Randy Bachman

by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

  “THIS TIME LONG AGO”

  We took a huge gamble flying off to London in February 1967. We expected a big welcome at the London airport. Instead there was nothing, not even any contracts for us. It was a costly mistake, but we did manage to record four songs with producer Tony Hiller. Tony worked for Mills Music, which had made a lot of money off our recording of “Shakin’ All Over.” He came to our hotel, where we laid out our dire situation, and he offered us an opportunity to cut some demos for him.

  Tony took us to Regent Sound Studios in Soho to record two Mills Music songs written by British songwriters Jimmy Stewart and Jerome Langley, “This Time Long Ago” and “Miss Felicity Grey,” which we thought were pretty decent. While we were recording at Regent Sound, I happened to look up at the acoustic tiles on the walls and spotted a little pattern where the dots had been punched out, creating a funny little caricature of a person. I followed the dots and at the bottom was a signature: J. Lennon. I asked the studio engineer if the Beatles had ever recorded there, since they usually recorded at Abbey Road studios, and he told me they were indeed once there recording some demos. So I asked him if I could have the tiles, but because they were tongue and groove, I’d have had to take the whole wall. Still, it was pretty cool recording where the Beatles had once been.

  We recorded over two days, just before we had to go home. We laid down the tracks on the first day and the overdubbing the next. We were nervous being in a London studio, but as soon as the engineer counted down the track, we just did our thing very professionally. Tony Hiller thought we were great. We were already better than the average British band because of our years of experience. Cy Payne, the arranger, wrote a score for flugelhorn and added glockenspiel and a few other things to improve the tracks. Despite our initial dislike of the flugelhorn, it made the record sound like the Fortunes, a British Invasion band.

  Tony took the tapes to Fontana Records, who worked out a licensing deal with Quality Records back in Canada to release them in the U.K. The singles did nothing over there, but “This Time Long Ago” became a hit for us that summer back in Canada. The tracks we cut in London with Tony served as the all-important transition from the derivative sound of our previous recordings to a more professional and original sound. Tony Hiller has since become a very good friend of mine and I see him whenever I’m in London.

  “PRETTY BLUE EYES”

  This was the worst record of all time by the Guess Who, trust me. We’d recorded some songs in England that we thought were pretty good, so we wanted to break our contract with Quality Records Canada and sign with someone else bigger. We thought we’d record a song originally done by Steve Lawrence called “Pretty Blue Eyes” and do it really, really badly. Our plan was to send Quality something that was so bad they’d say to us, “We’re never going to release this and you’re off the label.” So we went into Gar Gillies’s Garnet Amplifiers shop on Ferry Road in the St. James suburb of Winnipeg. Gar made all our amplifiers for us.

  Gar had an old Robertson tape recorder with two inputs and we had a couple of mikes. To make it sound really bad we had Burton sing through a trumpet bell so that it sounded like a megaphone, and instead of a bass drum we had a Coke bottle and someone blowing into it going “Whoooo.” It was like a jug band. We had a real cowbell in there and guys moooing. For the cymbals Gary used an electric drill that went Rrreeeeerrrr! Rrreeeeerrr! So it sounded like Boom Boom Rrreeeeerrr! Burton Cummings did his best Walter Brennan impersonation from The Real McCoys TV show and those old cowboy movies. We recorded it with this crazy stuff, and the middle is just a train wreck with all these noises and Gar Gillies playing trombone.

  This was the Guess Who trying to get out of our recording contract. So we recorded it and prepared to send the tape to Quality Records. But we didn’t have any money in case they decided to sue us, so we had second thoughts about sending it in. We chickened out. So we recorded a good version without all the nonsense and sent both to them. They liked the good version and released it with the bad version on the B-side, and it made the charts across Canada. In the end we failed to break our contract with Quality Records.

  “THESE EYES”

  The record that changed it all for us was, of course, “These Eyes.” I wrote the piano part for “These Eyes” in Regina one night waiting to take Lorayne Stevenson, my future wife, on a date. That was back in the summer of 1966 and we hadn’t known each other long. She wasn’t ready, so as I waited and noodled around on her parents’ piano in the living room, I came up with the chords. I’m not a piano player, but I sat down at the piano and I started playing these two chords, Dm7 to Cmaj7. I liked how they sounded and decided I would write a song with those chords. The words I had were actually “These arms” with the line “These arms long to hold you.”

  Burton Cummings and I used to meet every Saturday morning at his grandmother’s house, Granny Kirkpatrick, on Bannerman Avenue in the North End of Winnipeg to write songs. We each kept these Hilroy notebooks with us all week and would jot down any ideas for songs we came up with. Then we’d show each other what we had and see if we could come up with a song. So Burton listened to my two chords and my words to “These Arms.” I also had the descending progression down to the A minor chord. He said, “Hmmm. Can we move that to the second line and make the first line ‘These eyes cry every night for you’?” Then we came up with “These arms long to hold you again.” He also had the long line “These eyes have seen a lot of loves but I’m never gonna see another love like I had with you.” It all fit together perfectly. And from that we wrote a song that would forever change our lives. “These Eyes” started out with a guy who could only play piano in the key of C, and that’s why the beginning is so simple. That’s all I could play on the piano.

  In 1968 we took a demo of that song to Jack Richardson, the man who would become our record producer, in Toronto. He later took us to New York to record at A&R Studios with the great Phil Ramone and engineer Dave Greene. They didn’t want the intro to be played on a full piano. They wanted something different, so Burton played it on his little Hohner electric piano which had a built-in tremolo. That became the opening and the signature sound of “These Eyes.”

  Jack bought out our contract with Quality Records in Canada and signed us to RCA Records in New York. We actually didn’t want “These Eyes” to be our first single with RCA. We saw ourselves as a rock ’n’ roll band, not a smooth ballads band. We wanted a rocker like “When You Touch Me” as our first single off Wheatfield Soul. RCA and Jack Richardson wanted “These Eyes,” and they won. Jack sat us all down and told us, “This is the best song on the album. You have no other chance. I’ve mortgaged my house for this.” He was right. RCA paid less than $10,000 for the Wheatfield Soul album with “These Eyes” on it. Don Burkhimer at RCA Records told me years later they would have paid ten times that because they believed in “These Eyes” being a hit. It became our first million-seller.

  “LAUGHING”

  After “These Eyes” became a huge hit, we still wanted to release a rocking song. Don Burkhimer at RCA instead pressured us for another soft pop song. He took us out to a New York deli and told us, “Just give us one more like ‘These Eyes’ and you’ll never have to work again the rest of your lives.”

  Soon after that, in early 1969, I remember we were sitting on our tour bus waiting for the ferry to Vancouver Island. I really liked the opening minor chord strumming of the Bee Gees’ “New York Mining Disaster 1941,” but instead of a minor chord I turned it into a major chord and just started playing the opening chord. We took the chord progression from the Dave Clark Five’s “Because,” which was a fairly standard chord pattern used in lots of songs. Burton even used it later in “Stand Tall.” Then we added the background vocals pattern from the old Platters song “Twilight Time,” the ascending “ah’s,” and put them in behind the lyrics. This was all done right on the spot sitting on the bus. That got us started. The rest of it was original, the idea of laughing at someone who broke y
our heart. We both loved Roy Orbison’s hit song “Crying” and thought the idea of laughing was clever. We also liked the buildup in “Crying” where it starts quiet then builds to a crescendo. “Laughing” was finished in about thirty minutes. It was one of those songs written to order and gave us our second gold record. Sometimes songs can come so easily.

  “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” lin
e, 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.