Randy Bachman (6 page)

Marvin Polanski, who worked on the show, had been in my grade 12 class at Garden City Collegiate. Years later I was being interviewed for Bravo TV's Lenny Breau documentary and Marvin was the sound man. He said, “Do you remember me?” and I said, “Yeah!” He had replaced the sound man on the
Let's Go
show back in the late 60s.

So as I'm doing this interview outside at the Forks in Winnipeg, Marvin says to me, “I was so proud to be working on that show because I knew you and Garry Peterson from school.”

I'm going, “Yeah, that's cool,” but I'm trying to do the interview, so I'm not paying much attention to him.

Then he says to me, “And I saved all the tapes from the show.” Now he had my undivided attention.

CBC would erase the tapes each week and reuse them to save money, but Marvin had dubbed audio copies of the shows on reel-to-reel tapes and still had them some thirty years later.

“Can you go home and find them and send them to me?”

A few weeks later I received a box full of tapes, and when I played them I couldn't believe I was listening to this stuff for the first time in decades. It was amazing to be hearing ourselves at that early stage in our career. We sounded so innocent. It's incredible that this stuff wasn't lost forever. The tapes became the
Let's Go
album, with us doing cover tunes like “Along Comes Mary” and “White Room” plus some of our early attempts at “These Eyes,” “No Time,” “Minstrel Boy,” and “When You Touch Me.”

BRAVE BELT

In May of 1970, as “American Woman” sat at #1 in
Billboard
, I left the Guess Who and returned home to Winnipeg. The four
of us had grown apart as people, as bandmates, and as friends, and we had different lifestyles. I didn't party, do drugs, smoke, or drink; they all did. I needed to be home with my family for a while. But I wasn't done with music.

Between my departure from the Guess Who and the launching of Bachman-Turner Overdrive in late 1972, I put together Brave Belt. With me were Chad Allan, Fred Turner, and my brothers Robbie and Tim. Managing the group was my older brother Gary. The band's sound was aimed at the growing country rock scene, but it was clear early on that the country rock thing just wasn't working for us. Still, although a commercial failure, Brave Belt was an important transition for me from the Guess Who to BTO.

People still expected Randy Bachman to be rockin', not Crosby, Stills and Nash or Poco. We had done the first Brave Belt album, but it bombed, so I was looking to retool the engine. I knew we needed a harder sound and that Fred Turner's voice was perfect for that. Unfortunately Chad Allan wasn't onside with this and left the band. So we were now the Bachman brothers and a Turner.

We still had some bookings as a country rock band, and one of them was at the Saddledome in Calgary with Ferlin Husky and Canada's country music “Traveling Man,” CBC-TV's Tommy Hunter. We all used to watch
The Tommy Hunter Show.
At the Saddledome, Brave Belt was the closing act after these country music legends. The crowd was a country music crowd. In our earlier incarnation we'd have gone down a lot better, but we were now BTO in everything but name.

So we played our set, and when the lights came up at the end there was no one left in the arena. We'd emptied the place. Everyone had walked out on us. The next day the newspaper had rave reviews about all the other acts, but for us it had two lines at the bottom that said: “At the end of the show, four Vikings from Winnipeg came out and blew everybody's face off.” The promoter refused to pay us. We couldn't check out of our hotel because we had no money. Later that day we ran into Tommy Hunter in the
hotel lobby. He told us that what had been done to us was wrong and that he was organizing the other acts to go on strike against this particular promoter unless he paid us. “It's not your fault the promoter made a mistake booking you guys.” Thank you, Tommy. In the end we got paid.

We ran Brave Belt on a shoestring budget. We had little money and often had to travel huge distances to play for only a couple of hundred dollars. I paid each of the guys a salary out of my Guess Who royalties. If I hadn't done that, we wouldn't have had a band. Often we had to travel way out west somewhere on a weekend, come home again, then go out west again the following weekend. It was becoming too expensive driving back home only to head out again a few days later. As well, I'd be flying out during the week to pitch our third Brave Belt album, which ultimately became
BTO I,
to record labels across the U.S. The other guys couldn't afford to stay in hotels during the week, so they tented.

