Guess Who - Rockin'

Tracks

Side 1

		Track Name	Length
	1	Heartbroken Bopper
	2	Get Your Ribbons On
	3	Smoke Big Factory
	4	Arrivederci Girl
	5	Guns Guns Guns

Side 2

		Track Name	Length
	1	Running Bear
	2	Back to the City
	3	Your Nashville Sneakers
	4	Herbert's a Loser
	5	Hi Rockers!: Sea of Love; Heaven Only Moved Once Yesterday; Don't You Want Me

Photos

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Information/Write-up

well, rockin' was so fast it's a blur as far as the actual recording of the record. man, i wish that had been filmed, but there was no portable way of capturing career travels in 1972...lil does all of that now...the "life capturer"...

rockin' began about noon on a monday, as i recall, and on friday afternoon of that same week we turned over master mixes to rca...

four days, including final mixes...wow...i've heard of certain singers being thrilled at getting an entire verse of a final vocal in a week's time...el-a-tive-ray...

rockin' was the last one we did in chicago. up there on the 12th floor on north wacker drive right across from the opera house. we'd stay at the executive house by those twin marina towers, and walk along the river where capone's boys dumped things, turn left on wacker eventually and down the block to the studio...i always liked that walk...real chicago feel...

kurt and i wrote the songs for rockin' without even thinking about it...heartbroken bopper...kurt had the other guys playin' the lead riff with him, and leskiw's part too...but they were playing it on the off beats...syncopated...good riff, played stupidly, taking away from its own power...it was i who suggested to make it a caveman two and four, just play the riff and not be falsely fancy...the world knows we can probably play it in syncopation, but we don't have to do it to prove that...just let it rock...and we did...i had a specific guy in mind when i sang those words...a guy who had ditched high school even younger than i had, and went right to work in a car wash...his image in my mind's eye forged those words about the bopper who didn't quite "make it"...irony is, he's very successful now, later in life...you'd never believe the depths and heights and all that space in between...i remember having to ask our producer jack richardson about "summa cum laude". i remembered that it was a phrase denoting very high distinction and high praise, but i'd forgotten exactly what it was and how to say it correctly. we had to stop and look it up in an old book with real paper pages...it was 1972. we weren't able to google it. there were no computers...

so "summa cum laude" it became and everybody who really liked the song really liked that reference. ribbons was truly a split writing deal...kurt would sometimes get the guys goin' on chevrier before i even showed up. it wasn't that i was late all the time, it's just that kurt lived only about a hundred yards down the street from the studio. so he'd be there way more than the rest of us...i come in one day and they're doin' "get your ribbons on, honey, get your ribbons on..." that whole deal is goin' already. it's in c...i always liked the climb from c to f to ab to bb to c...so i told kurt i liked it and also told him it should go somewhere else...another key for the verses. so i came up with all that silly "vestibule" stuff...just rhythmics, that's all i was chasing...not writing the taming of the shrew...just rhythmics more than anything...and why the hell was the guy's girlfriend angela joining the football team anyway...? and what exactly was it that angela's parents were saying to him as he wiped his feet out in the vestibule...? i guess we'll never know....

the factory song...out in the back of our little world within walls on chevrier, there was a huge beet factory...i guess a refinery, not that i ever asked a hundred questions about it...it belched out this snow-white smoke for hours sometimes, and when the sky was manitoba prairie blue, as it is so often, the sight was beautiful...as horrendous as the actual event of the pollution was, it still had visual beauty, if you could divorce the thoughts of toxins from the visual. kurt had those nice guitar lines all worked out with leskiw...and i had that whole "sad eyes" and "green frame" and "islands" thing done way before this...but i'd never had anything really decent to go around those three verses...and kurt had worked out some of those nice harmonies on "smoke beet factory"...
and there it was...and one day kale says...hey man, how about callin' it smoke "big" factory...? and being the wannabee hippies we sorta were, kurt and i put his name under it. that's the only reason his name's there... for that one word. the song is really kurt's and mine...that's a true story. i still like the harmonies, the vocals. and for a brief few moments at the end, leskiw and i are actually playing nicely off each other...not bad piano feel on the end out...

