Bachman and Turner: Still Taking Care of Business

Randy Bachman is waxing nostalgic as he looks at the stage of Winnipeg’s Pyramid Cabaret, a small rock club in his hometown. “This was ground zero for Bachman Turner Overdrive,” Bachman says, speed-talking with excitement. He was gearing up for his first gig with Fred Turner and their new Bachman & Turner project, which took place on May 31st. It was the first time he’d played live with Turner, in front of an audience, in almost 20 years and at the time of this interview, which took place just prior to that gig, he was brimming over with restless energy. “We started out here playing in cover bands like a lot of other guys, trying to sneak one or two of our own tunes into the set. If we were really lucky, one or two weeks later someone from the audience might come up to you and say, ‘What was that song you played between “Walk Don’t Run” and “She Loves You” last Thursday?’ We’d get to play it again, and when there was a good crowd reaction, it made us think that maybe, just maybe, there was a chance we could write more originals and start to make a living at this music thing. “Back in the ‘60s, this place was called the Jade Disco, then the Twilight Zone and a bunch of other names, but it’s always been a rock club, so to us this is hallowed ground, the heart of the rock scene in Winnipeg.” Their tour kicked off at the Pyramid Cabaret on May 31st before they headed to, as Bachman put it, “a small place in Toronto, then the Relentless Garage, a 500-seaster in London” before hitting the Sweden Rock Festival “to perform in front of 35,000 people.” Bachman said that he’d had an open invitation to play the Sweden Rock Festival for years, provided he could get Turner to sign on. “Fred said he didn’t want to go on the road as a nostalgia act. He told me he’d only go out if we wrote some new stuff that could stand up to the older tunes. It took a while, but that’s finally happened. We’ll be releasing our new album, called Bachman Turner, in September. “The pieces started to fall into place a few years ago. I was working on a solo project and decided to invite a few people to guest on the album. I lined up Neil Young, Paul Rodgers, and Jeff Healey, who passed away after doing the tracks, and Fred. I sent [Fred] a song called ‘Rock n’ Roll is the Only Way Out’ and he sent it back to me with a couple of the new tunes he’d been writing. When I heard what his refrigerator-sized voice did to the song, I told him I’d scrap the solo album if he wanted to get together and make a record. And we did. “Fred has one of the most amazing voices in rock. He’s one of the greats to emerge from the Winnipeg scene, right up there with Neil Young. Unless they’ve been listening to classic rock radio, people haven’t heard him in a long time. When we began to work on the record, we were feeling like little kids who had just started a band who were thinking, ‘Maybe if we’re good enough, we’ll get some good airplay.’ We were thrilled at the whole process.” Bachman and Turner have put up “Rock n’ Roll is the Only Way Out” on their website, and it sounds like it could have been an outtake from an early Bachman Turner Overdrive record. It has a hint of funk in its rhythm, and the dual lead vocals of Bachman and Turner are as gruff and gritty as they were decades ago. Both singers still have the range and attitude of youngsters. Bachman produced the album using vintage equipment and recorded some of the tracks on analog tape. “Somehow I was smart enough to save all the old gear I’d collected in the ‘50s and ‘60s, guitars and little tiny 12 and 15 watt amps. They’re not that big, but if you put one of them in a bathroom and hang a mic over it and put a mic right next to it, you get a sound that’s like a distortion pedal, but there’s no pedal. That’s the sound you hear on all those early Stones and Led Zep albums. “I also had all the stuff I used with BTO in the ‘70s. I have two original LA-2A compressors from the ‘50s made by the Teletronix Company of Sunnyvale, California. I have an Urei 1176 Compressor/limiter, an API Trident Lunchbox, a Focusrite sidecar with an eight-strip input, and two important pieces that didn’t exist back then—EMT 250 reverb echo chambers. They look like R2D2. It’s a metal plate as big as a door and as thin as a matzoh. You attach your sound output to one end of the plate and put a mic on the other end. It has a hollow reverberation that you can’t match. I was able to get them in LA a few years back for a good price, but they’re really sensitive. If a bird was twittering outside the studio or a plane was flying overhead, you’d here it in the reverb. They only made 250, but now they’ve come out with a digital version. It looks like a black steam radiator that you’d see in an old hotel. When I plugged in and heard what it could do, I got one and redid all the guitars and vocals on the album. When you hear the sound of the guitar played through it, you hear a cloud of warm temperate overtones after each chord is struck. It’s the sound you heard on all those hits of the ‘60s and ‘70s. That sound was the gravy on our mashed potatoes.” Bachman produced all the BTO albums the band made in the ‘70s, and he returned to the producer’s chair for the new Bachman & Turner disc. He made the record using a combination of old and new technology to capture the band’s trademark sound. “[The new record] will sound familiar to the old fans. It’s a big, loud collection of blues-rock riffs you can sing to and dance to. We managed to capture that authentic mid-‘70s feel, and being in the studio is more fun for me these days. When I was making albums in the ‘70s, I didn’t know what I was doing. Back then, if you wanted to do an edit on a tune, you’d have to take out a razor blade and cut out little pieces of [recording] tape and then tape ‘em together. Then you’d run it through the studio deck and hope that it would hold together. That’s why [Bachman-Turner Overdrive] was never attracted to overdubbing. We played live in the studio, and if we didn’t like what we heard, we did another take. When we put a record together, we used the best takes we had and left them as is, even if the time was off or there was a small mistake, because they sounded like a real performance. “So this one was made using Pro Tools and while it’s all digital in the end, we did record using analog equipment and recording tape. We mixed it so that the people who get the vinyl record will hear the all the warmth of real instruments. People will get 12 tunes, just like on the old albums, but we are making some concessions to the new technology. We’re putting it out on vinyl with a CD enclosed in the package along with a download number so you can put it on your computer or iPod. You can also get it as a single CD if you want to play it in your car and as a double record vinyl set if you’re like I am and still have a turntable. “I love playing records on turntables, but I do have a portable CD player, and I still play cassettes. I have a Toyota truck that has a good cassette player in it, and the sound is amazing. Sometimes I just sit in the truck and blast out a Beatles or BTO or Creedence Clearwater cassette. They should still put cassette players in cars. The sound is so much bigger and warmer compared to playing an MP3 through a little iPod. You have to use a lot of air when you sing or dance or make music, and on our album you’ll hear the instruments breathing. I do believe that in the shrinking of music down to digital they’re narrowing the spectrum of sound. Digital makes everything sound stiff and rigid and hard. When I made this record, I made sure we didn’t strip the breath and the soul out of it. I’m going to ask the label to release it on cassette.” Bachman and Turner: Still Taking Care of Business is a post from Crawdaddy! - The Magazine of Rock.