My dad had a tent we used to take on camping trips as kids, so Robbie and I knew how to camp. The band would drive to Calgary, look for a suitable site to pitch the tent, do the gig, and return to the tent for the night, making sure no one was following us to discover our impoverished existence. We had a Coleman stove, and we'd bring a loaf of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from home. Or we'd cook up some soup. I remember coming back from a trip to Los Angeles trying to sell
Brave Belt III
and finding the tent covered in frost and snow, Robbie and Fred huddled together inside trying to keep warm.

Our battered old Econoline van was like a sieve on the highway. It had holes and cracks where the wind would whistle in. The heater and defroster couldn't keep the windows clear of frost or fog. When it was forty below outside, it was forty below inside. So we had a big leather glove-like cover for the front of the van to keep the draft out and some of the heat from the engine in. My father-in-law, Bob Stevenson, would make us large Sterno cans from empty Empress Jam pails. They had a roll of toilet paper
soaked in alcohol with a wick in the middle, and we'd put two of them on our dash to keep the windows clear and a couple on the floor to keep our feet from freezing. We would travel back and forth across western Canada like this in the dead of winter, sometimes all the way to Vancouver and back with these burning cans of alcohol all over the van. Hardly the glamorous life of a rock star! But what these experiences did was foster a strong bond between us. It was an “All for one and one for all” spirit. I called it Brave Belt Boot Camp, and it really helped us cope when the big success as BTO finally came.

With Brave Belt we were trying to be like Neil Young and the Buffalo Springfield or Poco and do a cool kind of country rock like that. It was clear that it wasn't working, though. People were confused as to what I was trying to do, and maybe I was confused, too. But with Chad Allan's departure, Fred Turner stepped up as our lead singer, and overnight we had a different sound. Fred had what I used to call this Harley Davidson voice, gritty and strong, very similar to John Fogerty in Creedence Clearwater Revival. Having a different lead singer, a guy with a more powerful voice, I found I could write different songs, more powerful songs. And so we evolved from a mellow country rock band into playing pretty cool rock 'n' roll. We played a lot of Stones, Who, and Creedence in our live shows. They all had that primal rock 'n' roll beat. That's where our sound came from.

We were clearly not Brave Belt anymore. We'd had two albums out as Brave Belt, and it was time to change our name because we weren't that band. My record label kept telling me, “You've got to put your name, the Bachman name, in the band so that people will recognize the guy who wrote all those Guess Who songs. The radio stations will recognize your name and you might get some airplay.” From their perspective it made perfect sense. Why try to hide my identity? My brothers Rob and now Tim were in the band, so we had three Bachmans and a Turner, and for about two weeks we called ourselves Bachman Turner. This was the era
of acts like Brewer & Shipley, who were playing acoustic folk– style music, and Seals & Crofts, who played acoustic guitar and mandolin. We were playing this heavy-duty rock 'n' roll.

But when promoters would hear the name Bachman Turner, they thought it was two guys with acoustic guitars playing folk songs like Seals & Crofts or Brewer & Shipley. So we got booked into these coffee houses with little tables. We'd come in and set up our big amplifiers and blow the cups off the tables and get fired. We needed a name that showed clearly that we played heavy music, not “Diamond Girl” or “One Toke Over the Line.”

We were coming back from a gig in Windsor, Ontario, one night, and we drove across the border to Detroit. We stopped at a gas station, and as I was paying I looked right by the cash register and saw a magazine called
Overdrive
. I called Fred over and said, “Look at this magazine! It's all about trucks!” It even had a centrefold, but when we opened it out, it was a picture of the inside of a guy's truck cab with leopard-skin seat covers, a stereo, and a little rack to put a book on—these guys actually read pocketbooks as they're driving these semi-trailers! I said to Fred, “This is a great name for an album,” and he replied, “This is a great name for a band!” No longer would people think we were a folk duo. It was a name that left no doubt we were a heavy-duty band: Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

I called the record label the next day because they'd been bugging me to get a name that had my name in it. They liked it but said that it was too long for people to remember, that we needed a one- or two-syllable name like Byrds or Beatles, something like that. So I said, “Well, there's the initials BTO …” They thought that was fabulous. So we got the name to go with our sound.

