How perfect is it that the song that shares top spot on this list with the Guess Who name-checks them - and decrees that they suck? When they heard the news, they celebrated by jumping up and down on the bed in a Chicago hotel room. 1 was American Woman, a song by four kids from Winnipeg who cut their teeth playing community club dances in the mid-1960s. 2 song, which had held top spot the previous week, was ABC by the Jackson 5. 3 on the singles chart that week was the Beatles’ Let it Be. singles chart that peaked on May 9, 1970.Īt No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, but when the album’s title song was released in March 1970, it began a climb up the U.S.
No Time was actually the first single from the American Woman album, and it did well, hitting No. With its bluesy acoustic guitar intro and vampy Cummings vocal, the full-length version of the tune clocked in at 5:15, while the edited version that was released as a single was just 3:51. 13, 1969, at the RCA Mid-America Recording Center in Chicago, with Jack Richardson producing, as part of the sessions for the American Woman album, which was released in January 1970. Cummings said most of the key lines were all there - “all that stuff about war machines and ghetto scenes, coloured lights that hypnotize…” Bachman told biographer John Einarson in Randy Bachman: Takin’ Care of Business that he liked the impromptu chord sequence he came up with while testing a changed string, so the trio kept the jam going as the singer scrambled onstage and began improvising lyrics.Ī kid in the hall had fortuitously recorded the set on an early-model cassette recorder so, after the show, when they realized they might be on to something, the quartet sent a roadie to retrieve the tape. They were a tight-knit musical unit but only just coming into their own as songwriters and recording artists.Ĭummings has said he was outside the hall, chatting with a fan, when he heard Randy Bachman’s guitar fire up, with bassist Kale and drummer Peterson quickly falling into a groove behind him. The precise details of the origins of American Woman have been lost in time but the gist of the story remains the same - the song’s familiar riff and many of the lyrics came about in a live jam after singer Burton Cummings was late returning to the stage for the second show of a gig at a curling club in southern Ontario in 1968.Īt the time, Bachman would have been 24, Cummings just 20, Kale was also 24 and Peterson was 23. It’s hard to imagine now - as Winnipeg’s most famous rock musicians seem to have been grizzled veterans forever - but Randy Bachman, Burton Cummings, Jim Kale and Garry Peterson were in their early 20s when they hit upon the riff that became Manitoba’s most memorable rock song. We encourage you all to air your grievances and/or support our choices in the comments below. We’ve all spent the last few weeks writing away, providing context for each of our 150 song selections, so we hope you’ll keep an open mind as you read through our picks for Manitoba’s most important 150 songs and listen to the playlists.
Like last time, the Top 10 was compiled using a super-secret email ballot system American Woman by the Guess Who and One Great City! by the Weakerthans tied for first place. We are not so cruel as to cut him out completely. We know, we know - it’s a controversial decision, but we’re letting you know now so you don’t incredulously scroll through looking for Heart of Gold or Harvest Moon. We also decided not to include Neil Young. Two hour-long video meetings, countless emails, a handful of vocal disagreements and a few last-minute changes later, we have the finished product.įor this list, we decided each artist could have up to three songs, but as it turned out, only the Guess Who ended up with a trio of tracks. In early May, we gathered together, this time on a Zoom call in order to adhere to social-distancing directives, and got to work narrowing down more than 250 potential songs to our final list of 150. This time, our expert panel consisted of me, writer Jill Wilson, arts reporter Alan Small, copy editor Rob Williams, columnist Jen Zoratti, arts reporter Eva Wasney, books and drinks editor Ben Sigurdson, managing editor for Canstar News John Kendle and writer David Sanderson. He knew it was a big ask, hence the pace of his stride, but the desire to highlight (and find a practical use for our knowledge about) 150 Manitoba-made songs outweighed any hesitation we previously had. Flash-forward to early in 2020, pre-pandemic, when enterprise editor Scott Gibbons did a brisk walk by my desk to suggest we get the team back together and create a similar list for Manitoba’s 150.
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