Songwriting and storytelling with Randy Bachman

Another day, another City Showcase workshop. Friday’s panel was full of songwriters, and the subject was ostensibly Turning your song into a recording. The star of the show was “Randy Bachman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Bachman (Canadian rock hero of of “Bachman Turner Overdrive”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachman-Turner_Overdrive fame) who, guitar in hand, told tales of writing his biggest hits in moments of panic on stage mid-tour. More of that later.

The rest of the panel (David Stark ["Songlink":http://www.songlink.com/], “Bill Padley”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Padley, “Paul Tipler”:http://www.discogs.com/artist/Paul+Tipler and the other guy whose name I’ve completely forgotten) did their best to answer a bewildering array of questions from the audience, and seemed to have a story to hand for any occasion. The discussion was peppered with the usual rants about The Old Days, Learning On Tape, Bands These Days Think They Can Just [insert musical crime], but there was plenty of meat to go around.

h3. And the message is…

As always, it’s difficult to distil a coherent message from the five panellists, but I get the feeling that persuading them to agree on everything would be like asking the Ghostbusters to cross the streams – ultimately destructive. They each had a unique and interesting vantage point on the songwriting business, and they kept us effortlessly entertained for a couple of hours.

Here are some key points I fished out:

• From the start, make the elements of your demo good enough to make it onto the record. Or, don’t make a demo, make a record.
• Keep several reference tracks to hand when building up your demo, and really listen to them. Try to pick out the parts (often not the bits you notice first) that make those tracks really sing.
• Radio pop songs are extended commercials. Write an epic jingle.
• When the chorus repeats, repeat it exactly (the vocal at least). No exceptions. People should be wanting to sing along by the second chorus, and you’re making them look stupid if you sing something else.
• Don’t waste your life playing with plugins. Work on the performance until it’s great, then record it.
• A good vocal track will withstand any treatment. You can rearrange the song underneath it to be in a different style, different groove etc. Try remixing your own songs (ie. take out all the clever bits).

h3. And now… Randy Bachman’s classic tales

Just because he sounds like a classic rock legend when he tells stories, try to imagine a great grey-bearded Canadian in a tie-dye t-shirt telling this story about JJ’s bass sound:

James Jameson (the Motown bass player) never changed his strings, and they had that great flat, thuddy Motown sound. When Motown moved to LA, Jameson got a sponsorship deal from Rotosound, who gave him a brand new set of super-bright-sounding bass strings (“like piano strings…”). So he turns up for the first session in LA, and the producer stops him and says “What happened to your sound? We want the James Jameson sound!” Jameson calls the music shop that fitted his Rotosounds to ask for his old strings back. Turns out they sold them for $2,000 – they were the Motown bass strings! So Jameson hunts down the guy who bought them and eventually has to pay $6,000 to get his strings back. Genius.

h3. How Randy wrote his hits

h4. “American Woman“:http://tinysong.com/iz0

The Guess Who (his band at the time) drove from Winnipeg down to Texas to play the circuit, but when they got there the US Army tried to draft them to Vietnam. They fled back to Canada, ending up in Toronto. To make the money they needed to get back home (over 4,000 miles of snow), they took a gig in a curling rink. Randy broke a string, and while tuning his guitar he came up with the riff for American Woman, called the band back on stage and launched into it. Voila. Megahit.

h4. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet“:http://tinysong.com/kPW

Randy was producing the Guess Who. He’s in the studio testing out the guitar levels, so he plays a quiet, jangly bit (“Only You Know What I Know“:http://tinysong.com/kPJ by Dave Mason) alternating with a loud, rocky bit. So that’s the rhythm track. Then he records a vocal to make fun of his brother who has a bad stutter (“B-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen n-n-n-nothin’ yet”), with some Van Morrison impressions thrown in for good luck (“She looked at me with those big brown eyes, and said…”). The track was only meant to send to his brother as a joke, but when the A&R guy turned up to listen through the album he decided there wasn’t a good single. Until the engineer played him the joke track, which he loved. Bingo.

As Smashie & Nicey “so memorably put it”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtZKvHmU8vg, “In the words of Messrs Bachman Turner Overdrive, LET’S ROCK!”

Tagged with: music industry, songwriting

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