Randy Bachman (10 page)

“UNDUN”

It was in late 1968 and we'd been touring with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and Alice Cooper. We'd played a date together in San Francisco and were in Vancouver for another show. It was Saturday morning and I was sitting around in my hotel room listening to CKLG FM radio. FM radio was still fairly new and very adventurous. There were no formats; they played whatever they wanted, including long album tracks, jazz, blues, you name it. I'd been carrying these jazz chords around in my head for months. Burton Cummings and I had tried doing something with them, but we couldn't come up with anything. We couldn't think of any lyrics that fit. So I'm listening to CKLG when the deejay played Bob Dylan's “Ballad in Plain D,” and somewhere in all the lyrics Dylan sings, “She's come undone.” That was the spark I needed.

I immediately turned off the radio and started writing out lyrics to these jazz chords I'd had for months. I wrote all these verses, ten or twelve, and I played it later for Burton. He said, “Wow, that's great. Pick three verses and we'll record it.” We put it on the flip side of our second single, “Laughing,” and when that song began slipping from the charts some deejay flipped it over and “Undun” became a double-sided hit, pushing the single over the million-selling mark.

We actually re-recorded “Laughing” and “Undun” without RCA's approval. According to our contract with them, we were required to record in their own studios. So we recorded our second album,
Canned Wheat,
with “Laughing” and “Undun” on it at their New York studio, but it was an old place and the technology was outdated. It had giant studios with high ceilings for orchestras. But for drums the sound was awful. Garry Peterson would hit his drum, and all you'd hear was a tinny little click rather than a solid thump. No matter how much we tried, we couldn't get a sound we liked. Because
Wheatfield Soul
had been an independent
production we could go wherever we wanted, and so we'd cut it at A&R Studios in New York. Although the sound we'd gotten was fantastic, RCA wouldn't let us go back there. So now we had ten days to record
Canned Wheat,
and we weren't happy with the sound. We'd already tried “Laughing” and “Undun” and didn't like it at all. We wanted to go back to A&R Studios with Phil Ramone to do the album.

So Jack Richardson secretly booked us into A&R for a late-night session. We paid for it ourselves. We went in, laid down two songs, “Laughing” and “Undun,” then went back to RCA studios and pretended to be recording. Then we said, “We're done the album.” You can tell when you listen to those two songs on
Canned Wheat
that they stand out in terms of sound from the other tracks. When RCA found out about our clandestine recording there was nothing they could do about it because it was too late. The album was completed. But they heard the obvious difference in the two tracks. You can still hear it. That's why those two songs are so good.

“Undun” gave the Guess Who that rarest of accomplish-ments: a double-sided hit single. Not a lot of recording artist have achieved that. But we were still pegged as a soft pop band and we wanted to rock.

“NO TIME”

In 1967 Neil Young's band, the Buffalo Springfield, released their second album,
Buffalo Spring field Again
. Burton Cummings and I took that album and listened to it over and over, dissecting the music. As songwriters, that's what you do and what we did. You listen to what others are doing and you're influenced by that. We kind of wanted to do country rock like the Buffalo Springfield. They were one of the first bands doing that and they were great. The Guess Who started out as a rockin' band, although our first single, “These Eyes,” was a ballad. But we still wanted to rock and have a rock hit record. We wanted a Buffalo Springfield kind of song.

There was a cut on the second Springfield album called “Hung Upside Down” with a great guitar riff that Stephen Stills played. So I took that riff, turned it around, and came up with the intro riff to “No Time.” When we were in San Francisco, the whole Haight-Ashbury scene was happening. Besides all the hippies and flower power, we saw guys who looked like they wanted to run away from the States and come to Canada. These were peace-loving guys who didn't want to be sent over to Vietnam. We overheard some of them talking, and one guy said to another, “Where have you been? I haven't seen you for a while.” And the other guy replied, “I've been to the killing floor,” which was a term used in slaughterhouses or abattoirs. We heard that phrase over and over, and finally we asked someone what it meant and they told us it was slang for the Vietnam War, being sent to the killing floor. Burton Cummings and I put that in our song “No Time
.
” “No time for a gentle rain, no time for my watch and chain. No time for revolving doors, no time for the killing floor.” Basically it meant no time for the Vietnam War. This was before we cut “American Woman.”