arrividerci girl was something i almost made up on the spot at home...finished it off the night of a taped studio after-show jam in nashville around 1971, with kurt on drums...just tryna be fats domino. simple as that. it's in g, although i don't know if i could sing it like that in g today in 2011...

i actually do play a hint of the piano solo from arrividerci girl at the instrumental vamp at the beginning of american woman these days on stage. oh brother. actually i still like this cut, just the feel of it...

guns...well it's always been a favourite. probably the best bass jim kale ever played on any guess who record, and kurt and greg just meshed so nicely...kurt's garbage can alley way fuzz and greg's teardrop wah wah sluggin' it out against each other...it's one of the most superb moments on all of the rca guess who albums...

running bear...live off the floor. no overdubs. when we did it it was largely for fun, not really thinking it would kick off side two...when johnny preston's version hit the airwaves in winnipeg, i was 11. it was 1959 and running bear had rocketed to number one on the cky charts...that same winter i got to travel up north with our olympic rink hockey team to bissett, which is actually an entry point to nopiming provincial park. back then it seemed like the "far north" to me, but as i look on the map today, it's not really that far up there...and i had one of those cky top fifty lists with me in my coat pocket and i was showin' it to ken fedoruk on the bus and running bear was in the number one slot...so it was always special to me. jack, our producer, thought we were silly, but there was starting to be visits with the white lady and he couldn't really control the material or the writing anymore...not that he ever did, but let's just say, back in the days when randy and i were doing all the writing, we were probably more likely to take any kind of "direction" from jack, than kurt or i would ever have been...truthfully...

back to the city was another real co writing product. kurt had that whole first verse about "sailor and the soda sunlight"...chords, words, riffs, it was a great place to start. but i'd been kinda screamin' that "beware of lies" thing around 89 lansdowne for a while...both pieces were in a, so i just sang it once before his soda sunlight verse and he liked the way it fit. so there we were...i wrote the second verse of lyrics, mirroring the cadence and rhythms of his first verse.."tinker tailor sailor mailer"...i wanted my line to be taken as "mailer" meaning norman mailer the author, but i don't think anybody did...oh brother...who cares ? nashville sneakers. kurt and i both bought sneakers from this place in downtown nashville that sold shoes to hospital orderlies and nurses...kinda "extra supportive" stuff, which back in 1971 was not "all the rage"...our sneakers were dye-washed brown and beige, patches of colour like on a cow...

that's all it took to bring on those lyrics...i'd been fiddling with that chord progession, slipping the home key back and forth from c to g for a while in 89 lansdowne...just sang gobbledeegook rhythms about a blue cougar and washin' yer sneakers and leavin' 'em out in the sun to dry...wasn't exactly writing war and peace...

more interested in "feel" than anything else on that cut...still kinda like listening to "nashville sneakers" once in a blue moon....

herbert's a loser...it's mainly there because greg was kickin' up a fuss about not gettin' more of his songs on the record...geez...it never stops...everybody thinks they're george harrison...harrison would have been a strong leader in any other band...but with jl and pm there, come on...consider the reality...anyhow, "herbert's" is not a bad cut...and greg actually encouraged me to do a bit of harp playing there....personally, i think it's the best harp i've ever played on a studio cut...soaked the harp that day in luke warm water and played it through a very thin felt cloth...greg sings this quite cool...credit where credit is due....but the ending went on way too long...as my friend mort "the brove" broverman said to me the day after the big luxton school reunion..."well, it's never perfect"...and he's right...wise stuff, brove...

hi rockers i must admit was my idea...the piecing together of stuff, making it a little theatre piece. ma clean and i were constantly, and i mean constantly, listening to the firesign theatre, so i wanted to do more "fantasy" stuff all the time...i remember showing kurt "don't you want me" for the first time and he loved all that stuff about burning the crops and killing the sister, cause it was all innocent sounding melody and simple community club rock, but this musical voice was threatening all these outrageous things...jack and brian managed to overspill some echo to link the musical pieces and i out and out stole the ending vocal shenanigans from fats waller...rca had sent me several archival albums of fats waller and he ended one of his albums with that "bong a zing, rotten ditten doo doo dong ee dong, this is the end of the record..."

stole it immediately...

so there you have it. rockin' slightly remembered. many have asked about #10 and that's another thing entirely...we can revisit that another time.
be well, people...

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