Randy Bachman (5 page)

LONDON CALLING

When our record “His Girl” on the King label made the British record charts we were giddy with excitement. Bob Burns had been contacted by Phillip Solomon at King Records, and we were invited to go to London, our dream come true. It was February 20, 1967, and a typical snowy Winnipeg day, but we had a big send-off at Winnipeg airport, with all the TV and press covering our departure. Many of our contemporaries on the local music scene showed up to bid us good luck because we were living their
dreams. Naively, we thought we'd actually see Cliff Richard standing on a street corner or the Shadows and Beatles playing at the London Palladium. This was our Mecca. We couldn't wait to go over.

We borrowed money for airfare, fancy new stage clothes from the Stag Shop, and new equipment from Garnet, all totally financed. It cost a fortune to ship the gear over, but we figured we were about to hit the big time. The streets of London were paved with gold. We went expecting to become the new Beatles, but we were rewarded with being the new nothings. We had no contracts, no bookings, zilch. All that money spent for nothing. It left us $25,000 in debt.

We met some very undesirable and disreputable people there who tried to con us into signing a management and recording contract with them. On our first day in London, we went to the offices of King Records run by Phillip Solomon. He laid out his plan for us, which was no different from what most young, hungry, naive bands were offered in those days. The difference was that we'd already been through the mill with Scepter Records, so we were wary. It was a very one-sided contract that gave us nothing and gave them everything. They would put us on a weekly salary of £400 for the whole band. If we had hit records or toured, we'd still get the same salary and nothing more. I found out later that Van Morrison's band, Them, were signed to one of Solomon's contracts and never made a penny. It was presented to us as “Take it or leave it.” I looked at Jim Kale, who was doing a slow burn. We all knew without even discussing it what our response would be.

“We'll leave it.”

We got up and walked out. They thought they had us by dangling a British tour before our eyes. When we hit the street we looked at each other and realized, “What have we just done? We have no tour, no label, no money. Nothing.” Bob Burns had failed to secure any contracts before we left. Our management team
hadn't gotten anything in writing before we flew off to England. Our only saving grace was that we had return-trip tickets.

So there we were in London with nothing, jobless in the U.K. We had nothing to do—and yet we still had a wonderful time. We pooled all our money, which wasn't much, and rented one room at the Regent Palace Hotel in Piccadilly Circus. “Here we are in London, guys, let's make the most of it.” Since we had our return tickets, we knew we'd get home. So we walked around and saw as many bands as we could in all the clubs. It was an incredible time. Probably the best two weeks of my life up to that point.

It was the custom in English hotels to serve a full breakfast—bacon, sausages, eggs, kippers, toast, cereal, muffins, everything—so we befriended the Spanish maids who pushed the breakfast trolleys from room to room. When the morning serving was over they would bring the leftovers to us. We literally lived on cold bacon and toast, which we made into bacon sandwiches, for the two weeks we stayed there.

I had a subway map, and each day I'd venture out around London, walking, riding the tube, and observing London life. I went to Carnaby Street and Soho and checked out record shops. I just figured that I may never be in London again. I soaked up all the sights and sounds of the city and would return to the hotel each night exhausted and have a bacon sandwich.

Walking around Soho, we met other songwriters. We met a guy named Reginald Dwight, who later changed his name to Elton John. We met a Canadian songwriter named Ralph Murphy from Ottawa who is still my very good mate today. We had on these Canadian pins because people had told us before we left that we wouldn't want to be identified as Yanks. They didn't like Americans over there. So we had these pins on, and Ralph saw us, and we kind of latched onto each other. He took us to his publisher, Mills Music, who had coincidentally published “Shakin' All Over,” which had made a lot of money for them and Johnny Kidd's widow.

At Mills Music, the head of A&R, Tony Hiller, offered us a deal. If we would play for nothing on some demo sessions at Regent Sound Studios for other songwriters, he'd let us keep the tapes as our recordings. There was no money involved. It was just time in the studio. He also said we could record a couple of our own songs. We didn't have anything else to do, so we agreed. I quickly wrote a song for the sessions, “There's No Getting Away from You
,
” in kind of a Walker Brothers style that I credited to Spencer Charles. We'd brought the first Buffalo Springfield album with us, so we recorded Neil Young's “Flying on the Ground Is Wrong.” I'm pretty sure ours was the first cover of a Neil Young song.

