Randy Bachman doc takes care of business

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This article was published 13/09/2024 (728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Early Thursday evening, the world got a surprising new glimpse at venerable Winnipeg-born rocker Randy Bachman in director Tyler Measom’s documentary Takin’ Care of Business, as it premièred at Roy Thomson Hall in the closing days of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Bear in mind, Bachman, 80, has told a lot of stories in the latter half of his career, mining the riches of his experience in two books (with Winnipeg’s John Einarson) as well as hours of rock history courtesy of his CBC radio show Vinyl Tap.

The main thread of the doc focuses on the singular disaster of Bachman’s creative career, the 1977 theft of his orange 1957 Gretsch 6120 guitar, which he purchased as a Winnipeg teen with money saved up from cutting lawns and delivering newspapers.

Bachman attributes the creation of all the hits he wrote or co-wrote for the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive — including American Woman, These Eyes and the doc’s title song — to this six-stringed Excalibur, and its loss was keenly felt throughout his 45-year effort to get it back, which he eventually did with the ingenious help of internet sleuth William Long from White Rock, B.C.

Along the way, the doc explores the relationship between Bachman and the five children he had with his first wife, Lorayne, kick-started when the couple divorced and Bachman was obliged to make up for the lost years he spent on tour.

But the documentary also lifts the curtain on a few unexamined events in Bachman’s life, such as his leaving the Mormon church after his musician son Tal Bachman publicly announced his departure from the religion via the 2008 Bill Maher movie Religulous.

During two Zoom interviews with Randy, Tal and director Tyler Measom prior to the première, Randy attributes his decision to leave the church to his son.

“My son is much more of a student than I am,” Randy says. “He reads all the time, and he’s much smarter than I am, and he remembers everything that he’s read.

“I was a participant in the religion that, I thought, benefited me. It preached abstinence from drugs and that survived me through the rock ’n’ roll party years. (My) son, who is a scholar, pointed out things to me that were incorrect, not true, legend.”

It’s been 20 years since he gave up Mormonism, but he says “you don’t lose your spirituality.”

The film’s director happens to be an ex-Mormon himself. But that is not why Measom signed onto the film. While his resumé includes the Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons, he is also a participant in rock docs such as the series I Wanna Rock: Chasing the ’80s Metal Dream and I Want My MTV.

The pitch for the Bachman doc came through an email from producer Rick Krim, emphasizing the loss and surprising recovery of the Gretsch as the lens to look at Bachman.

“It’s one of the most beautiful guitars of all time. He believed that the gods brought down the song and made him and his guitar a conduit. And he loved this guitar. It made great hits,” Measom says.

The director says he didn’t even finish the email before turning to his wife and telling her he was going to make the film.

“It wasn’t until the next day when it clicked: Oh my God, Randy Bachman is a Mormon. I was raised as a Mormon. I went on a Mormon mission,” he says.

Measom is no longer a Mormon, but says — having had a Mormon father and being a Mormon father himself — he understood the religion’s pressure to be a husband and a father first.

“‘No success outside the home can make up for failure in the home,’ is a well-worn motto among Mormon men, so I knew what Randy was going through in many ways, trying to be a rock star in the 1970s (amid the) decadence and sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll and hedonism,” Measom says.

“Balancing being a father to four or five, six kids and going on the road — that’s a lot of this story that I wanted to weave through in addition to his stellar career, and in addition to the magic guitar.”

Another aspect of the documentary suggests that it’s a miracle that Randy Bachman survived to see the première.

During the early days of the pandemic, Bachman and Tal’s wife Koko went to the doctor when he was discovered to have double pneumonia and COVID-19. The tests revealed even worse news than that: four different cancers and Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“I was given two to four weeks to live. That was an incredible sledgehammer to my face,” Randy says.

The guitarist decided he was going to fight.

“Through Tal and Koko helping me and some really great doctors, a lot of prayer and laughter and doing everything possible — medical and non-medical, Eastern or Western medicine, meditation and yoga and everything — I did it all, and we managed to conquer four cancers and Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” he says.

The doc uses film, video, photographs and material Bachman says he has been archiving since the early days of the Guess Who, inspired by fellow ex-Winnipegger Neil Young, whom Bachman says keeps “voluminous barns” filled with his own archival material.

“I’ve got two storage garages in White Rock with 12-foot-high ceilings with shelves filled with stuff,” Bachman says. “Mine wasn’t as organized but it is getting organized. And part of that (material) is showing up in this documentary.”

Prior to turning 81 in a couple of weeks, Bachman seems refreshed and ready to tour again with Burton Cummings — the pair just successfully resolved a lawsuit with former bandmates, winning the reacquisition of the Guess Who name. (Bachman Turner Overdrive’s local show opening for Heart at the arena on Nov. 24 has been postponed, owing to Ann Wilson’s own cancer diagnosis.)

“Before this reconciliation, we got into a plane once in Kelowna and Burton was on the plane. It was a small commuter plane and everyone could see what was happening.” Tal says. “Anyone would have thought that dad and Burton were racquetball partners or something. They just seemed like the best chums in that moment.

“You can tell it’s a true friendship with mutual respect. These two guys shared so many adventures together and fought so many battles together decades earlier. It’s really been cool for me to see all that negativity disappear and everything is positive now.”

arts@freepress.mb.ca