Canadian Idols

Reunited and it feels so good: From left, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman perform in First Time Around. Photo Barry Roden/CBC.

Admirers of the hoser heroes that were the Guess Who will be tickled by a wildly improbable remake of American Woman featured on First Time Around, CBC-TV’s Burton Cummings-Randy Bachman reunion special (airing Thursday, April 20 at 8 p.m.).

For the uninitiated, American Woman was the No. 1 song in North America and Winnipeg’s the Guess Who, the bestselling band in the world in 1970. With its molten, heavy metal guitar passages and protest-sign sloganeering, the tune succeeded as a classic bit of pop rabble-rousing during the height of the Vietnam War.

Performing the song recently on a Vancouver TV stage, co-authors Bachman and Cummings turn their signature hit into a nightclub samba. Looking more than ever like a high school geography teacher, Bachman abandons his guitar to cheerlead an audience clap-along, while Cummings scats the opening guitar riff: “Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doot-doot …” When he arrives at a verse, Cummings swipes bracketed forefingers across his right, then left eye, as if he’s doing the ’60s dance, the Swim; he croons, “American woman, stay away from me-ee …”

As much fun as American Woman provides, First Time Around suffers from the dilemma that besets all middle-aged rock shows. Rock and roll is about youthful abandon or defiance, and no matter how zippy the light show or great the songs, geezer rock never escapes the bittersweet ambience of an old-timers hockey game.

Nevertheless, it is great seeing Bachman and Cummings — once the best of songwriting partners, later the worst of friends — together again, for this odd couple invented Canadian pop music. And there are moments here — an occasional song or story — that cry out for some pop-savvy filmmaker to make a proper documentary on the jukebox geniuses that were the Guess Who.

Prior to the Guess Who, there was no such thing as a Canadian band. Oh, there were popular city groups — the Staccatos in Ottawa, the Collectors in Vancouver — but no one connected with an audience outside their turf.

If the Guess Who weren’t quite the Canadian Beatles (as some have suggested), Winnipeg was our music equivalent of the Beatles’ Liverpool — an isolated city that cultivated a thriving, unique pop scene. In early 1963, the Town ’n’ Country nightclub on Kennedy Street hosted jazz guitar great Lenny Breau, Neil Young’s the Squires and the city’s top band, Chad Allan & the Reflections, on the same bill. Vocalist Chad Allan’s band, which featured guitarist Randy Bachman, drummer Garry Peterson, and bassist Jim Kale, perfected Winnipeg’s pre-Beatles, Britpop sound. Bachman’s hero was Cliff Richard’s bluesy, impeccably swinging guitarist, Hank Marvin.

When the Winnipeggers traveled to Minnesota to cut a record in 1965, they opted to remake an obscure 1960 hit by England’s Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Shakin’ All Over. A studio foul-up created a tidal wave of guitar feedback and a distorted, truly shaken vocal. The group knew they had a hit, as did their Toronto label, Quality Records. But the music company figured kids wouldn’t be interested in a Canadian outfit, so issued the song under the name “Guess Who?” and marketed it as a mystery release from a British band. Canadian kids figured Guess Who was the name of a great new group and sent the record to No. 1 in early 1965.

House band: The Guess Who appear on a postcard promoting the after-school TV show, Let's Go. Photo CBC.

A contract blunder resulted in the group receiving $400 for what was an international hit. The Guess Who soldiered on, replacing Allan with a showboat teenage vocalist, Burton Cummings, who had ruined any number of Winnipeg church basement pianos by kicking out chords with the heel of his Beatle boots. The group toured relentlessly, at one point playing 24 Prairie towns in four weeks, and tricked their way into becoming the house band of CBC Winnipeg’s Thursday after-school TV show, Let’s Go, by ostensibly sight reading the music. (Bachman slyly got the set list before the audition and the group learned the numbers in advance.)

From 1967 to 1968, the Guess Who turned their Thursday, 5:30-6 p.m. TV segment into a sort of Canadian Bandstand. The group could cover anyone. Cummings expertly mimicked lead singers, slipping from Manfred Mann’s moony dreamboat, Paul Jones, to the Doors’ Lizard King, Jim Morrison. And no British guitar hero, from Eric Clapton to Jimmy Page, was beyond Bachman.

