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Randy Bachman: And I think I might be the only one who remembers the '60s.
[laughter]
RB: So I can make up any story I want and everybody believes me!
[laughter]
RB: There's no contradictions. We'd just gone separate ways. It's like getting married when
you're 14 and 18, suddenly you're 23 and 24 and you go, "Who's this woman I'm married
to?" And she's saying, "Who's this guy?" You know what I mean? We had started as mid-teenagers,
gone to England, gone broke, gone bankrupt, had wonderful experiences. And basically what
brought it on was I had a medical problem, and anybody out there who has had a gallstone
or a kidney stone, I had gallstones. I had a gallbladder problem, and so every night
on the road, and American Woman is hit number one. We'd gone from $750 a night...
Geoff Pevere: Yeah.
RB: To 10,000 a night. That's a big jump.
GP: Yeah. Wow, wow.
RB: And suddenly from being in the hole making $750 a night and ahead a month away is like
$10,000 a night, with Creedence Clearwater and stuff like that. I'm going to the hospital
every night throwing up blood, this pain in my chest, and I don't know what it is. It's
like a knife turning right there. I would literally turn a chair upside down take the
leg of the chair, and just push it in there on my gallbladder. I didn't know what it was.
Horrific amount of pain, and you're in a hot and cold sweat, and you don't know what it
is, and you think you're dying. And once is okay. When it happens every night for two
or three weeks, it's time to go home and see your doctor.
GP: Yep.
RB: And I would have our road manager, Jim Martin, who lives here in Toronto he works
at Sony, take me to the emergency every single night. And they'd say, "Well bring him in
in the morning and we'll do some more tests." And he'd say, "Well, we're leaving in the
morning, we're going to Cleveland." "We're leaving in the morning, we're going to Pittsburgh."
We're leaving the next morning, we were in a different place. I couldn't get any medical
attention.
GP: Yeah. Yeah.
RB: Finally I said to the band, "Look I gotta go home. I think I'm dying, I don't know what's
wrong with me." Nobody could diagnose me. I wasn't anywhere long enough. Or just every
single night. And so, this is an amazing thing, I don't even know if it's in any book. We
played at Westchester, Pennsylvania which is just outside of Pittsburgh. It's a room
very similar to this and the stage is only that high. After this particular gig, we actually
have a week off, like six days off. And then the next big weekend, I cut two more gigs
and then a week off, and then the Philmore East in New York I mean this is huge antic
for guys from Winnipeg. So I have the last attack, but I go and play that gig that night,
and a band comes. You can tell a band, the drummer's watching the drummer. The guitar
player is standing in front of me. You know everyone is watching with big binoculars to
see where they played the solo and write down, the solo was on the fifth fret and they'd
count it. And they'd go home stay up all night trying to figure out the solo 'cause there
was no videos for music in those days.
RB: And this guy's right in front of me and his name is Bobby. And he said, "My dad's
in construction of a big basement. This is our band, we practise in my basement, and
we got a ham and organ and PA all set up." "Do you wanna come to a party later?" and
blah blah blah and, "We know everyone of your songs." "We play your songs except, I don't
know She's Come Undone." "Can you show me the cords?" because he didn't know the Lenny
Breau jazz chord to She's Come Undone. So I say, "Okay." So later that night at his
house I'm teaching him the 'She's Come Undone.' And after the party, I go back to my room
and true to form, I have a gallbladder attack at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Jim Martin
takes me to the hospital, and they say, "Look if this has happened to you 14 times, you
gotta go... Where do you live?" "Winnipeg." "Well go back to your doctor."
RB: So we had that week off, so I went to the band and said, "Look, I gotta go home
to Dr. Lerner in Winnipeg, the guy who birthed me into the world and see what's wrong with
me. I don't know what's wrong with me. I think I'm dying, it's just terrible." And they say,
"So what do we do next week?" And I said, "Well that band knows every one of our songs
and Bobby Sabellico, I taught Undun, he knows everything else. I'll just hire him to play
with you. It's two gigs and then it's another eight days off and then I'll come back and
whatever I've gotta do. If I gotta throw up blood before," and I did at the Philmore in
the bathroom go on stage and play. So I teach this guy the songs and pay him a couple of
100 bucks. By then we're making 10,000 a night, Bob Sabellico plays I think four gigs with
the Guess Who I come back play the Philmore East and that was my last gig with them. It
was May of 1970, and we rocked the Philmore.
