Radioinfo is taking you back 50 years to the songs of 1974. It was a mighty fine year for music.
So much of success in the entertainment industry comes down to strokes of luck, and by 1973 Randy Bachman (second from the right – main image) probably deserved his.
Randy had been part of pioneering Canadian rock band The Guess Who. departing due to a youthful but lifelong decision to totally shun the rock and roll lifestyle. He was told no one would want to work with him again.
He shared an early version of Takin’ Care of Business, then called White Collar Worker and very much thematically inspired by The Beatles’ Paperback Writer with Burton Cummings from the Guess Who. Burton said it’d get the band sued and that Bachman should be ashamed of himself for even trying to emulate a Beatles song.
Burton was probably right at the time, and it was a hard lesson for Bachman to learn. Due to ‘no one wanting to work with him’ Randy recruited his younger brothers Tim and Robbie and a bassist and vocalist called Fred Turner. All were still teenagers.
The initial inceptions of this new band called Brave Belt was very country flavoured due to Randy not wanting anyone to think he was trying to be The Guess Who Mk II. They toured prodigiously but weren’t standing out.
One day they were booked for a gig that was cancelled because the venue found a better band to replace them. That better band pulled out and so they were asked again to perform, but do a set of classic rock covers instead of their originals, way more in Bachman’s and Turner’s original wheelhouse. This time, rather than just being background noise, people got up and danced and sang. Randy realised that’s what he wanted for his band too.
But no one would sign them to a deal. Randy said later (he had his own Canadian radio show for 15 years) that he got so many “we’ll pass” responses that he was going to use all 22 of them on the cover of a later greatest hits album.
He sent a demo tape to Mercury Records where it ended up on a fellow called Charlie Fach’s desk. Fach had just returned from a trip to France to the news that Mercury had lost Rod Stewart and Uriah Heep from the label. He swept all the demos off his desk into the bin, planning to start afresh.
One fell on the floor.
Fach happened to see Bachman’s name on that reel and had liked Bachman’s previous work enough to play it, just in case. The first song was Gimme Your Money Please, and that’s just what Mercury Records did.
Fach convinced Randy to change the band’s name to reflect the individual talent ala Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and added the Overdrive as a way of describing their music.
They toured relentlessly, with Randy still enforcing for the rest of the band his “no drinking, drugs and other naughtiness” on the other band members, which led to some departing, including his brothers. Their first year together as BTO they played 300 dates, and in a nonlinear fashion, going where radio stations were playing their songs, rather than a traditional route.
It was this drive, or overdrive perhaps, that found them new fans. A radio station KSHE in St Louis were putting on a benefit. Every time they booked a headline act of significance, that act would ‘get a better offer’. So the station sought a rocking band no one had heard of. BTO had their first album released by then and agreed. KSHE played every track off that album, across Missouri, all day every day ahead of the event. At that benefit BTO played to 20,000 people who knew all the words to their songs and they’d sold 10K of that first record in a week.
Takin’ Care of Business came from Bachman-Turner Overdrive II. Fred was mostly singer for the band by this stage and told Randy to sing this one to give him a break on stage. As it turns out Randy’s new lyrics to this song meant every time they performed it he could pause and hear the crowd chant the chorus back at him. They wanted it as an encore too.
The song was only a relatively minor hit, but its legacy is impressive. You could suggest that Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing is the 80s version of the same message. It was the theme to Randy’s syndicated radio show. In 1994 Randy and 1300 other guitarists gathered to play the song together for more than an hour in Vancouver. That still holds the Guinness World Record for most guitarists gathered to play a song.
For my mind the coolest legacy is from Elvis Presley. It was after seeing Elvis on TV that made Randy want to be part of the music industry. In the last couple of years of his life Elvis made takin’ care of business his personal motto. It appears on his gravestone and his last backing band became called the TCB Band. Apparently, Elvis even recorded a version that is likely never to be released.
Randy is the only one still going of his brothers, with he and Fred both turning 80 in the last year. His son Tal Bachman (above) is a one hit wonder in Australia with the song She’s So High. Apparently Randy has 26 grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.
BTO’s other very, very well known song will pop up when Radioinfo explored the Songs of 75 next year.
Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and music trivia buff for Radioinfo.