BTO, Guess Who main man shares tales from the past, talks up his new live DVD
By Peter Lindblad
 |
Randy Bachman - Every Song
Tells a Story 2014 |
Randy Bachman just keeps rolling down the highway, carrying a truckload of enduring songs from his days with The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, as well as his solo work.
Along the way, his career in music spanning 50-some years, Bachman has seen it all and lived to tell about it. Which is exactly what he does on a new live CD/DVD package called "Every Song Tells a Story" that's similar to the "Storytellers" series made popular by VH1 in the mid-1990s. It was recorded in April 2013 at Pantages Playhouse Theatre in Winnipeg, Bachman's home town.
In his own understated and lighthearted manner, Bachman candidly shares the compelling stories behind some of his biggest hits, as a video montage offers a seamless visual history of his life and times. Journeying through the social and political unrest of the '60s in America, Bachman talks of Winnipeg's musical groundswell, his struggles to get BTO off the ground and forming a partnership with Burton Cummings, all while performing the classics that made him one of Canada's most revered and successful songwriters.
His legacy includes No. 1 hits in a number of countries, 120 gold and platinum album and singles awards and record sales topping 40 million. And in recent years, Bachman has become a radio personality, his award-winning radio program "Vinyl Tap" allowing him to impart a wealth of knowledge about rock 'n' roll and connect to fans who want to know more about this legendary figure. In this two-part interview, Bachman talks in-depth about his new live "storyteller" release and his own path to greatness.
What prompted you to do this kind of performance? I understand Ray Davies of The Kinks played in this.
Randy Bachman: Well,
I’m a fan of Ray Davies, as most people are. He tells the story of The Kinks,
and I go backstage and I say, “That was amazing.” And he looks at me and he
says, “Well, you could do it better or more amazing than this.” I said, “Well,
what do you mean?” He says, “Well, you’ve got two bands. You could tell the
stories behind the songs. You’ve got more hits than me.” And I went back to
Vancouver after that, this little bit in London, and got asked to do a show for
the Canadian Cancer Society – a fundraising dinner, $5,000 a play, black-tie
dinner at a big golf country club, everybody’s dressed up and a silent auction
is auctioning Harley Davidsons and stuff. This is to raise many hundreds of
thousands of dollars for the cancer society, and the people voted that they
wanted me as the entertainment. But they said, “Could you come and play for
these people? But they’re having dinner. We would blow the plates off the table.”
They said, “Can you kind of do an acoustic show?” And I said, “My music doesn’t
really translate acoustically, at least the BTO stuff doesn’t. But how about if
I sit on a stool and tell stories about how I wrote the songs, and I’ll play a
little bit of the songs, and it won’t be a night of blasting it in their faces,
because they can kind of talk as they’re having their dinner.”
So I go there
and I do the night and nobody talks when I’m telling my stories. They’re all
listening. And I’m kind of frightened at this – that they’re listening to me.
And then we play the songs, and when the evening is over, they came and said, “You
know if you would put this on a CD or a DVD, we would buy a dozen copies and
send it to our relatives all over the world. This is just the most wonderful
insight into all these songs we all grew up with. It’s the soundtrack to our
lives – our teenage lives, our married lives, our working life and everything.”
So I let that go by and then somebody said, “Will you do that storytelling
thing again? Will you do it again?” So it became “Every Song Tells a Story,” and
I put it chronologically so it’s from the early Guess Who right up to the
present. And I did a run last spring, about 38 dates, and near the end was
Winnipeg. And my manager said, “Well, if you’re going to be in your hometown,
where all these songs originated and you’re talking about Neil Young and the
Guess Who and BTO and Portage and Main, and things like that, which is the main
intersection in Winnipeg there, let’s DVD it.” So we did it and they put
together a montage to show behind me, a visual of where we were – the haircuts,
the clothes, the cars, the guitars at the time. So it’s kind of a history
lesson of biographical significance if you grew up in Canada and into the
States, too – you know these songs.
