Randy Bachman

by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

  I used to go to all the country-and-western package shows at the Winnipeg Auditorium to see the fiddle players. Ray Price, Patsy Cline—they all had great fiddle players. On one occasion they introduced this fellow with neat curly blond hair who sat down at the piano and played “You Win Again” and a Johnny Cash song. Then he jumped up, kicked the piano stool aside, and started pounding “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” with his hair falling over his face. It was Jerry Lee Lewis. I’d never seen anything like him. It was a country show where people sat there and politely applauded Kitty Wells or Patsy Cline. The next day on CKRC, Doug Burrows played “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Rock ’n’ roll was just catching fire in Winnipeg, and the phones lit up. So he played it again back to back. I was mesmerized.

  I had a friend, Shelly Ostrove, whose dad was an electrician, and they had the first television set on the block; it was black-and-white TV only back then. Needless to say Shelly’s place was the place to go after school for all us kids to watch Range Rider and Howdy Doody. One Sunday night I got invited to his house to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and saw Elvis Presley for the first time. That moment inspired me. It was the first time I heard “Tutti Frutti.” Forget the violin, I wanted to play this!

  My brother Gary had some friends who went to the ProTeen club, a teen dance hall on Pritchard Avenue off Arlington Street in the North End, a really hip spot for dancers. His friends had dropped out of school and were working so that they could afford the coolest clothes. They were way hipper than I was. Gary brought them over one day and they said to me, “You like Elvis’s ‘Tutti Frutti’?”

  “Yeah!” I told them.

  “Have you heard Little Richard?”

  “No. Who’s that?”

  “He’s the guy that wrote ‘Tutti Frutti.’”

  So the next weekend they brought over a Little Richard album, and man, if I thought Elvis was wild, this was out of this world. Ten times wilder, screaming and shrieking. I’d never heard anything like it, the ferocity of that sound. When I played classical violin, it was all very structured and formal, playing the notes on the page written hundreds of years before. Now to hear rock ’n’ roll and hear the freedom in the notes and playing was liberating to me.

  Once I started playing guitar, I would sit by the radio with my Silvertone guitar and try to play these incredible songs. At night I’d be playing guitar in the bedroom that I shared with Gary, and when my parents would tell me to turn the lights out and go to bed, I’d turn off the lights but continue playing. That’s why I got so good at not having to look at my fretboard when I played, because I learned to play in the dark. I remember Gary telling me that one evening he went out with his friends—I guess it was a weekend—and left me playing guitar on my bed. When he came home after midnight, I was still in the same spot and the same position playing my guitar.

  My cousins, the Dupas brothers, lived out in the town of La Broquerie near Woodridge, southeast of Winnipeg. They had a blond, jumbo-sized Gibson hollow-body electric guitar, the kind Scotty Moore and Chuck Berry played. It was the coolest instrument I’d ever seen. While the grown-ups would be visiting, these guys would let me play their guitar and show me things. They would teach me Johnny Cash songs because they were into country music. Years later I bought that guitar from them.

  I’ve played thousands of gigs in my career, but never one as memorable as my public debut where I was upstaged by a Christmas tree. Garry Peterson and I went to Edmund Partridge Junior High on Main Street in West Kildonan. For the Christmas show, we put a band together called the Embers with another schoolmate of mine named Perry Waksvik. We were going to play Buddy Knox’s “Rockabilly Walk.” The curtain opens and Garry starts to play the drums. He’s set up in front of this giant decorated Christmas tree. I emerge from behind the curtain playing my guitar, and the crowd gasps. I thought to myself, “Wow, am I cool with my Elvis wave in my hair and my cool guitar!” I thought they were gasping for me. Instead they were gasping because the cord for my guitar was tangled in the giant Christmas tree and I was pulling it over, about to topple it on Garry and his drums. Thank god someone grabbed the tree and unplugged it in time before it crashed down on Garry. Needless to say I didn’t get to play my big song at the Christmas show. The teachers stopped it and sent us off the stage. All my buddies applauded and yelled out, “Yay for Bachman!”