GP: Okay.
RB: And we didn't wanna do These Eyes because it was the ultimate bubblegum song.
GP: Yeah.
RB: So we started with the heavy stuff, doing Friends of Mine and all the acid rock, and
I'm playing with the drumstick, and Burton's doing the flute, and we're being real hip
and cool. And we keep getting called back for encore after encore after encore, and
this is the Philmore East and it's full of hippies, and they're all blasted, everybody's
*** and everything. And we finally go on stage and Burton says, "We have nothing left
to play." And they yell out, "Play These Eyes," and it's like 2:30 in the morning, and we
start to go "pom pam." [music] And everybody starts crying they put their arms around...
[laughter]
RB: Their partners. And it's like Kumbaya at the Philmore.
[laughter]
05:00 RB: And they're all singing, "These eyes cry... " And we go "Wow! This is really
a hit. If the hippies love this. All the stoners there, love this song."
[laughter]
GP: Yeah.
05:08 RB: So that was my last gig with them, and I had to sort a whole bunch of stuff.
Went back to Winnipeg, saw my doctor, treated the gallbladder with diet and stuff like that
and then had two restless, restless years of wanting to do something else. And I started
another band that evolved again from, with Chad Allan. Started with Chad Allan again.
GP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
RB: As we got near success, he pulled out. He's kind of afraid of the... 'Cause when
you're successful, there's a commitment.
GP: Yeah.
RB: "I'm gonna give you a job. You gotta write every single night, and you gotta do every
concert whether you like it or not do me a review for the next morning. You gotta have
it in by 1 o'clock, so it's in the paper the next day." And your boss tells you that, it's
the same with us. "You're gonna have a hit, you gotta go on the road and work and play,
because if you don't go out and work and play, we're not gonna promote it because nobody
will buy your record, blah blah." So you get into this cycle, so Chad Allan would kind
of shy away from all that, so the band I started with him which is kind of country rock thing
evolved to getting Fred Turner in the band, and we changed our name to Bachman-Turner,
and it felt we were a folk band for a while.
GP: Yeah.
RB: 'Cause of the Brewer & Shipley and Seals & Crofts, and they thought we're playing coffeehouses,
and we're showing up playing this rock and roll music, and Fred's got a voice like a
gravel truck, and we're blowing cups off the table in coffeehouses like this and they said,
"You need a name to show you play heavy music, that you're not a folk duo like Seals & Crofts,"
and we saw a trucker's magazine called 'Overdrive.'
GP: Yeah.
RB: And I wrote it down on a napkin. You know how napkins are tall and the trucks... Those
chrome things, so I wrote down Bachman. I mean there's no room to write beside it. I
couldn't write on the napkin long way, so I wrote Bachman and under it Turner and under
it Overdrive. And I called the head of the label the next morning and said "I've got
a new name."
GP: Yeah.
RB: "Bachman-Turner Overdrive" and he goes, "Wow, phenomenal. No one's ever used that
word 'overdrive' in music before, but it's too long." And I look at the napkin and it's
got BTO and I go, "How about BTO?" and he goes "Wow! Ka-ching! That's like... " Chicago
then was Chicago Transit Authority, CTA.
GP: Right, yes.
RB: Crosby, Stills and Nash are being called CSN, and he goes, "Wow! You've got a logo
and then get an Overdrive gear like from a Ferrari and do that whole thing," and suddenly,
this thing just happened to us, it was amazing.
GP: Right. Well again, there was ELO and ELP, and as Homer Simpson said when you appeared
on 'The Simpsons'...
RB: Yeah, all the bands with the initials, yeah. ELO, ELP, yeah.
GP: Yeah, 'cause we're busy in the 70s, we did a lot of time. But the interesting thing
about Brave Belt is it starts out as a really interesting actually country rock outfit,
but it doesn't connect commercially. And then a song called I guess it's "Gimme Your Money
Please" is the first song that is an indication of what is to come right? How do you get to
that, how do you become like the ultimate blue collar rock band?
