Randy Bachman (21 page)

Then the stuttering vocals came in and I started to cringe.

“You've got to put this on the album!” Charlie insisted. “It's a monster!”

The recording was full of stammers and stutters, all kinds of goofing around, and had a slightly out-of-tune guitar. But Charlie said it had magic in the tracks. He was the man who'd discovered “Hey Baby” for Bruce Channel and “Maggie May” for Rod Stewart. You can't argue with that. So he said to put it on the album the way it was. I thought it would be the end of the band, but Charlie's instincts were right.

Before we released the album I tried to re-record “You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet” with a better vocal and a guitar riff that was in tune, but nothing worked. So I was forced to leave it as is.

When the album came out, it was “You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet” that got the most airplay, so Charlie insisted it be released as the first single off
Not Fragile.

“No way! I do not want this as a single.”

I heard it on the radio one day and was so embarrassed I turned it off. I just figured people would hear how bad the vocal was and
my slightly out-of-tune guitar. I was wrong. People loved that song and still do. It went to #1 in some twenty or so countries in 1974 and into 1975. We got gold records from places like Germany and Turkey. We rode that song for two years. It became BTO's only million-selling single.

“HEY YOU”

BTO's success was sweet.
Not Fragile
sold over two million copies and hit #1 on the Billboard album charts while “You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet” topped singles charts worldwide. Everything we touched turned to gold. But I wasn't looking to rub it in anyone's face. The music and the success spoke for themselves. And I did feel some satisfaction knowing that our hard work had paid off. I think I also dispelled the myth in the music business that you couldn't make it straight, drug-free. I was told when I left the Guess Who that I'd never make it in this business straight. I also showed Burton Cummings and company that I was still a force in music and couldn't be put down anymore.

So in “Hey You” there are some references to Burton and the Guess Who. When we played that song in recent years in our Bachman-Cummings shows, Burton introduces “Hey You” as a song written “when Randy wasn't happy with me.” I wrote it after “You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet” and
Not Fragile
both hit #1. “You say you want to change the world, it's all right, with me there's no regrets. It's my turn, the circle game has brought me here.” It was my turn to be on top. I certainly felt that way after reaching #1 again with a band that I had basically salvaged from nothing. We weren't any better players than the guys in the Guess Who, but we'd worked hard to get where we were against a lot of odds and in a much shorter period of time. So I deserved to gloat a bit after all the mud that had been slung at me by Burton Cummings in the media after I left the Guess Who. It was kind of a tongue-in-cheek poke at the Guess Who.

“LOOKING OUT FOR #1”

What do you do with a bunch of jazz chords from your mentor, Lenny Breau? You write a song with them. Like “Blue Collar” a few years earlier, “Looking Out for #1” was another change of pace from BTO on our fifth album, 1975's
Head On
. It was also a chance for me to stretch out a bit on guitar. It's still among my most requested live songs and made the transition to my jazz career.

The chord progression I used on “Looking Out for #1” came from the
Mickey Baker Guitar Book
that Lenny Breau had told me about when I was a teenager. All the jazz stuff I played in my career to that point, including “Undun” and “Looking Out for #1,” was either from Lenny or that Mickey Baker book. I was thrilled to play that song for Lenny much later. My verses on that song are the endings to just about every third jazz song. They're known as turn-around chord patterns because you reach the end of a verse and you turn around and start again. My chorus tag is from Ray Charles's “This Little Girl of Mine,” which the Everly Brothers had also recorded. When I told Lenny I had taken all these jazz turn-around chord patterns he'd taught me and put them into a song, he gave me this inquisitive look.

“How can you make a song that starts with an ending? Won't people think the song is over?” That was Lenny. The song was “Looking Out for #1.”

I didn't put a lot of deep thought into the lyrics. So many people have attached it to me and my own career, but I was just looking for something to sing over these chords and someone had mentioned something to me about sticking to your goals and following your dreams. I felt a little awkward at the end saying “I mean me,” but you can't look after others if you don't take care of yourself. The song has become associated with me, but not intentionally on my part. The funny thing is that when Mercury Records put out a
BTO Greatest Hits
CD, “Looking Out for #1”
was the first track on it. People buy it expecting to hear all this hard rock and instead they get this jazzy number.

THE THUNDERBIRD TRAX

Burton Cummings and I got back together in 1987 to see if we could still collaborate. The tracks we recorded were very much of their time and sound pretty good years later.

In the late 80s Burton Cummings and I had been invited to the BMI awards in New York. We walk in and there's Yoko Ono accepting John Lennon's awards, and Leiber and Stoller—the great songwriting duo for Elvis, the Coasters, and the Drifters— receiving awards. The room was full of all these great writers, and Burton and I looked at each other as if to say, “Do we belong here?!” Then we were up onstage and all these great songwriters we revered are giving us a standing ovation for “These Eyes,” our first big song. Afterwards everyone kept telling us, “Why don't you guys get back together and try it again?” I'd been out with BTO touring with Van Halen for ten and a half months. Now, when you play every night and you're doing sound checks and jamming with Eddie Van Halen, you really keep your chops up. I was playing really hot guitar at that point. So Burton and I decided to see if we still had the magic.

We got together at his place in L.A. and wrote a couple of songs, and then he came up to my place in White Rock, B.C., to write some more. He drove up from L.A. in this 1965 black Thunderbird. He pulled into my driveway in that cool car and I just went “Wow! Cool!” We spent our days in my front-yard tool shed—I'd had it converted in order to get away from my kids and write and record—working on songs and recording demos of them. We recorded ten songs. I played all the guitars, Burton did all the keyboards, and either I added bass or Burton played keyboard bass. We used a drum machine.

