“Our position was anti-war:” The making of American Woman, by The Guess Who

Article first published in Uncut, November 2014

July 1970, and Prince Charles and Princess Anne visit Canada for the first time. They go to a rodeo and a “trout festival picnic”, but history doesn’t recall their thoughts on attending a scheduled performance by The Guess Who.

Playing their proto-metal, No.1 anti-war song for royalty in Winnipeg was just another strange event in a career full of weird occurrences for the Canadian band. Formed in the early ’60s, the group spent most of the decade playing a varied mix of beat pop, soul, surf and rock’n’roll, to similarly varied success, until they came up with ‘American Woman’, a heavy, swaggering song with a riff every inch the equal of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, complete with anti-Vietnam lyrics from frontman Burton Cummings.

“We were so used to playing pop songs, three minutes long,” says guitarist Randy Bachman. “Copying The Beatles and The Hollies and the Stones… But we saw people were starting to get into listening to long songs, not little pop songs. So on ‘American Woman’, we stretched out.”

Conjured up spontaneously onstage during a mammoth set at a curling rink near Toronto, this marvellous anthem, soon to be banned from the White House, could have set the band up for mega-stardom, but illness, drugs and Mormonism split the lineup soon after its release.

“That was our only No 1 hit record,” says drummer Garry Peterson today. “Maybe we should’ve written more songs by jamming. That was the only one we came up with that way!”

RANDY BACHMAN (GUITAR): When you got hot and the label wanted another album, you basically did whatever they asked you to do. There was no real creativity, no “Oh, we need to wait and experience some life.” You just wrote another album. We played dances and big events, three or four one-hour sets a night. You had a chance once in a while to write onstage or at soundtrack.

JIM KALE (BASS): Yeah, ‘American Woman’ was heavy – we played all manner of styles, that’s just the way our band was. We covered the hit parade and that was a very varied thing.

BACHMAN: We came up with ‘American Woman’ at a curling rink in Kitchener, 100 miles outside Toronto. We were about to go to the United States and play down in Texas. The Vietnam War was raging in 1968. Crossing into the US, the guy at the border told us to go to a white building with an American flag over it. He said, “Do you know what that is? It’s the Selective Service building. If you go in there, you will be drafted. They’ll put you into uniforms and you will be fighting in a jungle in three months. You have a Green Card, that means you can live in the States, you can work in the States, and you can also be drafted by the States and you could go and die fighting for the States.” I said, “You gotta be kidding?” He said, “No, they drafted my son a year and a half ago to Vietnam, he was killed six months later.” So rather than go to Texas, we turned around and came back to Canada.

GARRY PETERSON (DRUMS): I remember that we went to those shows in Texas, and back at the border we handed in our Green Cards. We don’t know whether being drafted could have actually happened, but taking a chance like that, you know, didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

BACHMAN: When we got back to Canada, I called an agent in Toronto and said, “Do you have a gig?” and he said, “Yes, in a curling arena.”

PETERSON: We played two sets that night. We had a lot of people backstage between the sets. Our producer Jack Richardson was there, and all the people from RCA in Toronto. When we were starting to go back onstage, we couldn’t find Burton Cummings. So we decided to go onstage and make a little noise and he would naturally hear that and come on and be ready. I was listening to Buddy Miles a lot, so I started to play a sidestroke pattern on the bass drum, and then everybody else started to play. When Burton heard it he came running onstage and he started to sing something that came into his head. That was the beginning of ‘American Woman’.

BACHMAN: I think I started it. I’d broken a guitar string. I never had a guitar tech, a spare guitar or a tuner. So I’m kneeling on the stage, tuning up my guitar, and I keep playing an E and a B on Burton’s electric piano. Then I start to play a riff on the piano, “dun dun do do do do do do dun” [humming the riff]. Everybody’s head in the audience jerks towards the stage to hear where this riff’s coming from. I think, “I can’t forget this riff”, so I start playing it on guitar. Then Garry gets onstage, and then Jim, and the last person onstage is Burton. The first words he sang were “American woman, stay away from me…”

PETERSON: The crowd went crazy, they loved it. So we decided, well, we gotta keep this in the show, and as we kept playing it, it refined itself.

BACHMAN: The recording was done in like an hour and a half once we got that groove. We couldn’t get the groove until we started playing again like we had live. It’s all just build-up from that riff. Jack Richardson, our producer, said, “Give me four minutes of that.” Then Burton sang it, and I did the guitar solo.

BRIAN CHRISTIAN (ENGINEER): I’d say it took two days to record the song. We used a Herzog, a pedal that Randy would plug into – whatever string you hit, it would just keep going. So you had to dampen all the other strings while you were playing, and that’s how we got that lead guitar sound. After we finished putting it down, we knew it was gonna be a hit. Jack Richardson called Don Berkheimer, the vice president of A&R for RCA, and said, “You gotta fly to Chicago.” Before he arrived, we recorded a very silly country and western song, so when Berkheimer came in to hear this hit we put this thing on. We were all sitting there not saying anything, and he was looking at us like, ‘What?!’ We had a good laugh on that, then played him ‘American Woman’ and he immediately said, “Wow, great record.” It was pretty universal that as soon as people heard it they knew it was gonna be a hit.