RB: Well, Neil Young had come back and played us many demos of him and the Buffalo Springfield
and this other band called 'Poco' and on this new country rock thing going on with Jim McGuinn
and the Byrds, and we had played the Seattle Pop Festival in 1969 with the new Byrds and
the Burrito Brothers and all that stuff and I thought, "Whatever I do," 'cause I've left
the band that's number one in the world, album and single, "Whatever I do is gonna be second
best" okay? So rather than being second best, I'd rather be last. But not trying to copy
them, I can never get a better singer than Burton Cummings. I can get a different singer
who's as good but never get one in that music I was writing at that time, real good pop,
a Beatle kind of, Beach Boy kind of music. So we started to play country music. We went
on tour to Tommy Hunter, remember Tommy Hunter and remember King Gannon the fiddle player
and all that stuff?
GP: Yeah.
RB: And we started to do country shows, we got airplay and it just wasn't us, we were
playing too loud. We we're too much like Creedence Clearwater. Once Fred Turner was in the band,
he's got like I said this cement truck, I'm delivering this cement, if you're in the way
I'm driving over your face. That's how he sings.
GP: So I hope you enjoy cement because... Yeah, yeah. [chuckle]
RB: You ordered it, it's coming. And there's a very pivotal gig we had. It was in Thunder
Bay, and we just played Thunder Bay and told this story, and people were in tears 'cause
they all remember it.
GP: Right.
RB: They remember when I used to go at the guest room and played the Gardens there and
12-year-old Paul Shaffer was in the front row, and he'd come talk to us and Burton Cummings
about the keyboard and all that kind of stuff. And so we go and play at Thunder Bay at Lakehead
University, and it's the end of the season, and it's basketball games. So they gotta play
games on Friday night, and we played Friday night in the cafeteria which is much like
this, and then the next night's the next play off and we play again the Saturday night.
So we go and play the Friday night, they win the games which means they're gonna play again
the next night, and there's another team playing against them. And we go and play the cafeteria,
and we start our country rock kind of stuff, and the audience looks like this. They're
just sitting there like this.
[laughter]
RB: And nobody, I mean they want them to dance. I mean it's a dance do you remember? It's
not a sit, it's a dance.
[laughter]
RB: And the guy who was promoting us, there was a guy named Mike Tilka who ended up being
the bass player in... What's Kim Mitchell's group, Max Webster.
GP: Webster, yeah.
RB: And so Mike Tilka comes to us, he's a musician, he's got long hair, and he looks
like William Shakespeare kind of thing and he says, "I've got some bad news for you guys.
You didn't make it tonight. Nobody was dancing, everybody complained, you didn't play really
good music, so I have to let you go. I can't even pay you, there was not enough money that
came in the door. Everybody left and asked for their money back. So just leave your gear
and come back in the morning, come back Saturday morning, pack up your gear and go back to
Winnipeg." So we went and slept in the car 'cause we couldn't afford a hotel, and all
we can afford is a bucket of chicken from Jean's Kentucky Fried Chicken there. And we
slept in the car and in the parking lot, and we went in the next morning at about 10:30,
11 to pack up our gear, and he was gonna call the agency back in Toronto to get another
band. And he comes up and he says, "Don't pack up your stuff yet, surely you could play
some music that people can dance to." And I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "I can't
get another band for tonight."
[laughter]
RB: And I said, "What are you saying Mike?" He said, "If you guys can put together two
sets of dance tunes and do three sets, I'll pay you for last night and pay you for tonight.
Tonight's the big night, and if they win, there's gonna be a big celebration, and you
have all afternoon, your gear is here and they're playing games now and they'll be coming
in here about 7 o'clock." So I sat down with Fred Turner and said, "What can you sing?"
and he said "Proud Mary" all the Creedence, 'Proud Mary', 'Brown Sugar', 'Jumpin' Jack
Flash'. I said, "Great, I could sing bad guys like Dylan and Neil Young, and I'll fill in
between you, we'll play some instrumentals." We put together two sets and then the third
set is... By request we played this in the first set, we're gonna play it again. The
third set was a mixture of the other two sets and we got paid 800... 400 a night, 800 bucks
went home, that night changed. Brave Belt became Bachman-Turner Overdrive. We had this
music, we needed, knew we needed to change our name, and we did and I told you how we
changed our name, we got it from a trucker's magazine 'Overdrive'.
GP: Yeah. And when it came to writing the hits, pile driving truck-themed hits that
BTO became known for, tell me a little about that song writing process and how different
that was from writing with Burton Cummings, and then actually, in a few minutes... If
you folks want to get ready with your questions, we'll be turning it over to you guys.
