On the evening of Sunday, March 30, former
Winnipegger Randy Bachman will become the only Canadian Music Hall of Fame
member inducted twice. In 1987 he was inducted along with the other members
of the Guess Who. Now he enters with post-Guess Who megastars Bachman-Turner
Overdrive. While the Guess Who put Winnipeg on the North American music
map, BTO put it on the international map. Randy's current stature as Canadian
music elder statesman is well-earned.
Between those two multi-platinum bands there was Brave
Belt, Randy's first band endeavour after he left the Guess Who. Brave Belt
was a commercial failure, a country-rock experiment that cost Randy almost
all of his Guess Who nest egg. But it was the hard lessons learned from
that failure that helped propel BTO to the top of the rock music pantheon
by the mid-'70s.
What initially began as a solo album by original Guess
Who singer/guitarist Chad Allan transformed into a band once Randy came
onboard.
"I wanted to make a fresh start with a new band," says
Randy, who recruited youngest brother Robin on drums. "I knew that if I
did a pop band again it could never be as good as the Guess Who, and I
could never find a singer as good as Burton Cummings. Rather than be a
second-rate Guess Who, instead I went totally anti-pop."
Taking his cue from fellow Winnipegger Neil Young and
his former band Buffalo Springfield, Brave Belt became a country-rock band.
"Country music was always a big influence for me from the time I was a
kid," says Randy.
Young's intervention scored the band a recording contract
with Reprise in 1971. The label had high hopes Randy could deliver hits
like he had done with the Guess Who. Unfortunately, this was 1971; country
rock would not become commercially viable until the Eagles arrived two
years later. Audiences expected Randy the American Woman power-chord cruncher,
not a laid-back country picker. The band struggled to gain acceptance.
Gigs were few and far between, with Randy feeling the weight of a Guess
Who backlash against him. "They blackballed me," he says.
Prior to the release of Brave Belt's debut album in
early 1971, Randy recruited local rock music veteran C.F. 'Fred' Turner
to beef up the lineup. "I wanted a guy who had a strong, distinctive voice;
a guy who could really belt it out. Fred Turner had that refrigerator-sized
voice."
The one time Pink Plumm and D-Drifters member signed
on. "I just figured maybe it was time I took a chance," Turner explains.
"This was my last shot."
It was a shot that would later pay off in spades --
but not before a couple of years of struggling, what Randy later termed
Brave Belt boot camp. The band travelled in a beat-up Econoline van eschewing
hotels for campsites. "We had a Coleman stove and we would bring a loaf
of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from home," recalls Randy. "Or we
would cook up some soup." Hardly the rock-star lifestyle, but it fostered
a sense of unity within the band. "It really helped us cope when the big
success as BTO finally came."
At odds with Turner's grittier voice, Chad Allan bowed
out during sessions for Brave Belt II, but not before recording one of
the finest Canadian country-rock songs, Dunrobin's Gone.
"That song should have been called She's Gone and
She Won't Be Back, and that hurt the record's chances because no one
knew what the title meant unless you were from East Kildonan in Winnipeg,"
notes Randy. "People would phone in to radio stations asking them to play
She's
Gone and She Won't Be Back and they'd look on their playlists and say,
'We don't have that record.' " Both Brave Belt I and II sold poorly.
The band's epiphany came at a two-night gig in Thunder
Bay, when the promoter fired them the first night following tepid response
to their country-rock style. Unfortunately no replacement band could be
booked in time, so the promoter approached Randy asking if they could come
up with a rockier sound they could do the second night. That night the
band pulled out all the stops and won over the crowd with a set of rockin'
dance tunes. Randy realized his country-rock experiment was doomed and
set about retooling Brave Belt as a meat and potatoes blue collar rock
band.
"Being a survivor for all those years in the Guess
Who, I knew that no matter how much you like something, if it isn't working
you have to change it," he acknowledges. A few months later the band found
its new name at a gas station when Turner spotted a truckers' magazine
called Overdrive. Bachman-Turner Overdrive was born.
