A new sound for the quiet Beatle’s songs
Connections to Harrison inspire Bachman’s tribute
Randy Bachman, Canadian rock legend with the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, remembers the exact moment he made contact with late Beatle George Harrison.
“I talked to him on the phone about joining his new band,” he says of the fateful conversation that, had it gone a different way, could have changed the trajectory of his life.
“This was in 1970 and I had just got out of hospital after leaving The Guess Who.”
Bachman — who quit the band he co-founded for health reasons and disagreements over lifestyle — had been advised by his publicist, who happened to also be Harrison’s publicist, to give the newly solo Beatle a call.
“And he said he already had his best friend Eric (Clapton) playing in the band, who was probably the best guitar player in the world. And I said ‘OK, thank you very much. Thank you for taking my call. I’ll go start my own band.’”
And so he stayed in the wilds of Canada, gathered some burly countrymen and formed BTO, the foot stompin’ trucker rock collective that went on to score a U.S. No. 1 (“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”), a timeless rock anthem (“Takin’ Care of Business”) and paved the way, 48 years later, for a tribute album to the “quiet Beatle” he always felt a kinship with.
“George picked ME!”’ notes the loquacious rock icon, asked why he chose Harrison over John, Paul and Ringo.
“Way way back, there was a frontman, like Elvis, Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran, with some guys behind him.
“Suddenly, The Beatles are on Ed Sullivan and there’s three guys standing at the front — three stars — and in the middle of it all they move aside and the drummer sings a song.
“Suddenly, every drummer wants to sing Ringo songs. The lead guys want to sing LennonMcCartney songs. And I was lead guitar and I sang the George songs: ‘Don’t Bother Me,’ ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ ‘Taxman.’”
In a rock band context, Bachman was George.
So when the late Beatle’s 75th birthday rolled around, his same age disciple decided to salute his fallen comrade the best way he knew how: with his new album “By George — By Bachman.”
“Back maybe six or seven years ago I was travelling with (Burton) Cummings and we did the ‘Jukebox’ album,” notes the affable hitmaker, who decided to remake The Beatles’ “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You” (with George on lead) with his former partner from The Guess Who.
“But the way he did it, I couldn’t outdo it.
“There’s such a youthful exuberance and enthusiasm in those early Beatles songs, when they were just having fun, like little kids throwing mud pies at each other ... or in Canada, a snowball fight.”
Inspired by Clapton’s acoustic rendering of his rock hit “Layla,” he instead veered off-track, turned the song into “an acoustic blues shuffle” and found a receptive audience.
Jump to three years ago. After touring iconic Beatles landmarks in Liverpool and reconnecting with his youthful influences, the Winnipeg native figured it was time to take his Harrison tribute one step further.
“I thought, ‘I’m gonna reinvent his songs, like Junior Walker did to ‘These Eyes’ and Lenny Kravitz did to ‘American Woman’ or (jazz vocalist) Kurt Elling did to ‘(She’s Come) Undun,’ and just take this body of work and put a whole new set of clothes on it.’
“I wanted to radically change the tempo and, if the song was in a major key, do it in a minor key and change some of the chords around.”
“I tried to make it a real fun thing, like The Beatles are back together and this is like they’re redoing their songs.”
The Beatles, of course, are the Mount Olympus of Guitar Rock.
Those who mess with their legacy do so at their peril. Was Bachman concerned about blowback from the so-called “Beatles mafia”?
“Not at all,” he says without pausing for breath.
“It never entered my mind. I didn’t care. I did those out of pure love and joy for George.
“He was the quiet Beatle and I was the quiet guy in The Guess Who.
“It’s one songwriter celebrating another songwriter’s songs — not by copying them, but by reinventing them and presenting them to a new audience who, when they hear a brand new album, can sing along to every word.”
His favourite Harrison song? “‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ — it’s the standard guitar go-to song for where your guitar actually does what it says: it weeps.
“George and Clapton’s playing is just amazing. It’s like the guitar is crying and that’s very hard to do with an instrument.”
Though Bachman seems unaware when I point it out, Harrison — considered a second stringer in the days when John and Paul ruled the roost — is the one whose songs have the most traction with young people today, with “Here Comes the Sun” ranking as the No. 1 Beatles song on Spotify.
“Everyone has sung Lennon and McCartney,” notes Bachman by way of explanation.
“Look at the albums — there must be 3,000 of them: instrumentals with Chet Atkins and Boots Randolph, The Boston Pops play The Beatles, Dwight Yoakam sings The Beatles. “Not many people did George.” Bachman’s connection to the Fab Four, of course, runs deeper than Harrison.
While he was never invited to join his idol’s backing band, the Canadian guitar icon received the same tap on the shoulder —
ironically — from another Beatle a few decades later.
“After seeing a PBS fundraising weekend where they played ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ ‘Help!’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ over and over,” recalls Bachman without pausing for punctuation, “the next morning my phone rings and a voice goes (affecting a British accent) ‘Hoi, this is Reengo. I wont yow ta be in mah bond!’
“And I hang up the phone because I think it’s my road manager, joking.
“And then the phone rings again and he says ‘This is Reengo, Aw’ll give yow mah nombah in Moanacow. Cowl me bock if yow wont.’
“And then I realized it was really him and he wanted me to be ‘George’ in his band and play lead guitar. So I was like George for 10 months, and it was fabulous.”
Not only did he play Beatles songs on that ’95 tour, he had a chance to incorporate BTO into the mix.
“For me to do ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ — which I’m copying The Beatles in, because the galloping
drums and handclaps are from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ — to look back and see Ringo shaking his head and playing drums was like really, really surreal,” marvels Bachman in a typically ungrammatical sentence.
“And me playing the beginning of ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ and ‘Photograph’ with him was like being in a dream.”
Bachman has another Beatles connection, as one of few artists to score — along with Paul McCartney — chart-topping singles with two different bands.
“I think it was just me and him,” he says with an endearing lack of modesty. “And I’m about to have my third with the ‘By George’ album.”
With all due respect, Bachman — one of Canada’s great rock ’n’ rollers — is dreaming in Technicolour.
Quality notwithstanding, the vagaries of digital downloading and the rise of streaming have rendered old-school rockers like him dead on arrival in terms of new music.
Radio won’t play it. Fans won’t buy it. Nobody has the patience.
“In England, they have classic rock radio, classic rock magazines and classic rock awards,” notes the ambitious muckraker, well versed in the intricacies of his chosen field.
“The problem with classic rock radio here is they play the same 350 songs, and guys like me and Clapton and Tears For Fears and The Beach Boys and Heart put out new albums and we cannot get airplay.
“All they play is our hits.” “Somebody needs to revamp classic rock radio, even in Canada, and have ‘vintage classic rock’ and ‘new classic rock.’ Or they should play ‘then’ and ‘now.’
“Eric Clapton has a new great album out, nobody plays it. I’ve got a great new album out — I don’t know if it’ll get any airplay. I didn’t get any airplay on my last album.”
As Bachman motors on, his trademark enthusiasm overriding every sore spot, you sense that, in the end, he doesn’t care about this stuff as much as the sheer joy of performing.
“It’s me and four guys onstage,” he says, happy to turn the conversation back to his Kitchener show, which will include accompaniment from his son Tal (“She’s So High”) Bachman, a selection of revamped Harrison classics and his usual hits.
“We’ll also have stories about BTO and Guess Who songs. It’s a real classic rock party.”