Takin’ Care of Business With BTO’s Randy Bachman
Randy Bachman is a founding member of two legendary rock bands and he’s bringing one of them to the Wellmont Theater in Montclair on Thursday March 7th with Bachman-Turner Overdrive on BTO’s 50th anniversary tour.
The show will include all of BTO’s huge hits like “Takin’ Care of Business,” “Roll On Down the Highway,” as well as those from The Guess Who like “American Woman,” and “Undun.”
INTERVIEW EXCERPTS
Choosing the set list
We have so much requests from the fans that in the show, we can’t go by without doing “These Eyes,” “American Woman,” “No Time,” “She’s Come Undun.”
We put them in the show because fans have come a long ways and maybe never seen that song on stage. And I’m the guy who wrote it and I sang and played guitar and then it’s stuff like that.
Takin’ Care of Business
According to Snopes.com, this story never happened. But since Randy Bachman was actually there, we’re inclined to believe him.
We’re recording “Takin’ Care of Business” and there’s a knock at the door of the studio, I open the door and there’s a guy standing there, he’s about six foot four, a big frizzy black beard, frizzy black hair, an army hat, an army jacket, and he’s holding four pizzas. And he says, pizza.
And I said, not us. We’re leaving. We had been there since 10 in the morning. It’s now one o’clock the next morning.
I said, try down the hall – Studio B with Steve Miller recording his Fly Like An Eagle album, and Studio C was War doing their Why Can’t We Be Friends album.
There’s a knock at the door again. I opened up, the same guy there. I said, what can we do for you? We’re just leaving.
And he says, I’m a piano player. That song sounds like it could really use a piano. Give me a shot. Please give me a shot. I don’t deliver pizza all the time. At the end of the month, I got to deliver pizza to pay my rent.
So I figured, who am I not to give a guy a shot? It’s two o’clock in the morning.
You’ve got one take, kid
We throw a mic on the piano, cover it with a blanket and say, okay, you get one take. Try a little like Dr. John, Elton John, then Little Richard. He plays it through once, we’re so tired we say, thank you very much. He goes delivering pizza.
We come back the next day to the studio and haven’t even heard it back.
The head of our label comes, Charlie Fasch and he’s pushing me to expand BTO and do more…our first album, it was album cuts, right? Four and a half minute album cuts, jazzy and rock and everything else. He wanted more top 40 stuff.
So he comes to listen to the album and I say to the engineer, when you play the song, don’t play the piano track. We haven’t heard it back.
We play the whole album. It’s got “Let It Ride” on it. He’s very thrilled with “Let It Ride,” which is a very good guitar pop song.
Then it gets to “Takin’ Care of Business” and halfway through the song, the engineer pushes up the volume control on the piano and Charlie goes, what is that?
It’s a piano guy. He said, that will give you Elton John real estate. I said, what does that mean?
He said, Elton John has real estate on FM radio and AM because of the piano. It’s Top 40. You guys are all the same. Frampton, Doobies., ZZ Top, BTO. You’re all guitar, bass and drums. Elton John owns AM and FM radio. You put in a piano and you’re going to get some of his real estate.
We play in the whole track. He said, who’s playing the piano?
There’s dead silence. And I say, a pizza guy and he said, all joking aside, who’s playing the piano?
I said, hey Charlie, I’m not joking. I have no idea who this guy was. He was here like five or 10 minutes, played on the song. He wrote his chart on a pizza napkin. Three chords and taking a break. He’s gone.
Randy Bachman on trying to find the pizza guy
You’ve got to find this guy. He’s got to be in the union. You’re going to get sued. This song you’ll be playing the rest of your life. This is a party song. This will make white men get up and dance. OK?
I go down the hall to Steve Miller. Hey, Steve, where’d you get pizza last night? Not us, man. Try War. I go down to War’s room. It’s like Cheech and Chong’s basement. Hey, guys, where’d you get pizza from? and they go, hey, man, it’s still last night. Like, they’re still in there. No, they don’t remember where they got the pizza from.
So I go to the lady at the front and say, here’s the Yellow Pages. You start at Antonio’s. I’ll start at Mario’s, call all the Italian places near the studio within two blocks, ask if they have a pizza guy that brought pizza here last night and looks like Fidel Castro.
Because that’s the only way I can describe this guy – Army thing, big beard, frizzy hair.
I get lucky on the third phone call.
Yes, we have a guy like that. Really? What’s his name? We can’t give employees names over the phone. Does he work tonight? Yeah, he works at the end of the month. He works every end of the month for like three or four days. Send him again with a pizza. What kind of pizza? We don’t want any pizza. We want this guy.
He comes in, his name as Norman Durkee and he was really a piano player. He actually did work at that studio doing commercials sometimes during the day.
That’s the piano. One take. So when you listen to it, you hear one verse is like, t-t-t, like “Honky Cat,” like Elton John. The other one’s like Dr. John. And then at the end, it’s like all Little Richard stuff.
How the jazz-flavored “Undun” became a hit
I’ve heard that compared to “Girl From Ipanema,” which when it came out, there was nothing like it on the radio. Everything was like pop transition. The charts then had the Stones and Frank Sinatra. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormè, do you know what I mean? And then the Beach Boys.
The charts then were phenomenal. The Top 50 was amazing. And out comes “Girl from Ipanema,” like the samba with her great voice, Astrid Gilberto, and Stan Getz.
Years later, it’s pop music, it’s the Beatles, it’s the Stones, everything. And out comes “She’s Come Undun,” this incredible jazzy song.
I had always dabbled in jazz. And I was inspired to write the song by Bob Dylan, who said those words in “Ballad In Plain D,” somewhere he said, “she came undone, she came undone.”
So I took that and wrote the whole song around that. It had like a Bob Dylan thing, I had 12 verses, so let’s pick three of the verses and repeat them. I don’t wanna do a Bob Dylan epic that’s 12 minutes long. This could be a hit song.
It became the B side of “Laughing.” And some DJ in Boston flipped it over and boom, “She’s Come Undun” became a monster song.
Randy Backman with Bachmann Turner Overdrive and performing the songs of the guests who as well at the Wellmont Theater in Montclair on Thursday, March 7th. You can find all things Randy on the web at Randybachman.com. Check out his YouTube channel as well, which is Bachman Video and BTOBand.com.
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