Canadian rock legend Randy Bachman turns 75 at the end of September and shows little signs of slowing down either as a touring performer or a recording artist. Playing more than 200 dates a year, both full scale rock shows, as well as his more introspective Every Song Tells a Story performances, Bachman performs to audiences around the world, many of which contain three generations of fans.
First as a co-founder of The Guess Who, and later with Bachman Turner Overdrive, the Winnipeg native has created songs that continue to be the soundtrack of rockin’ good times, including American Woman, These Eyes, Undun, No Sugar Tonight, Blue Collar, Roll On Down the Highway, Takin’ Care of Business, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, and Let It Ride, among others.
One of his favourite venues in Ontario is Belleville’s Empire Theatre, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary since being revamped as a performance centre by owner Mark Rashotte. It features a plethora of indoor shows, as well as a number of outdoor shows in the adjacent parking area, which can bring in more than 3,500 fans.
As part of the Empire Anniversary Week, Bachman is playing a special show outside on Saturday, Sept. 15, with special guest Kim Mitchell. The evening before, Sept. 14, Jake Clemons opens up for another legendary Canuck rocker, Tom Cochrane.
“The Empire is just one of those incredible halls that you’re so glad when you’re in there knowing that somebody restored it because there’s nothing like the feel and sound of those old halls. They were acoustically perfect for the time before amplification and as movie theatres. There is something really cool about it. It’s so intimate. I have done my storytelling show there and it’s a great place for that kind of show. And having the back area outside where you can do these big rock shows is pretty amazing,” said Bachman, who continues to tour in support of his most recent album, By George – By Bachman, a reimagining of a host of songs written by late Beatles member George Harrison.
The demand to see his shows, which feature a set list spanning the entirety of his impressive career, is always high. But the release of the Harrison tribute album has generated even more interest than normal, leading to a premiere of the album at a show at B.B. King’s in New York City and later a livestream broadcast to millions of fans at the famed Troubadour in Los Angeles this past spring.
“If I am playing a rock show, I am pretty much standing up rocking out doing, I don’t know maybe four or five of the George songs, along with all my Guess Who and BTO hits. If it’s a sit-down show, where I am basically telling stories about how I wrote the Guess Who songs and the BTO songs, which is my Every Song Tells a Story show, I play the George Harrison songs and explain why I did the album and what it meant to me to grow up in bands where I was always George. I always did George’s songs.”
It was after attending festivities over in Liverpool on the occasion of John Lennon’s 75th birthday in 2015, that Bachman first began pondering creating his own tribute to Harrison – the member of the Beatles with whom he most identified.
“And at around the same time I was asked to do another record and to do something completely different again. I thought, well, I will do a George Harrison tribute. Because when I was in the Guess Who, in the early days we would wait for the new Beatles album to come out and I was always designated the George songs because I played lead guitar. I had the same guitar, the Country Gentleman Gretsch and then I got a Rickenbacker 12-string just like George. In the early days the other guys like Burton [Cummings] and Chad Allen were doing the John and Paul stuff, and I went for the George songs and then our drummer would sing the Ringo songs,” Bachman said, adding that his esteem for Harrison and his relationship with the songwriting twin titans of Lennon and McCartney led him to compose the album’s lead-off track, Between Two Mountains.
“In the middle of the process I thought about what George would feel like going into the session with Lennon and McCartney who show up with 30 songs each and after a while he would hope they may say, ‘hey George, have you got any songs?’ And he would say ‘Yeah, I’ve got a song called Here Comes the Sun,’ or ‘I have got a song called Taxman.’ So, I wrote Between Two Mountains, which was my feeling of how I felt George felt between these two mountains. But also, how whenever he got a chance, up grew Mount Harrison and it became the third mountain. I remember watching a documentary and it talked about how George was the most successful of all the Beatles – after the Beatles. His solo career was huge. And I thought that was a really cool thing.”
The intent right from the moment that Bachman had the initial idea for doing what became By George – By Bachman, was to deconstruct the original material, and reinvent the songs in his own image, using his more than five decades of experience as a performer, songwriter and arranger – not to mention his encyclopedic knowledge of the minutiae of rock and roll history.
“I have been very familiar with these songs for my whole life. I thought I had to do something different, because if I played it straight I knew that it would just be a really, really, really pale copy. Nobody can outdo them. There were these four guys who came in and had these conflicting ideas and they bashed things around and George Martin pout them in a bottle and shook it up and uncorked it and out came this lightning bolt that shocked the world. And every album and every single that the Beatles put out was totally different that the previous one – they took us on this wonderful musical journey,” he said.
“How can I do Taxman any different or better than The Beatles? I can’t. So, I’ve got to get my own riff and honour the song as a songwriter, with the original melody and lyrics, but some of my own chords and my own groove and see what I can do. Just like Junior Walker did with These Eyes or Lenny Kravitz did with American Woman. Just take it and make it your own. So, I took all of these George Harrison songs and reinvented them. And my band has been playing Beatles songs for years, as most hands have when the guys are over 40. It’s part of the book you learn from. You learn from The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, and then Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin – that covers everything. Everything in between is inconsequential.
“For example, when you take a song like While My Guitar Gently weeps, it has a lot of chords and a lot of Eric Clapton’s incredible turnarounds in it, and I made it a three-chord song of it, like The Who’s I Can See for Miles, because that’s what I was trying to do. It allowed me to do kind of a Neil Young Crazy Horse solos. And my buddy Walter Trout plays a solo on the end of that and it’s like Hendrix lands in the middle of the studio when Walter comes in with his solo – it just blows the top of my head off every time I hear it. And then I got this other groove for Taxman and I literally threw out the familiar bass line and came in with my own Randy Bachman, ZZ Top fast Texas shuffle. When we play that live the crowd goes nuts, because it’s like La Grange or Sharp Dressed Man, there is just something about that Southern Texas boogie.”
