Randy Bachman by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

powerful songs. And so we evolved from a mellow country rock band into playing pretty cool rock ’n’ roll. We played a lot of Stones, Who, and Creedence in our live shows. They all had that primal rock ’n’ roll beat. That’s where our sound came from.
    We were clearly not Brave Belt anymore. We’d had two albums out as Brave Belt, and it was time to change our name because we weren’t that band. My record label kept telling me, “You’ve got to put your name, the Bachman name, in the band so that people will recognize the guy who wrote all those Guess Who songs. The radio stations will recognize your name and you might get some airplay.” From their perspective it made perfect sense. Why try to hide my identity? My brothers Rob and now Tim were in the band, so we had three Bachmans and a Turner, and for about two weeks we called ourselves Bachman Turner. This was the eraof acts like Brewer & Shipley, who were playing acoustic folk– style music, and Seals & Crofts, who played acoustic guitar and mandolin. We were playing this heavy-duty rock ’n’ roll.
    But when promoters would hear the name Bachman Turner, they thought it was two guys with acoustic guitars playing folk songs like Seals & Crofts or Brewer & Shipley. So we got booked into these coffee houses with little tables. We’d come in and set up our big amplifiers and blow the cups off the tables and get fired. We needed a name that showed clearly that we played heavy music, not “Diamond Girl” or “One Toke Over the Line.”
    We were coming back from a gig in Windsor, Ontario, one night, and we drove across the border to Detroit. We stopped at a gas station, and as I was paying I looked right by the cash register and saw a magazine called Overdrive . I called Fred over and said, “Look at this magazine! It’s all about trucks!” It even had a centrefold, but when we opened it out, it was a picture of the inside of a guy’s truck cab with leopard-skin seat covers, a stereo, and a little rack to put a book on—these guys actually read pocketbooks as they’re driving these semi-trailers! I said to Fred, “This is a great name for an album,” and he replied, “This is a great name for a band!” No longer would people think we were a folk duo. It was a name that left no doubt we were a heavy-duty band: Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
    I called the record label the next day because they’d been bugging me to get a name that had my name in it. They liked it but said that it was too long for people to remember, that we needed a one- or two-syllable name like Byrds or Beatles, something like that. So I said, “Well, there’s the initials BTO …” They thought that was fabulous. So we got the name to go with our sound.
    THE RADISSON AND GROSEILLIERS OF ROCK ’N’ ROLL
    During the time of glam rock and platform boots, BTO weren’t wimps or pretty boys. We looked like mountain men in furs, fringe, flannel, and long beards. We were the Radisson andGroseilliers of rock, two hearty voyageurs who lived in the woods and never shaved. We were perceived by some as the lumberjack rockers from Canada who’d blow the windshield out of your car. The media picked up on that rustic image and really ran with it. Fred was a big guy like myself and had this flaming orange hair and beard. He even had a coonskin hat and these big, fringed jackets with beads. Fred looked like Mike Fink, King of the Keelboaters, right out of Davy Crockett. We were rugged men from the northern wilds of Canada. We’d come out on stage and the music was full-tilt stomping with Fred screaming at the top of his lungs over sledgehammer guitars and drums that sounded like falling trees. So our image matched the sound coming out on the records. We were a “Tim Allen’s Tool Time” guy’s band. Guys loved BTO. I remember on our whole tour of the U.K. we