  In the 1960s, Winnipeg was the rock ’n’ roll capital of Canada. It was like a mini Liverpool. We didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight you realize that Winnipeg was the hotbed of Canadian rock. It must have been something in the water, or in the cold. We grew up with different ethnic communities throughout the city, and in every neighbourhood there was a community club. As a kid you played sports at your community club, whether hockey or baseball. And when rock ’n’ roll came along, if you had a band and could play a few songs, you could get a gig playing your own community club. All your friends from school would come out and dance to the music you were making. I started out playing records at my community club before graduating to playing there in bands.

  Community clubs were a big deal for us, and so was radio. I was fortunate early on in my career to meet Lenny Breau, who was working with his parents, Hal Lone Pine and Betty Cody. They had a rockabilly kind of country show and wore all those Roy Rogers and Dale Evans fringed cowboy shirts with cactuses on them. They were called the CKY Caravan and worked out of CKY radio. They even had their own Elvis Presley. He was Ray St. Germain and he was fantastic, with the Elvis pompadour and the big sideburns. I loved this guy. He recorded his first single at CKY radio in 1958, an Elvis-style rockabilly number called “She’s a Square” that featured Lenny Breau on guitar. That was the first real rock ’n’ roll record cut in Winnipeg. In fact, radio stations were the first places to record rock ’n’ roll. There were no professional studios at the time.

  My first recording experience was backing a shoe salesman from Portage la Prairie named Gary Cooper. He was a lot like Ray St. Germain and drove a big white 1959 Ford Galaxie. He rented CKY’s studio, hired me to play lead guitar, and brought in the Triads to do the doo-wop backing vocals. Garry Peterson played the drums. Garry and I were in the Velvetones at the time with Mickey Brown. Gary Cooper had to change his name because of the actor of that name, so he became Gary Andrews for his recordings. We recorded “Come On Pretty Baby” with me on guitar. That was in 1961. I was eighteen.

  Every city has its hip spot where teenagers congregate, and back in the 60s, Winnipeg was no exception. When I started playing in bands, the Paddlewheel restaurant on the sixth floor of the downtown Hudson’s Bay department store on Portage Avenue was the coolest place to hang out and be seen.

  Every Saturday my friends and I used to do the walk between Eaton’s and the Bay downtown on Portage Avenue. I think everybody did, no matter what part of the city you came from. Within that five-block strip were all the hippest clothing stores and coolest restaurants, along with record shops, movie theatres, and musical instrument dealers. We would spend Saturday afternoons on that strip checking out the guitars and amps at Winnipeg Piano, buying records at the Record Room or Lillian Lewis Records, and trying on Mod clothes at the Stag Shop beside the Rialto Theatre. The Guess Who bought all their stage clothes from Bob McGregor at the Stag Shop along the Portage strip.

  But we’d always end up at the Paddlewheel. All the bands would be there on a Saturday afternoon, and our fans would be fawning over us. The radio stations sometimes did live broadcasts from the Wheel. The decor hadn’t changed in decades (in fact, it’s still the same!) and the food wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but for some reason teens congregated there and made it hip. I can remember saying to kids at a Friday night community club dance, “See you at the Paddlewheel tomorrow.” Besides meeting your fans, that’s where all the bands would catch up with each other and find out what we were all doing, where the good and bad gigs were, what new songs were being played, or who was in or out of a lineup. Because you were gigging all the time,
you rarely got the chance to hang out together and compare notes.

  CKY and CKRC were great stations, and really supported the local music scene. The deejays at these stations—PJ the DJ, Doc Steen, Boyd Kozak, Dino Corrie, Daryl B., Harry Taylor—were the Wolfman Jacks or Dick Clarks of the local scene. They’d go to the sock hops and emcee them, playing records and giving away 45s. These guys would promote dances on the radio all week long and work with the bands at the dances. You were really, really lucky if you had a deejay working with your band.

