Story time with Randy Bachman Part II

BTO, Guess Who hitmaker talks more about his life in music
By Peter Lindblad

Randy Bachman - Every Song
Tells a Story 2014

Randy Bachman has taken care of some unfinished business with "Every Song Tells A Story."

Fans of his who'd seen the legendary songwriter and guitarist on tour talking at length about his career and the creation of some of his most iconic songs while performing live – similar to the "Storyteller" series of VH1's past – were clamoring for such a release.

Out as a CD/DVD package, via the Independent Label Services Group, "Every Song Tells a Story" documents a wonderfully intimate and often humorous night of Bachman holding court and playing songs like "American Woman," "No Sugar Tonight," "These Eyes," "Let It Ride" and "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," among others, at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre in his hometown of Winnipeg.

In Part 2 of our interview with Bachman, he talks more in-depth about his time with Bachman-Turner Overdrive, while also talking about 1969, a big year for The Guess Who.

1969 was such a monumental year for The Guess Who, with the success of “These Eyes” and the albums Wheatfield Soul and Canned Wheat and “Laughing” and “Undun.” Why was that year such a creative high for you, and when did it seem like this year was going to be huge for the band? And what are your favorite memories of recording those records?

RB: Well, as songwriters, and I was writing full-tilt with Burton Cummings and later, writing on my own and then writing with [Fred] Turner and BTO, you write a song every day or at the end of the week, you’ve written maybe 10 songs or 10 fragments, and if you’re lucky, if you have a 10 percenter, where one out of 10 songs is good – so if you’re doing an album, you’ve got to write a hundred songs to get 10 or 12 good ones and you do do that, and you go back later and take some of those ideas and you develop them again, because they’re ideas about a girl or a car or wanting to fly or wanting to drive your car … things like that. But when you get into this groove where the record label is suddenly promoting you and not the other band that you hate, which might be the New York Dolls or Rush or somebody else on your label at the time (laughs), and with RCA with The Guess Who, it was the Jefferson Airplane … “they’re promoting them, why aren’t they promoting us?” – that kind of thing. And suddenly, it’s your turn, and they’re promoting your stuff, and that means all their PR guys, their record guys, who went into the radio stations were saying, “Here’s our priority. It’s the Guess Who.” Or, “Here’s our priority. It’s Bachman-Turner Overdrive. This is our priority single.” Which means they’re pushing that, and then radio gets it, and then radio suddenly tunes in and goes, “Yeah, this is really good. The phones are lighting up when we’re playing BTO or the Guess Who. So let’s play more of them in drive time because everyone’s listening in the morning driving to work and it makes us feel good.” 

And then suddenly the record sales start, and they all start to call you for more music. And you’re writing music all the time. You could say, “You want more? You want more? We’ve got more.” You give them more songs, and they put out more songs, and radio plays more songs, and you get into this groove that’s wonderful, and if it could last one or two or three years, that’s great. And then you burn out, and they go on to their next band, and that’s the music business. That’s like falling in love – two or three years of a lot of happening stuff, and then a couple of years of indifference, and then you either fall in love again or you take or break or the seven-year itch comes and you change partners, you know what I mean? It’s a cycle of life, and it breaks hearts, and bands break up, people break up, you love each other, you like each other, and then the same things that made you fall in love make you fall out of love or whatever. The friction that creates the music is the friction that explodes you up. It’s the same with Jagger and Richards and Aerosmith and every other band. The frictions are great. You make great music, and then you end up hating each other, and that’s the way the world rolls.

One of those lucky accidents you talked about was Charlie Fach essentially saving what would become BTO. How confident were you that this band was going to make it?

RB: Well, out of the blue, when I had Brave Belt, I had two albums with Brave Belt and Brave Belt III was dropped by Reprise Records. Neil Young got me a deal with Jon Ossman (Young's bassist) of Reprise. And they said they couldn’t put out Brave Belt III. I sent that out to 26 labels that passed on it all. Charlies Fach came and called me and said, “I gotta give you a chance. Change your name. We don’t want Brave Belt on there. Put the name Bachman in there.” And I said, “Well, it’s me and a couple of brothers and Fred Turner.” And he said, “Fine, call yourself Bachman Turner. It’s better than Brave Belt. Nobody knows what Brave Belt is. I want your name in there because you wrote all the hits for The Guess Who.” So we’re called Bachman Turner for a couple of months, and we show up and people think it’s Brewer & Shipley or Seals and Crofts – two guys on a mandolin singing, “Diamond Girl.” And we’re there blowing plates off the table. We’re booked in coffeehouses. We’re blowing the coffee off the table. And so we needed a better name and we find a truckers’ magazine called “Overdrive.” 