Burton and I wrote that song together, and we liked it so much we not only included it on our second album but re-recorded it and put it on our third album,
American Woman.
“No Time” became a million-selling single for us in early 1970. What's interesting is that Mike Post, who writes television theme songs, uses the same chord progression from “No Time” in the theme for the TV show
Law & Order.
So I hear that ten times a night on television. “No Time” bridged the gap for us, and we followed that with “American Woman
.
” That single and the album both went to #1.

“AMERICAN WOMAN”

I remember we were booked to play a gig in Kitchener, Ontario, in the late summer of 1969. But it wasn't a concert like the ones we were doing in those days, with just one set. This was a dance like in the old days, where we'd play three sets of dance music.
We were excited because we could play our Beatles, Doors, and Animals songs. So we'd been onstage for a while when I broke a guitar string on my Les Paul. In those days I didn't have a spare guitar or a guitar tech to change it for me. I had to do it myself. So I said to the guys, “We have to take a break.” The guys left the stage and I stayed there to change my string and tune it up. We would sometimes signal each other that the break was over by one of us going up onstage and starting to play the first song of the next set. We'd all recognize the number and come onstage to join the others. I started to play a chord pattern, “dum dum dadada dada dada dada dum dum dadada dada da dum,” and Garry Peterson and Jim Kale came onstage and joined right in behind me on the riff. We were looking to jam a bit. I started to solo over their rhythm then went back to the riff again. We just kept going and going and really digging it.

Burton Cummings was outside the arena having a cigarette when someone said to him, “Aren't you playing with the band?” He looked up and didn't recognize the song, so he ran up onstage yelling to me.

“What are we doing?!”

I replied, “We're jamming in E. Play something.”

Burton grabbed his harmonica and played a solo, then picked up his flute. Then he did a piano solo. I took another guitar solo. He came towards me onstage and I yelled to him, “Sing something!” As he stepped towards the microphone, the first words he uttered were “American woman, stay away from me.” Right off the top of his head. He sang it maybe four times, I soloed again, he sang it again, and we ended the song.

The place went absolutely nuts. We figured we had something with this jam, but we weren't sure what it was quite yet. It wasn't a song that Burton and I had sat down and written with verses and chorus. It was just a jam riff. We played it again at other gigs after that and it got better and better as we played it. When we went into the studio a few weeks later Burton strung together
lines like “war machines and ghetto scenes,” just rhyming words. I had part of the lead guitar line but didn't have the end. Burton had the final four-note riff for “New Mother Nature,” that “da do do da” line, so I just borrowed that. When I tried it in the studio, everybody dug it. But we couldn't pull the song together in the studio because it had been just a jam and it didn't have its own tempo yet. It was all over the place, speeding up, slowing down, stopping and starting. I remember we had a whole frustrating day of working at it in the studio.

Garry Peterson and I went in the next day and I just plugged my Stratocaster into a Fender amp with tremolo. It had a much cleaner sound. That seemed to get the groove going. Then Jim Kale added bass and Garry added some East Indian tabla drums that Jack Richardson brought in. That became the basic backing track. I overdubbed another guitar doing the lead using my 1959 Gibson Les Paul and Garnet Herzog. Then Burton put the words on. “American Woman” was born onstage but completed in the studio.

People always tell me what a really heavy song it is, almost a heavy metal guitar riff. But it's really not that heavy. I'm not using a two hundred–watt Marshall stack and grinding out these heavy power chords. It's a fairly light rhythm track. It's the thickness of the lead guitar lick that gives it the heavy sound, and Burton's vocals sound like he's yelling in defiance, as if he really means it: “American woman, stay away from me.”