After the two weeks, we came home to Winnipeg with our tails between our legs. We kind of snuck back into town and tried to avoid the humiliation of explaining what had happened, which was basically that nothing had happened. The one thing we had to boast about was that we had recorded in London.

Our other saving grace was that we brought back the latest sounds from the U.K. by groups like Cream and Jimi Hendrix. I took the first Hendrix record up to Doc Steen at CKRC and told him that this was what was happening over in England. He listened to it and then told me, “I can't play this on radio.” But we brought 1967 England to Winnipeg. We started playing this wild psychedelic stuff around the city and smashing our equipment like the Who. People thought we had lost our minds. Initially, audiences didn't like the music, but within a few weeks they were coming back to hear it again. We had smoke bombs going off, and I would ram my guitar through a fake Garnet speaker cabinet that our road manager, Russell Gillies, would re-cover the next day. The kids never knew because it all looked brand new when we started the night.

Gar Gillies, Russell's dad, owned Garnet Amplifiers in Winnipeg and built me a special pre-amp unit so that I could get all the distorted Hendrix and Clapton sounds. I named it the
Herzog, and I'd put it on full blast so that it would make howling feedback noises. Gar also made me a custom whammy bar for my guitar that was longer than the normal ones, like a propeller, and that allowed me to do the Hendrix sounds. The Herzog became my sound, the sound of “No Time” and “American Woman.” Over the years many guitar players have asked me how they could get a Herzog for themselves.

Soon deejays were hyping us on the air and there was a buzz going around about our new sound. “They're back from England! Come hear their new English sound!” We went from a few hundred curious people a night to thousands trying to get into the tiny little halls to see our incredible show. We were hip again because, just as years before in the Silvertones and Reflections, we were ahead of the pack in having access to English music before it hit these shores. Burton backcombed his hair like Hendrix, I had my Herzog and my whammy bar on my guitar sustaining and bending feedback notes, and all of a sudden we were heavy. Winnipeg had yet to witness any psychedelic music. Once again we were the trendsetters.

LET'S GO

Faced with an enormous debt from our U.K. trip, we got an offer to serve as the house band on the weekly CBC-TV after-school television show
Music Hop
. With the Guess Who as backing band and our former lead singer Chad Allan as host, the Winnipeg edition of the cross-Canada series was renamed
Let's Go
.

Before we got the CBC gig, the show's producer
,
Larry Brown, asked if we could read music. The routine was that each week the show's musical director, Bob McMullin, wrote out the music charts for the musicians to play. Bluffing, I said, “Yes, of course!” Garry Peterson and Burton Cummings could read music, but Jim Kale and I couldn't. As a band we learned everything by ear from records. That's the way every band did it. A few days before our scheduled audition, I called Bob McMullin and asked him how
he was progressing with the charts. He was nice enough to tell me both the titles he'd finished and not yet finished. So now that I knew the songs we had to play, I promptly went out and bought the records and called a band rehearsal, and we learned all the songs by ear. Two days later, when the music charts were placed in front of us at the CBC audition, we smiled at each other and began to play them. Not only did we play the songs perfectly, we sounded exactly like the records. Larry Brown came up to us and told us we had the gig.

It was hard work those two years. We even played the entire Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
album in one episode. But the $1100 per week pay went directly towards our debt from London, and in the end, every penny was paid back. There was another great benefit from doing the show, though.

At the start of the second season, Larry Brown approached Burton and me with a proposal. “This is the perfect opportunity for you guys to perform some original material. Why don't you write some songs, and if I like them, I'll let you do them on the show.” That's all the encouragement we needed. Burton and I would work at the piano in Burton's front room, putting our ideas together to create songs. At two in the afternoon Granny Kirkpatrick would bring us cookies and 7-Up, and we'd be done by four. A few hours later I'd swing by and pick him up for the gig that night.

