By Paul Freeman [2001 Interview]

He has created some of the most memorable riffs in rock history. Guess Who? It’s Randy Bachman.

Emerging from the edge of the Great Plains of Canada, The Guess Who, co-founded by Bachman, proved to be a powerhouse in their native land. Then they exploded onto the U.S. charts with 1965’s “Shakin’ All Over.” With lineup changes - including the arrival of charismatic new lead singer/songwriter Burton Cummings - they tore up the charts in the late 60s and early 70s. Hits included “These Eyes,” “Undun” and “Laughing.”

Bachman, who co-wrote many of the band’s top tunes, added classic rock guitar fire to such numbers as “American Woman,” “No Sugar Tonight” and “No Time.” But his Mormon beliefs conflicted with the sex and drugs lifestyle that so often went with the era’s rock ’n’ roll. So he left the band.

He went on to form Brave Belt and then Bachman-Turner Overdrive, creating such mid-70s smashes as “Takin’ Care of Business,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” and “Lookin’ Out For Number One.”

Now a septuagenarian, Bachman remains active and creative. He continues to tour. His most recent album, as of this writing, is 2015’s “Heavy Blues,” which features his blues-rock originals with appearances by friends Neil Young, Joe Bonamassa, Jeff Healey, Robert Randolph and Peter Frampton. Bachman hosts the CBC radio show “Vinyl Tap.”

We spoke with Bachman in 2001, when he was in the midst of a Guess Who reunion tour.

POP CULTURE CLASSICS:
So this is actually the first time this lineup has toured the U.S. since 1970?

RANDY BACHMAN:
Yeah, some of us have never played together before [laughs]. Bill Wallace [bass player] and I have never played together. He joined the band after I left. I left in 1970. Bill joined after that. Donnie McDougall [guitarist] has played in my band, the Randy Bachman Band, for the last five years. And Burton [Cummings] and Garry [Peterson, drummer] have played together. So there have been mutations of different groups of us together, but so this is like kind of an all-star team in a way, of real Guess Who members, who legitimately played on lots of albums and toured for years.

PCC:
The “Running Back Thru Canada” reunion tour was a sensation. How have things been going in the U.S.?

BACHMAN:
Just as incredible as Canada. We’re quite amazed at the audience response, at the age range of the audience and how they literally know every word of every song we sing.

PCC:
What is the age range? How young are some of the fans?

BACHMAN:
We’re seeing kids in their early teens. I mean there are little kids there, who I guess somebody’s brought. A 10-year-old kid’s not coming to the concert on their own. But backstage, we’ve met some people, maybe an hour, an hour-and-a-half after the gig, because we hang around sometimes. And there’d be like some stragglers at the back door and Burton and I would go sign autographs, because we know we’re not going to get deluged by hundreds. And we talk to them. And they’re like teenage girls, 15, 16, 17.

You’d say, ‘“Who brought you here? Your older brother? Your father?” “No.” “Well, why’d you come?” “Because we like that band. We like your songs.” “Oh, really, what else do you like?” “Well, we like The Doors and The Guess Who and Creedence Clearwater Revival. And then we like Britney Spears and Madonna and Smashing Pumpkins.” So they like this older stuff, I guess, because it’s melodic rock music.

PCC:
Did you have any sense, when you were creating the music, that it would be timeless?

BACHMAN:
No. And we played Denver, Red Rocks, we had a sellout there. The average age of the audience looked to be 22, 23. Like a college crowd. And then two days later and a few days before, the average age looked to be 38 or 40. Like in the Midwest, Quad Cities, Illinois and stuff. So we still see young and old. But the average age seems to change a lot.

PCC:
“American Woman,” has that taken on new life these days, with all that’s happening?

BACHMAN:
Yeah, it has. We did it shortly after the disaster. We were in Manhattan, when the Trade Center got hit. So it was tough to get out of there. We managed to get out the next day, drove to Boston and played. And Burton basically said, “We’re going to do a song now that’s how we felt 31 years ago during the Vietnam War. But it still applies today. But think of it as if the terrorists are listening to it, as if we’re directing this at the terrorists.” So then the lines, “American woman, stay away from me… Let me be,” the crowd went crazy. They loved it. It turned the meaning around.

