The guitarist-singer-songwriter is an enchanting conversationalist and a memory-laden rocker up for a chat about touring and more. Between that and the slew of hits he had a hand in as part of both Bachman-Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who, the world doesn’t even know how grateful it should be for him.
At 80 years old, Randy Bachman is still making monumental rock’n’roll strides. Freshly nominated for the Songwriters Hall of Fame, recently reunited with his long lost guitar, and currently on the road with his band, Bachman is the storytelling gift that keeps on giving. When the chance to highlight such came about, The Aquarian jumped on the opportunity. Reunite via phone call with the man behind some of our favorite songs of the last five decades and discuss his return to our beloved Northeast? Yes, we had no choice but to do just that.
Are you as excited as we are to be coming back to our area with a roaring live show?
Maybe more! [Laughs] I don’t know how excited you all are, but New York was great last time I was there. I think it was maybe 10 years ago when I was there with Ringo Starr – I started in his All-Starr Band in ’95. To becoming back now to New Jersey, New York, and even Maine and stuff like that is really gonna be great.
We’re all gearing up for these shows, so I’m glad that you feel that same thrill about coming back and taking the stage.
Well, we’ve done a few test gigs and I’m very surprised and wonderfully happy at the reaction of the crowd. There are people that are saying to me, “What does BTO mean?” I mean, they’re so young that they don’t know that the initials of BTO being Bachman-Turner Overdrive! And when I tell them, they go, “Oh, that’s really cool! You have a really big name and a really short name!” [Laughs] I’m going, “Yeah, everybody had that in the old days. There was the Electric Light Orchestra, ELO, Crosby, Stills & Nash as CSN. Chicago used to be the CTA: Chicago Transit Authority. If you were really cool, you had initials.” When I was on The Simpsons, the whole episode was about Homer Simpson running around telling his kid that it was so cool that the band had initial names.
I remember that! BTO has been in a ton of media – from the obvious being Taking Care of Business, the Jim Belushi movie, to the less in-your-face moments, all of it further immortalizes you, the music, and the name of the band itself: BTO.
We celebrate that, as well. We have our old stage gear back, which is a gigantic, round, probably 10 foot circle with BTO in the middle. When that BTO fades away behind us on stage, we play videos. We’re playing videos from the last 30 or 40 years that we did on German TV and British TV of us doing the songs. You see us way back then and you see us now on stage. Some of the guys, like my brother, have passed away, so they’re not there, but we put them up behind the drums. It’s kind of like seeing Queen nowadays – you see videos of Freddie Mercury singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” behind the band while the crowd sings with them. We’re kind of doing the same thing, which is also what Lynyrd Skynyrd is doing. You have got to honor the guys that were there and that are no longer on this earth, but were part of the band’s history. We do that pretty heavily with the gear, with the BTO [symbol].
I love to hear that. I think that it’s a reminder that BTO is more than what you’re seeing on stage, but it’s also paying homage to the true decades of music and memories that fans have made – and the band itself has made.
Also, because of requests from the fans and because I was in The Guess Who and wrote six of their big, million-selling songs, in the middle of the current set I say, “Hey, I was in another band, do you mind if we play some of that?” Everybody gives me a standing ovation. We play “These Eyes” and “Undun” and “No Sugar Tonight” and “No Time” and “American Woman.” We get standing ovations for every song. Then we get right back to the BTO stuff. Mixed throughout the night, people will be getting music that I wrote for both bands.
How special is that for you – to cover your life story via music, the soundtrack of Randy Bachman on stage for the people?
I tell a lot of stories. I talk about how I wrote certain songs, because people don’t really know. They think the songs are about one thing, but they were maybe germinated or started by another phrase or another event. For instance, I tell quite a few stories when we’re playing live and people love to hear that, but to play a song that you wrote when you’re a teenager or 22 years of age or something, you have no idea that it’s gonna be around a week later, a month later, five years later, a decade later, or three or four or five decades later. It’s quite an amazing thing. I feel very lucky to be in this club, so to speak, of Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and John Fogerty. We’re all in our late seventies or we’ve hit 80, but we’re still rocking in the free world. Neil Young’s out there, too – I’m gonna see him in a couple of months in Toronto. He is out there rocking with Crazy Horse again. It’s what we do, so as long as we can do it, we keep doing it. It is so much fun because when I play a song, I might have been 30 when I wrote it, so I feel like I’m 30 again with Fred Turner and he’s singing “Not Fragile” and it’s 1976 for us. It’s time travel.
