Randy Bachman Read online

  He looked at me and replied, “You don’t want to go there.” Then he told me that his son had been drafted and was fighting in Vietnam. “I suggest you turn around right now and go back up to Canada.”

  So we did that, and didn’t dare try to cross the same way again. Part of that might have been the sentiment behind “American Woman.” It was easier to say than “Uncle Sam stay away from me” or “Statue of Liberty stay away from me.” It was all unplanned. RCA used that imagery, though, in their promotion of the record: the Statue of Liberty with the face of an old woman superimposed over a New York alleyway with trash everywhere. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, so the timing was perfect.

  “American Woman” stayed at #1 for three weeks on the U.S. national charts in May 1970. That year we sold more singles than any other rock act, and we sold more records than the entire Canadian recording industry combined to that point. “American Woman” was recently voted the greatest Canadian single of all time. I’m not surprised.

  “NO SUGAR TONIGHT”

  In early 1969, after playing a gig in San Francisco, I was in Berkeley, California, and had just bought a bunch of vinyl records. That’s something I often did in different cities on tour. I’d be looking for unusual or hard-to-find albums. So I was taking these records back to my rental car when I saw three guys in black leather jackets walking towards me on the same side of the street. I was a little intimidated by this. They looked like guys from a biker gang, three rough, tough street guys and me, the lone Canadian. I’m six-foot-three but I certainly don’t look threatening. Plus I’m a Canadian. I’m a lover, not a fighter.

  As these guys walked along, people parted like waves, stepping aside to let them through. They were walking shoulder to shoulder and coming straight towards me. So I nonchalantly crossed over to the other side of the street, trying to avoid them, and they did the same, still bearing down on me. The three guys are getting closer and closer, giving me the eye. I could feel a confrontation coming.

  Suddenly this battered little brown car pulls up in front of them. It’s got dents in the front fender, a blue door, and the back window is all smashed like a spider’s web held together by duct tape. This little woman steps out and starts yelling at one of these tough guys. The other two scatter; they don’t want anything to do with this. She’s ragging on this one guy who doesn’t appear so tough now as he’s standing there being chewed out by a tiny woman. He no longer looks menacing; he looks embarrassed by this woman tearing a strip off him.

  “You’re nothing but a no-good bum!” she’s yelling. “You left me at home with the kids again. You’re supposed to be looking for a job and here you are with your buddies checking out the girls.”

  So he sheepishly goes around to the passenger-side door. Finally she says to him as he’s getting in the car, “And baby, when you get home you ain’t gettin’ no sugar tonight.”

  I wrote “No Sugar Tonight” as part of a unique collaboration. It was our producer Jack Richardson’s idea to combine my song with a Burton Cummings song, so we got “No Sugar Tonight/ New Mother Nature.” But when it came time to pick a B-side for “American Woman,” Jack chose to chop Burton’s song off and release “No Sugar Tonight” as a separate track. When “American Woman” started sliding from the charts, deejays flipped it over to find another hit. The Billboard record book shows that “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight” are the longest and shortest songs (double A-sides) to reach #1 in the charts.