Adding brother Tim Bachman on second guitar, the band
still found itself fulfilling Brave Belt contracts and playing coffee houses
and country music venues. At one gig in Calgary, they supported country
music star Tommy Hunter. When the promoter discovered he'd booked a hard
rock act he refused to pay them. It took Hunter's intervention for the
band to get their cheque.
Randy had been supporting Brave Belt from his Guess
Who royalties, paying each member a weekly salary as well as financing
sessions for a third album, all to the tune of some $97,000 by early 1973.
Having logged more than 20 record label rejections for the album, he was
all but tapped out and ready to fold the band when Mercury Records offered
a contract.
"Charlie Fach at Mercury in Chicago called me and told
me to forget about the country-rock thing, go remix the tracks and add
some heavier guitars. That's how Brave Belt III became the first Bachman-Turner
Overdrive album." And the rest, as they say, is history.
"Brave Belt was important for me because I needed to
go through that to figure out what I do best," says Randy.
Join John Einarson Saturday mornings
from 10 a.m. to noon for My Generation on UMFM 101.5
Familiar riffs
Bachman's second collection will satisfy rock 'n'
roll fans
Reviewed by: George MacLean
Ref: Winnipeg Free Press ~ March 22, 2014
Randy Bachman has been taking care of business for more than
five decades. Writer, broadcaster, producer and founding member of the
two biggest bands from Winnipeg -- the Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive
-- he built an astounding career in music, but with its share of setbacks.
Working with his longtime collaborator and music historian
John Einarson, Bachman answers questions from his CBC Vinyl Tap radio show
that don't "fit" a segment. Written in Bachman's typical guarded but factual
way, it will satisfy any rock 'n' roll aficionado.
Big band and jazz music played regularly in Bachman's
household, but it was the mid-1950s rock 'n' roll of Little Richard, Elvis
Presley, Gene Vincent and Chuck Berry that sparked his musical talents.
In one of the best parts of the book, Bachman lays out the most influential
music in his life, from Les Paul to his friend Neil Young.
Some stories appeared in different forms in his autobiography
Takin'
Care of Business (2000, co-written with Einarson) and his previous
Vinyl Tap book Vinyl Tap Stories (2011). Snippets have also appeared
on his radio show and interviews.
It's a fun read and an easy page-turner, but many of the
main themes -- his 1960s and 1970s hits, working with his brothers, his
strained relationship with Burton Cummings and his business-minded approach
to music -- are familiar.
He pulls no punches. Brothers Timmy and Robbie are dealt
with harshly (as they have been in past books). Family is fundamental,
but his inability to reconcile with his siblings is over dollars and cents.
The blunt talk about money is sometimes cringe-inducing (as it was in Takin'
Care of Business), and his (unexplained) scheme to insulate Canadian
artists from taxes is odd. Unfortunately, these bits are wedged between
terrific stories from the heyday of classic rock 'n' roll.
Cummings plays prominently in Bachman's life. Co-writer
and bandmate, Cummings re-entered Bachman's life several times, recently
during their reunion tour of Canada. Bachman calls him one of the most
influential people in his life, but blames him solidly for their unsettled
relationship. Again, business keeps Bachman from reconciling with his old
friend and partner.
Surrounded by music's decadence, Bachman is set against
drugs and alcohol, which killed or hurt many friends and peers. He has
no regrets about staying clean, though it got him kicked out of bands,
and led him to fire bandmates, including a brother or two.
For gearheads and recording enthusiasts, there's a lot
here to satisfy. Mixing guitar tracks for Bachman-Turner Overdrive II may
not excite the casual reader, but the details are excellent and insightful.