RB: Well, the man who signed BTO, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, his name was Charlie Fach, and
he was the head of Mercury Records. When he signed us, I had 26 refusals from 26, maybe
20 record labels. Some had refused us twice over a period of two years 'cause a guy got
fired, I knew that guy, went in, and I'd resubmit. [laughter] I used to love this thing called
executive turn-table in billboard. Who's left this position, who's moved in? I would send
them both at their new jobs, even though they'd passed earlier... You need a rock band? Here's
our new CD. I mean, here's our new tape. We didn't have CDs then. And, it was just kind
of amazing, the evolution there. So, our, the deal was built on me, my song writing
because he knew I could write songs. That's why he wanted my name. He didn't want Brave
Belt on. He wanted Bachman there, and there's a couple of my brothers in the band, so it
was like Bachman, and then put Turner in, and so, because it all boils down to DJ recognition.
RB: They recognize your name, they're bound to play it, and even if they don't like it,
he's played it. They're just not throwing it away because they get so many records in
submissions. So, that's what we were... It was based on me, so I figured I'm not that
great a writer because I'd written most of my stuff with Burton Cummings. Once in awhile,
I wrote like "She's Come Undone," or "No Sugar" alone, and he'd write a song alone, but basically
we were like a Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, and I found it very hard to
write alone for the first time. So, being the genius I was, I said to the guy, the guy
at the event, try to some songs, and bring them to me, and I'll help you shape them and
form them into songs. I don't want to write every song. I don't want 12 of the same songs.
I mean, Chuck Berry had the same song 12 times on every album.
RB: They were good because he was a great lyricist. They all told a different story,
but it was the same music underneath. So, the other guys would write, and I would bring
them in, and I wanted to copy horns section, so if you hear a song like "Give Me Your Money
Please," I'm playing horns sections. [music] Dut dut, like the big horn, like Little Richard
kind of thing, just playing the chords dut dut and that kind of thing, and so, besides
playing rhythm and lead, I always do... [music] Taking care of business... [music] Dut dut
dut dut. That kind of think. So I'm actually playing that on guitar for maybe the first
time, and kind of getting with and reinforcing it by doubling it, and I almost created like
a new texture because Creedence was all... [music] Straight rhythm thing, and I was...
If I'd played that, I'd go... [music] [singing] Like real, like Fred, instead of going [music]
that kind of difference between us, more driving, and we looked at what made people dance. Nothing
got them up like "Brown Sugar," or "Jumpin' Jack Flash." Do you know what I mean? That
kind of thing, so we kind of went after primitive tribal beat rock 'n' roll.
RB: My brother was not a great drummer. He grew up playing oatmeal boxes. I made him
his first drum set out of those round oatmeal things, and I would cut one off, so it'd be
smaller than the other and put the lid on, and he played with wooden spoons. So, all
I could him was just play like this "Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, chinkem, boom,
boom, chinkem, boom," and that's how he played on most of the records, but, on all of them
actually. [laughter] But it formed a beat that was very identifiable, and I've had people
come, like great musicians, like Jim Vallance, who wrote all Bryan's hits come and say "Your
brother, Robbie, is like one of the greatest drummers in rock" because... [laughter] He
was an animal. He just played... He was like Animal in muppets, the same thing over and
over, right? The same thing over and over and over, like that kind of thing, so...
GP: We have... There's so much more to talk about. You know, you should get a radio show
because you are... [laughter] so good at this.
RB: You mean a J-O-B?
GP: Yeah, J-O-B. Yeah, working for the man. If you would... [background conversation]
You want me to sing? [laughter] They're asking one of us to sing, and I don't think it's
me.
RB: Okay. I'll tell you a story how I wrote a song, and then I'll play you a little bit
of the song. Okay? I don't know if you remember... This was a couple of guys here my age. The
late 60s, there was a CBC show called "Let's Go" on Music Hop, and the guests who were
on every single week... It was on every day of the week, like one day would be from Halifax,
that's where Anne Murray started. Then, it would be Ottawa, then it would be Toronto,
and the host in Toronto was Alex Trebek. I mean he was the DJ, and the bands would be,
you know, guys that became Lighthouse and things like that, and from Winnipeg was us,
and from Vancouver was Susan and Terry Jacks, and everybody went on to have hit records
after that show, but we were on it every week from Winnipeg, and we wanted to be like the
Beatles. So, we had pink... Remember the first Beatles album where they're all looking down
like a stairway down at somebody shooting a picture at them? We had on pink button-down
shirts, burgundy sparkle suits, and burgundy sparkle ties. So, we would wear these on TV
even though it was black and white.