Another interesting way that Bachman honoured Harrison the guitar player and soloist was to incorporate his solos into the songs – but not the song that they were originally composed for. In a trick that only the most detailed of Beatles fans or the most attuned of guitar aficionados will twig to is how he actually places Harrison solos from one song, into another.
“If you really listen to the song Between Two Mountains, the solo in the middle is George’s solo from And I Love Her. I play that in the middle. Then in the next song I play another George solo from the wrong song. I am not playing his solos in the songs that you’re expecting them. I am moving them and overdubbing other solos. In I Need You I am playing the solo from Taxman. And then we’re doing another song and Brent from my band is playing the slide guitar from My Sweet Lord, even though we didn’t even put My Sweet Lord on the album,” Bachman explained.
“So, if you’re a guitar player you go, ‘wow this is incredible. He put the solo from that one song with is 80 beats per minute into this other song that is at 120 beats per minute. And it still sounds perfect.’ I have had many guitar players tell me that they love sitting there trying to figure out what solo is from what other George song.”
Some may think that an artist, even one as accomplished, acclaimed and well respected as Randy Bachman, ‘messing’ with the immortal compositions of the legendary Beatles would be open to some rancour from purists and iconoclasts who want nothing but the most faithful of interpretations. But Bachman said he has received nothing but compliments and commendations from some of The Fab Four’s most ardent admirers.
“When we debuted the album in New York on the Feb. 24 and 25 weekend, I was invited to The Beatles Channel on Sirius XM and did two, three-hour full shows with us playing the songs live and discussing them. Beatles fans loved it. They were saying, ‘we love the Beatles Channel, but after a while it gets a little repetitious. To hear your fresh new versions of these songs and have our kids like it because it sounds more modern and has more boogie and more groove in it, it’s just a wonderful thing,’” he said.
“Then my son Tal and I went and did a Beatles festival in New York City, full of all these Beatles fans, as well as Peter & Gordon and the guys from The Rutles and all these incredible Beatles historians, they all just really embraced the album and totally loved it. So, I am really happy with it. The response from the critics and from the writers like yourself, and people who have podcasts, has been just great.”
He said the release of the album and the amount of buzz that it has created, particularly online and through specialty satellite radio stations, has meant he is fielding press and booking enquiries from some pretty far flung locales.
“When you are told bluntly up front by every radio programmer in Canada and the States, who are all my friends, that they can’t play anything on this new album, you’re like, ‘what the f***, are you kidding? This is great music. This is the best music I have ever done. This is Beatles music, are you kidding me? They say, ‘no we can’t play it, but we really like it and play it in our car.’ Well, when you can’t get any airplay, there’s a certain freedom. You can do whatever the heck you want and please yourself. And then you get this feedback on your Facebook and internet from fans who love it it’s incredible. I have people like the head of the Beatles fan club in Holland, or the head of the Beatles fan club in Greece, who has this internet radio show that has millions of listeners, contacting me,” he said.
“It’s like the old days in the 1950s when you put out a record and nobody would play it and nobody knew who you were, so you went to the local radio station and the DJ liked it and played it, and then he took a copy with him when he went on vacation and gave it to his DJ friend in Florida and that guy played it, so now you’ve got a breakout hit in Florida. With the internet radio now, it’s almost like the old-fashioned radio. When you have a breakout, and it gets really big, suddenly millions of people are aware of it.”
As for the future, Bachman said because there is no pressure to try and get airplay with his new recordings – mostly because in this day and age of corporate radio and compressed formats, no one will play his new stuff anyways – he is free to follow his muse. The first example of this was the 2015 album Heavy Blues, which he recorded alongside female blues stars bassist Anna Ruddick and drummer Dale Anne Brendan. By George – By Bachman is the follow-up instalment, and a possible next step could be a collaboration with his songwriter son Tal Bachman, who is currently playing in his dad’s band, and is of course a hit artist in his own right, thanks to the chart topper She’s So High from 1999.
“When my regular guitar player Brent Howard got sick I got my son Tal, who is just a great musician and singer, to fill in. And when Brent came back I said, well I can’t let Tal go and with this George album we need the extra harmony vocals. So, he and Brent play the harmony slide guitars. They are on either side of me, so now I get to focus on playing rhythm and singing. They are like having twin guitars on either side of me. And having Tal in the band is great. I actually talked him into doing his hit She’s So High in the set. He tells the story about that and people go nuts for that song,” Bachman said.
“Having him in the band is really quite a fantastic thing for me. And we’re evolving that he is in the band. Now people are asking if I would do a studio album with him. He is such a staunch band member, plays incredible slide guitar and piano in the George Harrison songs and on songs like Takin’ Care of Business, and he sings his own song. I would love to do an album called Bachman and Bachman, because nobody has done that. Bob Dylan didn’t do an album with his son Jakob. Stephen Stills didn’t do one with his son, Adam Cohen didn’t do one with his dad Leonard. And people are saying, ‘look, your son is in your band. You have to do a Bachman and Bachman album. You son even looks like you did 30 years ago. And he plays guitar and sings great.’
“So, we might do a thing where we write a couple of songs together, then he writes one or two alone and I write one or two alone and we put out a mini EP and try out a mini tour, because anything these days is possible with things like Facebook. We may put it out on social media and tell people if they like those six Bachman and Bachman songs we’ll do another six and have a whole album. And maybe play some shows here, there and everywhere. Anything can happen.”
For more information on Bachman, visit www.randybachman.com or his Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/RandyBachmanOfficial.
For tickets and more information for his show at The Empire 15th Anniversary Weekend in Belleville on Sept. 15, visit www.theempiretheatre.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
SHARE THIS POST:
