It’s a beautiful clear summer night and crowd of about 3 or 4 thousand people surround an outdoor stage on the riverfront. The downtown skyline provides a backdrop to the scene, with boats bobbing in the water and freighters gliding by gracefully. My friends and I arrive late to the capacity crowd and give up hope that we will be able to get close enough to see anything. We probably should have gotten here two hours ago rather than lingering over dinner. However, it’s a great night, a lively crowd and sitting along side the riverfront listening to the band we grew up with seems like a great way to spend the evening.
- The band began in Winnipeg, Manitoba as the Silvertones in 1960, with Garry Peterson, Jim
Kale, and Chad Allen. Randy Bachman joined in 1962, and Burton Cummings in 1965. By 1966 Chad Allen was gone and the four-man band known as the Guess Who was officially on their way. I saw them for the first time in 1970, sometime between the American Woman and Share the Land albums. They looked like refugees from an artic logging camp, wearing blue jeans and untucked flannel shirts, and seemed to have found the intersecting point of being cocky and charismatic. The show was great and I had a new favorite band.
Just as the stage lights are dimmed and the band takes the stage, a group of people we had reminisced with earlier yells for us to squeeze in with them along the fence that surrounds the concert area. My friends and I gladly accept the offer, climb up the stairs and squeeze in along the fence, feeling like three kids peeking in under the circus tent. There are miscellaneous drum riffs, guitar cords, piano notes and “check-check” coming out of the darkness. The crowd is electric.
- It’s 1973 and I’m sitting on the side on a hill on the campus of St Clair College in Ontario, fumbling with a couple of microphones and a head set, trying to get the right level settings on the recorder. The people around me are intrigued by this blatantly illegal act and offer nonstop technical advice which I graciously listen to, but completely disregard. I have bootlegged 8 or 10 concerts by now and am getting very good at it. Since this is an outdoor event, I know I need to have at least two mics because the sound blows around with the wind, making it go in and out on the recording. Unfortunately, the only device I can find with stereo mics is a friend-of-a-friends 8-track recorder. It’s a little cheesy, but I’ll worry about putting it on decent media later. This will at least get the job done. If I ever graduate from college, I’m going to get some decent equipment and do this for a living.
Randy Bachman has left the band in an argument over Burton Cumming’s fixation with Jim Morrison. In his place they add two more guitarists (Greg Leskiw and Kurt Winter) and settle into the configuration that will provide the majority of their long-standing material. The show is outstanding and ends to a thunderous ovation. As is their tradition, they leave without playing on encore, walking off the stage into a waiting motor home. The motor home pulls out and leaves the venue with the rest of the patrons.
The band tonight consists of original members Jim Kale on bass and Garry Peterson on drums, as well as three young guys, one on piano and two guitars. Thirty years of technology and some young energy has done wonders for this band. They open with Bus Rider, a long rocking version of Star Baby, and Albert Flasher. This show could be better than I thought it was going to be.
- It’s 1974 and we find out the Guess Who are making a special appearance on the television show “In Concert,” which airs every Friday night at 1130pm. This is reason enough to delay the departure for our east coast road trip by 18 hours. With the help of a drill, soldering iron, a couple of screw drivers and some needle nose pliers, I retrofit our TV with a head phone jack. This will allow me to record directly onto my new cassette deck, negating the need for microphones and eliminating all background noise. I suspect there will be hell to pay when my parents see this, but this is an opportunity that cannot be passed up.
The band has produced ten or twelve albums by now and has made some additional changes, going back to a four-man format with Domenic Troiano now playing guitar. This has raised the musicianship a couple of notches and they sound better than ever. A giddy Burton Cummings is interviewed after the show and confidently states that there are big things ahead for the Guess Who. Its 1AM and we take the cassette tape of the concert, jump into my VW Beetle (which is equipped with a removable cassette player), and head for Montreal, where it is rumored that they show re-runs of Bonanza with dubbed-in French. Life is good.
The TV ends up in my Grandma’s room where, with the help of a light-weight set of headphones, she is pleased to be able to hear the TV again. This becomes an optional feature on TVs a few years later.
In 1975, Burton Cummings and Domenic Trioano leave the band and it disintegrates shortly thereafter. After the break-up, original Guess Who bassist Jim Kale discovers that, in the frenzy of success, the name "The Guess Who" had never been registered. He promptly drove back to Winnipeg to register it, and maintains control of the band name to this day (In fact, when Cummings and Bachman did a couple of reunion tours in the late 1990s, they leased the name back from Jim Kale). Beginning in 1978, a 'reformed' Guess Who featuring Kale and original drummer Gary Peterson began touring and have attempted to keep the band alive ever since. Tonight is another night in this on-going effort.
- It’s 1990 and the reformed Guess Who plays a St Patricks Day party at a movie-theater-turned-bar on the East side of the city. The movie theater was an elegant place at one time, but it has aged badly and is now home to touring semi-big rock and roll bands. The concert is broadcast live on a local radio station and, although I never did go into the concert bootlegging business, I have a put together a pretty high-end audio system and record the concert onto open-reel tape at 7.5 IPS. There are no commercials and if it wasn’t for the limited bandwidth of the FM broadcast, this would be commercial quality stuff. The drunken, raucus St Paty’s Day crowd makes for a great recording, but the music is definitely not the old Guess Who. Afterwards, I begin to feel like I’ve committed an act of blasphemy - This not Burton Cummings’ Guess Who. I Fed Ex the tape to my good friend, confidant and fellow Guess Who junkie and ask his advice. He ponders the matter carefully and determines that “its not their best work, but its all we’ve got.” The judgment has been rendered and the tape is preserved.
The band played in East Lansing, Michigan just prior to their stop here, and will head for Comstock, Nebraska for a show two days later. A quick look at their web site confirms my suspicion that this really isn’t a concert tour. There is no theme and no sponsor. There is no clear beginning and no clear ending. It snakes through the US and Canada from January to December, and this year looks a lot like last year, which looks a lot like the year before. This is what these guys do for a living.
Meanwhile, the hits just keep on coming: No Sugar Tonight, Runnin Back to Saskatoon, Hand Me Down World….and the crowd knows every word to every song. They dance and sing and laugh and sway, and for two hours, this looks like the happiest place on Earth. The young guys in the band, who I was once a little suspicious of (“how did these guys get the right to play this music!”), seem to hold a fair amount of respect for the music they’re playing. They seem to understand that for this crowd, this is not just a bunch of songs, this is the soundtrack of their lives.
At the end of the show, the fans spill into the streets, still singing and laughing. Suddenly, everyone is 21 again. They file into their favorite downtown bar and spend the rest of the night telling stories that getting larger with age. I realize that my only remnant of the show is a picture on my cell phone, but that’s OK. All in all, it’s been a good night.
- Backstage, the show ends and the band divies up the nights take. The young guys pocket their share and head out for a small-scale rock-star night on the town. The original guys change into their civilian cloths and head out onto the streets of Detroit, where they are unnoticed by all but a few very serious fans. They find a downtown bar with lots of noise and cheap drinks and spend the rest of the night swapping stories that getting larger with age. But that’s OK. All in all, it’s been a good night.