[laughter]
RB: We'd wear them on TV, and as people grew up and left Winnipeg, and most of them did...
There's a lot of great people famous from Winnipeg, a lot of them are friends of ours
who were friends back in Winnipeg, and Daryl Burlingham, who was also in Toronto known
as Daryl B, was in Vancouver at that time, and he called up, and he said, "Because you're
on TV every week, the kids, you have a little following, and I'm playing your records, and
they know a couple of your records, I want you to come and be on a show. You'll open
the show. The headlines are Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention," and he's just discovered
another band called Alice Cooper. It's a bunch of guys who dress up like chicks, "and you're
going to be the opening act." So, we showed up with our burgundy suits, and pink button
down shirts, and we were the freaks because we were so straight. We looked like four business
men, because The Beatles dressed like business men. They had shirts and ties and The Stones
dressed all shabby and bad boy, but Frank Zappa and The Mothers, they had, they're wearing
baby diapers on their heads, and boas, and the most incredible... These are on airplanes,
they're wearing this stuff.
RB: And Alice Cooper wearing tights and lipstick and all that stuff, and so I've known these
guys for that time. So we played Vancouver, Seattle, Portland and San Fransisco. Couldn't
wait to get from San Fransisco. As a kid in Winnipeg growing up, I'd heard about a hippie.
There's no hippies in Winnipeg, it's freezing. [laughter] These are your kids without shirts
on playing guitars with a peace sign on saying, 'make love not war,' and they're basically
affected by the Vietnam War, and we're not in Winnipeg.
RB: So I'm walking down where Berkley is, the University of California. They've got
Telegraph Avenue, I'm walking down Telegraph Avenue, and we've gone into the record stores
there because there's just tons of record stores on that avenue because it's right at
the foot of the university. And I'm buying vinyl, and I'm buying like Neil Young bootlegs,
and Beatle bootlegs and stuff, and I'm carrying all these vinyls around, I'm going to my car
to put it in the trunk. As I walk down the street, there's three guys coming towards
me down the street, and they're probably like as far away as that back exit sign there,
good couple of hundred feet. And they've got leather jackets on and tattoos and chains
and they look like... When you're all alone, three guys together in leather, it's a biker
gang, okay? Looking at these guys, and you're also told when you're an American... I mean
when you're Canadian, you're touring the States, this is the late '60s, never ever get into
a fight with an American guy. They're all drafted at seventeen; they're taught hand-to-hand
combat; they could kill with their baby finger, and unless you're on skates with a hockey
stick, you can't fight, okay?
[laughter]
RB: So these three guys are coming towards me, and all that is flashing in my mind is,
"Get away from these guys. Don't get into a fight with these guys. Be nice to them.
Avoid them." So I go over and pretend I'm looking at a window, and the three of them
come to my side of the street and they're glaring at me, and they're giving me this
look like, "We're going to rip you apart," and so I nonchalantly try to walk across the
street pretending I'm window shopping. And I [whistling] I walk across the street to
this side to pretend I'm looking in the window and they come to my side of the street and
they're getting closer and closer to me, and as they get up to about where that microphone
is 30, 40 feet, the three of them are glaring at me. I figure, "What am I going to do now?"
and up pulls a little brown, remember those Ford Pintos, those weird little cars? Out
pulls a little brown Pinto or something with a blue door and a smashed window held together
with Scotch tape and stuff and really a poor car. And out of it gets a little small Mexican
woman, about five feet tall, and these guys are like Mexican, one's Mexican and one's
black and one's white, and they're big macho three guys giving me this glare. And she pulls
over the car and she starts yelling at them, and I go, "Whew! Wow great!"
RB: She starts yelling at them, and two of them leave and leave this one guy behind who
obviously is the man in her life [chuckle] and she says to him, "You no good bum. You're
out checking out the chicks with your buddies. Walking down the street. You're supposed to
be looking for a job. You didn't take out the garbage when you left blah-blah-blah.
Get in the car." So he shrugs and looks at me, so suddenly mister macho and his buddies
are gone, he's shrugging going, "Gee, I'm henpecked and she's... " He gets in the car,
and she slams the door, and she says, "Furthermore baby, when you get home, you ain't getting
no sugar tonight."