  It was like one big family in the Winnipeg music scene. We shared amplifiers and instruments, went to each other’s gigs, and hung out together. Neil Young used to borrow Jim Kale’s Fender Concert amp from us whenever we weren’t playing. I made friends with CKRC’s Doc Steen. I’d pop in every week and Doc would give me a box of 45s that they weren’t playing anymore or that didn’t fit in with their format. I got some great records that way. I remember a Nina Simone 45 that was very cool called “I Loves You, Porgy,” but I loved the flip side, “Love Me or Leave Me.” I always thought Nina Simone was some cool French chick, but she was a black classically trained pianist and singer from North Carolina.

  By the early 60s the music scene really changed, from rockabilly, doo-wop, and Elvis to rock groups—and the best of them seemed to come from Great Britain. Beatlemania hit Winnipeg hard. All of a sudden everything was Beatles and the British Invasion.

  I loved the Beatles. So when the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, opened in Winnipeg at the Garrick Theatre in the summer of 1964, I was right there on opening day. I went with a few friends for the matinee, and in those days you didn’t have to leave the theatre between shows. My friends went home but I stayed, mesmerized, memorizing everything. I completely lost track of time. It was like a how-to video for me: how to be a rock ’n’ roll star. How to run from crowds of screaming girls, how to write songs in a boxcar, how to be cheeky to a reporter. Sitting in that darkened theatre, I decided that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I must have seen the movie five or six times when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Phil Brown, the chief of police in West Kildonan, and my dad, who was an alderman in West Kildonan. They’d been out looking for me after the other boys had returned home and I hadn’t. My dad had phoned the hospitals and the police were looking for me. They decided to go check the theatre, and there I was, immersed in Beatlemania.

  When the Beatles first appeared on the scene, John Lennon played harmonica on several of their early recordings, including “Love Me Do” and “There’s a Place.” So I decided I would learn to play the harmonica, and began listening to and watching other guys. I ended up playing harmonica on some of the early Guess Who records, like “I Should Have Realized” and “Use Your Imagination.”

  One thing about the harmonica is that you have to keep it wet or the reeds dry up and you can’t get any sound from them. You can blow your guts out, but all you get is tweets or nothing at all. If you’ve ever seen Neil Young when he’s doing a solo acoustic show, he keeps his harmonicas in glasses of water on stage with him. That keeps them lubricated and easier to slide around on your lips, because of course they’re made of metal and wood. When Neil needs one, he just pulls it out of the glass, shakes off the excess water, and puts it in his harmonica holder.

  So there I was, the lead guitarist and harmonica player in the Guess Who. It was winter in Winnipeg, thirty below zero, and I was going off to band practice one morning. When it’s that cold you have to let your car warm up awhile before you put it in gear and drive. The engine and the oil in it have to warm up. So while I’m waiting, I decide I’ll use the time to practise. I pick up one of my harmonicas that’s been sitting in a freezing car all night, and guess what happens? I put it to my lips and it sticks to my tongue because it’s frozen metal and my mouth is wet and warm. It’s like when you were a kid and your parents told you not to put your tongue on a light standard or a metal fence. So I had to go in the house with this harmonica stuck in my mouth and run hot water over it until it dislodged from my tongue. When it did so, it ripped the skin off the front top of my tongue. I couldn’t play harmonica again for several months.

  So remember: If you play harmonica, don’t store it in the fridge or freezer or a car in winter.

  At the same time as the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night was playing at the Garrick Theatre, the Beatles themselves paid the city a surprise visit. Their airplane landed in Winnipeg on its way to San Francisco, where the group was set to start its first full North American tour. It was a routine stop to refuel in those days because those planes couldn’t make it from the U.K. to California without refuelling. It was supposed to be no big deal, but the rock ’n’ roll radio stations in the city, CKY and CKRC, got wind that the Beatles would be here in Winnipeg and announced it on air. Within half an hour there were what seemed like a thousand screaming kids at the airport. In those days you could stand outside on the roof of the airport building to watch planes take off or land, so there were all these kids up there and on the ground beside the tarmac. The Beatles weren’t supposed to get off the plane, but when they saw the screaming, waving mob, Brian Epstein, their manager, convinced them to come to the door and maybe come down the portable stairs that were quickly wheeled up to the plane.

