Takin’ care of business the Bachman way
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/03/2018 (2216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
RANDY Bachman has already written an autobiography, but on Friday night the Winnipeg rock legend offered up a new live audio version at the Club Regent Event Centre.
He regaled a sold-out crowd with hits from his career, starting with his days with Chad Allan and the Reflections, to the heady times on the blue bus with the Guess Who and onto his rocking days with Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Interspersed among all those hits were a handful of rearranged George Harrison-written Beatles classics from his new album By George By Bachman.
Two songs from that album got the evening started, Bachman’s Between Two Mountains, which has a chant at the end reminiscent of My Sweet Lord, and the 1965 Beatles song You Like Me Too Much.
What separates Bachman from so many classic-rock artists of the 1960s is his memory; he has hundreds of stories to tell of those early Winnipeg days with Allan, battling it out on high school stages with Burton Cummings and the Deverons and Neil Young and the Squires.
In many ways, Bachman and Cummings are still battling for Winnipeg audiences.
Cummings sold out two shows at his self-named theatre last year and then sold out this casino on his 70th birthday on New Year’s Eve. Bachman has another sold-out show tonight, and like Cummings has lost little of his stage presence from the ’60s and ’70s.
Meanwhile, Young is in another sphere altogether, and Bachman almost admitted as much, recalling his love of the first Buffalo Springfield record on Friday night.
He shared how the Guess Who got their name, which emblazoned that first hit, Shakin’ All Over, which kicked off a series of Guess Who tunes that Winnipeggers have heard thousands of times in the last 50 years.
These Eyes, Laughing, No Sugar Tonight, with a series of vocalists, including Randy’s son Tal Bachman, offering up a fair facsimile of Cummings in his prime.
Just like the Guess Who, it took a bit for Bachman and his band to rock out on Friday night. That happened with No Time blending into the Guess Who’s biggest hit, American Woman.
That signalled the transition into BTO hits, starting with Roll on Down the Highway, with St. Boniface drummer Marc LaFrance in fine Fred Turner holler mode.
After a reggae version of Harrison’s Here Come the Sun, it was back on the BTO wagon, and back in the day it was a gutless AMC Ambassador station wagon, Bachman remembered. It’s amazing such chugging highway classics such as Let it Ride and Hey You could be inspired by a car as anemic as Bachman remembered.
The Bachman autobiography goes on well after his BTO days, with his son Tal’s 1999 hit She’s So High, which provided a sweet moment having father accompanying son.
Still, everyone in the somewhat subdued audience were like Homer Simpson — they wanted to hear Takin’ Care of Business, and they had to wait until the very end for it. There isn’t a song in the Canadian rock canon — if there is such a thing — that boogies like Bachman’s anthem for the white-collar worker.
“Written in Winnipeg, about Winnipeg. This city is TCB,” Bachman shouted in announcing the hit during the encore.
alan.small@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @AlanDSmall
Alan Small
Reporter
Alan Small has been a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the latest being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.