[laughter]
[music]
RB: Lonely feeling, deep inside, find the corner where I can hide, silent footsteps
crowding me, sudden darkness, but I can see. No sugar tonight in my coffee, no sugar tonight
in my tea, no sugar to stand beside me, no sugar to run with me. Daba do do daa, daba
do da, da do, da, do, da no sugar tonight.
[applause]
RB: Thank you. So a lot of the inspirations for the songs came from moments like that
when I go, "wow, what a title." And when I wrote that song, it was quite racy. Hence,
I knew what no sugar tonight meant, that guy, what he wasn't going to get that night. But
when I played it for the record label, they said, "Oh, you can't put this out, it'll be
banned." We said, "Great, we want it to be banned because everything banned would get
played." They said, "No, you gotta change it." So it became "no sugar tonight in my
coffee, no sugar tonight in my tea," and that was a number one twin single with American
Woman, double A-side, and I had written it alone, so that was a big deal for me.
GP: Tell us how American Woman came about?
RB: We had crossed the border from Winnipeg, and we were going to play... See Winnipeg,
besides being the centre of Canada, it's also the centre of nowhere.
GP: Right.
[laughter]
RB: You've got to drive hundreds of miles to get anywhere. Consequently, that's why
the music scene is so good that you stay there.
GP: Dead centre of the continent, isn't it?
RB: Dead centre. Right in the middle of the North American Continent. So we had a gig
in Texas to play a grad, it was 400 dollars, so we thought, "What the heck". So, imagine
driving from Winnipeg down to Texas. Tyler Texas. I'm going to see Buddy Holly there,
I'm going to see Buddy Knox there. Roy Orbison. Naïve, you think they're all going to be
there waiting for you to show up. [laughter] So we would cross the border. We had something
then called green cards, which meant you could work in the United States. And we crossed
the border, and gas was cheaper then in North Dakota than it was in Canada. We crossed the
border, and I'd always go to a gas station to fill up our tank, and the guy who's an
old farmer, one of these tanks was like a glass tube, and you got glass by like the
inch or two, not a meter like when you see it go down, and he'd always say, "So where
are you boys going this time?" And we'd say, "We're going to Washington DC to play, we're
going to San Francisco to play with Joan Baez, we're going to Boston to play with Richie
Havens" or something. And he said, "Where are you going this time?" And we'd say, "Texas.
And we're going out to play a graduation in Tyler, Texas." But first, the guy at the border
said to go in some building... A white building that's called 'Selective Services', I think.
"I don't know what that means."
[laughter]
RB: And he said, "You don't know what Selective Services means? You're really a Canadian."
[chuckle]
RB: I said, "What does it mean?" He said, "It's the draft board."
[laughter]
RB: And he said, "You got green cards?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "You don't wanna
go in there. They will actually, physically take you and put you in handcuffs. You'll
be in a uniform, you'll be gone. They took my son a year and a half ago, he was just
killed in Vietnam. They've now taken my nephew, out of college, he's 18. They sent him over
there, we're just all upset, we all want to run to Canada. Do yourselves a favour, don't
go to Texas 'cause they'll come and find you, you got your green cards. Turn left here,
drive over, turn left again, turn up through Duluth, go back up to Canada. Turn in your
green cards at the border, don't come back 'til the war is over."
RB: We don't go to Tyler, Texas [chuckle] We don't get the 400 bucks, we turn left,
turn left. We're suddenly across the border at Duluth, we're in Toronto, and I phone the
agency in Toronto and say, "Hi, this is Randy Bachman from The Guess Who, we need a gig
or two and can you get us a gig?" And he says, "For when?" And I said," Tonight."
[laughter]
RB: This is on a Saturday morning. He said, "Amazing, this is just amazing, I just had
a band called Little Caesar & the Consuls cancel because somebody lost his voice and
we need a band to play Kitchener-Waterloo. There's curling rink there. I said, "How much
does it pay?" He said, "400 bucks."
[laughter]
RB: We're there!
[laughter]
RB: So we went there to play Kitchener-Water... It was a typical dance, which is like three
hours, and they put the plywood on the ice and everybody comes in their parkas and rubber
boots, and they're there playing tooks and everything. And so we're sitting there playing,
and I broke a string and then I had one guitar, no tech, no tuner, nothing. Just one guitar.