I saw Sting on television being interviewed a couple of months ago and they asked him about writing “Amber Fields of Grain” and “Roxanne,” and he said the great thing about music is if someone asks you what were you doing 10 years ago, nobody knows. Do you know what you were doing 10 or 12 years ago tonight? Probably not. If someone were to ask you what were you doing the first time you heard “Roxanne,” the first time you heard an “American Woman,” or the first time you heard “Taking Care Of Business,” though, you might know. You’d go, “Well, the first time I heard ‘These Eyes’ was our high school graduation and then they played it at our wedding and we play every year on our anniversary. That’s our song. ‘These Eyes’ is our song.” Everybody has a favorite song, and I’m really lucky that I’ve written 12 or 15… and that we get to play them all night long.
It’s a night full of memories and time travel. […] Everybody is there celebrating the moment of now, and so when I’m there that night, I thank everybody for coming. I’m grateful that I can come out and play and that everyone comes to see me. It’s a really great experience.
That communal energy is irreplaceable.
You’re right, and that’s really cool.
I love how you mentioned that some of these songs that you’ve written and still play brings you back physically, mentally, and emotionally to when they were written – that period of time for you and the band. Like you said, fans are going to have those reactions and be brought back to their own memories. What is it like to know that people have big moments in their life and that you have been part of the soundtrack of them?
It’s really neat. One thing that’s really cool is sometimes people will wait outside for when you’re leaving the gig and they’ll bring a ticket from like 1980 or 1975 – around the time where we were the number one band with the album Not Fragile. They bring their tickets from then and they say, “We saw your concert in Cleveland. We saw your concert in New Jersey. We saw your concert in New York City at the Academy of Music.” Stuff like that is really neat that. There are fans out there that bring part of their memories with us to show us.
We just got back from Japan where I got my stolen guitar back. It was stolen 50 years ago. I got it back last year, because the people from Japan are the same. They bring their tickets and the guitar picks and the posters from back then. They are real fans and like rock music and like country music and they know every single word. Me getting my guitar back when we were there was an amazing thing. I see Paul McCarty just got his bass back. I got my ’57 Gretsch back that I played on “Shakin’ All Over” and “American Woman” and all of these songs. To get it back after 50 years is the most amazing dream come true.
I find this is happening everywhere, though; there’s this weird kismet thing where Paul McCarty just got his bass and I just got my guitar and Peter Frampton got his ’59 Les Paul and John Fogerty got his Rickenbacker. Everybody – even after 50 years – are getting these stolen, lost guitars back. There must be some sort of karmic thing going on and getting back to guys like us who played them. These instruments are what we learned to play on or wrote our hits on. We’re getting them back and playing them on stage again now. It’s so magical. It’s like you went home and took your old bicycle out of the garage. You haven’t ridden it since you learned to ride a two-wheeler when you were five or six, but when you get on your little bike and you ride it, you go, “I’m free. I can go ride down the street and go out on my own. I can leave this little yard.” Then you’re right around the block and you feel like you can fly. When you get an old guitar back that’s been stolen and can play it again on stage, that’s what it feels like. It’s amazing.
That is amazing, and the fact that you are not only getting these instruments back, but are taking them back out on the road to play these songs and more for the fans that have kept the music alive and well is just rockstar stars aligning.
Thank you. It really is something to play on the guitar that you learned to play on and that you wrote these songs on and that you played on these records. To actually have it there on stage is just absolutely amazing.
It makes me think of one of my favorite BTO songs: “Average Man.” There’s this one line in it that says, “We got the future to win, nothing to lose.” In a way the music was the future and you didn’t have anything to lose until you lost the instrument that the music was born from, and now those instruments are back!