Bachman is rather hard on younger music fans. He says
kids see music as disposable, and don't care about the artists or how music
is made. Album covers indeed may be a lost art, but Bachman doesn't contemplate
how the digital generation has more information online, and much more music
at their fingertips, too. Despite what Bachman says about changes to commercial
radio, it isn't that different today than the 1970s -- today's bubble-gum
pop will be classic nostalgia for a future generation.
He hasn't lived here for decades, but still calls himself
a "kid from Winnipeg." Winnipeggers will appreciate Bachman's numerous
shout-outs, like "socials," which (delightfully) he doesn't explain, as
well as locales from Garden City to Crescentwood.
One of Winnipeg's major musical exports, Bachman has not
forgotten his professional or geographical roots.
Forever Rock:
70-year-old Randy Bachman may have a Hall of Fame
spot,
but he isn’t going away
National Post ~ March 29, 2014
Randy Bachman, Canadian musician best known as a founding member
of the rock band "The Guess Who," speaks to the National Post before performing
at Toronto's Massey Hall on March 16, 2014.
Backstage at Toronto’s Massey Hall before a sold-out performance
of his Vinyl Tap tour, Randy Bachman, 70, father of eight, schleps his
Don Cherry frame to two separate meets and greets, with premium ticket
purchasers and clients of a local Lexus dealership, respectively. Wearing
a long black scarf, black comfort shoes, and an Ed Hardy-esque rocker T,
Mr. Bachman, blessed with more hair than most of tonight’s giddy crowd,
rarely breaks character. He spins anecdotes as easily as the popular DJ
spins records — telling tales he repeats variations of on his CBC radio
show, just renewed after nine years for another three; in his two volumes
of memoirs, and from the stage during his concert. As he says, not 15 minutes
from curtain: “I don’t want to be, ‘Whatever happened to?’ I want to be,
‘Look at what this guy’s doing now!’”
On Sunday night at the Juno Awards on his home turf in
Winnipeg, Mr. Bachman will be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of
Fame for the second time, with his band mates in Bachman-Turner Overdrive,
the group he started after breaking up with Burton Cummings in The Guess
Who. For Randy Bachman, the event’s an exclamation mark after a flurry
of work that he hopes will propel a new album that he says will resemble
the lean (and popular) crunch of The Black Keys. He says getting to this
moment hasn’t been easy. He knows he can be a hammerhead. After two broken
bands and two failed marriages, he acknowledges that he comes off strong.
“I am relentless, like you’d find in a Richard Branson,
Conrad Black or Shaq O’Neal,” he says. “You learn, after years of being
screwed, you can’t trust or depend on anyone — it’s you, and if you let
yourself down, you hit a bottom and believe me, you don’t want to go there.”
Mr. Bachman’s been up and down, rich and poor, fat and not-so-fat, and
he believes that the timing is right for an epic musical comeback. Don’t
snicker. If Rick Rubin can reinvent Neil Diamond, and Jack White can save
Tom Jones, you have to wonder: could Randy Bachman be cool again?
Born in West Kildonan, Man., in 1943, Randy Bachman, the
oldest of four brothers and a business graduate from the Manitoba Institute
of Technology, released his first album with Burton Cummings in The Guess
Who in 1966. Together, the two men wrote These Eyes, No Sugar Tonight,
Laughing, Undun, No Time, and American Woman, with a riff Mr. Bachman concocted
during a sound check at a hockey rink in Waterloo, Ont.. Publishing disputes
and lifestyle choices broke up the band, all of which was exacerbated when
Mr. Bachman adopted the Mormonism of his first wife Lorayne. About her,
Mr. Bachman, a lapsed Lutheran, says two things: 1) For her, he wrote These
Eyes; 2) She was Miss Regina Roughrider, 1965. “For me to join a religion
that believed in God and taught kindness and abstinence of drugs and alcohol,
was like joining AA,” Mr. Bachman says. “When the rest of the band was
drinking, when I’d say I’m a Mormon they’d leave me alone.”