And we called Charlie Fach and say, “How about Bachman-Turner Overdrive?” He says, “Wow! Great name for an album, but it’s too long for a band.” I said, “Well, how about BTO?” Because Chicago then was CTA, Chicago Transit Authority. We’re calling Crosby, Stills and Nash, CS&N. I said, “So we’ll have the initials. We’ll have the long name, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and we’ll have a short name, BTO,” and he said, “Perfect.” We put out our first album. It said, “BTO” in the middle and Bachman-Turner Overdrive around this big overdrive gear, and bang! We’ve got a worldwide recognized trademark and symbol. It all happened by organic accident, it just evolved. And there we were, BTO. So I trusted Charlie Fach and his instinct. He liked the name. He gave me a break. He was the only guy out of 26 labels who gave me a break, and we’re supposed to put out one album every 18 months, and the first 18 months, we had three albums on the charts, a No. 1 single and a No. 1 album. And he was totally right. That was a big moment. He was right. He urged me to put “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” on the album. It was a throwaway track. He made me put it on the album. He said, “I discovered ‘Maggie May’ for Rod Stewart, and ‘Hey Baby’ for Bruce Channel, and I discovered ‘Tennessee Waltz” for Patti Page.’ He went that far back. And he said, “I’m discovering this for you. This is going to be a career song for you. Put it on the album.” That was the first BTO album that had the ninth song. They all had eight songs – four a side. We took the five short songs and put them on one side, had the ninth song on, it became No. 1 in 22 countries. It was a million-selling single. He knew what he was talking about.

Not Fragile turns 40 this year. Was there a point in the recording where you felt you had something special on your hands?

RB:  Well, we knew we were on a roll because previous albums were on the charts and “Let it Ride” and “Takin’ Care of Business” had done very well on the chart. We had no idea the reject song, “Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” would go to No. 1, but Charlies Fach felt we had really good momentum with radio and the fans, and that this album was going to do well. Fred Turner wrote the title song, “Not Fragile,” in kind of a pun response to the Yes album called Fragile, with the world breaking apart. Ours was a box full of gears saying, “We’re not fragile.” He wrote this heavy-riff song and in there are another couple of great songs, “Sledgehammer” and “Rollin’ Down the Highway,” and out of it comes this magical reject of a song “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” that becomes a million-selling hit single, and boom! It becomes a quintuple platinum album at the time. It sold five or six million copies.

In 1974, Tim Bachman left the band, and you had a daunting tour schedule. Somehow you were able to record Not Fragile. How were you able to work through all that to get Not Fragile done?

RB: I have no idea – sheer guts and determination, and Plan B is to stick to Plan A. We’re doing an album … and I didn’t care if we did the album with the three of us. We were quite competent. We were a trio many times, because guys kept leaving Brave Belt and BTO, until we got my brother Tim. When he left, it was no big deal. We went back to … we were ready to cut the album, but Bruce Allen, who was our manager, said, “Why don’t you try Blair Thornton? He’s a good guitar player. You’ll be like the Allman Brothers. You’ll have two lead guitars. You can trade off.” So we gave Blair a shot and it worked. He was great for many albums, and he would play different solo structures with me, so you could tell his solos and it gave our songs a bit of variety. I do it the first solo, you do it the second and we play harmony together and it kind of was a chance for us to stretch out and spread out a little bit.

Watching the DVD, you seem like a born storyteller. Has it always been that for you?

RB: No. I found it very odd to hear my voice speaking, but I got my own radio show by accident and now it’s in its ninth year. It’s called “Randy’s Vinyl Tap,” and it’s on CBC Radio and Sirius satellite and I have about 12 million listeners every week, so I’ve gotten used to telling stories. And it’s really easy telling the stories behind my own songs. I’ve told them for years to every DJ I met at every radio station, who’d say, “How did you write ‘American Woman’? How did you write ‘Undun’? How did you write this?’ I told the stories one at a time, so to be able to put them together and to be able to do it in my hometown where I’m basically looking at the front row and it’s all my cousins and guys I went to school with, and I’m telling these stories ... to me, I didn’t see the cameras. That’s the trick when you’re an actor. You look right at the camera and the trick is to not see it. So I didn’t see the cameras there. All I could see were my friends and relatives. I could see and feel love from the audience and maybe that showed in my face, because I haven’t seen the DVD. I have no idea.