We do “Share the Land” at the end. It’s like a whole new meaning. When I do “Takin’ Care of Business,” it’s like a whole new meaning. The audience at the end are chanting “USA… TCB. USA… TCB.” It’s quite moving.

PCC:
When you guys began this reunion, did things click into place immediately or did it take a while?

BACHMAN:
No, it was absolutely immediate. We didn’t really plan a reunion, so to speak. We got a call to re-form to play the Pan-American Games closing ceremony in August of ’99, in our hometown of Winnipeg. We had to do four songs. So that was no big deal. We all had different agendas and itineraries. We made a hole to go to Winnipeg for a week, rehearse for four or five days, just have dinner together and pick up on old times and do the gig at the Pan-Am Games. And it was just incredible. We wanted more playing together. We felt a connection with each other and with the audience that can’t be put into words, but just felt really like going home. It was a great feeling. So we agreed to get back together and play.

And the fans in Winnipeg felt cheated. They paid a lot of money to go the closing ceremonies and saw four songs, which was all we contracted to do. So the deal was struck to go back the following year, which was just last year, on Canada Day, July 1st, to play 2001 Canada Day, at the brand new baseball stadium opening in Winnipeg. And we recorded it live, video and audio, as a live album. And the date sold out in about 15 minutes. And we were stunned. It’s 18,000-plus seats. And so House of Blues, who was putting it on, said, “This was an incredible response. Why don’t we try this in Toronto?” And we said “Okay.” So they put a show on sale in Toronto, same thing, 18,000 people, it sold out in 10 or 15 minutes. So they said, “Let’s try this across Canada.” So we ended up going across Canada and having absolute sellouts everywhere and did 48 or 50 shows, all last summer. And we had callbacks to go back in the fall of places we missed during the summer. So we had a great year in Canada.

PCC:
In Canada, it really goes beyond stardom, it’s more like icon status with Guess Who.

BACHMAN:
It is. It was more like a celebration of being Canadian, all the people coming. We actually had songs that they could celebrate, that they had first dated to, first made out to in a car. It was their wedding song, it was their fight song, when they were in football or basketball. Or if they went to war, it was their war song, like a lot of Gulf War guys used “American Woman” or “Takin’ Care of Business” or “Roll on Down the Highway” as their fight song. So every song has a different meaning to different people.

PCC:
There are many internationally known Canadian artists now. That wasn’t the case when you started out. Do you feel like you opened a lot of doors?

BACHMAN:
Yeah, I have to in all honesty and modesty say yeah, we did open some doors [laughs]. It took us a long time. It took us eight or nine years to finally have that big break. But once we paved that road out of Canada, it’s been traveled on by many other people.

PCC:
Once you first got together with Burton Cummings, when he joined the band, was the chemistry right there? How did that magic work?

BACHMAN:
Yeah, it was there immediately with him. He’s kind of yin to my yang. And when we’re writing songs or playing together on stage, there’s a certain complement we have, bouncing off each other. The chemistry is undeniable and it’s kind of like a Jagger-Richards or a Tyler-Perry thing, you know?

PCC:
And it’s still there today?

BACHMAN:
Yeah, it’s there every night.

PCC:
And your decision to leave the band in 1970, Burton has said that the difference in your lifestyles spurred that along. He was a wild man and you had different values at that point.

BACHMAN:
Yeah, there was that difference way back then. You find that as people mature and get older, they get more and more alike. Like when you’re really young, you might say, “I don’t like jazz. I don’t like classical music. Or “I don’t like religion.” Or “I don’t like working out.” Or “I don’t want to eat meat” or something [laughs]. As you get older, everyone goes through the same thing in life, but at different times in their life, at different stages. After a certain while, you experience everything and you get back to back to your own sense of home kind of values and find that you’re still pretty similar.

PCC:
So things now work well, comradeship-wise, as well as musically?

BACHMAN:
Yeah, well, we wouldn’t be together, if we weren’t getting along or having fun. When we go on stage every night, there’s an absolute joy when we all play together. We hear the sound that we create together and it’s quite magical to us. And it’s addictive. We want to keep doing that. And what’s really addictive is the audience’s response. It’s absolutely the best drug that could ever exist - playing a song and having people laughing, crying, dancing, singing, playing air guitar and air drums and creating this moment in people’s lives, especially now, where they’re reliving happier times.