  My Picks

  “HIS GIRL” by the Guess Who

  “HUNG UPSIDE DOWN” by the Buffalo Springfield

  “LAUGHING” by the Guess Who

  “NO SUGAR TONIGHT” by the Guess Who

  “NO TIME” by the Guess Who

  “PRETTY BLUE EYES” (bad version) by the Guess Who

  “PRETTY BLUE EYES” (good version) by the Guess Who

  “SHAKIN’ ALL OVER” by the Guess Who

  “THESE EYES” by the Guess Who

  “THIS TIME LONG AGO” by the Guess Who

  “TRIBUTE TO BUDDY HOLLY” by Chad Allan and the Reflections

  “UNDUN” by the Guess Who

  Randy’s Guitar Shoppe

  If there’s one thing I know about, it’s guitars. I have several hundred of them. Keith Richards is rumoured to have eighteen hundred guitars. Back in the early 60s the Winnipeg Piano Co. at the corner of Portage Avenue and Edmonton Street in downtown Winnipeg was a great place for guitars. On the main floor were the pianos, sheet music, and all that stuff. But when you descended the stairs to the basement, that’s where they had all the electric guitars on the wall—brand-new Fenders, Gibsons, and Gretsches—and amplifiers on the floor. Guys like me, Fred Turner, Neil Young, and other local guitarists would stare at these beautiful guitars and dream of playing them. The sales clerks there were very supportive of young kids like me wanting to buy guitars. When Fred Turner was maybe fifteen years old he went to Winnipeg Piano and got a guitar and amplifier, but when his dad wouldn’t co-sign the contract for the payments, the store clerk let him keep the stuff, telling him, “I think you’ll play this. Just come in whenever you have a few dollars.” If it hadn’t been for that sales clerk, Fred likely would never have played guitar.

  My first electric guitar was a Silvertone model from the Simpsons-Sears catalogue. It was $35, a lot of money for a teenager in the 1950s. I remember seeing a local band, I don’t even recall their name, but the guitar player was Eugene Hywarren. I thought he was absolutely cool. He had flat-top hair with the sides slicked back and he was playing a cool-looking Harmony electric guitar. At that time I only had an acoustic guitar. So I went up to him and asked if I could come to his house and play his electric guitar, and he said sure. He later found me that Silvertone guitar. I still have it. It’s funny, but the cheap guitars back in the early 60s— Silvertone, Harmony, Hagstrom, Supro, Danelectro, Kay—are much sought after today. These were the beginner guitars back then and are hard to find now. I guess everybody threw them out once they moved up to a better model. But these beginner guitars had their virtues.

  I just loved the sound of an electric guitar. I would go to the country-and-western music shows at the old Winnipeg Auditorium and watch the guitar players. When Bonanza came on the television every Sunday night everything stopped at our house. We all watched it. For me, though, I loved the theme song played on electric guitar by Al Caiola. He had so much reverb on his guitar that it sounded as if he were playing in a cave or a tiled bathroom just to give it that depth and big sound. My dad would say that one guitar was the same as another, but I knew early on that different makes and models produced different sounds.

  In the spring of 2008 I introduced one of our most popular themes with Vinyl Tap listeners. Over several weeks I featured profiles of the guitars that changed the sound of rock ’n’ roll. There are three or four makes of guitars that every player knows should be in your guitar arsenal. They’re like your tools: your hammer, your saw, your screwdriver. Most guitar players need a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Stratocaster, a Gibson hollow-body electric and a solid body, a Gretsch, and a Rickenbacker. In Vinyl Tap’s “Guitarology 101” we explored all these guitars—the sounds that made them unique and the recordings that were made using them.

  FENDER TELECASTER

  Our first guitar is the Fender Telecaster. Some of the people who’ve played Telecasters for years are known as the Masters of the Telecasters. Some you know and some you don’t. The Telecaster has a very bright, clean, trebly sound. But there’s a thickness to it as well. The first time I ever heard a Telecaster sound was Luther Perkins backing up Johnny Cash in the Tennessee Two. It was in the first song I ever learned on guitar. My cousins, the Dupas brothers, had a guitar, and they taught me the three chords to “I Walk the Line.” Once I learned those three chords I was on my way.

  I later played with Johnny Cash in Brandon, Manitoba, way back when I was in the Silvertones with Chad Allan, before we became the Reflections (then the Expressions, then
the Guess Who). It must have been about 1962. Johnny came out with these two guys, Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass. When they’d first started with Johnny back in the 50s none of them knew much about playing their instruments, but Luther knew a bit more than the others, so he got to play lead guitar. His lead playing was so simple that it appealed to everybody and helped define Johnny Cash’s sound. It was that LCD thing, the lowest common denominator.

  The first Telecasters were called Broadcasters. There was also a single-pickup model with the same body called an Esquire that had the bridge pickup only.

  When Fender issued its Broadcaster, Gretsch already had a guitar of that name, and Fred Gretsch sent Leo Fender a letter informing him that he couldn’t use the name. So Leo changed the name to Telecaster. He didn’t change the guitar, just the name. But nowadays an original Broadcaster, or better yet a “No-caster,” which were the handful of models he made in between the name change, sell for big, big bucks.

