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The Guess Who
American Woman / No Sugar Tonight - 7"
Nimbus - 1970
Mike Milner
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The story of how 'American Woman' came about is now fairly well known. The Guess Who - singer/keyboardist Burton Cummings, guitarist Randy Bachman, bassist Jim Kale and drummer Garry Peterson - were playing a gig in Ontario and Randy Bachman had broken a string. The other members took an impromptu break while he put on a new string and tuned up. While tuning, he began fooling around with a riff, and after he began playing it, he noticed the crowd suddenly paying attention. Realizing he was on to something, he called on the rest of the band to the stage to join him. The other musicians jumped in on the groove, with Burton providing an improvised vocal line consisting of "American woman, stay away from me". In a moment of pure serendipity, a song which would forever define the Guess Who was born.
The Guess Who had been going for a grittier sound in their recordings. While they were justifiably proud of their earlier successes, they knew they had the ability to write and record songs that were closer to the way the band sounded live. Burton Cummings unquestionably had one of the great voices in modern popular music, capable of bringing a searing intensity and deep sincerity to the lyrical content of the songs he and Randy Bachman were writing. In 'American Woman', the band had written a song which would be the perfect platform to showcase the harder, more driving sound they were aiming for.
In addition to the great groove the song has, there were in my opinion two other important musical ingredients that really stood out on 'American Woman' and made it a hit: Bachman's guitar sound and Cummings' impassioned vocal. The guitar sound came from Bachman's 1959 Gibson Les Paul, played through a unique electronic device built for him called a Herzog. This was a tube pre-amplifier designed by a friend of the band named Garnet Gillies, an electronics repairperson and musician. Much like Toronto's Pete Traynor, Gillies would go on to start his own company and eventually build a line of uniquely Canadian musical instrument amplifiers under the Garnet name. The Herzog was designed to provide a deep, warm sustain to the lead guitar lines Randy played. It can be heard to great effect on the guitar solos played throughout the song.
Burton Cummings delivers his vocals with passion and depth, singing with a slightly harder edge than in previous recordings. The song's lyrical content and the conviction with which Burton Cummings sang them gave it a level of authenticity not normally associated with popular music. The lyrics themselves are an allegory about the turbulent period in history that the Guess Who had found themselves in. As proud Canadians plying their trade in America, they were witness to the political unrest and challenges that were day-to-day occurrences in that country, specifically as a result of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.
To the band's credit, they put their feelings into words and produced a hit single that combined great music and profound social commentary on a crucial topic. 'American Woman', with the equally great 'No Sugar Tonight' on the back, would go to #1 on the Billboard charts on May 9, 1970, making it the most popular record in America at that particular time in history, based on radio play and record sales. It was a tremendous achievement.
Check out more of Mike Milner's writing here.
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