Customer Reviews

Let's Go

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3 star:		(1)
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I had the good fortune to catch the return tour of the REAL Guess Who in 2000 (Bachman, Cummings, Peterson, McDougall & Wallace) and was overjoyed when the live double CD came out. Then, Randy Bachman unearthed a ton of early material from before the release of Wheatfield Soul (the double CD This Time Long Ago, with a few great cover tunes and early versions of several tracks that made it onto the Wheatfield album)...I was aware they'd been the house band on CBC Television's "Let's Go" in the mid-late 60s. This CD proves how good they were at handling just about any material at all (never mind their own great stuff). To hear the Guess Who tackle songs like Along Comes Mary, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, Time of the Season, You Keep Me Hangin' On and more only cements my respect for these guys as a band who could do it all, and when These Eyes finally hit the airwaves, as Burton Cummings put it, "It changed our lives forever". The real bonus on this disc is the inclusion of five tracks done for a Coca-Cola promotional album ("A Wild Pair", with Ottawa's Staccatos on the other side of the LP...later to be known as The Five Man Electrical Band). Some of the band's first RCA hits are included here as performed on the TV show, the cover songs you have to hear to appreciate, and the "Wild Pair" music has been nearly impossible to come by until now. This is worth any Guess Who fan's money...as well as the attention anyone who hasn't made themselves familiar with them yet (if not, why not?) If you have the other stuff, this is a must. If you don't...get this and at least one of the greatest hits packages! Kudos to Randy Bachman for bringing this material to the light of day!

Burton Cummings must have been a teenager when he recorded the tracks on this LP, and the other band members were, what, 20 or 21? But they were cooking! His voice, with its amazing range and tonal surety, had the youthful appeal of a Stevie Winwood, crossed with something more mature and darker, which comes across on these early tapes like hard rain. Randy Bachman on guitar shows some of the flair that he later put to such good use, and you can see why out of all the bands in Canada, this one, the Guess Who, had such unconditional success. In America we wondered at the versatility of the Guess Who's first big hits, for each one had a different sound--"These Eyes," "Laughing," the jazzy samba of "Undun," the blistering rockout "American Woman," but that's because we didn't know that the band originally played on a Canadian pop show and had to learn dozens of new songs every month to keep up, and you can hear the sweaty energy and the explosion of new sounds on these tapes. And the division between different kinds of rock collapses. No wonder they called themselves the Guess Who, for they could fade in and out of an already existing sound almost at will.

The show was called "Let's Go," and from what I understand was constructed a little bit like the British Top of the Pops, with some American Bandstand thrown in. The Guess Who played a wide range of soul, rock, blues and pop standards, including "Blackbird," :You Keep Me Hanging On," Jim Morrison's "Touch Me," and "Along Came Mary" by the underrated Association. You know you have to have balls to even *think* of attempting to cover the gonzo "Touch Me." On this LP there's a different version of "White Room" than you got in the previous covers LP THIS TIME LONG AGO. Sometimes the band apparently got to pioneer some originals, so between these two LPs you get quite a bit of the music that wound up on their first LPs, and here for example is "No Time." It's a great bargain for fans of one of the more imitated bands in Canadian pop history.

CD contains some great covers and early versions of their own compositions, most destined to become latter hits. The sound is in mono as recorded for TV broadcast. The Wild Pair sessions (the last five selections on the CD) are mono as well, I own the stereo LP and would have liked the stereo versions included on the CD instead. Unfortunately I understand that those master tapes are unavailable or no longer exist; too bad those songs are all great and are produced by Jack Richardson as well! Thanks to Marv Polanski for preserving the tapes, he had much more forethought than the CBC!

I'm a diehard Guess Who fan, so this was a good find. I didn't know that they were such a good cover band. The originals are pretty good too.

This CD is all sung by Randy Bachman. A bit of a misnomer to call it The Guess Who without Burton Cummings. Still, a fun CD to listen to.

. . . comprising songs that the Canadian band The Guess Who performed for their mid-1960s television show "Let's Go" as well as the songs recorded for the rare "Wild Pair" album. The songs from the TV show include a wide range of covers as well as originals, and display great talent and diversity in their singing and playing. In fact, the band had already been together for several years and had released three albums by the time that they began working on the show. The songs from the Wild Pair album appear on CD for the first time here, and it is a joy to hear them. As the liner notes state, the songs from the TV show are a little low fidelity, having been recorded for small television speakers of the time. The Wild Pair songs, however, sound great. They all bring back memories, although I would have liked to have seen the show in which they performed the complete Sergeant Pepper's album. Buy this and enjoy a visit to the 60s.