Fact #124215
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Randy Bachman (Guess Who) : Being at the top of the Great Plains, late at night you could pick up every single radio station down below you, because the land is flat and the signal would just keep on travelling. A lot of these stations had 50,000 watts.
I had a little thing called a Rocket Radio which I would plug into the wall and attach it to the metal bedframe or a water pipe to act as an arial. It didn't have a speaker, just a little earplug that I put in my ear. Didn't even have a dial. You just pulled the nose of the rocket up and down to tune in the stations.
I would hear WLF in Chicago, WNOE down in New Orleans, I'd hear Wolfman Jack broadcasting from somewhere down in Mexico, Central America, There was deejay called Gatemouth down in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. I used to save my money and send it to Stan The Record Man in Shreveport who sponsored the show, and send off for the Muddy Waters Special or the B.B. King Blues Special and get ten singles for five dollars.
When they arrived, I'd take them to school, or go to gigs and show them to Neil Young and say, 'Look what I got!' Freddy King, Frankie Lee Sims, Larry Davis, all these cool blues guys, because in Winnipeg there was no blues. We had white Bread kinda country music.
Then Elvis arrived and he was basically a wild country guy, and Jerry Lee Lewis, so suddenly country became rockabilly, and then that evolved into rock'n'roll. When I saw Elvis on tv, I went, 'Wow, what is that?' I realised it mean I wouldn't have to play notes on a page any more, I could just play what I felt.
So I started to do rock'n'roll. I got a guitar. On violin, of course, you only play lead, so I started out playing lead. My big influence at the time was Cliff Richard and The Shadows.
The Reflections, we were trying to be The Shadows and Chad was Cliff. Our repertoire was basically everything that Cliff and The Shadows did. Then there were the spinoffs like Shane Fenton and the Fentones, Mike Berry And The Outlaws, every Cliff Richard and The Shadows clone, we would get that and learn it. Consequently, we were different from every other band in Winnipeg.
A friend of Chad Allen's had a cousin in England who used to make up reel to reel tapes of all her and her friends 45s and send them over for us. It ran at one and seven eighths ips, so it would last for hours. So we had a huge advantage, because we had a repertoire to copy, a sound to copy, and I had an old German tape recorder that let me get the Hank Marvin echo, and I know Neil Young did the same thing when he was in The Squires.
She would put on everything on those tapes, from Lonnie Donegan, skiffle, Cliff, Frankie Vaughan, a real mixture of everything that was on the hit parade, even if it was stuff her parents were buying. That's where we got Shakin' All Over by Johnny Kidd And The Pirates and we copied that and it became our first hit.
We had to change our name because there was already a band called The Reflections who had a hit called Just like Romeo And Juliet, so we became the Expressions, but we got a lawyer's letter explaining that there was a black band in Detroit called The Expressions, so when we took Shakin' All Over to the record company, they were completely convinced we'd made a hit, but we didn't have a name. So they decided to put it out with Guess Who on the label. Of course, it came out and went into the Top Five in Canada and Top 20 in Billboard, we were all still in High School, and suddenly we were called Guess Who.
So the record company sent out copies to one or two deejays, and it started a bit of a rumour about who was actually playing on the song. The rumour was that it was Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones, and some guy from The Yardbirds, and it was recorded at a party by Joe Meek, but they couldn't reveal the real names for contractual reasons, so it went out as Guess Who.
(Source : not known)
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I had a little thing called a Rocket Radio which I would plug into the wall and attach it to the metal bedframe or a water pipe to act as an arial. It didn't have a speaker, just a little earplug that I put in my ear. Didn't even have a dial. You just pulled the nose of the rocket up and down to tune in the stations.
I would hear WLF in Chicago, WNOE down in New Orleans, I'd hear Wolfman Jack broadcasting from somewhere down in Mexico, Central America, There was deejay called Gatemouth down in Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. I used to save my money and send it to Stan The Record Man in Shreveport who sponsored the show, and send off for the Muddy Waters Special or the B.B. King Blues Special and get ten singles for five dollars.
When they arrived, I'd take them to school, or go to gigs and show them to Neil Young and say, 'Look what I got!' Freddy King, Frankie Lee Sims, Larry Davis, all these cool blues guys, because in Winnipeg there was no blues. We had white Bread kinda country music.
Then Elvis arrived and he was basically a wild country guy, and Jerry Lee Lewis, so suddenly country became rockabilly, and then that evolved into rock'n'roll. When I saw Elvis on tv, I went, 'Wow, what is that?' I realised it mean I wouldn't have to play notes on a page any more, I could just play what I felt.
So I started to do rock'n'roll. I got a guitar. On violin, of course, you only play lead, so I started out playing lead. My big influence at the time was Cliff Richard and The Shadows.
The Reflections, we were trying to be The Shadows and Chad was Cliff. Our repertoire was basically everything that Cliff and The Shadows did. Then there were the spinoffs like Shane Fenton and the Fentones, Mike Berry And The Outlaws, every Cliff Richard and The Shadows clone, we would get that and learn it. Consequently, we were different from every other band in Winnipeg.
A friend of Chad Allen's had a cousin in England who used to make up reel to reel tapes of all her and her friends 45s and send them over for us. It ran at one and seven eighths ips, so it would last for hours. So we had a huge advantage, because we had a repertoire to copy, a sound to copy, and I had an old German tape recorder that let me get the Hank Marvin echo, and I know Neil Young did the same thing when he was in The Squires.
She would put on everything on those tapes, from Lonnie Donegan, skiffle, Cliff, Frankie Vaughan, a real mixture of everything that was on the hit parade, even if it was stuff her parents were buying. That's where we got Shakin' All Over by Johnny Kidd And The Pirates and we copied that and it became our first hit.
We had to change our name because there was already a band called The Reflections who had a hit called Just like Romeo And Juliet, so we became the Expressions, but we got a lawyer's letter explaining that there was a black band in Detroit called The Expressions, so when we took Shakin' All Over to the record company, they were completely convinced we'd made a hit, but we didn't have a name. So they decided to put it out with Guess Who on the label. Of course, it came out and went into the Top Five in Canada and Top 20 in Billboard, we were all still in High School, and suddenly we were called Guess Who.
So the record company sent out copies to one or two deejays, and it started a bit of a rumour about who was actually playing on the song. The rumour was that it was Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones, and some guy from The Yardbirds, and it was recorded at a party by Joe Meek, but they couldn't reveal the real names for contractual reasons, so it went out as Guess Who.
(Source : not known)