As Randy Bachman prepares to return to the road with the Guess Who, he recalls the practice session and accident that sealed his fate as the band’s guitarist.
“I was still in high school when I got an audition to play rhythm guitar in a band called Chad Allan and the Reflections,” he says. The group, which was later renamed Chad Allan & the Expressions, was inspired by the Shadows, the famed British guitar group led by guitar great Hank Marvin.
“They gave me a Shadows EP with four songs on it: ‘Kon-Tiki’, ‘Man of Mystery’ and a couple others,” Bachman recalls. “And I passed the audition and got the job as rhythm guitarist.”
At his very first rehearsal, he soon found himself promoted.
“We started to playing an instrumental, and the lead guitar player suddenly broke a string,” he recalls, “so I finished playing the lead. Afterward, he says, ‘Wow, you play better than me! Do you want to play lead?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’
“So he says, ‘Learn this song.’ It was Johnny Kidd & the Pirates’ ‘Shakin’ All Over,’ and we we’re going to record it as a single.’”
Attempting to generate publicity for the group, their label, Quality Records, credited the single to “Guess Who?”
“They wanted everybody in Canada to believe it was a British band,” Bachman explains.
The song topped the charts in Canada and went to a respectable number 22 in the U.S.
“We then got a call to go to New York City to do a tour with the Kingsmen,” Bachman explains. “And from that point on, I'm playing lead guitar in the Guess Who.” (The name would later cause some confusion when the Who became popular in the U.S., leading to Bachman’s humorous confrontation with Who guitarist Pete Townshend.)
The group eventually pared down to a quartet, with Bachman on electric and acoustic guitar, singer Burton Cummings on keyboards, Jim Kale on bass and Garry Peterson on drums. Bachman and Cummings were the main songwriters, and tried their hardest to cover a range of styles.
“We were trying to be the Beatles, the Hollies and the Beach Boys, all in one,” Bachman says, “On those first three Guess Who albums, Burton and I basically wrote and pieced together the music, that had all those influences in it.
“The albums were very Beatle like, as we did them to try and beat the Beatles, where one song would be like rock and roll, one would be kind of jazzy, one would be like a British musical, another one would be a ballad and another psychedelic like. And we put these on the albums to show how diverse and cool we were as a band.”
The effort secured them three hits in 1969: “No Time,” “Laughing” and “Undun,” a song that Bachman says “shouldn’t have worked all.”
But the payoff came in 1970 with “American Woman.” Co-written by all four band members, the song topped the American Billboard chart, a first for a Canadian group.
After settling their legal battle with their former bandmates, Bachman and Cummings will tour for the first time in more than 20 years. The Guess Who “Takin’ It Back” tour will run through Canada, beginning with shows in January and February before hitting the road in earnest from May 26 through August 23.