Eventually, Mr. Bachman and Mr. Cummings became rivals,
and Mr. Bachman wrote the Cummings diss track, Hey You, with BTO. Like
Paul McCartney before and Dave Grohl afterwards, Mr. Bachman would become
that rare rock ‘n’ roll animal — a performer that makes it big with two
separate bands.
Michelle Siu for National Post
Michelle Siu for National PostCanadian musician Randy
Bachman, best known as a founding member of the rock band "The Guess Who,"
performs at Toronto's Massey Hall on March 16, 2014.
“BTO was just this desperate attempt to say, ‘Listen to
me one more time,’” he says. “I don’t want people walking out on me. I’m
there to entertain them. If they walk out it’s, ‘Why are you leaving? What’s
wrong?’”
People, however, or at least audiences, haven’t walked
out, at least not during his 12 big songs, including BTO’s Taking Care
of Business and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Critics, on the other hand,
sometimes cover their ears.
“He’s not as good as Neil Young, Leonard Cohen or Joni
Mitchell, and I don’t think he’s so stupid as to think he’s as good as
them, he’s not a great musician,” says Robert Christgau, the old Village
Voice music critic, the Pauline Kael of rock tunes. “There’s no way you
can say his bands had any swing to it, but the music has a matter-of-fact
efficiency, very businesslike.”
Ewan Currie, singer for Saskatchewan’s The Sheepdogs,
who are closing the Junos with a BTO tribute, says tastemakers often miss
the point: “There’s a temptation to write off his music as not important,
but that reeks of snobbery,” Mr. Currie says. “Randy, he’s not like Lou
Reed or Steven Tyler, with drug addiction and that stuff people think rock
‘n’ roll’s supposed to be; rather, he does his thing with a blue-collar
approach. He doesn’t have an air of rock ‘n’ roll superstar about him and
that’s fine by me.”
When ranking the all-time great Canadian rock stars, it’s
hard to know where Mr. Bachman sits. Based solely on record sales, his
40-million albums sold would find him near the top. However, “artists”
like Rush, k.d. lang, Feist, Blue Rodeo, Arcade Fire and The Tragically
Hip inspire more reverence. Denise Donlon, who’s held senior positions
at Sony Music Canada, CBC and MuchMusic — it was she who paired Lenny Kravitz
with The Guess Who at the 2000 MuchMusic awards — says Mr. Bachman’s likability
is tied to the fact that he comes off like a Canadian football fan.
“If you saw Randy on the street, you’d go up to him and
say, ‘Hey man, I love that song,’ but if you saw Gord [Downie of The Tragically
Hip], you might go, ‘He’s too cool,’ or even Neil Peart [Rush’s drummer],
you might just wave from your car,” she says. “When he did his huge weight
gain, people were genuinely worried that he was a walking heart attack,
but when he lost all that weight, it was such a great relief — ‘wow, Randy
just saved his own life.’”
Mr. Bachman’s always had an appetite — for audiences,
for airplay and, indeed, for food. Prior to the Massey Hall gig, the only
time he interrupted his reminiscingwas when he spotted a tray of burger
sliders. “Get me four of those,” he commanded, as he began to confess to
his lifelong vice. “Buckets of chicken, whole chocolate cakes — eating
with me was like eating with John Candy or John Belushi,” he says. “Not
drinking or doing drugs, you have to do something. It used to be a box
of Oreos or Dad’s cookies with a gallon of milk and then I’d just lie there
in this weird sugar shock.”
A lifelong music junkie, it’s not surprising that even
his gastrointestinal surgery in 2001 comes with a rock anecdote. The doctor
who cut his digestive system apart, he explains, was the same one who worked
on Brian Wilson’s daughter Carnie, author of the pop hit Hold On. “He took
my stomach, which was the size of a basketball, and made it the size of
a golf ball — I lost 160-pounds,” Mr. Bachman says. “I get up every morning
and I’m grateful for this new body. After the surgery, I even took four
months off from work.”