Story time with Randy Bachman Part I

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.

Randy Bachman: Still 'Takin' Care of Business'

New live release from iconic artist tells tales of a life in music
By Peter Lindblad

Randy Bachman - Every Song Tells
A Story 2014

What a life Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business" has lived.

Before it was released in 1973 and included on BTO's Bachman-Turner Overdrive II album, it had lived an orphan's existence, unable to find a permanent home.

Eventually, though, it did, and it became one of the biggest hits of Randy Bachman's career. The story of how "Takin' Care of Business" came to be is one of the highlights of a new CD/DVD set titled "Every Song Tells a Story," which finds Bachman mining his past for tales from a musical life and playing a number of favorites from The Guess Who and BTO.

"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, and it 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 [to the studio] and brought the pizza and played piano on it ... no writer in Hollywood could have written a better story, but it happened and I tell the story and it’s pretty amazing," said Bachman.

That's right. A pizza delivery guy named Norman Durkee played piano on the recorded version, adding his part at Kaye-Smith Studios in Seattle, Wash. This song that had started out as a story of a recording engineer who took "the 8:15 into the city," going by train, and was originally called "White Collar Worker" when Bachman wrote it while with The Guess Who got a new name when Bachman heard the phrase "takin' care of business" on the radio while heading to a gig in Vancouver, British Columbia, where Turner's voice gave out that night. Bachman had to take over on vocals and started singing "White Collar Worker," only with a new chorus, "Takin' Care of Business."

"Every Song Tells a Story" is a CD/DVD live set that captures Bachman's "Storyteller"-type performance from Spring 2013 in his hometown of Winnipeg at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre. Here's a teaser clip of the show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rqJ8pG0Ir0&feature=youtu.be

Ray Davies of The Kinks is the one who persuaded Bachman to do this. Bachman saw him do something similar in London.

"Well, I’m a fan of Ray Davies, as most people are," said Bachman. "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 plate, 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."

When asked, Bachman was a bit apprehensive. They were persuasive.

"They said, 'Could you come and play for these people?'" recalls Bachman. "I said, 'But they’re having dinner. I don't want you to 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.'"

Thinking that was the end of that, Bachman was asked again to "do that storytelling thing again," and it became “'Every Song Tells a Story,'” he said, "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."

The reviews, so far, have been glowing.

"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," said Bachman. "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. 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."

"Every Song Tells A Story" is out on the Independent Label Services Group.

We'll have more from our interview with Bachman in the coming days.

CD/DVD Review: Randy Bachman – Every Song Tells a Story

CD/DVD Review: Randy Bachman – Every Song Tells a Story
Independent Label Services Group
All Access Rating: A-

Randy Bachman - Every Song
Tells a Story 2014

The intimacy and warmth of the Pantages Playhouse Theatre in his home town of Winnipeg proved to be the ideal environment for a pleasant evening of storytelling and music from Canada's favorite rock 'n' roll son, Randy Bachman.

Describing his life as "a series of accidents" that he's followed wherever they lead, sharing funny and insightful yarns from a long life in music, Bachman takes a rapt audience hanging on his every word on a tour through the dusty back roads and well-traveled highways of a legendary career. The resume now includes an award-winning radio show called "Vinyl Tap" that served as the inspiration for this wonderful event, captured on a new Independent Label Services Group CD/DVD release called Every Song Tells a Story.

The first stop on this journey: "Prairie Town," a really lovely, nostalgic ode to where he hails from – Winnipeg in the '60s being Canada's version of Liverpool, says Bachman – that appears on his 1992 solo album Any Road. From there, a lighthearted Bachman revisits the humble birth and ascendant rise of The Guess Who and tells personal tales about quitting college, the confused recruitment of Burton Cummings, navigating the treacherous waters of the music industry, his friendship with Neil Young and taking the act to the States, a foreign land where they encountered hippies, surfers, a biker gang and the sociopolitical turbulence of a nation at war in Vietnam.

All the while, as the engaging, self-deprecating Bachman reveals the true stories and inspiration behind the band's biggest hits, he and his backing band – playing on a stage designed to look like someone's living room – perform light, electrified versions of those songs, sliding into the raw garage-rock of "Shakin' All Over," the tender, beguiling ballads "These Eyes" and "Laughing," the sparkling folk-rock of "No Time" and the proto-metal blast of "American Woman" with both gentle ease and reckless abandon.