I’m surprised that you love that song. You’re a real fan if you know that song! “Average Man,” yeah, I had fun writing that. I also thought it was cool if I put it in a song, like, “I’m an average man, but I’m someone tonight.” We were all just average kids that grew up taking out the lady next door’s garbage, you know? Shoveling her sidewalk when it snowed or cutting her lawn, but then suddenly the average man has his name in lights and was someone tonight. Then you leave town and hoping you’re someone the next night. That one was really special to me, and even more since you like that song… and you even know it.
I love that song. The humbleness and grounded aspect of it holds up well. I think that’s probably why it’s my favorite – it’s such an effortless idea that you can be a superstar in one place on one night, but then when you’re back home, you’re still just your neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor. I love it, and f you ever decide to play it live, just know that I wouldn’t be complaining [Laughs].
Well, if you’re gonna be at the [New Jersey[ show, I’ll tell the band to run through it and we’ll play it.
I would love that and be beyond ecstatic. Chatting about traveling, coming home, going out for shows, and traveling, I wanted to let you know that I was looking around online on the plethora of streaming services and noticed on your Spotify page that the top three cities that listen to BTO are all in Australia. Do you have any idea why that may be? And what does that mean to you?
I did not know that.
Isn’t that interesting? I know BTO has generations of being on a globe scale, but Australia leading the pack on this streaming service where you have well over two million monthly listeners as it is? Very cool!
That’s weird and amazing. We’ve never even really been to Australia.
Even more interesting!
I heard years ago that I should go there because I have four gold and platinum albums with The Guess Who waiting that they won’t send. You’ve got to go there and they present them to you at the gig, but I’ve never been there. Then, with BTO, someone tells me that I’ve got six gold and six platinum albums there. “You need to go to Australia!” It’s too far to go there to get a gold record album [Laughs], and I’ve got a hundred of them on my walls already. It would be so nice to get, but I don’t know…. We did just got a call about two weeks ago asking if we would we go back to New Zealand, though. We went to New Zealand about seven or eight years ago – Bachman-Turner Overdrive were on tour with Pat Benatar and America and it was really great. They might want us to come back, so if they do that, we’ll be putting Australia on there for sure.
They’ll love it, I think, given the stats and the timeless quality of your songs. Not to mention the memories they, too, have made.
When BTO was really hot, when Not Fragile was the number one album in the mid-seventies, we toured England and Scotland and Germany and much of the world. Most of our audience were guys, because we were the guys next door. We were the guys that needed to lose 10 pounds, you know what I mean? [Laughs] We were not handsome, we’re not the Steven Tyler kind of guys. We looked more like we were the guys next door. In fact, we had T-shirts that said, “a half a ton of rock and roll.” There were four of us and we were all over 250 pounds. We had T-shirts that said we were “a half a ton of rock and roll.” That’s what we were. And back in that day, Turner and I were the only guy that had beards. Now everybody has a beard! They’re all copying us [Laughs]. I’m just joking, but we did have beards when beards were not in fashion.
You started a trend.
You know, this weird rumor started that when we were touring Germany. A guy said, “You look like lumberjacks,” because they saw a picture or a movie of a mountain man or a lumberjack and that’s what we looked like to them. “We are lumberjacks. We found our guitars in the woods and we played so loud that we knocked down trees,” we said. They ended up printing it over and over in Germany. We became legendary! They said to Fred Turner, “What were you before you were in BTO?” And he said, “I was a viking!” [Laughs] He had orange hair and an orange beard, so they believed him and they printed that he was a viking. Once it gets printed, it’s basically biblical and it gets printed over and over and over and over again. It became our thing. We were vikings. We were lumberjacks. We plugged in our amps and we knocked down trees. Those were all pretty cool things to be.
FOR TICKETS & INFO ON BACHMAN-TURNER OVERDRIVE’S TOUR, WHICH COMES TO MONTCLAIR, NJ, THIS THURSDAY & WESTBURY, NY, THIS FRIDAY, CLICK HERE!
