Album Reviews

Only in retrospect do you realize how much The Guess Who’s sound drew from Creedence Clearwater Revival. That’s fine, because only in retrospect do you realize how much of what sounded new and unique when you were immersed in it, was really formulaic and sometimes trite.

For instance, I went to see the Broadway show “Jersey Boys” the other week. It’s the Four Seasons story and boy is it well told! For once the music’s performed in the play as well as it originally was by the group being covered. I’m a big Four Seasons fan and these guys pull it off!

But as the story proceeds, and the group’s musical output over many years gets compressed into two hours, you realize how much of Bob Gaudio’s later output for the group was copped from Motown. “Working My Way Back to You,” and “Let’s Hang On,” sound so Motown now. Back when it first came out? I didn’t hear it. I was immersed.

Anyway, back to this curious reissue, done by Cisco at the behest of the label’s Robert Pincus, who oversaw the reissue of one of my early favorite folk albums, Ian and Sylvia’s Northern Journey. Great sound, and if you love ‘60’s folk, it’s highly recommended. Otherwise you may end up holding your nose from it. Same with the Joan Baez reissues Cisco did. Give Pincus credit for going with his gut.

I don’t know how well those reissues have sold, but apparently well enough to encourage him to do this one from the RCA vaults. The Guess Who were a Canadian group, and the first to hit number one on the American charts with the title track to this album, which is ironic since it’s a plain old, bitter anti-American rant laid on some poor hippie chick (“I don’t need your war machines, I don’t need your ghetto scenes”).

But then, when "American Woman" was a hit, all the “lefty hippies” were anti-American (don’t you know! You don’t? Ask any bitter, miserable conservative who was too uptight during the '60's to have fun and they’ll tell you!). So it makes complete sense that an anti-American song would become number one in America.

Guess Who members Randy Bachman and Chad Allen went on to form Bachman Turner Overdrive, otherwise known as BTO, whose biggest hit, “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” will be familiar to everyone over a certain age. And of course The Guess Who clicked with “These Eyes,” a year before “American Woman.”

“American Woman,” is well known to a young generation thanks to Lenny Kravitz’s faithful cover produced for the Austin Powers film “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” It’s been covered by others, too, including Butthole Surfers. With it’s irresistible rhythm and great feedback-drenched guitar part, it couldn’t lose and it didn’t.

Next up on this LP is “No Time,” another potent track, and another bitter kiss off. Only in retrospect does this song’s obvious inspiration come seeping through: why it’s the Jamie’s “Summertime, Summertime!” But how could I have realized it at the time? I was so immersed! Anyway, “No Time” has great harmonies, a terrific hook and it rocks.

So we’re off to a great start and then it all falls to shit with “Talisman,” which is redolent of Kansas, Styx and all the pretentious midwest crap that you surely don’t like. “Let me live only to do, and let me do only to live…?” “Ships in bottles cannot sail and neither can a tombstone kill a feather?” Knock me silly with a Canadian club! I’ll give the tune one thing: it’s so bad it’s good! You’ve got acoustic guitars, a piano part right out of a cancer drug commercial and a vibrato borne of magic fingers to drive it into the ground. It’s a pity they didn’t see what they were doing but they were so immersed!

Unfortunately, things don’t improve with “No Sugar Tonight” and “New Mother Nature,” which close out the side. They sound like Crosby, Stills and Nash rejects, though the harmonies are quite good.

Side two’s opener, a blues/jazz jam makes it clear that these guys went into the studio with a few good tracks and weren’t prepared to cut an album. They’re all over the map, next up with “When Friends Fall Out,” which veers between an Association rave-up, and a public service announcement.

The rest of the side’s kind of weak, though the musicianship and harmonies are smooth and well textured. Clearly these guys were pros at this point, capable of turning out well-oiled dross when necessary and that was the case here in order to finish an album. Pros? Yes. The Guess Who had been around at this point almost a decade, growing out of a 1960 aggregation called Allan’s Silvertones.

When the big noise began coming from the UK, the group shifted gears. In his autobiography “Shakey,” Neil Young pays tribute to Randy Bachman as being one of his prime influences. So these guys were musical chameleons for years and that comes through on this unfocused set, which moves from jazz to rock to blues, with not much of substance to show for it on this outing once you get past the first two dynamite tracks.

American Woman then, is two hit singles by a band in search of an album’s worth of material. They didn’t find it. No doubt if someone at RCA complained about how uneven this album was, the answer was “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

For a less “hippie-fied” raucous Guess Who, more surf and Mersey-beat oriented, recorded between 1963 and 1967, check out Sundazed’s fascinating two LP compilation The Guess Who Shakin’ All Over! (Sundazed LP 5113). You’ll hear why things went so wrong for rock at the turn of the decade and stayed that way pretty much until the punk movement.

This set, taped at RCA’s Mid-America Recording Center, begins strong and weakens sonically along with the music. Two good tunes does not a great album make. Where was iTunes when we needed it? Oh, I forget. They used to make 45s.