Several years ago, I was watching some sort of superfluous music awards show, and I chanced to see the Barenaked Ladies accepting the award for “Best Canadian Group.” As is obvious from their music, the Ladies have well-developed wry senses of humor. This was apparent when lead singer Ed Robertson (or perhaps it was Steven Page) acknowledged the silliness of the award’s title by commenting: “We’d like to thank our competitors in this category: Loverboy, Rush, and The Guess Who.” The audience chortled heartily. Clearly, Barenaked Ladies and Rush can both be considered under the rubric of what I like to call “Canadian Dork Rock,” and the less said about Loverboy the better. The Guess Who, however, is an entirely different kettle of clams.
The Guess Who was without question the biggest Canadian rock band of the sixties. They were well known in the States, and they had some hits here, but they were massive superstars in the Great White North. Representing Winnipeg (which sounds sort of like a game one-legged pirates might play), they started off as Chad Allen & The Expressions in the early sixties. In addition to Chad Allen, one of the initial members of the band was Randy Bachman, who went on to form Bachman-Turner Overdrive after leaving the Guess Who (shortly after becoming a Mormon) in 1970. (BTO would go on to inspire one of the best names for a band based on the name of another band ever: Kathleen Turner Overdrive. Bourbon Tabernacle Choir is also pretty rad.) While their first few albums were heavy on the ballads, they really hit the big time when they turned on the distortion and cranked the amps up to 11.
In 1970, they released American Woman, which is arguably their best album. Not only is the title track an all-time classic, but the album also contains “No Time,” and another personal favorite, the double rocker “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature.” And here is where the irony enters: the only number one song the band ever had in the United States is an extremely sarcastic anti-American diatribe. Obviously, the song is a reaction to the Vietnam War. (Incidentally, do you know what the Vietnamese call the Vietnam War? They call it the American War. Go figure.) It was recorded between August and November of 1969, which would overlap slightly with the “Summer of Love.” Listen closely to the lyrics of this song and it should become apparent that a bunch of sanctimonious Canucks are basically accusing us of being a pack of warmongers: “I don’t need your war machines; I don’t need your ghetto scenes.” Leaving aside the question of the accuracy of that assertion, Cummings, Bachman et al. are conspicuously and brazenly turning their collective back on the longstanding ties of amity and cooperation that exist between the two northernmost nations of North America.
And yet. I absolutely love this song. It rocks. It totally rocks. There’s simply no other way to put it. It’s so masterfully arranged, too. It starts off with that little acoustic blues intro: “American Woman, gonna mess your mind…,” and then Randy Bachman comes in with that riff-tastic fuzztone and the song kicks into high gear. Awesome. My intense love of this song kind of bothers me in a way, because for some reason it especially bothers me to hear Canadians talking trash about my country. Granted, they are entitled to their opinion. And it’s not like I’m going to disparage Canada. Why would I criticize them? Because they’re too nice? Because putting gravy and cottage cheese on your fries is weird? Or perhaps I could criticize the federal government’s foot-dragging in according more autonomy to the Quebecois? It’s hard for me to get too worked up about any of that. Canadians generally are pretty innocuous.
This tale gets even stranger, though. For the second Austin Powers movie, they got Lenny Kravitz to cover “American Woman” as a sort of theme song for Felicity Shagwell, the character played by supervixen Heather Graham. Lenny’s cover is pretty good, as he is one talented cat. I’m just not sure it works in that context. But then his version got used in a context where it really didn’t work. That would be a Nike commercial with Mia Hamm. This is totally inappropriate. Mia Hamm is probably the greatest all-around soccer player the United States has ever produced. She’s a team player, an incredibly hard worker and she doesn’t showboat or cause static. She is a model to millions of American girls (and boys, for that matter). Using “American Woman” in an ad with her is not only inappropriate, it’s kind of insulting.
Bizarrely, the album became such a hit that the band was asked to play at the White House for the Nixons and a visiting Prince Charles. “American Woman” was not included in the set list.
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