Top 30 Randy Bachman Quotes

Every night we all felt grateful to be there, stunned at the amount of people that are there, and stunned at their reactions. They go crazy; they know every lyric from eight years of age to eighty. It’s unbelievable.

I look on most religions as fear-based rather than love-based. I’ve drifted away from all that. Yes, I think I’m more spiritual. I just don’t go and pretend every Saturday or Sunday that I’m in this wonderful club. I’m exploring.

To add an AC outlet, for example, you just drill a circular hole in the wall, tap into the wiring, add the outlet and you’re set. If you don’t want it, pull it out and plaster over it with more earth to seal the hole.

Change is inevitable, and you can’t stop that change. You say, ‘Wait, stop,’ and it just drives right over you.

The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You’ll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm. It is the most popular instrument in the world; it is the one everybody loves.

Generally, you are held to a sound and that becomes your sound. That gets branded as your sound, and all the copycats start with it because the labels are looking for that sound.

I remember having my father stand over me when I had driven over my own foot; one leg was out of the car and one leg was in the car. He looked at me and told me that I was a drunk and that he was ashamed to call me his son. That night, I stopped drinking and I never drank again; I was twenty four.

You are still lucky – you have a certain type of people who keep buying your music – but then you can get typecast and have to keep making that same music, and you can change only slightly. It’s risky to bounce around and change your type of music.

When you get successful, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

I listened to it last night for the first time since we started this project. I went out to my car and put it in and went to an empty parking lot and just listened and read the little pamphlet that came with it. After two or three songs I burst into tears.

Burton Cummings joining the Guess Who in January 1966 changed my life forever. It’s been a rocky affiliation, no doubt. One journalist once described our relationship as the longest running soap opera in Canadian history. That may be a bit oversimplified.

Those albums are so important to me because, for the first time, I was making my own music, paying for it, finding strengths in it, and going through the process of finding the right music for the record.

You take all the things that frighten you, and when you can get them to work for you all of sudden people are calling you a success.

You don’t need a uniform color: We used a mixture of brick red, browns and grays, and then threw in seashells, branches and various types of rock, so our walls ended up looking like cave paintings!

I learnt one thing in the past or in my life: the only person you can change is yourself, and it has to come from within.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

My life has been a whole series of accidents, some of them happy, some not.

With The Guess Who, it took us fifty-something singles before we had hits.

Radio was my lifeline as a kid growing up in Winnipeg in the 1950s. It connected me with the wider world outside our little prairie city.

When I pull into a city and I rent a car and it’s Nashville, or it’s London, or I’m driving in the taxi to the hotel, and on comes one of my songs, it’s like, ‘Oh my God, they’re still playing these songs on the radio.’ And you still feel tearful and very grateful that somebody still likes these songs that you made up.

You don’t have to have a great voice to sing, just a distinctive one. But make sure you say the words clearly and tell a story.

I started playing the violin when I was 5, but by the time I was 12 or 13, I wasn’t really liking it.

I think what made John Lennon so exciting as an artist is that, like Dylan and other musicians with a truly important musical legacy, he had several faces, personas that changed over time as he developed.

My songs are like cheap Neil Young copies.

When I was five I had violin lessons.

My love, growing up on the Prairies, was country music.

When you play all that as a body of work there are four great songs, four mediocre songs and four bad songs. I didn’t know it at the time; I was just doing my best.

I learned at an early age that I was given something special when I was born, and that was the gift of music.

People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what’s so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.

I never get tired of performing to people who want to hear me. Hell, that’s my handshake to the world. I’m doing just what I’ve wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.