  Leo Fender started his company in 1947 making Hawaiian lap steel guitars. They made them out of a two-by-four with a pickup on it, and that gave them the idea to make a solid-body electric guitar. Fender claimed that they made the first solid-body guitar, but others were working on the same idea at the same time, so there are plenty of counterclaims as to who was really first. In evolving from making lap steel guitars to solid-body regular guitars they kept the back pickup, which had a bright sound to it because Hawaiian music required that bright sound. It made the Telecaster very trebly and bright, yet not tinny. But if you take a Telecaster and crank it through a loud amplifier, it has a very piercing sound.

  The cool thing about a Telecaster is that you can throw it off the roof of your house, pick it up, and it’ll still play because it’s just a piece of wood. They can take a lot of abuse. The body is about a two-inch-thick slab of wood and the neck is bolted on with four bolts. So if you don’t like the neck, you can just take it off and bolt another one on. I used to take the neck off my Telecaster and put the two pieces in a small suitcase for travelling, and then put it together to play a gig. Telecasters are probably the most durable and distinctive electric guitars. Best value for your money and one of the most enduring guitars ever. You can hear Telecasters played in rock, country, blues, jazz …

  If you listen to Johnny Otis’s 1957 record “Willie and the Hand Jive,” it’s got a great Telecaster sound. Another great Telecaster sound is on Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps’ “Whole Lotta Lovin.” The Blue Caps’ lead guitarist, the great Cliff Gallup, switched from a hollow-body Gretsch to a Fender Telecaster after the band got an endorsement deal with Fender. When I saw them in Winnipeg back in the late 50s they had all new Fender amplifiers and guitars.

  Dale Hawkins was born in Goldmine, Louisiana, and was Ronnie Hawkins’s cousin. Dale recorded a song in the 50s called “Susie Q,” and the guy playing that memorable lead line was James Burton, who went on to play with Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley. James Burton became synonymous with the Fender Telecaster.

  When Norman Petty, who owned Buddy Holly’s song publishing, sold that catalogue to Paul McCartney’s company, MPL, Petty threw out the old recording equipment that had been used to record those classic Buddy Holly and Fireballs recordings in Clovis, New Mexico. A friend of mine, Wes Dakus, happened to be there at the time, and he told me that all this old recording gear that still worked was piled up by the garbage. So I managed to get some of it, and I have it in my own studio. If you plug a Telecaster or a Stratocaster into the recording console like Buddy did, you get that distinctive sound he had.

  Two of the original masters of the Telecaster were Roy Buchanan and Danny Gatton. These two guys could coax the most amazing sounds from a Telecaster: moans, howls, and screams. The great thing about a Telecaster is that even though you might play it through a distorted amp, you can still pick out every note distinctly. When you did crank up your Telecaster, it made this great growling sound.

  Roy Buchanan played with Dale Hawkins after James Burton. Roy could squeeze the most amazing sounds from his old battered Tele. No pedals or effects. He made the guitar cry by using his volume pod. He spent some time up in Canada playing guitar for Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and his understudy was a teenager named Robbie Robertson, who adopted Roy’s Telecaster sound. After Robbie became the Hawks’ lead guitarist every guitar player in Toronto had to have a Telecaster like he played.

  By the late 50s everybody wanted that Telecaster sound in rock and rockabilly, and in country music as well with Buck Owens and Don Rich from the Buckaroos. In England there was an embargo after the war on a lot of U.S. goods, so guitar players over there couldn’t get Fenders very easily. One of the first Telecasters in the U.K. was used on Johnny Kidd and the Pirates’ “Shakin’ All Over” in 1960. It was a clean Telecaster sound, but it was so powerful. Johnny Kidd’s real name was Frederick Heath and the Pirates’ guitar player was the legendary Mick Green. He was a big influence on a lot of U.K. guitarists, including the Who’s Pete Townshend.

