A studio foul-up created a tidal wave of guitar feedback and a distorted, truly shaken vocal. The group knew they had a hit, as did their Toronto label, Quality Records. But the music company figured kids wouldn’t be interested in a Canadian outfit, so issued the song under the name “Guess Who?
” and marketed it as a mystery release from a British band. Canadian kids figured Guess Who was the name of a great new group and sent the record to No. 1 in early 1965.
House band: The Guess Who appear on a postcard promoting the after-school TV show, Let's Go. A contract blunder resulted in the group receiving $400 for what was an international hit. The Guess Who soldiered on, replacing Allan with a showboat teenage vocalist, Burton Cummings, who had ruined any number of Winnipeg church basement pianos by kicking out chords with the heel of his Beatle boots.
The group toured relentlessly, at one point playing 24 Prairie towns in four weeks, and tricked their way into becoming the house band of CBC Winnipeg’s Thursday after-school TV show, , by ostensibly sight reading the music. (Bachman slyly got the set list before the audition and the group learned the numbers in advance.) From 1967 to 1968, the Guess Who turned their Thursday, 5:30-6 p.
m. TV segment into a sort of Canadian Bandstand. Cummings expertly mimicked lead singers, slipping from Manfred Mann’s moony dreamboat, Paul Jones, to the Doors’ Lizard King, Jim Morrison.
And no British guitar hero, from Eric Clapton to Jimmy Page, was beyond Bachman. Bachman and Cummings show off their cover-band mastery on by offering an elegantly soaring reconstruction of the 1967 Moby Grape number A studio foul-up created a tidal wave of guitar feedback and a distorted, truly shaken vocal.
News RSS