Randy Bachman (9 page)

We were friends with a guy named Bob Burns who hosted an
American Bandstand
clone show in Winnipeg called
Teen Dance Party,
which was recorded live at CJAY TV studio at Polo Park every Saturday afternoon at two. Kids would dance to the latest hit records that Bob would spin, and they'd have a local band on from time to time. I remember Neil Young telling me he'd gone to
Teen Dance Party
because his girlfriend at the time was a dancer with the Pepsi Pack, but that he didn't go on the show because he didn't know how to dance or was too self-conscious. We played the TV show a couple of times when we were the Expressions.

So one time, it was in late December 1964, we convinced Bob to let us into the CJAY TV Channel 7 building late one night so we could record there. It was too cold and too expensive for us to travel to Kay Bank studios in Minneapolis. We'd played a community club gig that evening, and so it was the middle of the night when we got to the station. We bribed the janitor a few bucks and paid a recording engineer to come in. We set up our gear in the middle of this empty studio where they hosted
Teen Dance Party
. For the TV show they had this big black velvet curtain to hide all the wires and technical stuff. So we pulled that around us to deaden the sound. In the middle we had one microphone, the one Bob used to announce the records he would play. We set up around this one mike and recorded our songs. Jim Kale had a Fender Concert amp that all the instruments were plugged into. No separation at all: my lead guitar, Chad's rhythm guitar, Jim Kale's bass, and a contact microphone stuck on the back of Bob Ashley's piano. We did one take of “Shakin' All Over,” and when we listened back, the drums were too loud. So we went back to the studio floor and moved Garry Peterson's whole drum kit a couple of feet back from the one microphone.

We did several takes before we got the sound right. It was just a monophonic one-channel tape recorder, so when we'd come up to the booth to hear the take, the engineer had to patch the cords from record to playback. This happened several times. We'd record, put our instruments down, and go up to the booth to listen to the playback. But on this one take the engineer forgot to patch the cords back, and what we heard was the same sound Elvis used to get on his early Sun records: a slapback echo. That was the sound we wanted, and that became the take we kept. It became the sound of “Shakin' All Over.”

When we sent the tape in to George Struth at Quality Records, he decided to simply credit the group as “Guess Who” so that radio programmers would give the song a spin. Canadian recordings
didn't get much airplay in those days, so George knew he needed to trick programmers into playing the record. The deception worked. “Shakin' All Over” became a national hit under our new name, the Guess Who. It was Top 10 or better right across Canada. Following up a hit, though, is always difficult. You're only as good as your latest record, and while our subsequent releases did well in Canada, none matched “Shakin' All Over” in excitement and appeal.

“HIS GIRL”

In 1966 Burton Cummings joined the Guess Who and, soon afterwards, Chad Allan left. He had problems with his throat and he had problems with Burton. They didn't get along. That meant Burton was the lead singer now. We were given a song to record by Whitey Haines, the head of BMI in Canada, who told us it was going to be a hit. We'd been touring one-horse towns in Saskatchewan all summer for $400 a night but had little money left by the end of the summer to pay for a recording session. So I took what money I had and went to the horse-racing track and won enough to pay for a session. Off we went to Minneapolis to cut “His Girl
,
” written by Canadian songwriter Johnny Cowell. “His Girl” marked a change in our usual choice of singles because it was a sweet, soft ballad and we were a rockin' band.

We brought along Gar Gillies and his trombone. Gar was a well-known big-band trombone player who we knew because he made our amplifiers for us. It started out with me getting Gar, who owned an appliance store, to fix my amplifiers when I'd blow them out. We were playing larger and larger venues, and our Fender amplifiers just couldn't cut it. So Gar started souping up my Fender amp before making amps for us. This was the start of Garnet Amplifiers, which became the sound of the Guess Who, BTO, and the sound of Winnipeg.

Gar played the trombone solo in the middle of “His Girl
.
” The record was a hit across Canada in the fall of 1966. In early
1967 it was licensed to King Records in the U.K. They took our three-track tape and sweetened the recording by adding strings, glockenspiel, and additional guitar. That became the first Winnipeg record to make it onto the U.K. record charts. At the end of the song, Burton Cummings does his little Sam Cooke thing like from the end of “You Send Me,” that “Oh la ta ta ta ta ta ta a a.”

