Randy Bachman Read Free Page B

gig playing your own community club. All your friends from school would come out and dance to the music you were making. I started out playing records at my community club before graduating to playing there in bands.
    Community clubs were a big deal for us, and so was radio. I was fortunate early on in my career to meet Lenny Breau, who was working with his parents, Hal Lone Pine and Betty Cody. They had a rockabilly kind of country show and wore all those Roy Rogers and Dale Evans fringed cowboy shirts with cactuseson them. They were called the CKY Caravan and worked out of CKY radio. They even had their own Elvis Presley. He was Ray St. Germain and he was fantastic, with the Elvis pompadour and the big sideburns. I loved this guy. He recorded his first single at CKY radio in 1958, an Elvis-style rockabilly number called “She’s a Square” that featured Lenny Breau on guitar. That was the first real rock ’n’ roll record cut in Winnipeg. In fact, radio stations were the first places to record rock ’n’ roll. There were no professional studios at the time.
    My first recording experience was backing a shoe salesman from Portage la Prairie named Gary Cooper. He was a lot like Ray St. Germain and drove a big white 1959 Ford Galaxie. He rented CKY’s studio, hired me to play lead guitar, and brought in the Triads to do the doo-wop backing vocals. Garry Peterson played the drums. Garry and I were in the Velvetones at the time with Mickey Brown. Gary Cooper had to change his name because of the actor of that name, so he became Gary Andrews for his recordings. We recorded “Come On Pretty Baby” with me on guitar. That was in 1961. I was eighteen.
    Every city has its hip spot where teenagers congregate, and back in the 60s, Winnipeg was no exception. When I started playing in bands, the Paddlewheel restaurant on the sixth floor of the downtown Hudson’s Bay department store on Portage Avenue was the coolest place to hang out and be seen.
    Every Saturday my friends and I used to do the walk between Eaton’s and the Bay downtown on Portage Avenue. I think everybody did, no matter what part of the city you came from. Within that five-block strip were all the hippest clothing stores and coolest restaurants, along with record shops, movie theatres, and musical instrument dealers. We would spend Saturday afternoons on that strip checking out the guitars and amps at Winnipeg Piano, buying records at the Record Room or Lillian Lewis Records, and trying on Mod clothes at the Stag Shop beside the RialtoTheatre. The Guess Who bought all their stage clothes from Bob McGregor at the Stag Shop along the Portage strip.
    But we’d always end up at the Paddlewheel. All the bands would be there on a Saturday afternoon, and our fans would be fawning over us. The radio stations sometimes did live broadcasts from the Wheel. The decor hadn’t changed in decades (in fact, it’s still the same!) and the food wasn’t exactly haute cuisine, but for some reason teens congregated there and made it hip. I can remember saying to kids at a Friday night community club dance, “See you at the Paddlewheel tomorrow.” Besides meeting your fans, that’s where all the bands would catch up with each other and find out what we were all doing, where the good and bad gigs were, what new songs were being played, or who was in or out of a lineup. Because you were gigging all the time, you rarely got the chance to hang out together and compare notes.
    CKY and CKRC were great stations, and really supported the local music scene. The deejays at these stations—PJ the DJ, Doc Steen, Boyd Kozak, Dino Corrie, Daryl B., Harry Taylor—were the Wolfman Jacks or Dick Clarks of the local scene. They’d go to the sock hops and emcee them, playing records and giving away 45s. These guys would promote dances on the radio all week long and work with the bands at the dances. You were really, really