PCC:
The Guess Who songs, though they all have the distinctive group sound, there’s a great variety woven in there, musically. Is that something you were consciously striving for?

BACHMAN:
No, it’s just, back in the 60s, when Burton and I were learning how to write songs, we were copying, even back in the 60s, if you look at The Rolling Stones, and basically we were copying The Beatles and The Stones… and The Beach Boys. The Beach Boys did a surf song and then they did “Surfer Girl.” Then there was “Good Vibrations” and I don’t know what that is - it’s slow, it’s fast and it’s like a mini-symphony. Then they would do “Surfin’ U.S.A.” And The Beatles would go from “Michelle” to “I Saw Her Standing There.” And even The Stones did “Ruby Tuesday” and ballads with string quartets. Bands then did anything they wanted.

They weren’t pigeonholed into having a certain sound, like U2 or Garbage. They have a certain sound and they kind of stay with it, even though U2 tries and they do a very good job of bringing in other elements. I just thought the bands were a lot more adventurous in the 60s and we kind of come from that. I would liken seeing our show now to seeing The Beatles. Every song is just a total different aural picture and soundscape than the previous one.

And having Burton Cummings being able to move around on stage, from playing piano on one song to playing guitar in another song to nothing in the next song, maybe just a harmonica or a flute solo, adds and subtracts from the band’s sound. It makes the band kind of change. Sometimes we sound like a three-piece band, like a power trio. And then it’s all guitars and it’s more like a Buffalo Springfield thing. And then sometimes it’s a Hohner piano and it’s like a Doors thing. And sometimes it’s the other piano, that’s the Guess Who, Elton John, Little Richard sound. So the sound kind of changes with what instrument Burton is playing… or not playing.

PCC:
And your own guitar sounds seem to incorporate a lot of different influences.

BACHMAN:
Yeah, I go through a myriad of different tonalities. And throughout the show I also do four BTO songs, which also gives The Guess Who show a nice little detour. It’s my Joe Walsh moment, so the fans get to hear a couple of things I did on my own with Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

PCC:
And you’ve got Joe Cocker with you on this tour. That must be a good balance.

BACHMAN:
Yeah, Joe Cocker is the perfect balancing act for this - you know the scales of justice? This is the scales of rock ’n’ roll [laughs]. He brings the bluesy, R&B, soul side of pop music, because he’s had a lot of hits, a lot of, lot of hits. And we bring kind of the, I don’t know, commercial guitar, more innocent side to pop music, not soulless, we do have some sort of soul [chuckles].

It’s a great night for the audience to sit through, a 30-year musical journey of all your greatest moments. I love walking in halfway through Joe’s set, which we do every night and just standing there, listen to him hit the scream in “Little Help From My Friends” and then the high note in “You Are So Beautiful to Me.” When he hits it, they go crazy [laughs]. It’s exactly what is expected. So it’s really a fun night.

PCC:
And The Guess Who touring, is it open-ended? Do you hope it will continue for quite a while?

BACHMAN:
Well, we all made a three-to-five-year pact when we started. And we’re kind of in year two now, so we still have a ways to go. We hope to get an offer from a label somewhere, saying, “Do a new record.” And get a new producer like Matt Serletic, who did Santana or Glen Ballard, who did Alanis, some new hip guy, who’s late 30s, early 40s, who understands us and our music, but who has the connection to modern rock and radio. Pairing us with a guy like that to produce or co-produce with us and getting new product out there, like Aerosmith did.

PCC:
Are you putting together material?

BACHMAN:
We haven’t, but there’s been no real incentive to take it any farther than dabbling. I mean, the incentive will be a record contract, a release date and a studio date and then we back that up to Burton and I getting together, putting together songs and pieces. We’re trying to get through this tour and then rest and catch up. And then look at next year. And maybe that’s when we’ll do a new studio album. So we’re just kind of doing one thing at a time.

The minute anybody says, “We don’t like this anymore,” if we all just look at it and say, “This isn’t fun,” well, we’ll just pack it in. We could pack it in at any time or keep it going. So other than the daily gripes and complaints of being on the road, being away for too long, too many hotels and too many fast food restaurants, we basically are all grooving on this and really liking it and never ever in our lives expected this. We’re all in our fifties. We never ever expected to even play together again, never mind have a successful Canadian tour and now an American tour and an album [“Running Back Thru Canada”] out that is triple-platinum in Canada, coming out in the States in a couple of weeks. We never ever thought this was going to happen. So we’re just surprised at the ride, enjoying it for as long as we can and seeing where it’s going to take us.

