Local blues guitarist Jake Thomas meets rock legend Randy Bachman 36 years after the former Guess Who guitarist helped him out.
Local blues guitarist Jake Thomas meets rock legend Randy Bachman 36 years after the former Guess Who guitarist
helped him out.____________________________________________________________
It's taken 36 years, but North Bay blues guitarist Jake Thomas has finally been able to thank rock icon Randy Bachman for helping him out, no string attached.
Literally.
Thomas accompanied BayToday.ca to an interview with Bachman this morning and expressed his gratitude for something which occurred in 1968.
Broke the high 'E'That summer Thomas and his band
Buckstone Hardware, Motherlode and Bachman’s Guess Who were performing at a rock festival at Commonwealth Stadium, in Edmonton.
Motherlode, whose smash single When I Die established them as one of the first Canadian supergroups, opened the show, followed by Buckstone Hardware, and then the Guess Who.
Within a minute into Buckstone Hardware’s first song, Thomas said, he broke the high ‘E’ string on his black Les Paul Custom electric guitar.
“I thought to myself ‘oh no, I don’t have an extra guitar’ and that I was going to have to play with five strings for the whole set because you just can’t stop at a festival to put a new string on,” Thomas said.
All tuned upWhen the song ended, though, Thomas said he felt a tap on the shoulder.
“I turned to look and there was Randy Bachman offering me his black Les Paul Custom,” Thomas said.
“And after the next song he comes back with my guitar and it’s got a new string on it and it’s all tuned up.”
Always bugged meWhen the show ended Thomas went back to try to thank Bachman but security guards wouldn’t allow him into the tent the Guess Who was in.
Thomas said he'd partied at his Toronto house with Guess Who singer Burton Cummings and bassist Jim Kale before--"Jim's the one who taught me how to stash beer away by putting it in a toilet tank while we were playing"--but it was his first encounter with Bachman.
“The Guess Who got really big after that and I never saw them again,” Thomas said, “and it’s always bugged me that I never got a chance to thank him.”
Until today that is.
“I just wanted to thank you for that,” Thomas told Bachman as he shook his hand behind the stage where the 40-million record seller will be performing tonight at the North Bay Heritage Festival and Grant Forest Products Air Show.
Same boat.
Bachman remembers the show and said that’s how it was in those days.
“Yeah, everybody in the Canadian industry was struggling at that point and no one was different than anybody else and there was less competition,” said Bachman, who arrived in North Bay after a nine-hour drive from Windsor.
“We were all in the same boat, we all had the same dreams, we all wanted to be Elvis, the Beatles, Hendrix, whatever, we all had that thing. And also roadies and technicians were virtually non-existent then, so we had to do all this stuff ourselves.”
A lessonBachman remembers a similar incident of cooperation among musical brethren involving the Guess Who and the Stampeders.
“We were driving to a gig in the States and I remember being stopped at the border because we didn’t have the right customs documents for our gear, because in those days who knew,” Bachman said.
“So they took all our gear and just let us go, and we got to the gig and we had to play, and the Stampeders said, ‘yeah, use our gear’ and we did. And that was a lesson to us," Bachman said.
"So anytime someone else would break a guitar string or a bass drum head or a snare, we’d let them use ours.”
Pretty relaxedThomas said he learned the same lesson from Bachman and helps out other guitarists under the same sort of circumstances.
And what was it like for Thomas to meet a music legend?
“He seemed like a pretty relaxed kind of guy, a normal head,” Thomas said.
“It was great.”