  Bob Burns, the host of Teen Dance Party on CJAY TV and our manager at the time, became the first Canadian media person to interview the Beatles in Canada. He rushed up to John Lennon and said, “Bob Burns from CJAY TV,” and John replied, “That’s not my problem.”

  The plane stayed about twenty minutes, but before it left, Bruce Decker, who was a guitar player in the Deverons with Burton Cummings, broke away from the crowd on the ground and ran toward the steps to the plane. As the crowd cheered him on, the RCMP chased him. He managed to get a few steps up the stairs before he was tackled by a Mountie and taken away. The event made the front page of the papers and even the television news the next day and was called Decker’s Dash. Bruce Decker later joined the Guess Who on rhythm guitar for a few months in the summer of 1966.

  The Beatles were big in Winnipeg, but so was another band, only they were from California, not Liverpool. I remember hearing the Beach Boys singing about something called surfing. I had no idea what it was; it wasn’t something we did at Winnipeg Beach or Grand Beach. You’d see their albums with these boards strapped to the top of these hot rod cars and think, “What’s that all about? Do people stand on these boards in the water?” I didn’t have a clue.

  We were all freezing in a typical Winnipeg winter. One day I’m listening to CKRC radio and Doc Steen starts describing this new craze in California called surfing. You get a board, float out onto the ocean, wait for a wave, and then you stand on the board and float as the wave carries you to shore. He said that everyone is going to California to do this and that a bunch of brothers named Wilson have gotten together and written songs about it. So I’m listening to this and imagining a board from a fence or a plank. Is it like skiing or riding a toboggan rolling downhill? It was hard to imagine guys floating on a piece of wood and standing up on a wave. I finally found out what surfing was all about, although I never tried it. But the Beach Boys started the surfing music trend.

  The surfers pictured on the albums would have an old Ford station wagon with the wood panelling on the sides, and that became known as a Woody. Then they started singing about cars and a little Deuce Coupe. That’s a 1932 two-door, cut down and built into a hot rod with a big chrome engine. I remember seeing Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck with one in a photograph. He was into these American hot rods.

  The Beach Boys became the embodiment of California, with songs about surfing, girls, and cars. They were the ultimate American band. They had that barbershop-quartet kind of singing, but with a lot of cool things going on, like playing jazz notes and singing jazz bass lines. That was all Brian Wilson. He put the Little Deuce Coupe album together because he wanted all his car songs on one album. But that surfing thing, wha
t did we know about that in the Prairies?

  With all this music going on in my life, it’s no wonder I was failing at school. Not long ago we received a letter at Vinyl Tap from Alex Whibley in Australia. He was in my grade 10 class at West Kildonan Collegiate in Winnipeg. He asked if I remembered him, and I do. I also remember that I got thrown out of West Kildonan Collegiate for playing hangman with my friend Dennis Tkatch, that little game where you guess the letters in the alphabet. I was called into the principal’s office, and O.V. Jewitt expelled me and Dennis. Mind you, I was failing because I didn’t attend very regularly; I was too busy playing guitar. I ended up going to a new school, Garden City Collegiate. That was the only school that would take me.

  Fast-forward to 2006 and I get a call to come back to West Kildonan Collegiate, the new West Kildonan Collegiate. They’re naming the new performing arts centre after me. So there you go. The principal who threw me out, O.V. Jewitt, is long dead now, but I know he’s up there listening. So for you, Mr. Jewitt: “I made it!”

  My Picks

  “CAN’T BUY ME LOVE” by the Beatles

  “GOOD ROCKIN’ TONIGHT” by Elvis Presley

  “I SHOULD HAVE REALIZED” by the Guess Who

  “LOVE ME DO” by the Beatles

  “PLEASE PLEASE ME” by the Beatles

  “PRAIRIE TOWN” by Randy Bachman with Neil Young

  “TUTTI FRUTTI” by Little Richard

  “WHEN I GROW UP TO BE A MAN” by the Beach Boys

  “WHEN I WAS JUST A KID” by Randy Bachman from the album Survivor

  What’s in a Name?