Bachman and Cummings show off their cover-band mastery on First Time Around by offering an elegantly soaring reconstruction of the 1967 Moby Grape number 8:05. Ironically, in reupholstering what is no more than a pop song trifle, the songwriters demonstrate what made their partnership special. Bachman refines the Grape original by compacting the song’s melody on a chiming acoustic guitar, while Cummings finds hidden sweet spots in the lyric. For three minutes we are transported back to Winnipeg in the ’60s as the two musicians rediscover their ability to pull pop music magic out of thin air.

Back in 1967, after a week of TV rehearsals and nightclub performances, Bachman and Cummings returned every Sunday to Cummings’s North End Winnipeg home to hone their shared gift for creating pop music. There, they wrote the group’s earliest material, numbers like the eerily prescient When Friends Fall Out. It was in Cummings’s house that the partners’ troubles began, when Burton’s mom asked the foursquare Bachman to look after her son, a wild child whose father left home when he was an infant.

Bachman had recently quit drinking and joined the Mormon Church. He took the task of saving Cummings as seriously as he did making successful pop music. That the songwriting partners excelled at the latter became evident in 1968 when the band released These Eyes, a gorgeous Bachman ballad distinguished by Cummings’s impromptu run-on sob, “these-eyes-have-seen-a-lotta-love-but-they’re-never- gonna-see-another-love-like-I-had-with-you-oo!”

Guess Who a go-go: The Winnipeg band indulges in a bit of sixties psychedelia on a 1968 CBC special hosted by Juliette. Photo Roy Martin/CBC.

The No. 1 hits continued for 18 months: Laughing, Undun, No Time and American Woman. Throughout their magic run, the Guess Who wore their passports on their sleeves, draping a maple leaf flag over Cummings’s piano. Indeed, the group’s rapport with its home base was manifest in its biggest hit. The boys had returned from an American tour and were playing a forgotten Canadian city, when Bachman snapped a guitar string. The group quit the stage, with Bachman returning first, trying out a power chord variation of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. The audience went wild. Cummings, who had been talking to a girl backstage, returned, shouting, “American Woman, stay away from me.” More cheers! The band continued to jam, feeding the crowd’s frenzy. Afterwards, a teenager bearing a tape recorder wandered backstage and proudly handed the group a bootleg cassette of their debut performance of American Woman.

Cummings often remarked that the song was pro-Canadian as opposed to anti-American. A comment that offers a clue as to why the Guess Who are so fondly remembered by native Boomers. For in addition to being skilled craftsmen, the leaders were rock and roll patriots who cast their spell at a time of national celebration — just after Expo 67 and Trudeaumania — when this country was searching for new and unlikely heroes.

The fabled partnership didn’t last. Patriotism often leads to rebellion, and in 1970, Burton Cummings led a revolt against Bachman, who, true to his promise to Mrs. Cummings, worked hard at coaching a team of unruly kid conquerors. With the band on an American tour that would allow them to sell more albums in 1970 than the Beatles, the guitarist took ill. “I’d been away from the band for eight or nine days, and they hadn’t had the pressure of me being there,” Bachman told group historian, John Einarson. “I was like a narc all the time. They said they had enough of my religion and all this stuff and were throwing me out. I said, ‘That’s fine, I quit.’”

The Guess Who continued for five years, squeezing out more hits — Running Back to Saskatoon, Albert Flasher, Clap for the Wolfman. Bachman would also achieve more fame, leading Bachman-Turner-Overdrive to a series of stomping mid-70s guitar workouts — Roll On Down the Highway, Taking Care of Business, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

Working with an anonymous backup band, Bachman and Cummings tackle some of these songs in their current special. And it’s fun to see the Guess Who co-leaders sharing a stage again. Still, to truly capture the First Time Around magic of Canada’s pioneer pop heroes, a reunion special won’t do. For that task, you would need a film archivist who is prepared to travel back 40 years.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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