of great lyrics and soulful guitar playing. The video for this has Neil trying to stand up against a powerful windstorm, and that’s kind of symbolic of his career.

  3. “Sugar Mountain”—I love the simplicity of the silly lyrics and the childlike chorus that anyone can sing along to.

  4. “Down by the River”—The lyrics tell it like it is and the guitar solo breathes in and out of different attacks on the strings.

  5. “Heart of Gold”—A different, more casual, folky Neil with a cool blend of acoustic guitar and harmonica.

  6. “Mr. Soul”—Great lyrics and a guitar riff like the Stones’ “Satisfaction.” (I’m amazed Keith Richards never sued over that.)

  7. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”—Again, a different Neil, this time playing piano with a great sing-along chorus. His versatility amazes me.

  8. “Expecting to Fly”—Neil doing another switcheroo with a Beatlesque mix of tempos
, textured with an array of different instruments, sound effects, and lyrics. Impressive every time I hear it.

  9. “I Am a Child”—Just a great easy melody with lyrics seemingly written by a child or the child inside Neil.

  10. “Rockin’ in the Free World”—The title says it all. It’s wild, frantic, urgent, and everything a great rock song should be.

  The Story Behind the Song, Part 1

  In 2002 I put together a tour concept called “Every Song Tells a Story” where I would share with audiences the stories behind the songs I’m best known for from the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. At each show the audience was enthralled by the stories and sang along to the songs. The tour was a tremendous success and led to a live CD, a concert DVD, and a songbook. People seemed to really like the intimate, insider background stories to the songs. I’ve shared a lot of them on Vinyl Tap over the years.

  “TRIBUTE TO BUDDY HOLLY”

  In 1962 Chad Allan and the Reflections cut our first record, a 45. It’s a cover of a song we heard from England by Mike Berry and the Outlaws about Buddy Holly’s 1959 plane crash. I remember some friends of mine and I were going to drive down for Buddy Holly’s show in Fargo when we heard the news that morning that his plane had crashed.

  We recorded the song in Minneapolis at Kay Bank studios. We’d bought the Trashmen’s record “Surfin’ Bird,” and on the label it said “Recorded at Kay Bank Studios, Minneapolis.” Winnipeg lacked a decent studio. CKY and CKRC had recording studios, but the best you could get was mono or two-track recording. So we phoned down to Kay Bank and inquired about their studio. They offered three-track recording. “Wow, one more track!” So we pooled our money and booked a couple of dates over a weekend in late 1962. My girlfriend Claudia Senton’s dad worked at Birchwood Motors and he loaned us a Buick to use. I borrowed my uncle Jack’s little box trailer for the equipment. We used to go on tenting trips as a family, so I asked my dad if we could borrow his canvas tent. We set up the tent in the trailer, put the equipment inside it, and collapsed the tent over it all with a couple of bricks on top to keep it from blowing away. And off we went to Minneapolis.

  At the studio session, Chad Allan had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. And my Gretsch guitar wouldn’t work. There was something broken in the wiring, so I had to use Chad’s new Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar while he strummed my Gretsch acoustically. His Jazzmaster had a thinner sound because it had a solid body, so I wasn’t happy with the sound I got. But we managed to record four or five tracks. We signed with Canadian American Records and released our first single, “Tribute to Buddy Holly.” By the time we released it, we were Chad Allan and the Reflections. What an amazing moment for me when I heard that record and my guitar playing on the radio for the first time. We thought that was the big time for us.

  Between 1962 and 1964 we recorded further singles at Kay Bank and released them on the REO and Quality Records labels. They all charted in Winnipeg and the Prairies, but none had a national impact until “Shakin’ All Over.”

  “SHAKIN’ ALL OVER”

  Recorded under very minimal conditions in the middle of a chilly Winnipeg winter night at a local television studio, “Shakin’ All Over” was the song that catapulted us to national success and gave us our name, the Guess Who. “Shakin’ All Over” was released in January 1965 and represents the thriving 1960s Winnipeg community club dance scene. Imagine the movie That Thing You Do multiplied by a thousand, and that’s what the 60s Winnipeg music scene was like.

  Chad Allan had a friend named Wayne Russell who had an amazing record collection from overseas. He also had all these reel-to-reel tapes of the British hit parade. As a Christmas present each year, his cousin in England would tape her favourite 45s and send them to him. Or she’d tape British radio and send him those tapes. As I mentioned earlier, for rock ’n’ roll–crazed kids like us, it was like discovering buried treasure. These were songs we never ever heard in Winnipeg. We used to learn the songs right off the tapes, sometimes without knowing the title of the song. That’s how we learned “Till We Kissed” and found out much later that the title was actually “Where Have You Been All My Life.” And that’s how we first heard the Beatles in early 1963, a full year before their records hit over here. In amongst Wayne’s collection we found “Shakin’ All Over,” a hit in Britain for Johnny Kidd and the Pirates back in 1960 that never crossed the Atlantic. That song just leapt off the tape at us. The guitar riff still turns heads forty years later. We loved the song immediately and wanted to record it.