THE RADISSON AND GROSEILLIERS OF ROCK 'N' ROLL

During the time of glam rock and platform boots, BTO weren't wimps or pretty boys. We looked like mountain men in furs, fringe, flannel, and long beards. We were the Radisson and
Groseilliers of rock, two hearty voyageurs who lived in the woods and never shaved. We were perceived by some as the lumberjack rockers from Canada who'd blow the windshield out of your car. The media picked up on that rustic image and really ran with it. Fred was a big guy like myself and had this flaming orange hair and beard. He even had a coonskin hat and these big, fringed jackets with beads. Fred looked like Mike Fink, King of the Keelboaters, right out of Davy Crockett. We were rugged men from the northern wilds of Canada. We'd come out on stage and the music was full-tilt stomping with Fred screaming at the top of his lungs over sledgehammer guitars and drums that sounded like falling trees. So our image matched the sound coming out on the records. We were a “Tim Allen's Tool Time” guy's band. Guys loved BTO. I remember on our whole tour of the U.K. we didn't see one woman at the shows. We appealed to the ordinary Joe kind of guy.

We dressed like Neil Young: farmers' flannel or denim shirts, jeans with patches, lumberjack boots. The difference was that while Neil looked frail with a twenty-eight-inch waist, we were size thirty-eight, soon to become forty-eight. He was a young tree while we were mighty oaks. The legend that surrounded us in the early days, and I remember actually reading this in a magazine, was that we were lumberjacks living in the forest who found guitars abandoned in an old car. We didn't eat a peanut butter sandwich, we ate a loaf of peanut butter sandwiches. We didn't eat a piece of apple pie, we ate the whole pie. We didn't live in houses, we slept outdoors in the snow.

My Picks

“AIN'T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH” by Ashford and Simpson

“DUNROBINS GONE” by Brave Belt

“FLYING ON THE GROUND IS WRONG” by the Buffalo Springfield

“FLYING ON THE GROUND IS WRONG” by the Guess Who

“HEY HO (WHAT YOU DO TO ME)” by the Guess Who (with Ashford and Simpson)

“HIS GIRL” by the Guess Who

“HURTING EACH OTHER” by the Guess Who (with Ashford and Simpson)

“JUST LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET” by the Reflections

“LIGHT MY FIRE” (Jose Feliciano version) by the Guess Who

“LIGHT MY FIRE” (the Doors version) by the Guess Who

“NEVER COMIN' HOME” by Brave Belt

“SLEDGEHAMMER” by BTO

“THIS TIME LONG AGO” by the Guess Who

Lenny, Neil, and Me

The two musicians who've had the most direct and enduring impact on my life and my career are Lenny Breau and Neil Young. I came in contact with both growing up in Winnipeg, and both continue to inspire me.

LENNY BREAU

Jazz guitarist extraordinaire Lenny Breau mentored me in my early years learning guitar, and his lessons remain at the core of my own style of playing. Lenny was the ultimate technician of the guitar, incorporating elements of classical, flamenco, rockabilly, and jazz into a unique approach that few others have been able to master. There was only one Lenny Breau.

He was born in Auburn, Maine, and moved to Winnipeg as a teenager. He was only a few years older than me. Lenny started playing guitar at age seven and left school at age ten. There was no point in him continuing at school. All he wanted to do was play guitar, and so his parents, Hal and Betty Breau, let him quit. By the time he was twelve, he was playing full time in his parents' band, the Lone Pine and Betty Cody Show, and travelling. Lenny was truly a music guy. He could barely read or write. He couldn't even balance his cheque book. But he would practise his guitar
fifteen to sixteen hours a day. He just played guitar all day because he wanted to master it all.