When “His Girl” made it into the U.K. Top 50 we thought we were going to be stars. In our minds, as I said earlier, the streets of London were paved with gold. We borrowed a ton of money, bought all new gear and travel cases, all new stage clothes, and flew everything to London only to discover we had no contracts and bookings. It was a disaster. But we survived and “His Girl” became a Top 20 hit across Canada, marking another important step in our progress from local cover band to international recording artists.

“THIS TIME LONG AGO”

We took a huge gamble flying off to London in February 1967. We expected a big welcome at the London airport. Instead there was nothing, not even any contracts for us. It was a costly mistake, but we did manage to record four songs with producer Tony Hiller. Tony worked for Mills Music, which had made a lot of money off our recording of “Shakin' All Over.” He came to our hotel, where we laid out our dire situation, and he offered us an opportunity to cut some demos for him.

Tony took us to Regent Sound Studios in Soho to record two Mills Music songs written by British songwriters Jimmy Stewart and Jerome Langley, “This Time Long Ago” and “Miss Felicity Grey,” which we thought were pretty decent. While we were recording at Regent Sound, I happened to look up at the acoustic tiles on the walls and spotted a little pattern where the dots had been punched out, creating a funny little caricature of a person. I followed the dots and at the bottom was a signature: J. Lennon. I
asked the studio engineer if the Beatles had ever recorded there, since they usually recorded at Abbey Road studios, and he told me they were indeed once there recording some demos. So I asked him if I could have the tiles, but because they were tongue and groove, I'd have had to take the whole wall. Still, it was pretty cool recording where the Beatles had once been.

We recorded over two days, just before we had to go home. We laid down the tracks on the first day and the overdubbing the next. We were nervous being in a London studio, but as soon as the engineer counted down the track, we just did our thing very professionally. Tony Hiller thought we were great. We were already better than the average British band because of our years of experience. Cy Payne, the arranger, wrote a score for flugelhorn and added glockenspiel and a few other things to improve the tracks. Despite our initial dislike of the flugelhorn, it made the record sound like the Fortunes, a British Invasion band.

Tony took the tapes to Fontana Records, who worked out a licensing deal with Quality Records back in Canada to release them in the U.K. The singles did nothing over there, but “This Time Long Ago” became a hit for us that summer back in Canada. The tracks we cut in London with Tony served as the all-important transition from the derivative sound of our previous recordings to a more professional and original sound. Tony Hiller has since become a very good friend of mine and I see him whenever I'm in London.

“PRETTY BLUE EYES”

This was the worst record of all time by the Guess Who, trust me. We'd recorded some songs in England that we thought were pretty good, so we wanted to break our contract with Quality Records Canada and sign with someone else bigger. We thought we'd record a song originally done by Steve Lawrence called “Pretty Blue Eyes” and do it really, really badly. Our plan was to send Quality something that was so bad they'd say to us, “We're
never going to release this and you're off the label.” So we went into Gar Gillies's Garnet Amplifiers shop on Ferry Road in the St. James suburb of Winnipeg. Gar made all our amplifiers for us.

Gar had an old Robertson tape recorder with two inputs and we had a couple of mikes. To make it sound really bad we had Burton sing through a trumpet bell so that it sounded like a megaphone, and instead of a bass drum we had a Coke bottle and someone blowing into it going “Whoooo.” It was like a jug band. We had a real cowbell in there and guys moooing. For the cymbals Gary used an electric drill that went
Rrreeeeerrrr! Rrreeeeerrr!
So it sounded like
Boom Boom Rrreeeeerrr!
Burton Cummings did his best Walter Brennan impersonation from
The Real McCoys
TV show and those old cowboy movies. We recorded it with this crazy stuff, and the middle is just a train wreck with all these noises and Gar Gillies playing trombone.

