A couple of years after Burton Cummings had left the band to pursue his solo career RCA put together yet another greatest hits collection. Considering the first best of collection had gone platinum in Canada, and gold in the US back in 1971, and the second collection in 1973 went gold in Canada wasn't it about time for another one? After all Burton was riding high in 1977 with his double platinum My Own Way to Rock, but that success didn't seem to help this one too much. It did crack the Billboard 200, but I guess people already had enough recycled Guess Who albums.
To me though, this is the album I remember as the band's best of. I mean, the cover was simply amazing! How could you not love this one? Besides, I had no idea there were already a bunch of best of albums out, this is the one of my friends had.
Now, I know that as far as being a definitive greatest of The Guess Who, there are a lot of missing pieces, and it's one of the reasons best of albums can be tricky. You're going to leave something off and offend someone somewhere. However as a kid I knew very little about them. To me they were the band that Randy Bachman was in before launching BTO, and Burton Cummings for my formative years was a pretty big deal with his solo hits, even if some of them were kind of sucky schmaltz.
I knew "American Woman" I mean, who didn't? But it was their waning hits that I remembered. Particularly songs like "Clap for the Wolfman" and "Star Baby." So listening to this one for what it is, it certainly packs a punch, and frankly hits a lot of the band's high points. With a lot of so called best of albums, there tends to be a fair bit of filler just to flesh out an album - here with The Guess Who the opposite was the problem. A double album wasn't feasible (although in 1980 when Burton dropped The Best of Burton Cummings that was a double album, go figure) so they just packed in a dozen tunes and spanned the band's catalogue (although the classic line up did perform the first five tunes). Which I really appreciated. It would have been easy to focus solely on the early years, but Bruce Somerfild who compiled the album did a great job picking songs and fleshing out a pretty cohesive album. Of course a nod to Jack Richardson who produced the songs is in order too.
I also really liked how the album provided band credits for the songs. Considering how many guitar slingers the band employed over its run getting a chance to see who who did what was a really nice touch.
So let's give the guys a shout out:
Burton Cummings – lead vocals, rhythm guitar, keyboards, flute, harmonica
Randy Bachman – lead and rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Jim Kale – bass, backing vocals
Garry Peterson – drums, backing vocals
Kurt Winter – lead guitar, backing vocals
Greg Leskiw – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Don McDougall – rhythm guitar, backing vocals
Bill Wallace – bass, backing vocals
Domenic Troiano – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals
While the band was never at the top of my list of favourites, they've had enough stellar moments to make this a really worthwhile addition to my collection.
Having Jack Davis do the cover was just gravy. I got pretty lucky with this one - not bad for a loonie, eh?
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