American Woman by the Guess Who - possibly inspired by ETs according to my friend Grant Cameron... youtube/watch?v=3OR6HkGS11c Wikipedia: The songs origins took the form of a live jam at a curling rink concert in Waterloo, Ontario. The group was rushing into the second set and began improvising a rhythm to liven up the crowd. Burton Cummings, the lead singer, began improvising lyrics to fit the music. They liked what they had played and noticed a kid with a cassette recorder making a bootleg copy and asked him for the tape.[1] [1] Cummings, Burton (July 23, 2013). The Guess Who legend reveals true origin of “American Woman. Examiner. Interview with Ray Shasho (Clarity Digital Group). It was jammed onstage one night in Mississauga, Ontario, we were playing at a club called the Broom & Stone which was actually a curling rink and doing two shows that night. Between the two shows, I was outside bartering with this kid, he had some old Gene Vincent records that I wanted to get for my collection and tried to strike-up a deal with this guy. The next thing I know, it’s time to start the second show and the other three guys have gone back onstage and I hear them start this riff … I said to this guy, Oh my God; I’m supposed to be onstage man, I’ve got to run, I’ll see you later about these Gene Vincent records. I run inside and run up onto the stage and just grab a microphone and started singing whatever came into my head; it was all stream of consciousness at the moment stuff … all that stuff about war machines and ghetto scenes, colored lights can hypnotize… it was all just spur-of-the-moment. And nobody would have ever heard it again but there happened to be a kid bootlegging the show that night. This was way back in the 60’s and he had a cassette machine, and those machines were a relatively new invention at that time. But this was 1968, forty-five years ago. We noticed this onstage as the night went on and he still kept recording. So we motioned to our road manager, go get that tape, go get that tape! He got the cassette tape and we listened to it later and heard this jam about American Woman stay away from me. So we actually kind of learned it from that tape, otherwise nobody would have ever heard it again. So talk about a Cinderella story. And that was a monstrous hit record for us; it was number one on Billboard for three weeks. So it was all an accident, I guess the music gods were smiling on us. The music gods probably sent that kid with the cassette machine.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:22:18 +0000
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