Some of the greatest critiques I’ve had is
that it’s the most wonderful history lesson of Canadian music, especially out
of Winnipeg, that anybody could have, because that’s the music that rocked the
world – the Guess Who and BTO and Neil Young were the music that came out
Winnipeg that’s still going and still being played on radio to this day. So I’m
kind of thrilled that … it wasn’t a big plan. No big producer came and said, “Let’s
do this.” It kind of evolved from me just following my passion and getting that
idea from Ray Davies and developing the idea, putting visuals behind it,
incorporating both bands, taking it on the road, and doing a DVD of it and now
this DVD that we put out a little while ago has now gone triple platinum in
Canada. It’s triggered now releases in the States, in the U.K., in Germany, in
Denmark, and Australia. So I’m doing phoners all the time, and I’m kind of
stunned at the reviews. My manager just sent me 40 or 50 great reviews that are
just … I’ve never had reviews like this in my life. I don’t know what I’m
doing, but it must be something good (laughs). I don’t know what I’m going to
do next, but it’s funny, it’s funny.
The tide is turning, right?
RB: It’s like when you have a hit record.
You go, “What did we do that made this a hit record? We’ve got to do it again,
but we don’t know what we did. Everybody likes this song, so …” So everybody
liking this DVD is really an honor to me and a thrill, and a way of people I
guess acknowledging and recognizing that I’ve made a difference in their lives
with my music.
I know Winnipeg was ideal for this, and the Pantages
Playhouse Theatre was really a great location.
RB: Well, that was
our dream to play there back in the old rock ‘n’ roll days. I mean, I went to
that theatre to see the "Dick Clark Caravans." I saw Johnny and The Hurricanes
there. I saw The Champs. I saw the Bill Black Combo. I saw everybody there …
Dick and Dee Dee, Lonnie Mack. Everybody would play the Winnipeg Playhouse.
It’s now renamed the Pantages, but we knew it as the Playhouse. So when you
came to Winnipeg, you either played there or the big arena, which is a big
hockey arena, which is a big, booming barn. This is a theatre, where you sat
down and really got to the see the band and hear the music. So for me to go
back there – and it’s all been refurbished and it’s all really quite beautiful
– it was really wonderful to go there. They say you can’t go home again, but I
went home and it was really, really great. It was wonderful. I went home and
celebrated the songs from both bands that I’d written there, and I knew the
audience. I must have known everybody in the audience. They were all related to
me. I either went to school with them or grew up with them or played in bands
with them. I really felt like I was at home in a reunion, so I was very
comfortable that whole evening and I really felt warmth and love from the
audience, and I guess it shows in the DVD because people are saying it’s really
a magical moment that we captured there.
Do you have a favorite moment from that show?
RB: My favorite
story of all, which even amazes me, is the entire story of “Takin’ Care of
Business,” how I started it in the late ‘60s, was called “White Collar Worker,” how
it transformed to become what it became about five years later through an
accident at a BTO show when Fred Turner lost his voice and I had to sing, to
the pizza guy who came in and brought the pizza and played piano on it … that
whole thing is … no writer in Hollywood could have written a better story, but
it happened and I tell the story and it’s pretty amazing.
That is a great one, and it’s a longer story and it takes
a while to spool out …
RB: I picked that one and
that’s kind of appropriate for that night, right? And I tell people it’s a long
story, because actually it starts when I went on the “Louie, Louie” tour with “Shakin’
All Over.” (mistakenly credited to The Guess Who's in the U.S. release of the single) That’s when it starts, that’s when I wrote that song. That’s when I
met Stanley Greenberg, who was the blind engineer, Florence Greenberg’s son,
the engineer at Scepter's studio. So it goes back to the beginning of the show and
pulls it right up to the present, so it’s a little bit longer, but the
threads pull the people in, because they want to know what happened in between.
You talked of Winnipeg in the ‘60s being like Liverpool.
What made it such a vibrant musical community and how were you able to carve
out your own place in it?
RB: Well, a lot of
things made it vibrant. Winnipeg is about 450 miles away from anywhere else.