Those Saturday songwriting sessions were something we both looked forward to, getting together with scraps of songs. It was the excitement of creating our own music that spurred us on. We both wanted to be songwriters like Brian Wilson, Jagger and Richards, Bacharach and David, or Lennon and McCartney. Even with the differences in our personalities, we still connected. There was just a chemistry that happened, and the result was some great music. I became McCartney to Burton's Lennon, the missing piece to his puzzle and he to mine. I'd bring a nearly completed song to him and he'd play me one
of his song fragments. Then we'd take the strengths of each and piece together a completed song. From that came the Bachman-Cummings songwriting team.

GO NORTH, YOUNG MEN

We did a northern tour of Canadian air force bases in early 1968 that was sponsored by the Department of National Defence and broadcast live to remote communities above the 60th parallel. We thought it would be a cool experience, and the money was good, so we agreed to go along. We were booked to perform alongside Ted Komar and his orchestra. Ted played accordion, and the other players were well-established local jazz musicians. Headlining the tour was CBC singer and ex-Winnipegger Juliette, star of her own long-running television series. Her show followed
Hockey Night in Canada
for decades. A magician and a comedian rounded out the troupe. We were the token pop act.

We were told to wear our warmest clothes. It was the middle of winter, forty below in Winnipeg, and we were heading north towards the Arctic Circle. I had this cool sheepskin coat that was bulky but warm, and we all wore scarves, toques, mitts, and boots. When we showed up wrapped up in our winter wear these air force guys proceeded to give us even more clothes to put on, telling us, “Where you're going you'll need these extra clothes.” As big as my feet are, size thirteen with big winter boots on, they put them into another pair of sheepskin-lined boots with galvanized rubber on the outside. With six pounds on each foot, I could barely walk. They then gave us parkas to be worn on top of our parkas. As he was handing me mine, the officer told me, “By the way, the buttons are made of compressed, dehydrated soup, and inside the hood is aluminum lining. If you take it out, put some snow in it, and place it in the sun, you can heat up the buttons and eat the soup. In your pocket is some Sterno and matches to start a fire.” This coat was a walking survival kit. I thought to myself, “What have we gotten ourselves into?!”

We boarded an air force cargo plane called an Atlas, the kind where the entire front end lifts open and trucks drive right on in. In the middle of the fuselage they had a couple of rows of theatre seats bolted to the floor. It was freezing onboard, so we were glad to have the extra warmth of the survival coats.

Our first stop was Churchill on Hudson Bay, then we headed off to places like Inuvik beyond the Arctic Circle. For the crowds, seeing Juliette live, watching a magician make rabbits disappear, and listening to a real live rock band that appeared on television was a real treat. The whole community would come out to the shows—old, young, Moms and Dads, Native and non-Native.

The guys in Ted Komar's band were real partiers. They were being paid well and the music was a breeze to play, so they were drinking pretty good. It soon turned into high school hijinks all over again. One night at another one of these remote outposts somewhere, Juliette was onstage performing, backed up by the Komar band guys who were half smashed. Burton decided to have some fun. He proceeded to make this huge cardboard sign three feet wide. On one side he printed “Applause” and on the other he put “F… You.” In the midst of one of Juliette's numbers, he strolled right across the stage between her and the musicians. The crowd saw “Applause” and erupted. Juliette was all smiles because she figured it was for her. She couldn't see Burton. Meanwhile, the band cracked up and fell over in hysterics because they saw the other side of the sign. The music momentarily fell apart as these guys cut up. Juliette turned around to see what was happening to her accompaniment, but by then Burton was already offstage. When we completed the tour, the Canadian Armed Forces gave each of us a plaque showing a map of the North and little flags where we'd stopped.

THE MARVIN POLANSKI TAPES

I've served as unofficial archivist for the Guess Who, releasing our early recordings, including the group's first three Quality
Records albums and a double CD compilation entitled
This Time Long Ago
. Over the two years the group appeared on CBC-TV's
Let's Go,
only two of the shows had been preserved on videotape. A lot of musical history was lost, including some of the earliest attempts at songwriting by Burton and me.