We sent out tapes of these songs to all the major labels, people like Clive Davis, Mo Ostin, and all the big shots. The response
was generally “We love you guys and we love your stuff but who's gonna play it?” This was in the days before CDs and classic rock radio and all that. Everybody was saying, “Nobody wants all these classic rock dinosaurs.” So we didn't get a record deal.

I moved a few times after that and the masters of those tracks somehow got lost in the shuffle. I'd given Burton a copy on cassette, and he'd thrown it in the trunk of his T-bird and driven back down to L.A. A few years later Burton called me and said he was moving a lot of his stuff back to Winnipeg. He'd bought a house in the city's classiest neighbourhood, Tuxedo. Then he said, “I'm selling one of my Thunderbirds. Do you want the black one?” Of course I said yes. When it arrived at my house I figured that instead of just driving it I should get it restored. So I called the Thunderbird Club in Vancouver and spoke to this wonderful guy named Bert who restored it for me. While he was doing the restoration, he handed me a box of stuff that he'd found in the car—stuff that falls out or is thrown in the back seat—and in the box among the pencils, tire gauge, manual, and candy wrappers was a little tape. I had mixed the songs on a Hi 8 movie-camera tape because at the time that was the only thing that was digital. I called my bass player, Richard Cochrane, who'd since bought my Hi 8 tape player from me, but he'd sold it to another guy who in turn had sold it. But finally we traced it back. When I got hold of it I put this little tape on, and it was the lost masters for those Bachman-Cummings sessions in my tool shed. For our 2006 Bachman-Cummings tour we released these tracks and called the CD
The Thunderbird Trax.
We quickly got some photos taken of the T-bird for the cover, Burton and I both wrote some liner notes, and we released it ourselves, no record label. We sold it at our concerts with the merchandise and it sold out almost immediately.

My Picks

“AMERICAN DREAM” by Bachman-Cummings (on
The Thunderbird Trax
)

“BLUE COLLAR” by BTO

“GIMME YOUR MONEY PLEASE” by BTO

“HEY YOU” by BTO

“LET IT RIDE” by BTO

“LOOKING OUT FOR #1” by BTO

“TAKIN' CARE OF BUSINESS” by BTO

“YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING YET” by BTO

Close Encounters of the Six-String Kind, Part 2

FESTIVAL EXPRESS

I was back home in Winnipeg in the summer of 1970 after leaving the Guess Who when the Festival Express came to town. It was a tour of the hottest acts in rock music at the time, who were travelling across Canada on a specially equipped Canadian National Railway chartered train. The lineup included the Band, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Mountain, Ian and Sylvia, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and Eric Andersen, among others. The whole thing was organized by promoter Ken Walker and backed by Thor Eaton of the Eaton's department store dynasty. The train stopped in Winnipeg for a concert on Canada Day, July 1, 1970. I wasn't booked or anything, but I played Festival Express in Winnipeg. I just walked onstage between acts while they were setting up equipment and did a brief acoustic interlude. No one really announced me. I just came out assuming people in Winnipeg would know who I was. Unfortunately, I don't think they did for the first few minutes. Then someone shouted out, “Hey, it's Randy Bachman.”

I was so nervous that I ended up spelling “American woman” wrong. I was doing the “I say A, M, E …” and I missed a letter. I was going to do a whole mini set, but I got so flustered by that flub that I walked off halfway through. I was just out of my element. I wasn't a solo acoustic performer and I didn't have a band. It was embarrassing. But I'm not sure anyone really knew who I was, so when I left I don't think anyone noticed or cared. I came back out later and joined Delaney and Bonnie onstage along with Leslie West for their big jam at the end of their set.

I also jammed on the train in this elegant parlour car. I was sitting there with Jerry Garcia and other members of the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Delaney and Bonnie and their band, guys from the Band, Leslie West from Mountain. Players would wander into the room, pull up a chair, plug into one of the little amps they had or sit at the drum kit in the corner, and just join in the flow of the ongoing jams. I played all this rambling blues rock music. The smoke was so thick I opened a window and sat beside it. Guys were passing joints around, but I'd just say “No thanks” and it would get passed to the next guy. As the drugs and booze circulated around the room the playing got slower, lazier, and sloppier. But I was so charged to be playing with these people that my adrenaline was pumping. I just wanted to play with anybody, and since I'd left the Guess Who I hadn't played with anyone. I overheard someone say, “Who's the guy by the window with all the energy?” I was pumped while they were stoned.

THE BEE GEES

Way back in early '73, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (me, Fred Turner, and my brothers Tim and Robbie) was just starting to happen. Our first album was out but we didn't have any hits yet. So we were thrilled to be invited to play on
The Midnight Special,
a Friday late-night rock 'n' roll concert-type show. The Bee Gees were hosting that night. So we arrived with our gear for the
load-in during the night only to have the guys from the show tell us, “Okay, you have to be back here by six-thirty in the morning.”

“What? I thought this was a late-night show?!”

So they tell us, “Yeah, it is. All the kids come in around five-thirty in the evening and the stars come soon after. But all the lesser-known artists have to come in a lot earlier and tape their spots. Then they edit it into the show and make it look like it's live in front of the audience.” A lot of people don't realize that sometimes what they're watching is fake. I've been on television shows where we've had to lip-synch our songs on contrived sets in front of a fake audience. I've learned to expect anything in the entertainment business.

Then they add, “Oh, and by the way, there won't be anybody else here, so just come in and mime to your songs and we'll tape them.”

So we get to our hotel, catch maybe three or four hours sleep, and come back to the television studio for six-thirty in the morning to tape our songs.