Writer uncovers wheres, whens of the Guess Who

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2021 (1981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This summer will be the 50th anniversary of the release of So Long, Bannatyne, the 1971 Guess Who album.

That fact and countless other details of the Winnipeg group’s recording career fill the pages of Wheatfield Empire: The Listener’s Guide to the Guess Who, written by Toronto rock historian and author Robert Lawson.

Lawson grew up in Winnipeg — not on Bannatyne Avenue but in East Kildonan, where he delivered the Free Press as a kid — but he moved away when he was 10. His family says the first concert he attended was the Guess Who, but he was only two, tagging along with his father, who was an avid record collector.

Reunion tours in 1983 and 2001-02 gave Lawson, 52, opportunities to see the band in a more memorable way. He’s seen Burton Cummings perform solo, Randy Bachman on his own or with Bachman-Turner Overdrive bandmate Fred Turner, and both Cummings and Bachman together over the years.

But it’s those original Guess Who albums and singles — going all the way back to the early 1960s, when the group was called Chad Allan and the Reflections, and until the 1975 record Power in the Music — that grabbed and held Lawson’s attention.

“At the core they’re just a great rock band,” Lawson says. “Every single album you have a couple of hits, then you have a couple of weird songs, there’d be a bluesy tune and a psychedelic kind of thing. Every album it’s a mix of every genre and not a lot of bands do that.”

Wheatfield Empire offers some well-researched looks at the band’s infancy in 1958, when Allan formed the Silvertones, which would become Chad Allan and the Reflections, with Jim Kale, Garry Peterson, Bob Ashley and Bachman in 1962.

Their first recordings were in December 1962 at Kay Bank Studios in Minneapolis, which led to their first single: Tribute to Buddy Holly on the A-side and Back on Forth on the B-side.

The group was obsessed with early British Invasion groups such as the Shadows and Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, whose version of Shakin’ All Over led to the first hit for the group in 1965, which by then had become Chad Allan and the Expressions.

“I really wanted to give that early Chad Allan era as much respect as the later, more well-known Burton Cummings era,” Lawson says.

Wheatfield Empire finds its groove when focusing on the Guess Who records, whether it’s 1969’s smash hit Wheatfield Soul or 1970’s Share the Land, which featured Kurt Winter on guitar.

“The thing that interests me and is important to me is to get into the guts of the albums,” says Lawson, who includes recording dates and locations, as well as serial numbers of hard-to-find Guess Who material for the band’s superfans. “I know that people are just interested in listening to the music and don’t collect albums and import singles. They don’t need those product codes, but the collectors do, so I put them in there for them.”

Lawson has also uncovered early concerts, whether it was a Feb. 25, 1966, date at the Winnipeg Arena or a 1968 concert with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra at the Centennial Concert Hall. Readers might also remember the band’s many television appearances on shows such as Let’s Go, the CBC comedy specials Wayne & Shuster or U.S. mainstays such as American Bandstand or The Midnight Special.

Lawson’s book, which is out of stock at McNally Robinson, according to its website, is a self-published project through FriesenPress publishing. He has written two similar listener’s guides about bands he followed during his younger days: Nazareth and Cheap Trick.

Interviews with some Guess Who band members, including Cummings, add insight to Wheatfield Empire that the other two books don’t have, Lawson says. He said at first he was able to get Bachman’s co-operation on the book, but the guitarist suddenly got cold feet and backed out.

“He was told by somebody that the book was a tell-all gossip book and he didn’t want anything to do with it any more, after we exchanged quite a few emails about it,” Lawson says. “I’d explained to him, as I pitched it to him backstage at Toronto, that the book wouldn’t have any gossip in it and it wouldn’t be about rumours… It was very disappointing that he chose to believe somebody who tried to undermine the book.”

Wheatfield Empire is long on details about music and recordings. It’s short, though, on why the personality clashes that started five decades ago persist to this day.

“I purposely tried to stay away from too much of that,” Lawson says. “If you want to dig for dirt, there’s definitely dirt there, probably like any rock band of that stature.

“I’m not really interested in the drama. I know a lot about it and I even learned more about it. I’d interview certain band members and they would go off on another guy in the band and lay out their feelings about how they feel about it. I’d just nod and go along with it, because I knew I wasn’t going to include any of that stuff in the book.”

Bachman and Cummings are scheduled to play a free concert at the Manitoba legislature on Aug. 28. The show was supposed to have taken place in 2020 to mark Manitoba 150 and as part of a Bachman-Cummings tour and box set, but the free show, the tour and the box set release were all postponed, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lawson hopes the shows finally can happen this year.

“Burton played a show here (in Toronto) at the CNE (in 2019) and Randy joined him for the encores,” he says, remembering the strong and fond reaction from the crowd. “I think now, if we’re able to get back to some kind of concert setting again, it’ll feel really good to see those guys onstage.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall