What: Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap live
Where & when: National tour begins Feb. 28 at Algonquin College in Ottawa. Get information on tickets and location on campus by clicking here.
See the full list of Bachman’s tour dates by clicking here.
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Randy Bachman brings his Vinyl Tap live show to Ottawa Feb. 28, the first date on a long tour of Canada. (Photo courtesy CBC)
Randy Bachman is speaking of his upcoming concert tour and being either disingenuous or modest.
“The good thing about Vinyl Tap,” Bachman says of his national radio show, “is that it’s on CBC everywhere, so I can go to Inuvik or Iqaluit . . . and get a crowd who listen to my show on CBC. They know who I am and they know my music.”
Bachman may be the only person in Canada who believes he needs the exposure of his radio show, as hugely popular as it is, to earn him name-recognition from coast to coast and ensure good crowds at his Vinyl Tap Live concert tour, which starts in Ottawa Feb. 28. Decades have passed since the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive earned him international fame and a secure space on the highest shelf of Canadian popular culture.
What Canadian hasn’t heard a dozen of the classics created by the bands of Randy Bachman? American Woman, No Time, Takin’ Care of Business, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet — all staples of the classic-rock radio format, and on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
How ironic, then, that Bachman’s radio show, Vinyl Tap, has succeeded by being precisely what classic-rock radio is not. As anybody who listens to the program on CBC Radio on Friday, Saturday or Sunday nights knows, the only format for Vinyl Tap is whatever strikes Bachman’s fancy, based on a list of changing and whimsical themes.
The theme format of the two-hour show, he says over the phone from Toronto, “allowed me the broad spectrum of drawing from 50 years of me growing up with rock and roll, and being able to play in one show Frank Sinatra and Lady Gaga and then Madonna and then Led Zeppelin, all in the same show. I found out my audience really likes that diverse kind of programming, rather than hearing the same songs every three hours, like most radio stations now have a loop.”
From one week to the next the theme on Vinyl Tap could switch from songs with double words in the title to songs about motorcycles, but what’s never been a theme is the music of Randy Bachman. Now it will be the theme, not on radio but on stage in his new concert format.
“It really is welcome to Randy’s Vinyl Tap, the stories behind my songs,” he says. With the musicians who have backed him on stage for years — Brent Howard, Marc LaFrance and Mick Dalla-Vee — Bachman will perform 15 of his most popular songs from his years with the Guess Who and BTO, and introduce each song with a story. A screen behind the stage will show old photos and videos to illustrate the stories.
“I start with Prairie Town and I then go to Shakin’ All Over, tell how the Guess Who got their name, how Burton Cummings joined the band, how we went to play in Saskatchewan, went to a Joni Mitchell concert, met Joni, met my first wife there, wrote These Eyes for my first wife, on and on and on.”
On and on, indeed. Bachman is an irrepressible storyteller, and during an interview it’s difficult to get a word in. He raves about how good his backing band is — “They know about 10,000 songs, they’ve been together 25 years” — how the stage will be decorated to look like a working studio — “open guitar cases, pizza boxes all over, drinks everywhere” — how the music on stage will sound — “The songs are going to sound exactly like on the records” — and how pleased everyone will after the show. “Everybody leaves totally blasted with four decades of Canadian soundtrack rock and roll.”
Yet, does he really believe he needs his radio show to attract crowds to his concerts? Later in the interview he does say, “We would play anywhere when we started in the Guess Who and BTO. I’m sure we’ve played every grad (party), every bar mitzvah and every wedding everywhere.”
And at those parties where he didn’t play, no doubt his music was played all the same.
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Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
