Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

July 23, 2012
Bachman, the founder and main songwriter of two wildly successful rock groups—the Guess Who in the 1960s (“American Woman”) and Bachman-Turner Overdrive in the ’70s (“Takin’ Care of Business”)—who has played with everyone from fellow Canadian Neil Young to ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, has great stories to tell in this memoir. The strength of this entertaining book is that it isn’t really a typical rock autobiography—it expands on the weekly Sirius XM radio broadcast Randy Bachman’s Vinyl Tap, in which Bachman plays music and tells tales based on his own songs or different themes like “Randy’s 25 Favorite Vehicle Songs.” So, instead of a drawn-out history of the well-known tension between Bachman and Guess Who cofounder Burton Cummings, the reader gets a wry, funny, and well-written story about how “No Sugar Tonight” got its title from his diminutive girlfriend yelling at her hulking biker boyfriend. And in explaining the recording of “Takin’ Care of Business,” which became “BTO’s signature song,” Bachmann gets straight to the good part: how a Fidel Castro look-alike pizza delivery man shows up at the wrong studio, offers to add a piano track that gives the song a classic hook, and turns out to be a classically trained pianist delivering pizzas between gigs.