The American woman we were singing about wasn't the average American girl on the street but the Statue of Liberty and that poster of Uncle Sam pointing and saying, “I want you!” So when that song became #1 we were labelled a protest band, but we were just a bunch of guys from the Canadian prairies.

A few months earlier we'd had a situation where U.S. authorities tried to draft us. We had green cards by then and were crossing the Manitoba–North Dakota border at Pembina. I remember the American customs guard telling us to pull in half a mile beyond the border under the sign saying Selective Service. Just before that
sign was a gas station, and since American gas prices were cheaper than Canada's at the time, we always filled up in the States. We drove in to fill up and started talking to the attendant. I asked him where the Selective Service building was.

He looked at me and replied, “You don't want to go there.” Then he told me that his son had been drafted and was fighting in Vietnam. “I suggest you turn around right now and go back up to Canada.”

So we did that, and didn't dare try to cross the same way again. Part of that might have been the sentiment behind “American Woman.” It was easier to say than “Uncle Sam stay away from me” or “Statue of Liberty stay away from me.” It was all unplanned. RCA used that imagery, though, in their promotion of the record: the Statue of Liberty with the face of an old woman superimposed over a New York alleyway with trash everywhere. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, so the timing was perfect.

“American Woman” stayed at #1 for three weeks on the U.S. national charts in May 1970. That year we sold more singles than any other rock act, and we sold more records than the entire Canadian recording industry combined to that point. “American Woman” was recently voted the greatest Canadian single of all time. I'm not surprised.

“NO SUGAR TONIGHT”

In early 1969, after playing a gig in San Francisco, I was in Berkeley, California, and had just bought a bunch of vinyl records. That's something I often did in different cities on tour. I'd be looking for unusual or hard-to-find albums. So I was taking these records back to my rental car when I saw three guys in black leather jackets walking towards me on the same side of the street. I was a little intimidated by this. They looked like guys from a biker gang, three rough, tough street guys and me, the lone Canadian. I'm six-foot-three but I certainly don't look threatening. Plus I'm a Canadian. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

As these guys walked along, people parted like waves, stepping aside to let them through. They were walking shoulder to shoulder and coming straight towards me. So I nonchalantly crossed over to the other side of the street, trying to avoid them, and they did the same, still bearing down on me. The three guys are getting closer and closer, giving me the eye. I could feel a confrontation coming.

Suddenly this battered little brown car pulls up in front of them. It's got dents in the front fender, a blue door, and the back window is all smashed like a spider's web held together by duct tape. This little woman steps out and starts yelling at one of these tough guys. The other two scatter; they don't want anything to do with this. She's ragging on this one guy who doesn't appear so tough now as he's standing there being chewed out by a tiny woman. He no longer looks menacing; he looks embarrassed by this woman tearing a strip off him.

“You're nothing but a no-good bum!” she's yelling. “You left me at home with the kids again. You're supposed to be looking for a job and here you are with your buddies checking out the girls.”

So he sheepishly goes around to the passenger-side door. Finally she says to him as he's getting in the car, “And baby, when you get home you ain't gettin'
no sugar tonight.
”

I wrote “No Sugar Tonight” as part of a unique collaboration. It was our producer Jack Richardson's idea to combine my song with a Burton Cummings song, so we got “No Sugar Tonight/ New Mother Nature.” But when it came time to pick a B-side for “American Woman,” Jack chose to chop Burton's song off and release “No Sugar Tonight” as a separate track. When “American Woman” started sliding from the charts, deejays flipped it over to find another hit. The
Billboard
record book shows that “American Woman/No Sugar Tonight” are the longest and shortest songs (double A-sides) to reach #1 in the charts.

My Picks

“HIS GIRL” by the Guess Who

“HUNG UPSIDE DOWN” by the Buffalo Springfield

“LAUGHING” by the Guess Who

“NO SUGAR TONIGHT” by the Guess Who

“NO TIME” by the Guess Who