“I’ve worked on this poetry book for seven years now. It’s finally ready,” says former Guess Who lead singer Burton Cummings about his book of poetry entitled The Writings of B.L. Cummings. The collection of 52 stories in rhyme and free verse is available at www.burtoncummings.com
“If it’s on any shelves, it’ll be next to e.e. cummings,” he laughs, pondering a release to book stores. “Then alphabetically, you’ll be first,” I say. “I guess that’s right,” he replies.
His book of poetry is but one of many pursuits that keeps this Canadian icon busy in his California home with his wife of 35 years, Cheryl DeLuca. Sure, he’s surrounded by the Hollywood glitterati; he was hanging out with Alec Baldwin the other day; and he’s an avid comics and basketball cards collector – “I have Superman No. 1, 1939,” he says – but it’s the touring and the singing that occupies his time.
“I’m still drawing crowds at almost 70 and I’ve got more work than I can handle,” he says. “I turn down gigs all the time.” Burton and his five-member band hit the North American casino and festival circuit about 50 times a year belting out the hits like “No Sugar Tonight,” “These Eyes” and “American Woman,” as well as more recent tunes like “A Fine State of Affairs” and “Break It to Them Gently.”
“My audience is anywhere from 10- to 12- to 75-years old,” he says. “I’ve been on the radio so long it’s multi-generational now.” His last performance in British Columbia was at Richmond’s River Rock Casino on New Year’s Eve 2016. It was sold out. “American Woman is always received with huge cheers and standing ovations as is These Eyes,” says Burton. “In Canada, Break it to Them Gently is the one audiences want.”
American Woman; it’s the song that put Burton and the Guess Who on the map. “That was a nice couple of minutes (in 1970) when we got that phone call and we realized it was No. 1 on Billboard,” he confirms. “Those were two or three minutes I wouldn’t mind reliving. That was quite something.”
But that was then, and this is now. There will be no more Guess Who reunions in the future, he declares.
Winnipeg was a hotbed of local bands in the 1960s and Burton, living with his mother, Rhoda, and his grandparents in Winnipeg’s north end, was caught up, like his peers, in the music of the day.
“I used to stay up late with my little transistor radio and I could hear the classic songs that changed my life,” he says.
Elvis and Chuck Berry were gods. “Fats Domino was my favourite,” he continues. His best friend, Ed Smith, was in a high school band called The Deverons, and young Burton desperately wanted to join. The Deverons were an instrumental band playing rollicking, upbeat music that didn’t need a vocalist. But the young high schooler persisted.
“I was just turning 14 when I weaselled my way into that band,” he says. “I hung around the rec room where they were rehearsing, and I kept saying ‘hey, do you guys ever think of getting a singer? Boy, you guys could sure use a singer.’ After a while, I guess because I was so annoying, they were willing to try a few songs with me singing and, after a few months, I was kind of running everything, not as a manager but as the leader deciding what songs we were going to learn.”
Burton was having a great time, but his grades suffered, so the principal told him he had better buckle down and forget about singing in that year’s operetta, a hallowed tradition at St. John’s High. For Burton, performing was his life. He desperately wanted to sing. There was only one alternative.
“It forced me to quit school and, had I not quit, I wouldn’t have been in the Guess Who. So, in a way the principal did me a favour by forbidding me to be in the operetta.”
Now 17, out of school and devoted full-time to music, Burton was approached by another Winnipeg band called Chad Allen and the Expressions that wanted to replace its keyboard player. Burton accepted and met bassist Jim Kale, drummer Garry Patterson and lead guitar Randy Bachman. Since frontman Chad Allen was still singing lead, the newcomer was relegated to keyboards and singing two songs a night. When Allen left in May 1966 for college, Burton filled the position and the band became the Guess Who.
“The first two years were a disaster,” he says. “We ended up in England in February of 1967, and we didn’t even have enough money to fly back to Winnipeg. Everything fell apart when we got there. I was 19, stranded in England, one year out of school and broke. I thought I had made a terrible mistake.”
A two-year gig as the house band with a CBC-TV teen show, Let’s Go, kept the Guess Who alive. Burton and Bachman started to write their own material.
“These Eyes” was written in his mother’s living room. “I hadn’t even left home yet,” he says. “American Woman” was written on the fly. “It was a guitar riff that Randy started playing,” says Burton. “The words came out of my head in a stream of consciousness and we ended up recording it later. More than the fame and the money, I wanted to make records,” he says. “We heard the Beatles from day one and the Beatles were the greatest thing to come along. That’s what Randy and I wanted to do, write songs like John and Paul.”