It’s far to Minneapolis – 450 miles. Regina – 400 and something miles. There’s
nothing near it. It’s the dead center of North America, the center of Canada
and the center of nowhere. There’s nothing else near it, so consequently, when
you’re there, you’re there. So the ethnicity of your parents, if they were from
England or Germany, or Scotland, their parties, their bar mitzvahs, their
church gatherings, their weddings – all that ethnic music is there. And then
the stuff we heard late at night on the radio – because Winnipeg is the top of
the Great Plains – so late at night I was able to listen to my little AM radio
as Neil Young was listening, too, on the other side of town, and Burton Cummings
listening to WLS in Chicago, WNOE in New Orleans, “Cousin Brucie” in New York, “Wolfman”
Jack … on a good night I’d get “Wolfman” Jack from some station in Mexico or
something, and hear this music that we’d never heard before. It was so
exciting. It was called rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll was starting. We were
like 14, 15, or 16, hearing this music for the first time, it was really,
really amazing.
And so when we started a band, the drinking age in Winnipeg was
21, so everyone from 21 on down came to your dance. High school dances didn’t
have high school kids. All the older kids came who had graduated came back to
their old high school. Being at a high school dance, you had 500 to 800 kids
dancing in the gym, and they had already seen it on the rock ‘n’ roll movies,
the Allen Freed movies – “Rock Around the Clock” – and they had seen it every
week on “American Bandstand.” Everybody knew how to dance and there were 150
bands in this little town of 300,000 people playing every church, every
community center … community centers were a building in the middle nowhere,
where they’d flood the field in the winter and we’d play hockey on it. And then
in the summer they’d put lines on it and we’d play baseball or soccer on it. We
had these community centers, and women would play bingo there, and if you had a
wedding, the wedding reception would be there. You’d go from the church to the
community center, so we had all these high school gyms and community centers,
and ethnic halls, like the Jewish Hall or the Polish Hall, where these people
went for their weddings and stuff. And we also had friends and relatives in
England who would send us this incredible music from England of Cliff Richard
and The Shadows and the Telstars, and The Beatles and then all the Beatles
clones, Gerry and the Pacemakers and everybody else.
And we had this great
music there, and we’d just all try to outdo each other, even though it was a
community but we shared things because if someone got the first bass in town, and Jim
Kell had the first electric bass in town and the amplifier, we’d loan it to
Neil Young. If we weren’t playing a gig and Neil Young had a gig, he’d call and
say, “Are you guys using your amp and bass next week?” And we’d say, “No, you
can use it.” So we would take it to the gig and watch him play with The
Squires, and then he’d come and see us play the next weekend. It was kind of a “helping
each other out” kind of thing, because he’d play his end of town, and we’d play
our end of town, and then we’d talk to each school or promoter and say, “Why
don’t you book Neil Young and the Squires on our end of town?” And then he
would talk to his places and say, “Why don’t you book The Guess Who in my end of
town?” And we would trade community centers or halls and get to play other
schools. And you’d make like $20 a night, and each guy in the band would get $4
or $5, and that was a big deal – better than delivering newspapers, which was
how we earned our money to buy our guitars. We all had a paper route, do you
know what I mean? Or mowed lawns … that was it.
Some of the funniest and most poignant moments had to do with your first trips to America. It was a country at war. What were
your initial impressions of the country and how did they change as your career
advanced?
RB: Well, there were
two things going on at the time. We would play a concert, and a race riot would
break out. We’d be in Chicago or we’d be in Minneapolis, and you were told by
the promoter, if black and whites start fighting, do not stop playing that
song. Play that song forever, because a lot of the people won’t know there’s a
fight. There’ll be dancing. They’re hearing the music. The minute you stop and
hear a scuffle, they’re going to go and it’s going to turn into a mass riot. So
if it’s two or three guys having a fight or four or five guys in the corner,
we’ll try to get the bouncers in, we’ll call the police. Don’t stop playing.
But that is frightening when you’re playing, and you’re looking down and guys
are fighting with knives in front of the stage and they’re black and white
guys. I’m onstage backing a black band. I’m with the Guess Who. We’re backing
The Shirelles or The Crystals or The Ronettes. We’re thrilled to be backing
these black artists, because to us, they were superstars. And here they are
fighting in the audience – it was amazing.