For the rest of the guys in BTO, including singer Fred
Turner, who Mr. Bachman hired at the recommendation of Neil Young, the
Juno tribute feels less like a siren sound of another comeback and more
like a fun night on the town. Blair Thornton, who joined the group after
Randy fired his brother Tim — now a realtor in Abbotsford who recently
had a disturbing sexual-assault charge dismissed — says he’s moved well
beyond his rock ‘n’ roll youth, and even retired from his rock ‘n’ roll
middle age. Thornton never subscribed to Mr. Bachman’s strict Mormon rulebook
— which eschewed premarital sex, as well as drugs and booze — but says
the band gelled onstage. Even today, he views his former bandleader with
a mixture of frustration and awe.
“Randy’s a force of nature and his nature hasn’t changed,
which works well when you have to do things, but not so good when you want
time to reflect,” says Mr. Thornton, who hasn’t played with BTO since their
last run through casinos and fairs in 2004. “Randy, he’ll just keep trying
to run stuff up the flagpole. You have to admire a guy like that – takes
a tremendous amount of work.”
Mr. Bachman currently owns homes in Los Angeles, Toronto
and London, England, and is weathering a second divorce. While one music
industry insider estimates that Mr. Bachman earns $250,000 annually from
Taking Care of Business royalties alone, Mr. Bachman clearly still carries
the wounds of a tough five-decade career. He sees the detritus in his wake
as the price of his craft.
“My marriages came to a critical mass, a critical point,
when my bands ended and suddenly I’m home and we realize, ‘Gee, I don’t
even know her, she doesn’t really know me and we don’t even like each other
anymore.’ That love thing is kind of gone,” says Mr. Bachman, who sought
advice from a psychic after the end of his first marriage, where, in addition
to losing his family and his rock group, he also found himself $1-million
in the hole. “Back then, 1983, my band got called back to play the Molson
Amphitheatre for $400,000 and we got $100,000 each and life’s just like
that. You want to jump off the bridge, but you pick up the guitar and life
slowly rebuilds.”
Tal Bachman, 45, Randy’s oldest, works with his father.
A musician himself, Tal Bachman researches his dad’s segments on Vinyl
Tap and, though he had a public fallout with the Mormon church — his turn
in Bill Maher’s documentary-style takedown of organized religion, Religulous,
is striking — he still holds his father in high regard. “When my parents
split up, I stuck with dad because he seemed to be the more stable parent,”
says Tal, who compares his father not to a rock star but to a craftsman,
a perfectionist forever deconstructing what makes a hit song. As for his
breaking from the church, Tal says his father respects his freethinking.
He believes that Mormonism, for Randy, might have been a way of surviving
the times. “Devoutly believing could come in handy when you’re in a fish
bowl and every other fish is going berserk, vomiting, being dragged to
hospital, literally dying,” he says. Having grown up around his father’s
career swings, Tal’s a believer that now could be his dad’s moment. “When
I was a little kid, with BTO he had this radiant drive like, ‘I know where
I’m going, I know how to get there, and if these guys don’t want to do
it the right way, they’re gone,’ and I assume that’s what it was like with
The Guess Who,” he says. “With dad, there’s been a time or two in his life
when he didn’t feel that way, but he’s swung back – and for that, I can
see the possibility of another act.”
Mr. Bachman reaches nearly a million listeners on the
radio each week and last year, across the country, he played close to 100
shows. A Hall of Famer — twice even, come Sunday night — he’s a guy who
went back down to the minors and continued to get in the ring. In his mind,
he’s still the scrappy fighter from Winnipeg who built audiences for two
bands one bar at a time (without having a drink). He calls his as-yet un-recorded
new album “a knockout.”
“The new stuff is about the song and the performance.
It’s that I’m here and I’m touching you,” he says. “I want to get to that
point right away.”
