GuessWho gets the last laugh?

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This article was published 31/05/2003 (8326 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AND now, for some more salacious Guess Who Makes How Much news…

Earlier this week, original band member Jim Kale — laughing like The Wolfman and sounding just as gravel-throated — divulged the inside financial arrangements of the reunited Winnipeg rock icons.

Kale has controlling ownership of the band’s name, which has fuelled a long-running feud between him, lead singer Burton Cummings and Lorne Saifer, the group’s manager.

It’s also why they had to strike a deal with the very estranged bass player before they could start touring again in 1999 — and why Kale knows what everyone has made from the millions the band has grossed in the first three years of its comeback.

Cummings gets 40 per cent of the net, and the others — Kale, Randy Bachman and drummer Gary Peterson — take home 20 per cent each.

That’s what Kale said Wednesday.

What he didn’t tell me, but what I heard later, is that the contract that allows the band to use the Guess Who name for five years plus an option year calls for Saifer to get 10 per cent.

Of the gross.

Plus a share of Cummings’ take as his personal manager.

“Terrifying, isn’t it?” Kale asked.

I don’t know that it’s terrifying, but it’s intriguing.

Especially if, as Kale claims, The Guess Who grossed $14 million in that first three years of reunion touring.

The animosity between Kale and Cummings isn’t just about money.

Oh, no.

Kale wants to rejoin the band he abruptly left just as The Guess Who was starting their Running Back Through Canada tour in 2000.

At the time, rumour had it that Kale was strung out on drugs.

According to Kale, who’ll be 60 in August, that wasn’t the reason.

He said the main reason was a custody battle over his infant son.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m a goddamn saint. I had a big-time drug problem — at that time.” But he insisted that he could have gone on the road, and treated it like rehab.

“If I had gone on that tour, I would have got healthy. I would have got some rest. And they would have had a better show. Because I’m actually alive. You know, in spite of everything else. The other guys are drinking embalming fluid.”

Now Kale had me howling like The Wolfman.

Kale was also left behind, so to speak, when the current Guess Who were presented with the Governor General’s Performing Arts award last fall.

Six months earlier, Kale said Saifer spoke to him about the award.

“He said ‘Are you interested? I said, ‘Of course I’m interested.’ That was the last I head of it.”

A spokesman for the Governor General has said the awards were for the group’s recent achievements, which sounds preposterous, of course.

Kale believes that “Lorne Cummings and Burton Saifer” — just two of the many names he likes to call them — were behind his being left out.

Kale may yet receive the award.

He said he has since been nominated by people who didn’t like what happened.

So why do Kale and Cummings have so much animosity for each other?

The answer goes deep into the band’s history, and maybe even deeper into the place where the demons dwell in both mens’ psyches.

But tracing how Kale — the bass player in the background — came to gain control of Cummings’ comeback with The Guess Who is probably most illustrative.

By the mid-’70s, the Guess Who had imploded in a clash of life styles, egos and — for some, excess.

Bachman had left the band in 1970 for a $10,000 buyout, according to Kale.

Five years later, Cummings launched a solo career.

Kale had been left behind for the first time.

Now it was 1978.

“I’m 35. What am I going to do?” Kale said. “I don’t have a plumber’s ticket. I don’t have a bachelor of science. I don’t have a paper route. And I’m not starting over in a garage band.”

Kale and his corporate lawyer, Robert Hucal, discovered that no one owned The Guess Who name.

It had never been registered.

So he decided to reform The Guess Who.

First, though, he needed to secure the name rights, by getting the remaining members, Cummings and Peterson, to sign off.

He asked, and they did.

“Including Cummings,” Kale said. “Who’s bitching and complaining to this day about it — ‘If I’d only known…'”

Kale figures he’s made “several millions” over the years because — more out of desperation than any Boom, Bust and Echo genius — he hit the road for 17 years, like The Stones playing without Mick and Keith, and made a living.

Then along comes the rock revival era, and Cummings & Co. have to get his permission to be The Guess Who again.

Guess Who’s been laughing like The Wolfman ever since?

gordon.sinclair@freepres.mb.ca