  The first time I heard Booker T. and the MGs’ “Green Onions” I was drawn to Steve Cropper’s Telecaster sound. It almost sounds as if he’s simply making a bunch of noises the way he played his Telecaster through a small amp with distortion. That sound changed my life the first time I heard it. It’s not like he’s playing a chord; he’s just making a noise, but it’s the coolest noise. Steve Cropper was another one of those Masters of the Telecaster. He asked Leo Fender to build him a Telecaster made out of solid rosewood. That was a heavy guitar to hold and it had a heavier sound. Leo Fender made two of these. The other one was sent to George Harrison of the Beatles. Now, I know that when people see the Beatles performing on TV or live, George is usually playing a Gretsch Country Gentleman or Tennessean or a Rickenbacker 360 twelve-string, but he used other guitars in the recording studio. Listen to his sound and tone on “Let It Be.”

  The second pickup they put on the Telecaster, farther up the body towards the neck, was the most useless thing ever. It was very bassy and nobody used it. The only player I ever saw using that second pickup was Canadian jazz guitarist Ed Bickert, who used it constantly. Everybody else just used the bridge pickup because it has such a bright sound.

  The Yardbirds were a 60s British Invasion band who were much more than that. Their producer had them record pop songs to get their name out there, but basically they were a blues band. In the Yardbirds’ history were three of the greatest rock guitar players of all time: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. And they all played Telecasters in the band. So you’d have these pop songs but somewhere in the middle you’d get these incredibly cool guitar solos like nothing you’d ever heard before. And these were played and recorded on Telecasters. Listen to “Shapes of Things” from 1966 and Jeff Beck’s guitar at the end with all the distortion, feedback, and crashing sounds. That changed pop music. Beck later gave his Telecaster to Jimmy Page when he joined the Yardbirds. Page was still playing that same Telecaster when he recorded the first Led Zeppelin album.

  Not long ago I went to see Jeff Beck in Vancouver, and he played a Fender Stratocaster all night and was amazing. He hardly spoke throughout the show, he just played his guitar. But for one song and only one song, he picked up his Telecaster, and he just made it cry and weep. The song was by Stevie Wonder entitled “’Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” from Jeff’s breakthrough guitar instrumental album Blow by Blow. I never ever tire of hearing that song.

  On much of the Guess Who’s It’s Time album in early 1966 I was using a Fender Telecaster that had this incredible grungy sound through this tiny Fender amp. As a result, much of the material on that album has a biting guitar sound. I didn’t have the clean Rickenbacker sound like on our previous albums. Usually you tend to write for your singer, and suddenly I could write for another singer’s style, not just Chad Allan’s. I could write for Burton Cummings, who had a raw, screamy voice. Now we had an Eric Burdon in the band. So “Believe Me” was like the Kinks and Paul Revere and the Raider
s, and “Clock on the Wall” was like the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” done slower. That was Burton’s first vocal with us. Neil Young once told me that “Clock on the Wall” was one of his favourite songs from that period. He even wanted to record it at one time.

  Back in the 60s I went to the Winnipeg Arena to see Lonnie Mack. He was a well-known guitar player at the time, so before he comes out on stage, a drummer and a bass player come out and plug in. Then Lonnie comes out and he’s got the weirdest-shaped guitar I’d ever seen. It’s a Gibson Flying V guitar, sometimes known as a wedge guitar, and it’s got a Bigsby tailpiece on it. Along with this guitar around his neck, he’s carrying in his hand a Magnatone amplifier. It was small enough for him to carry it like a book. He sets this little amp on a chair, plugs it in, and gets the most amazing sound from it. The amp is vibrating from the volume but it sounds great. I was enthralled by the sound and by his guitar.

  So I get the idea that I’m going to have a Flying V guitar like Lonnie Mack. My dad was in the process of finishing our new house; we were moving from West Kildonan to Garden City, just a little farther north. The doors had been delivered for the new house. So I took what was supposed to be my new bedroom door, carried it down to the basement, and cut it in half. On each half I drew a V with a pencil and then cut them out with a saw. We didn’t have a router or anything like that, so on one of the V’s I cut out where the pickup would be dropped in. I had a Fender Telecaster that didn’t work very well and it was all in pieces. So I dropped the Telecaster pickup into the body then added the Fender neck and bridge. I then screwed the two pieces together and I had a Flying V guitar.

  My father came home from work that night and I proudly showed him my guitar like a kid showing his dad his woodworking project. “Hey, Dad, isn’t it good?” My dad looked at it and then at me and said, “Where did you get that wood?!”