And then some of the towns we went
to, we would be the only guys between 18 and 30. Women would come to our dance
and touch us like we were aliens. There was no guys in some of these places; they
were all drafted. I’m talking about ’67, ’68 – there were no guys. The war was
going full-tilt; they were drafting everybody. Then the riots were starting.
The students were starting to protest the draft and the war, like, “Why are we
at war? Why are we losing our youth to the war in a jungle somewhere, for what
purpose? We don’t understand this.” And the whole thing was in turmoil, and
here we were on tour, Canadians at the time. They tried to draft us. We came
back to Canada and wrote “American Woman” on the spot. “Stay away from me/let
me be/we don’t want your war machine.” That was the whole idea behind that. “American
Woman” was the Statue of Liberty; that’s what that stood for. It wasn’t the
woman on the street. And I tell that story on the DVD. It was like us almost
being drafted and coming back to Canada and turning in our green cards. And
that night onstage, I broke a string, I wrote the riff, Burton Cummings sang
the line, “American woman/stay away from me” … bam, we wrote it, and it was a
No. 1 hit.
Yeah, that was an amazing story from the DVD, and it kind
of brings me into my next question. You describe your career as a “series of
accidents” that you followed wherever they led. Was there a time when you felt
most scared that the break you were looking for wouldn’t come, whether that was
with The Guess Who or BTO?
RB: Well, the whole
thing is, the whole music business, and from my thinking, you have a dream to
be like Elvis. You have to have a dream to be like John Lennon. You have a dream
to be like Clapton. You have somebody to look to. You have a dream if you’re a
kid to be like David Beckham or Michael Jordan, or somebody like that. You have
a dream to be like Robert Dinero if you’re an actor or somebody, or Nicholas
Cage or somebody like that. So everybody laughs at you saying, “You’ll never be
another Dinero. You’ll never be another Clapton.” And then suddenly, they’re
paying money to see you act or play or shoot a hoop or play guitar, and then
suddenly, they’re buying your record, and suddenly, they’re saying, “You’re the
new Eric Clapton.” And so there’s this change if you keep at it. You have Plan
A and if you stick to Plan A and Plan B is to stick to Plan A, which is you
plan to chase your dream no matter what and climb every mountain that’s in your
way and crawl through every gutter that’s in your way and keep chasing your
dream and keep doing it, and suddenly you achieve and you become something. And
your whole life becomes that. And in a way you’re a spectator and can look back
at it and go, “Wow! We broke up 22 times, but the 23rd time we got
back together, that’s when it happened,” because if we’d broken up, it never
would have happened.
And you learn to keep going, and then I also learned back
when I was writing a song or seeing something or feeling something happening
onstage to just let it happen. It’s almost like a psychic. You feel this thing
coming to you, this revelation or this story or this fact about someone, you
open up and let it come and suddenly you sit there, and you’ve written this
amazing song in like five minutes and you write it down. And you go and play it
for someone, and you say, “Listen to this,” and they go, “Did you write that?
That’s amazing.” And all you can say is, “Yes, yeah. I think I wrote that. I
think I wrote it,” because it’s in you and you don’t know where it comes from,
and you don’t know if you’ve heard it before. If you play it for someone,
they’ll say, “Oh, we’ve heard that. It’s on the new Beatles record, right?” And
you go, “Really?” And they go, “Yeah. That’s Side 2, Cut 3.” And you go, “Oh,
yeah. That’s a Beatles song. It was on my mind,” but if nobody recognizes it,
you claim it as your own and as years go by, you have accolades for having
written these songs and that’s what it is, because there’s nothing new. It’s so
hard to get something new, and when something comes, I’m quite surprised that
I’ve written something new out of all the things I know that are begged and
borrowed and stolen. You know what I mean? And if you can shape something new
and call it your own, it is in fact a miracle, and on this “Every Song Tells a
Story” DVD, I’m celebrating about 50 miracles that nobody called me on. Nobody
said, “Well, you stole that song.” They’re saying, “That’s a great song. You
wrote it by yourself,” and so I’m excited to have that out there and I frankly
tell the stories where the songs came from and what inspired them and all that.
