Day #6 of Appreciating Great Canadian Musicians. The Guess Who from Winnipeg sing American Woman. Frontman Burton Cummings tells how the song was spontaneously created onstage in 1968: It was jammed onstage in Mississauga, Ontario, we were playing at a club called the Broom & Stone which was actually a curling rink and doing two shows that night. Between the shows, I was outside bartering with this kid, he had some old Gene Vincent records that I wanted to get for my collection. The next thing I know, it’s time to start the second show and the other three guys have gone back onstage and I hear them start this riff. I run inside onto the stage and just grab a microphone and started singing whatever came into my head; it was all stream of consciousness at the moment stuff, all that stuff about war machines and ghetto scenes, colored lights can hypnotize, it was all just spur-of-the-moment. And nobody would have ever heard it again but there happened to be a kid bootlegging the show that night. He had a cassette machine, a relatively new invention at that time. We noticed this onstage as the night went on and he still kept recording. Our road manager got the cassette tape and we listened to it later and heard this jam about American Woman stay away from me. So it was all an accident, I guess the music gods were smiling on us. The music gods probably sent that kid with the cassette machine. About its meaning, Cummings observed: The popular misconception was that it was a chauvinistic tune, which was anything but the case. The fact was, we came from a very strait-laced, conservative, laid-back country, and all of a sudden, there we were in Chicago, Detroit, New York--all these horrendously large places with their big city problems. After that one particularly grinding tour, it was just a real treat to go home and see the girls we had grown up with. Also, the war was going on, and that was terribly unpopular. We didnt have a draft system in Canada, and we were grateful for that. A lot of people called it anti-American, but it wasnt really. We werent anti-anything. John Lennon once said that the meanings of all songs come after they are recorded. Someone else has to interpret them. Later that year, they were invited to play at the White House, but the Nixons requested that they not play American Woman due to its alleged criticism of America in the late 60s. https://youtube/watch?v=e8z1EzDouNs
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 01:13:52 +0000
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