Takin’ care of business as usual
You could probably not prepare a single question and still have an entertaining phone interview with Canadian veteran rocker Randy Bachman.
One minute he’s enthusing about the evergreen joy of playing his 1973 mega-hit Takin’ Care of Business for live audiences, and before you know it he’s extolling the delights of liver and onions and how “Every Thursday, my mother used to make it, and that’s your iron for the week.”
Bachman, who turns 73 on Sept. 27, still mounts a darn good show.
He’s pretty much been doing that since he was three years old. That’s when, as he eagerly recalls, he performed You Are My Sunshine before the studio audience of a radio station in his native Winnipeg.
“I remember being very frightened backstage and being very cold and going out in front of 1,200 people,” he says. To his shock, “I got a standing ovation and I go, ‘This is really cool!’ I remember I got five bucks when a Popsicle was, like, a nickel.”
That recollection leads Bachman to explain that the drive to perform is “hunger for applause, basically” and that many performers are basically shy. Like serious businessmen who at Mardi Gras time don masks and whoop it up before slipping back into their pinstripes come Monday morning, performers when they step on stage “get to be this other person.”
Then, whoosh! He’s talking about how some families hop into their old convertibles and go for ice cream while listening to his popular weekly CBC Radio show Vinyl Tap.
All of which Bachman relays in an affable manner and, despite being a great-grandfather, in a voice that could belong to someone decades younger.
He really was much younger when he broke into rock ’n’ roll. He began studying violin at the age of five, but quit at 12 because he couldn’t read music (he still plays by ear) nor abide the structured lessons. Then, at 15, he saw Elvis on TV, and that was that.
He found a guitar, got fellow Winnipegger and jazz icon Lenny Breau to teach him fingerpicking and eventually co-founded powerhouse bands The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive before going solo.
Bachman says songs like American Woman and These Eyes from his old Guess Who days, played countless times since the members went their separate ways, remain vital today. “Every time I play (She’s Come) Undun on stage I think of (The Guess Who frontman) Burton Cummings being 18 years of age and singing that song of mine … that little scared Irish kid and me (saying), ‘You can do it.’ ”
Bachman, who seems to be friends with every rock musician in the universe, is unabashedly fond of older music, but has his nose always to the wind of what’s new and generously promotes it.
For example, in July he attended Roxy Music’s show at Toronto’s Massey Hall and was blown away by the much younger warm-up act LP (Laura Pergolizzi). Likening her to a newgeneration Kate Bush with a “crystal-clear voice,” Bachman says she’s someone “everyone has to hear.”
Before you know it, Bachman is off on other topics: Remixing a CD for a young band (“It’s very exciting helping someone”); the depredations of touring (“You say to yourself, ‘Here I am going to a Holiday Inn again, alone’”); the importance of staying grounded (“Or you burn out and one day you don’t wake up; you’re Glenn Frey or Prince or Whitney Houston”).
As to performing live, it remains pure joy for Bachman.
“I still get this anticipacious feeling, which I think is a word I made up. ‘Can I go out now?’ ‘No, you gotta wait; people are still coming in.’ ‘I don’t care. Please, can I go out?’ It’s the same kind of high you get from jogging or working out.”