This was the Guess Who trying to get out of our recording contract. So we recorded it and prepared to send the tape to Quality Records. But we didn't have any money in case they decided to sue us, so we had second thoughts about sending it in. We chickened out. So we recorded a good version without all the nonsense and sent both to them. They liked the good version and released it with the bad version on the B-side, and it made the charts across Canada. In the end we failed to break our contract with Quality Records.

“THESE EYES”

The record that changed it all for us was, of course, “These Eyes.” I wrote the piano part for “These Eyes” in Regina one night waiting to take Lorayne Stevenson, my future wife, on a date. That was back in the summer of 1966 and we hadn't known each other long. She wasn't ready, so as I waited and noodled around on her parents' piano in the living room, I came up with the chords. I'm not a piano player, but I sat down at the piano and I started playing these two chords, Dm7 to Cmaj7. I liked how
they sounded and decided I would write a song with those chords. The words I had were actually “These arms” with the line “These arms long to hold you.”

Burton Cummings and I used to meet every Saturday morning at his grandmother's house, Granny Kirkpatrick, on Bannerman Avenue in the North End of Winnipeg to write songs. We each kept these Hilroy notebooks with us all week and would jot down any ideas for songs we came up with. Then we'd show each other what we had and see if we could come up with a song. So Burton listened to my two chords and my words to “These Arms.” I also had the descending progression down to the A minor chord. He said, “Hmmm. Can we move that to the second line and make the first line ‘These eyes cry every night for you'?” Then we came up with “These arms long to hold you again.” He also had the long line “These eyes have seen a lot of loves but I'm never gonna see another love like I had with you.” It all fit together perfectly. And from that we wrote a song that would forever change our lives. “These Eyes” started out with a guy who could only play piano in the key of C, and that's why the beginning is so simple. That's all I could play on the piano.

In 1968 we took a demo of that song to Jack Richardson, the man who would become our record producer, in Toronto. He later took us to New York to record at A&R Studios with the great Phil Ramone and engineer Dave Greene. They didn't want the intro to be played on a full piano. They wanted something different, so Burton played it on his little Hohner electric piano which had a built-in tremolo. That became the opening and the signature sound of “These Eyes.”

Jack bought out our contract with Quality Records in Canada and signed us to RCA Records in New York. We actually didn't want “These Eyes” to be our first single with RCA. We saw ourselves as a rock 'n' roll band, not a smooth ballads band. We wanted a rocker like “When You Touch Me” as our first single off
Wheatfield Soul.
RCA and Jack Richardson wanted “These Eyes,”
and they won. Jack sat us all down and told us, “This is the best song on the album. You have no other chance. I've mortgaged my house for this.” He was right. RCA paid less than $10,000 for the
Wheatfield Soul
album with “These Eyes” on it. Don Burkhimer at RCA Records told me years later they would have paid ten times that because they believed in “These Eyes” being a hit. It became our first million-seller.

“LAUGHING”

After “These Eyes” became a huge hit, we still wanted to release a rocking song. Don Burkhimer at RCA instead pressured us for another soft pop song. He took us out to a New York deli and told us, “Just give us one more like ‘These Eyes' and you'll never have to work again the rest of your lives.”

Soon after that, in early 1969, I remember we were sitting on our tour bus waiting for the ferry to Vancouver Island. I really liked the opening minor chord strumming of the Bee Gees' “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” but instead of a minor chord I turned it into a major chord and just started playing the opening chord. We took the chord progression from the Dave Clark Five's “Because,” which was a fairly standard chord pattern used in lots of songs. Burton even used it later in “Stand Tall.” Then we added the background vocals pattern from the old Platters song “Twilight Time,” the ascending “ah's,” and put them in behind the lyrics. This was all done right on the spot sitting on the bus. That got us started. The rest of it was original, the idea of laughing at someone who broke your heart. We both loved Roy Orbison's hit song “Crying” and thought the idea of laughing was clever. We also liked the buildup in “Crying” where it starts quiet then builds to a crescendo. “Laughing” was finished in about thirty minutes. It was one of those songs written to order and gave us our second gold record. Sometimes songs can come so easily.