The rest, as they say, is history: Twenty-three Canadian gold singles; eight Canadian multi-platinum albums; six Juno awards; one American platinum award; induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame; and the Order of Canada, which Burton received in December 2009.
Now a bona fide rock star, Burton embraced the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. He doesn’t shy away from his self-indulgent past. “I did a lot of acid, smoked a lot of great hash, great weed. I barely even laid down till I was about 40,” he once told a Globe and Mail reporter. He was having fun. And then he wasn’t. The turnaround came in 1973.
“It was starting to turn into a jazz fusion band, and they would wheel me out in front to sing the big hit singles. It was just bullshit towards the end. I wanted to write rock ‘n’ roll stuff. When we started doing that other stuff, I knew it was time to get the hell out of there. I wanted to keep it simple.”
“I didn’t like what we were doing musically, and I wasn’t that friendly with everybody, so it just got uncomfortable.”
Burton officially left the Guess Who in 1976 to pursue a solo career. His debut single “Stand Tall” hit No. 1 in Canada later that year.
In 1978, he emigrated to Sherman Oaks, California to continue his solo career, but he hasn’t forgotten his roots, and Winnipeg hasn’t forgotten him.
“I still go back and walk my old neighbourhood and walk past the trees I climbed as a kid,” he says. The two neighbourhoods I grew up in have changed very, very little.”
Business connections also tie him to the city. In 2006, he became a minority shareholder in Salisbury House, a Winnipeg family restaurant, famous for its “nips,” or specialty hamburgers. He also returns to play concerts at the Burton Cummings Theatre, a former vaudeville hall and movie palace named after him by its former owners in 2002.
But it’s the Burton Cummings Community Centre that has a special significance for him. “It’s nice to have my name on that because I played there a million times with the Deverons when it was the West End Community Centre,” he says. “The day they put my name on it, I put my hands in cement. It was a pretty big deal.”
“A lot of my soul is there, a lot of my memories,” he says about Winnipeg. “You only get one home town.” And although the visits have tapered off after his mother died in 2012, the city still has a special place in his heart. “I go back because I like it. All my firsts were there. I’m nostalgic. As a writer, I think it stimulates me. It serves the creativity.”
The hard living, drug and booze-fuelled bad boy of Canadian rock has mellowed.
“I’m so clean and straight these days, I’m boring. You want to quit drinking? Quit going to the fridge. If you want to quit smoking, throw them in the garbage. If you really want to quit, you can quit. It’s as simple as that.”
Burton has moved on in other ways, too. He’s happy to be playing his old tunes with his new band mates. He’s been with them for the past 16 years – six more than with his former Guess Who partners.
“I still love the two hours on stage,” he says. “I have enough stuff for another double album. I’m definitely going to do another album, maybe a couple more.”
As for his legacy, Burton and the Guess Who paved the way for other homegrown artists to break into the international scene. “We did it before CanCon,” he says, the federal ruling that made it mandatory for Canadian radio stations to play 35 per cent Canadian content.
“At first, I thought it was weak and I thought that any self-respecting band didn’t need help from the government, but I changed my tune when I saw how it changed the Canadian music scene. Producers and engineers and artists started coming to Canada from other places, so it ended up being a good thing in the long run. It breathed new life into the Canadian music industry.”
But enough about legacy. Burton wants to talk about the present.
“I can keep doing concerts for another 10 or 15 years, if I keep my chops. I see the crowds getting bigger,” he says. I remind him that dancing around on stage isn’t what old people are supposed to do.
“Old people, ha. Listen to me, I’m 70. We all grow old, but I like to think like a teenager still mesmerized by the music,” says the septuagenarian. “I’m still mesmerized by the music. Definitely.”
Snapshot with Burton Cummings
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give him?
“I would say don’t do those last two years with the Guess Who. I should have been a solo artist at the end of ’73, early ’74, instead of all the way to the end of ’76.”
Who or what has influenced you the most and why?
“The Beatles. Did two guys ever bang out so many great songs in such a short time? Look at that legacy. It’s the songwriting.”
What does courage mean to you?
“Courage is trying to be true to yourself. You can put on airs, but real courage is walking up to the mirror and not being afraid or ashamed of what you see. Jim Morrison used to say, ‘when you realize your deepest fear, walk right up to it and stare it down.’”
What does success mean to you?
“Feeling you’ve accomplished something and you haven’t wasted your time. First and foremost, success is a sense of accomplishment.”
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