This is the time for the Guess Who

By Jim Dail

Contributing Writer

It is true that great bands stand the test of time. It is also true that great songs do too, which is one reason The Guess Who is still touring as much as they want to, including a stop at Pala Casino on Friday, August 28, as part of the Rock of the 70s tour with Ambrosia, Firefall and Al Stewart.

“For us it’s no doubt the catalog,” said original drummer Garry Peterson during a recent telephone interview. “It’s such a wide range of music. ‘These Eyes’ is a ballad, while ‘No Time’ is towards a kind of West Coast country rock jazz tune. ‘No Sugar Tonight’ is a bubblegum thing, and ‘American Woman’ is a hard rock tune.”

And Peterson believes that’s also a reason the band is drawing young people to the shows.

“I believe our particular career of material appeals to the wide range of people and apparently the young kids are being exposed to it on digital downloads,” he said. “In addition, the last thing I’d say is the era of the ‘60s and ‘70s is kind of a magical period in rock history”

It was in 1962 that the band formed, hitting it big for the first time with “These Eyes” in 1968 and then “Laughing” and “Undun” the following year, along with the classic “American Woman.”

“Back then you had The Doors and the Led Zeppelins, but now ‘American Idol’ has done a big disservice and created the sense that the idol is the singer rather than the music behind the singer,” he said. “Our era was the era of the groups and collaborations, but now it is single artists who have the music produced for them and arranged by people.”

Another key to the band is the ability to play around in the studio and be musical.

“We were allowed to do what we wanted,” he said. “Now, there is a formula for being successful rather than experimenting, I’m not saying people are not talented, but as with every new thing there are pros and cons.”

And there’s no better place to search for experimentation than the albums. Granted, their singles are definitely not copies of each other.

“If you listen to our albums, the stuff that wasn’t hit songs are even farther out than you can imagine,” he said. “We did crazy things on the record. We recorded in the bathroom and did little theater stuff inside the record itself. I downloaded every one of our albums on iTunes, and I constantly go through them to see the progression the band made musically and writing wise and where it ended up to the last album. I’m amazed sometimes at what we did.”

That figures since the band members were heavily influenced by The Beatles.

“The Beatles were our idols just as The Beatles and British bands were influenced by American bands like Muddy Waters and the Beach Boys,” he said. “They took our products and invention of rock and Rolland experimented with it.”

Of course, when The Guess Who were emerging, radio presented a problem.

“Unfortunately at that time, you were either an AM artist with singles or a FM underground with long cuts,” Peterson said. “We had both, but FM wouldn’t play us because they looked down on us as a pop machine when we had both. That’s kind of sad because a lot of people didn’t get to hear some of what we did.”

That also explains the name.

“That’s why they call us The Guess Who because they didn’t know who we were,” he laughed. “Most people know us from ‘American Woman’ and ‘These Eyes,’ but some of the others they don’t recognize that it is us.”

And Peterson likes that fact that there isn’t a lot of repetition.

“If you go back on the albums, there’s a jazz cut on the album, and certainly a country thing on every album,” he said. “We were influenced by all kinds of music and that is reflective in our music. We just didn’t want to do an album of ‘These Eyes’ or ‘American Woman.’ Maybe that’s one of the reasons we were not as successful as we might have been.”

But it is also clear that this is a band that loves the stage.

“The big drug for me about being an entertainer is entertaining people,” he said. “If you ask any of the true artists like Frank Sinatra and all those guys from old days, they would tell you what a great thing it is to make people feel good and have people come from their everyday life to hear you. Life can be tedious and to see good music can get you out of that repetition.”

And there is a sense of appreciation as well.

“As I said, I downloaded all our albums and I go through them constantly,” he said. The thing I am amazed at and most proud of is that is I had the chance to play on and execute this vast volume of music. It is a thrill for me. I never get tired of it. It’s not that I listen to how great I was, but the fact I had the opportunity to play."