Of course, the new record could be hot or it could be
awful. Mr. Bachman’s last album of original rock tunes, 2010’s Bachman
& Turner, amounted to less than a slider tray. But there’s nobody questioning
that he’s willing to put the work in. When the crowd at Massey Hall, on
its feet, demanded an encore, no one in the building had any doubt that
their grizzled old hero would return. He still hadn’t dived into Hey You.
Ultimate Guess Who reunion highly unlikely
Winnipeg Free Press ~ April 1, 2014
Randy Bachman is inducted into the
Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 2014 Juno Awards.
Winnipeggers
wore Juno Awards weekend as if we had received the best award of all. Which
we did, in a way.
I haven't seen our beleaguered "Disaster City" this proud
of itself -- or mentioned so affectionately and so often on the national
stage -- since the return of the Jets. But the proudest Winnipeggers of
all had to be Randy Bachman, Fred Turner and the rest of the boys in Bachman-Turner
Overdrive, inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame here in the city
where they began.
Actually, the only place I've sensed Bachman being prouder
of his roots is in his latest book, Tales Beyond The Tap, which
he was autographing Saturday at McNally Robinson. It's a memoir of sorts,
structured around 20 questions posed by Free Press contributor and Bachman
pal John Einarson, each set at the beginning of a chapter. I was captivated.
Especially by what Bachman revealed about his pride in his late father,
his single-mindedness about wanting to be a musician and the way parts
of the book overflow with his obvious affection for our city.
Inevitably, it also includes the other stuff. What Bachman
refers to as "the sad legacy of the Guess Who... the residue of bitterness
and recrimination." I had reason to expect that and more from the book.
In November 2012, I received an email from Bachman. He had been in town
to see Neil Young and the Sadies perform. Coincidentally, that weekend,
I had written a column about his former bandmate, Jim Kale, who owned the
right to the Guess Who name, and Kale's venom-dipped relationship with
Burton Cummings. In his email to me nearly a year and a half ago, Bachman
alluded to his own unresolved issue with Cummings and suggested someone
should write a book that exposed it.
It now appears Bachman did it himself. Or at least a one-chapter
version of the sticking point that, over the years, Bachman says has cost
him millions of dollars in royalties. And sleep. The chapter explaining
why is set up with this question: "Your relationship with Burton Cummings
has been a roller-coaster. Will you ever work with him again?"
Bachman goes on to relate the story in sometimes anguished
tones, starting in 1968 when Bachman and Cummings agreed to a deal that
gave their publishing rights to their producer's production company, which
essentially amounted to 50 per cent of whatever the songs they wrote earned.
The other 50 per cent -- the writing royalties -- went to Bachman and Cummings.
But the production company also received half the record royalties, which
meant they were taking 75 per cent of total song earnings.
Then, around 1980, the production company's rights became
available because of a bankruptcy. By chance, Cummings found out first.
And, as Bachman writes: "Burton wasted no time in contacting his lawyer
in L.A., Abe Somer, who brokered the deal for Burton to acquire all the
Guess Who songs, from
These Eyes onward. All the songs, including
the ones I wrote alone or with Burton, now came under the control of Shillelagh
Music, Burton's publishing company."
The bottom line? Cummings receives 75 cents of every dollar
the songs earn; Bachman gets 25 cents. During the years, the tours and
the Guess Who's induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Bachman
kept quiet and collected his cheques. He also sued over the perceived wrong
and lost.
"He was a kid when I invited him into the band," Bachman
writes. "I was his big brother, picking him up for gigs and bringing him
home as his mother insisted. I taught him about publishing and shared everything
equally with him in our little publishing company. Then having him grab
it all and not tell anybody was hurtful. He needs to fix it."
Bachman also writes about wanting to do a Guess Who reunion
next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their first hit, Shakin'
All Over. Of course, for the ultimate Guess Who reunion, Bachman would
need to reunite with Cummings. "I still want to celebrate the songs," Bachman
says in the book, "but I'm not going to do so with him unless he rights
the wrong between us."
