Randy Bachman by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

couldn’t pull the song together in the studio because it had been just a jam and it didn’t have its own tempo yet. It was all over the place, speeding up, slowing down, stopping and starting. I remember we had a whole frustrating day of working at it in the studio.
    Garry Peterson and I went in the next day and I just plugged my Stratocaster into a Fender amp with tremolo. It had a much cleaner sound. That seemed to get the groove going. Then Jim Kale added bass and Garry added some East Indian tabla drums that Jack Richardson brought in. That became the basic backing track. I overdubbed another guitar doing the lead using my 1959 Gibson Les Paul and Garnet Herzog. Then Burton put the words on. “American Woman” was born onstage but completed in the studio.
    People always tell me what a really heavy song it is, almost a heavy metal guitar riff. But it’s really not that heavy. I’m not using a two hundred–watt Marshall stack and grinding out these heavy power chords. It’s a fairly light rhythm track. It’s the thickness of the lead guitar lick that gives it the heavy sound, and Burton’s vocals sound like he’s yelling in defiance, as if he really means it: “American woman, stay away from me.”
    The American woman we were singing about wasn’t the average American girl on the street but the Statue of Liberty and that poster of Uncle Sam pointing and saying, “I want you!” So when that song became #1 we were labelled a protest band, but we were just a bunch of guys from the Canadian prairies.
    A few months earlier we’d had a situation where U.S. authorities tried to draft us. We had green cards by then and were crossing the Manitoba–North Dakota border at Pembina. I remember the American customs guard telling us to pull in half a mile beyond the border under the sign saying Selective Service. Just before thatsign was a gas station, and since American gas prices were cheaper than Canada’s at the time, we always filled up in the States. We drove in to fill up and started talking to the attendant. I asked him where the Selective Service building was.
    He looked at me and replied, “You don’t want to go there.” Then he told me that his son had been drafted and was fighting in Vietnam. “I suggest you turn around right now and go back up to Canada.”
    So we did that, and didn’t dare try to cross the same way again. Part of that might have been the sentiment behind “American Woman.” It was easier to say than “Uncle Sam stay away from me” or “Statue of Liberty stay away from me.” It was all unplanned. RCA used that imagery, though, in their promotion of the record: the Statue of Liberty with the face of an old woman superimposed over a New York alleyway with trash everywhere. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, so the timing was perfect.
    â€œAmerican Woman” stayed at #1 for three weeks on the U.S. national charts in May 1970. That year we sold more singles than any other rock act, and we sold more records than the entire Canadian recording industry combined to that point. “American Woman” was recently voted the greatest Canadian single of all time. I’m not surprised.
    â€œNO SUGAR TONIGHT”
    In early 1969, after playing a gig in San Francisco, I was in Berkeley, California, and had just bought a bunch of vinyl records. That’s something I often did in different cities on tour. I’d be looking for unusual or hard-to-find albums. So I was taking these records back to my rental car when I saw three guys in black leather jackets walking towards me on the same side of the street. I was a little intimidated by this. They looked like guys from a biker gang, three rough, tough street guys and me, the lone Canadian. I’m six-foot-three but I certainly don’t look threatening. Plus I’m a Canadian. I’m a lover, not a fighter.
    As these guys