Sticking to a chronological timeline, Bachman breaks from The Guess Who and finds starting a new project harder than he thought, as he recounts how Brave Belt simply spun its wheels. When all seemed lost, in walked Charlie Fach of Mercury Records with a record deal, and the dark clouds disappeared.

Bachman's relief is still palpable, and the anecdotes he sprinkles in between rugged, driving BTO anthems such as "Let It Ride," "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet," "Takin' Care of Business" and "Hey You" – these live versions still retaining that blue-collar vigor and slamming horsepower that made them hits in the first place – show how ingenuity and dumb luck, as well as a handful of great riffs, lifted the band to the top of the charts. Perhaps Bachman's tale is not the greatest story ever told, but it's a damn good one, filled with plenty of plot twists and surprises. And he delivers it in a manner that stays true to who he is.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Bachman & Turner - Live at the Roseland Ballroom, NYC

CD Review: Bachman & Turner - Live at the Roseland Ballroom, NYC

Eagle Records

B+

Bachman & Turner 2012

Hard hats in hand, Randy Bachman and Fred Turner went back to work a few years ago after a long layoff. The driving forces behind ‘70s blue-collar rockers Bachman-Turner Overdrive had mothballed BTO in 2005, before reuniting as Bachman & Turner with a self-titled album that turned back the clock to 1973 and displayed the kind of industrious riffs, lovably gruff melodies and tight, rugged hooks that made workingman’s anthems of “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” “Let it Ride,” “Roll on Down the Highway” and “Takin’ Care of Business” – all of them steeped in Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, bologna sandwiches and blind optimism. The hit factory they’d shut down was back up and running, and they didn’t need a bailout to get the assembly line running at peak efficiency, as it did at the Roseland Ballroom.

If only the rest of the world gave a damn about good, honest songwriting and no-frills, guitar-driven rock and roll. Rolling up their sleeves, Bachman & Turner rumbled into the Roseland in New York City on November 16, 2010 and stubbornly plowed through a slew of hard-hitting classics and new sonic brawls without regard for what’s trendy or fashionable these days. And they do more than just punch a clock on this warm-sounding double-CD live recording – a DVD/Blu-ray release is also scheduled – of that comeback show. Starting with a rigorous, triumphant run through “Let it Roll,” Disc 1 pounds away at a brick wall of indifference with swinging sledgehammers “Rock is My Life” and “Not Fragile,” two of the toughest, most defiant songs in their catalog. Feeling bluesy, Bachman & Turner add just a touch of jazzy sophistication to “Moonlight Rider.” One of the pair’s more recent concoctions, it slides smoothly and effortlessly into the light neon glow and cocktail-hour meditation of “Lookin’ Out For #1” and the soulful, closing-time feel of Disc 2’s “Blue Collar,” while the understated pop brilliance of “Hey You” – its chorus building into something unexpectedly heady and exhilarating – shines perhaps even brighter than it did in the ‘70s.

Although their slinky, low-down reading of Johnny Kidd’s “Shakin’ All Over” wins points for its restless energy, there is a sluggishness that hits Bachman & Turner at precisely the wrong time. Just as they’re about to go out in a blaze of glory with “Roll on Down the Highway” and “Takin’ Care of Business,” the band – comprised also of drummer Marc LaFrance and guitarists Brent Howard Knudsen and Mick Dalla-Vee – struggles to get on the same page and maintain a lively pace. All of a sudden, they’re running in quicksand and drowning in it when they should be galloping toward the finish line, too eager to settle into that mythical pocket and never quite finding that open stretch of road to let the engine out.

It’s not age that’s slowing them down. Bachman still nestles those economical, searing guitar leads of his perfectly within the open cracks of a song and Turner’s booming bass sounds as vigorous and powerful as ever when they grind their way through the punishing “Four Wheel Drive” and the piston-pumping dynamo “Slave to the Rhythm.” And their spitfire version of the Guess Who classic “American Woman” snarls with primal energy. In a sense, BTO is a bit like AC/DC, doing what they do so simply that they seem to hit the spot every time they pick up their instruments. Maybe they’ve lost some of their relevance, but that’s only because the music industry is wandering in the wilderness. If there were more bands like BTO, it might not be in the mess it’s in today.

-            Peter Lindblad