When he contacted me nearly a year and a half ago, Bachman
wanted someone to write a book about all this in hopes it would "shame"
Cummings "into making things right." Evidently, that's what he's trying
to do in his own book. But Burton Cummings is not about to be shamed. Which,
if Bachman remains true to his promise, means he and Cummings will never
perform together again.
FREE PRESS COMMENTS
"Unless he rights the wrong between us...." oh please
Ranbach. You just lost out to a guy who was quicker on the draw and had
a smarter lawyer while you collected guitars. Too bad so sad. Get over
it.
Interesting point of view from Randy. I
wonder how you would explain when Tim or Robbie brought songs to the table
you insisted on redoing the arrangement or adding a few words and then
publishing the songs through your own company you told them if it wasn't
done that way it would not be recorded by BTO. This was your way of insuring
you would get credit on the record and the publishing rights which meant
a higher personal payout for you. That was a long standing source of animosity
between the brothers. Ah Randy, how easy it is to remember the slights
done to you but how you forget what you did to others. By the way seems
to me that you benefited from Burton being in the band, so taking him home
was no big deal right. You needed a lead singer, he wrote a giid song and
the Derons constantly was the band of joice among Winnipeg teens so better
he was with you. He did a business deal and because he was smarter and
quicker than you were, you feel it necessary to complain? Hey you made
money touring with him a few years ago. Thought you forgave him then? Come
on man...step up. Or is it just about the money?
I enjoy the music of both
these men regardless of their personal differences. It would be nice if
they could reconcile those differences but at the moment that seems unlikely.
Both of them are to be congratulated for their accomplishments.
It's a little sad when a guy has one sole
focus in his life: PUBLISHING. All he's ever cared about, and all he ever
will. But if he got to those songs first....based on his OTHER dealings
with OTHER songs...he's likey to have done the same thing. So he thinks
ol Burt is gonna get an accountant to go back 30 years and count all the
quarters he owes Randy...? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
I would suspect that both men in this squabble,
are a little bit wrong & a little right. They will come to realize
that the collection of currency as a lifelong goal, usually does not involve
taking the high road. Maybe they should both sit down and listen to their
song "Share the Land"
Bachman is no angel either.
He did the same thing to his band mates in BTO. Read the book "Randy Bachman:
Takin' Care of Business by John Einarson"
We might never know the exact truth about this. It's
a real shame though that there is still friction after so many years between
these two and other members of the Guess Who and B.T.O. Burton and Randy
are really Winnipeg's favorite sons.
I guess Cumming's response would be Looking out for Number
One.
Cummings always was and still
is a jerk. That's why I still call it The Walker Theatre...the EGO doesn't
deserve to have anything named after him.
MANITOBA MUSIC MUSEUM COMMENTS
If RB's version is true this speaks
badly of BC. You can sometimes say there are two sides to a story but either
BC bought all these rights from a bankrupt production co or he didn't.
NO respect at all for Cummings greed and
arrogance...I love the songs but can't stand the man.
My guess (given RB's past history of suing
everybody in aight), is that he would have done exactly what Burton did
if given the opportunity, and then let the courts decide. Exactly what
Burton did. Randy you taught him too well.
The 2 will go to their grave as the hatfields
and mccoys of music!!
Another Guess Who reunion
EH??? Think I'll be staying home and listening to Budgie that night
They should both just shut
up once and for all and be thankful for all the good fortune that seems
to have followed them all their lives!!!!!
In a nutshell...... ego·tism - noun:
: the feeling or belief that you are better, more important, more talented,
etc., than other people
Forget about the ingrates of GW and BTO
who only care about money and let's start celebrating Streetheart and Harlequin
and The Pumps who still rock the party.
There are a lot of " wrongs
to be righted " in that camp !