  We were friends with a guy named Bob Burns who hosted an American Bandstand clone show in Winnipeg called Teen Dance Party, which was recorded live at CJAY TV studio at Polo Park every Saturday afternoon at two. Kids would dance to the latest hit records that Bob would spin, and they’d have a local band on from time to time. I remember Neil Young telling me he’d gone to Teen Dance Party because his girlfriend at the time was a dancer with the Pepsi Pack, but that he didn’t go on the show because he didn’t know how to dance or was too self-conscious. We played the TV show a couple of times when we were the Expressions.

  So one time, it was in late December 1964, we convinced Bob to let us into the CJAY TV Channel 7 building late one night so we could record there. It was too cold and too expensive for us to travel to Kay Bank studios in Minneapolis. We’d played a community club gig that evening, and so it was the middle of the night when we got to the station. We bribed the janitor a few bucks and paid a recording engineer to come in. We set up our gear in the middle of this empty studio where they hosted Teen Dance Party. For the TV show they had this big black velvet curtain to hide all the wires and technical stuff. So we pulled that around us to deaden the sound. In the middle we had one microphone, the one Bob used to announce the records he would play. We set up around this one mike and recorded our songs. Jim Kale had a Fender Concert amp that all the instruments were plugged into. No separation at all: my lead guitar, Chad’s rhythm guitar, Jim Kale’s bass, and a contact microphone stuck on the back of Bob Ashley’s piano. We did one take of “Shakin’ All Over,” and when we listened back, the drums were too loud. So we went back to the studio floor and moved Garry Peterson’s whole drum kit a couple of feet back from the one microphone.

  We did several takes before we got the sound right. It was just a monophonic one-channel tape recorder, so when we’d come up to the booth to hear the take, the engineer had to patch the cords from record to playback. This happened several times. We’d record, put our instruments down, and go up to the booth to listen to the playback. But on this one take the engineer forgot to patch the cords back, and what we heard was the same sound Elvis used to get on his early Sun records: a slapback echo. That was the sound we wanted, and that became the take we kept. It became the sound of “Shakin’ All Over.”

  When we sent the tape in to George Struth at Quality Records, he decided to simply credit the group as “Guess Who” so that radio programmers would give the song a spin. Canadian recordings didn’t get much airplay in those days, so George knew he needed to trick programmers into playing the record. The deception worked. “Shakin’ All Over” became a national hit under our new name, the Guess Who. It was Top 10 or better right across Canada. Following up a hit, though, is always difficult. You’re only as good as your latest record, and while our subsequent releases did well in Canada, none matched “Shakin’ All Over” in excitement and appeal.

  “HIS GIRL”

  In 1966 Burton Cummings joined the Guess Who and, soon afterwards, Chad Allan left. He had problems with his throat and he had problems with Burton. They didn’t get along. That meant Burton was the lead singer now. We were given a song to record by Whitey Haines, the head of BMI in Canada, who told us it was going to be a hit. We’d been touring one-horse towns in Saskatchewan all summer for $400 a night but had little money left by the end of the summer to pay for a recording session. So I took what money I had and went to the horse-racing track and won enough to pay for a
session. Off we went to Minneapolis to cut “His Girl,” written by Canadian songwriter Johnny Cowell. “His Girl” marked a change in our usual choice of singles because it was a sweet, soft ballad and we were a rockin’ band.

  We brought along Gar Gillies and his trombone. Gar was a well-known big-band trombone player who we knew because he made our amplifiers for us. It started out with me getting Gar, who owned an appliance store, to fix my amplifiers when I’d blow them out. We were playing larger and larger venues, and our Fender amplifiers just couldn’t cut it. So Gar started souping up my Fender amp before making amps for us. This was the start of Garnet Amplifiers, which became the sound of the Guess Who, BTO, and the sound of Winnipeg.

  Gar played the trombone solo in the middle of “His Girl.” The record was a hit across Canada in the fall of 1966. In early 1967 it was licensed to King Records in the U.K. They took our three-track tape and sweetened the recording by adding strings, glockenspiel, and additional guitar. That became the first Winnipeg record to make it onto the U.K. record charts. At the end of the song, Burton Cummings does his little Sam Cooke thing like from the end of “You Send Me,” that “Oh la ta ta ta ta ta ta a a.”

  When “His Girl” made it into the U.K. Top 50 we thought we were going to be stars. In our minds, as I said earlier, the streets of London were paved with gold. We borrowed a ton of money, bought all new gear and travel cases, all new stage clothes, and flew everything to London only to discover we had no contracts and bookings. It was a disaster. But we survived and “His Girl” became a Top 20 hit across Canada, marking another important step in our progress from local cover band to international recording artists.