PCC:
You mentioned the commerciality of the band. The fact that the songs were so commercial, that you had so many radio hits, did that detract from the critical acceptance at some point?

BACHMAN:
Well, way back in the late 60s, we got panned by a lot of the press as being too bubblegum and too commercial. Looking back at it now, those bubblegum, commercial songs are why we’re here. And the bands that were so hip back then, with their underground songs, everyone’s forgotten about. So it was really the commercial songs that have lasted.

We played Denver at the front end of this tour. And it was quite a lovefest. And the newspaper said it was like the Grateful Dead… with hits. We have all these people, there’s people here now from Africa, who have been at the last four gigs and they flew over here just to see us. And they’ve been to St. Louis, Chicago, they’re coming to Milwaukee tonight. There’s other people, like from Texas, following us around and some people from Australia.

There are these Guess Who fans, who, I guess, on the internet, all share and all pool their airline points to have some of these fans coming. A lot of these people have been communicating on the internet for years and never got to meet. So it’s not like a dating service, it’s like a Guess Who fan service [laughs]. They’ve been talking to someone and trade like an Australian release for an African release or whatever or a French or German release. They’re trading singles and vinyl. And then all of a sudden, we’re touring and then they all come over and they meet at our concerts. It’s kind of a weird thing going on with the internet.

PCC:
And there’s a box set on the way.

BACHMAN:
Yes, we want to have a box set. I’ve released an album of the early years of The Guess Who [“This Time Long Ago,” covering 1967-68]. It’s just before we got really big. The first version of “These Eyes” is in there. And “We’re Coming to Dinner” and “Friends of Mine,” that later on were on our first big “Wheatfield Soul” album with “These Eyes.” That’s really quite an important filling-in-the-blank thing for Guess Who fans. So we are looking at a box set which would incorporate a lot of stuff. I mean, we could pretty much be like Neil Young, who I think is putting a like a trunk of 40 CDs. We could pretty much put out a good 10 or 12 or 15 CDs

PCC:
With all of this renewed interest in the band, do you kind of get a different perspective on the whole thing, yourself?

BACHMAN:
I do. It’s just kind of amazing. The band never really had a big press agent. Or the right manager way back then. We have the right manager now. But we didn’t back then. And a lot of bad decisions were made. What really amazes us is the resilience and the endurance of the songs and the fans, that we even have a fan base, that we can go, like two days ago, playing Chicago and have a sellout. And play Pine Knob in Detroit, which is huge, 18,000 people, and have a sellout. And Red Rocks and have a sellout. There’s no hit records. In fact the advertising in a lot of the places we’ve been has been kind of lax and lacking. And we still are getting great crowds. And it just amazes us. And you know, the street talk - the new street is the internet - and the talk on there, is really hot about the band. You can’t buy that kind of press. You gotta go out and earn it. We earn it every night, going out and playing and the fans post their own reviews and it just perpetuates itself. There are people coming to gig after gig after gig, following us around.

Even the young kids are saying, “It’s so great to see a band that can actually play rock ’n’ roll.” No drum machines. It’s almost, in a way, like seeing old blues guys. I think classic rock is now a respectable genre, whereas it was kind of looked down upon four or five years ago, that, “Oh, so and so are back together - for the money. They’re all blown and they’re all finished.” It’s not that way anymore. There’s a certain respectability about guys getting back in and playing this music that is so endearing to everyone’s life. There’s a whole new respect for it.

Somebody told me yesterday there’s now 23 Guess Who songs being played in high rotation on over 400 stations in the U.S. People are calling, wanting to hear it. It’s just good songs, played really well. We’ve been playing them for 30 years. And everyone is a much better musician than they used to be. And we’re much more grateful than we used to be. We took a lot for granted back then, being young guys traveling around. To look back now and say, “Wow, we wrote and played some great songs. And we have this base of fans, which you can’t buy, you’ve got to earn it. And we have earned it. So let’s go out and celebrate with these fans.” It really is a big deal to us.

For the latest news on this artist, visit www.randybachman.com.