The Guess Who

It was sometime in the start of my kindergarten year when Dad pulled this one out, and asked me if I'd ever heard "Bus Rider". I honestly had never heard this album before, though I had seen it in the collection, but it had never been played around me. It sounded like something we could identify with, since we didn't have a car, and pretty much traveled everywhere by bus, courtesy of Pierce Transit.

He put the album on the turntable. The first thing I noticed was that the album had a piece missing out of it on the outer part, as if it had been dropped, or something hard fell on it, and so the opening song on either side was permanently (and literally) cut out. "Bus Rider" played, a two-and-a-half-minute perfect explosion of Rock & Roll, great hooks, great chorus, and fun lyrics. A hit single, if there ever was one.

That did it, and I was hooked.

Dad also had the 8-Track tape of this album, and I began to play it on the stereo on days that I was at home from school, and he was at work. I could not get enough of it. Awesome songs all the way through it, and I loved Burton Cummings' bluesy rasp. When Angie saw the cover, she thought the guys were standing around in a sewer. The songs played through my head as Mitchell, Angie and myself played at Wright Park throughout that school year, and well into that summer.

When we got into the cassette format, I put this album onto cassette, and played it all the time. One interesting way to fill in the gap with the two missing songs was that Dad also had another "greatest hits" album that featured "These Eyes" and "Hand Me Down World", and I was able to record them onto tape in their original running order, and not miss a thing. Plus, it also had songs like "Star Baby" and "Clap For The Wolfman", which I also liked.

Dad also told me that he saw them in concert at the UPS Fieldhouse in 1971 or so, around the same time that The Best Of had come out, so it was the same lineup on the album cover. A great show, but the one thing that he always remembered was that Burton Cummings skulked around the stage all night, smoking a lot of cigarettes (one after the other), and made it seem like he didn't even want to be there. Later on, I felt that maybe it was around the time that he found out Jim Morrison had died, and maybe that's what put him in such a mood.

As I grew up, I still played it often, knowing all the words, and also teaching myself how to sing by singing along to them. And as time went on, I began to find their albums and picked them up as I found them. There were lots more great songs on albums like Canned Wheat, So Long, Bannatyne and Rockin'. I also began picking up some of their albums on 8-Tracks, which I would find at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store. If I liked what I heard, then I would go and pick up the album on my next vinyl safari. One that I loved and played all the time was of their 1974 album Road Food, which I found at House Of Records on my fourteenth birthday.

A year after that, I found a vinyl copy of The Best Of The Guess Who that had a black-light poster included in it. I wasn't aware that the first pressings of the album had a poster included in it, but there it was; a similar shot of the guys underneath the pier, standing in shallow water. I bought it for that, and also to replace the copy at home that was pretty much worn out, and the poster went on my wall. It's still up there.

Flash forward many years, and one of Geoffrey's favorites is "Bus Rider", followed by "Rain Dance" and "Sour Suite". Why he likes the latter song is kind of a mystery, as it's a bit melancholy, but it's one of his favorites.