BACHMAN: After recording the song, we thought, ‘Well, it’s kind of boring, the same riff over and over and over, so let’s just do an acoustic intro and we’ll end the album with a reprise’, which a lot of guys did at that time. So that kind of became a thing, where we started with an acoustic version. Which is in a different key than the other version, they didn’t even go together.

“By the time the radio realised it was against the war in vietnam, it was too late; it was no.1”

Randy Bachman

KALE: People would ask, ‘What do you have against American women?’ The American woman was the Statue Of Liberty, and all that she represented. As younger, idealistic men, our position was anti-war.

CHRISTIAN: Everyone was singing it in the streets and it was a very anti-American song. It struck me as very funny. When they performed in Toronto, they played that song and they burnt the American flag. Not the group, but the audience. I was there, I saw it. It was a really weird feeling.

BACHMAN: They wouldn’t play anti-war music in the States. Because of our momentum with “These Eyes” and “Laughing”, they played it anyway. And then they said, “I think they’re protesting the war, they’re singing ‘we don’t need your war machines…’”, but by then it was too late, it was a No 1 record. We were still playing dances then, ’cause you get booked six or nine months ahead. Having a No 1 single, you should be getting $10,000 a night, but you’re getting $1,000 dollars for a three-hour dance for kids in high school. Then the next night you’re playing the arena 150 miles away and you make your $10,000. It depended on the airplay in the area. Just after it hit No 1, I left the band. I had medical issues with my gall bladder. That was just the icing on the cake, though, we had differences in lifestyle.

KALE: Randy was always very conservative, and so was Garry. Cummings and I, on the other hand, were the other side of the coin. It was, I think, destined to come apart at some point. Ironically, Peterson and I, two very different people, still continue with The Guess Who today.

CHRISTIAN: Randy was a Mormon, so there was no tea, no coffee, no beer, no whisky, no smoking, no this and that… well, the other guys were the opposite of that. But I don’t think there was much tension, it was just a different lifestyle.

‘I DIDN’T LIKE WHAT THE DRUG SCENE DID TO PEOPLE‘

BACHMAN: I didn’t like the drug scene and what it did to people. Friends of mine had overdosed on acid, they went into a coma and never came out of it. I was terrified of drugs, I still am. The band started to dabble, like the rest of the world in the ’60s, and smoke and do psychedelics and drink heavily, and that just wasn’t it for me. I wasn’t overly religious, but the Mormons had this lifestyle, “We don’t do drugs, we don’t smoke, we don’t drink.” I thought, great, I can join this club. It gave me an extra reason to be strong and to keep a good straight lifestyle. Plus, I was having a gall bladder attack every night for three weeks in a row. Throwing up blood and going to an emergency hospital, and they couldn’t treat me because we were travelling to another gig the next day… this just went on and on and on. Finally, I went to the doctor and said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I think I’m dying…”

PETERSON: Randy was a Mormon, and Burton was experiencing the youthful trappings of rock’n’roll, and I think they grew apart. I guess Randy got to the point were he didn’t want to be in the band anymore, and Burton said, “Well, good, we don’t want you in the band anymore.”

BACHMAN: When I left, I think the others felt the freedom that the nag was gone…I was always saying to them, ‘Don’t go to the party, don’t do the drugs. We have to get up at 9 o’clock and get to the next gig…’ We didn’t have a road manager or a tour manager, I did everything.

KALE: After Bachman left, Prince Charles and Princess Anne were on a visit to the Colonies, and they were in Winnipeg. We played to them at a function here locally, and then we went to Washington DC, where there was a reception hosted by the Nixon daughters. You say hello to the Nixon daughters. Say hello to Prince Charles and his sister [also in attendance in Washington]. It took like a minute and a half, and then that was the end of that.

PETERSON: Of course, it was quite a joke to get to play on the front lawn at the White House, for us as guys from Winnipeg.

KALE: One of our guitarists snuck off into a bush to have a pee, but was followed by the secret service guys. It was right out of a Kevin Kline movie [Dave]. So there was ourselves and a navy band and Gary Puckett & The Union Gap. And we were asked through channels not to play ‘American Woman’.

BACHMAN: If I was there I would’ve launched into ‘American Woman’ and got arrested and thrown off the White House lawn. It would’ve been monstrous! It would’ve been great! Burton Cummings has said that that was their greatest mistake, to not play it there. They lost their credibility with all the hippies and all the anti-war protesters and became another band that was manipulated and controlled by the government.

KALE: No, I can’t say that I wish we had played it. We were respecting the wishes of the government. I don’t regret not playing it.

BACHMAN: The song got revitalised by Lenny Kravitz years later on. Online there’s a 12-minute video of Prince and Lenny Kravitz singing ‘American Woman’ with a big horn section on New Year’s Eve! So Lenny Kravitz was great for that song, by reinventing it for a whole new generation. To my daughter, who was a teenager at the time, and her friends, I was very hip. Even though I was very ancient!

KALE: It was used in American Beauty some years ago, too. And everybody did very well with that… Thank you very much!

BACHMAN: I still see many people who say, “Here’s a poster of you when you played at our high school in 1970 when ‘American Woman’ was No 1. You played our Valentine’s Day dance at the end of February. And your song was No 1 and you played there for $750…” —