So I broke a string, Burton said to the kid, the audience, "Randy's gonna change a string,
we're gonna take a break, then we'll be back in like ten minutes."
RB: So they all leave the stage, I'm on the stage tuning up my guitar, putting on a string,
and I'm kneeling in front of the piano... It's kind of dark, we had two little lights
on... I'm kneeling in front of the piano just tuning to the piano so I'm going ***-***-***-***.
I'm tuning up my guitar [plays the guitar] and the band is now interspersed, talking
to the audience, 'cause we kind of know the kids. We played Canada many, many times, all
these schools and certainly meet everybody, we have friends everywhere.
RB: The band is all talking. Burton Cummings is at the back door of the arena, it's one
of these beautiful winter nights where it's a full moon and you can read a book outside
when it's reflecting off of the snow, it's just phenomenal. And I see Burton out there
doing something with a guy in the trunk of his car, he's buying something, he later said
he was buying comic books but who knows what.
[laughter]
RB: So I'm tuning the guitar, and I get to this [plays the guitar]. Play me a start [plays
the guitar]. My guitar's in tune and as I look up, all the heads in the audience that
have gone... They look, at me, this is the beginning of Whole Lot of Love, it's like
do-dow-do-dow-da. It's like that kind of thing and I go, "Oh, my... I can't forget this."
So I gotta keep playing it. So I keep playing it, and I look out into the audience and I
see Jim Kale, the bass man, and I go like this like, "Get up on stage" he comes up and
I say, "Just play this with me." [plays the guitar]
RB: Then we get Gary Peterson up, and we play this song for four or five minutes and Burton
looks in, he sees that it's us on stage... Because records were being played then...
And he comes up on stage and says, "What is this? What are we doing?" And I said, "I don't
want to forget this riff." And I'm yelling this to him while I'm playing it stage. "Play
something." So he plays a flute solo 'cause he played flute in the odd song, he plays
a harmonica solo, he plays a piano solo. Finally, I yelled to him, "Sing something!" and he
said, "Like what?"
[laughter]
RB: 'Cause it was not a blues, I mean a blues all you gotta do to start is, 'Woke up this
morning' that starts every blues, right?
GP: Yeah, yeah.
RB: But because of the threat of being almost drafted and being sent over there against
our own will to fight in the jungles of Vietnam, and seeing all the posters, 'Uncle Sam Wants
You.' remember the posters with the stars and stripe hat? And the Statue of Liberty,
'The Statue Wants You.' 'Fight For Your Liberty' and stuff. Out of his mouth, when I said,
"Sing anything." He just screamed out, "American woman, stay away from me!" He did that four
times, I solo-ed, he did it four times, I solo-ed, the song was over. We remembered
the song. Sometimes your lyric helps you remember the lyric, like McCartney, 'Yesterday' was
first called 'Scrambled Eggs' 'cause that's what made him go, "Scrambled eggs... [sings]
Oh my baby I really love your legs." Did you ever see him do that with Jimmy Fallon? That's
great.
[laughter]
RB: But that's how you remember a song, is get funny lyrics to it and you can recall
the funny lyrics.
RB: Then the next day we were to do the song again, Burton said, "I've got some lyrics
to add in." I'm like, 'War machines and ghetto scenes' and I said, "Great, add it in." So
we just did the song like that and finally we played it for Jack Richardson, who was
our producer and he said, "That song's great, let's count it in and do it."
RB: We counted it in... We couldn't do it. We didn't know how to do it, it was not really
a formal song. We tried it over and over and finally Jack said, "Okay, let's take a break,
and Randy, I want you to start it just like you did on the stage at Kitchener-Waterloo."
So I go out and I've got my Les Paul and I tune up the guitar, and I start [plays the
guitar] again and then Gary starts playing drums and then Jim comes in and suddenly we
get the groove 'cause it had to come from nowhere. And then Burton comes out and sings
a track, I over-dub a guitar, he says, "This is gonna be a career record." And they release
it and it goes to number one. And that store, that curling rink is now a True Value Hardware
in Kitchener-Waterloo.
[laughter]
GP: Wow.
RB: There's a spot on the floor that says 'American Woman was written here'.
GP: Yeah, was written right here...
RB: And that was recently vote, I think, the top song in Canada of all time and the number
one best...
GP: I believe it, no I believe it... Absolutely, it is. It is.