After a long contentious legal battle with some former bandmates, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman will be going back on the road as the Guess Who for the first time in 23 years. They will embark on a series of cruise ship performances, followed by a Canadian tour.
Their 2026 tour will begin in Moncton on May 26th and over to Halifax and Vancouver.
The Guess Who will be part of the Rock Legends Cruise XIII, which will depart from Fort Lauderdale, Florida through the Caribbean in February 2026. Don Felder, a former lead guitarist for the Eagles, will be the supporting act on the Canadian tour.
"Randy and I are thrilled that our songs have never gone away," Cummings said in a press release. "That people still want to hear us perform them live. We are going to go out and honour the music."
"I’m looking ahead and very excited to be joining up with Burton and touring as the Guess Who again," Bachman added. "Together we created decades of incredible songs and memories that still stand strong today. Can’t wait to sing them with you all soon!"
“Along with the almighty Creedence Clearwater Revival, it was Winnipeg’s one-and-only Guess Who who, for me and countless others, filled the gaping sonic hole left in 1970 with the Beatles’ break-up,” recalls fellow Canuckian Gary Pig Gold. “With B. Cummings and R. Bachman in particular not just making hits, but making history as Canada’s native wheatfield-fuelled Lennon/McCartney, the band had an enormously profound impact upon north-of-the-border songwriters and aspiring musicians alike as they criss-crossed their homeland for years on the road, not to mention appeared weekly as a house-band on CBC Television’s Let’s Go series.
“Strictly personally speaking, RCA’s 1971 Best of the Guess Who, complete with its enclosed shocking-pink-and-purple suitable-for-sticking-onto-my-bedroom-door-interior poster, helped me make it through Grade 11 more or less intact. Side 1 alone consisting of ‘These Eyes,’ ‘Laughing,’ ‘Undun,’ ‘No Time,’ ‘American Woman’ and ‘No Sugar Tonight’/‘New Mother Nature’: a supremely-solid, wholly-Bachman/Cummings composed 24 minutes absolutely without equal ...on either side of the 49th Parallel!”
Before relocating back to Canada this century, Burton was a neighbor of mine in Southern California and on occasion we would meet up at record stores. In the mid-seventies I attended The Midnight Special tapings in Burbank at NBC-TV studios he did with the Guess Who and his later solo appearances.
I wrote his Portrait Records label biography in 1976 when he released his debut self-titled solo album. On the back of his Plus Signs 1990 EMI/Capitol Records LP, he thanked me and longtime friend David Barmack, “David and Harvey,” on the back cover.
For the December 28 1974 issue of Melody Maker, I interviewed Burton Cummings in Hollywood at RCA Records arranged by the label’s Grelun Landon.
During 1972 Best of the Guess Who was constantly on my turntable. I saw the band on their visits to Southern California.
"I WANTED to buy some records, so I went collecting for UNICEF on Halloween and took the money," admitted the 26-year-old lead singer for the Guess Who, Burton Cummings, as the remaining members of the group, Bill Wallace – bass, Garry Peterson – drums and Domenic Troiano – guitar, chatted around the fourth-floor office of RCA Records.
Burton and Co. have long since made up for his crime of 15 years ago, when the group recently raised $70,000 for the financially troubled Canadian Ballet, and another $17,000 for the Winnipeg Zoo.
The Guess Who has been in Los Angeles finishing up their 13th album for RCA, Flavours and to give a concert at the Anaheim Convention Centre. Over the years, the Guess Who have turned out many hit singles, and some very impressive albums. However, the Guess Who are earning the title as the most misunderstood, underrated, and consistently entertaining band ever produced in the rock genre.
The original members came from a Winnipeg group called Chad Allen and the Expressions. When Allen departed, they changed their name to the Guess Who. At the time, the group consisted of Jim Kale, Gerry Peterson, Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman, now the guiding force behind the Bachman Turner Overdrive. Then in 1966 the group dented the charts with the definitive version of 'Shakin' All Over'.
It wasn't until 1969 that the Guess Who achieved international recognition with their first million seller single, 'These Eyes'. As the decade approached its end, the Cummings-Bachman team turned out three more million-selling tunes, 'Laughing', 'No Time' and 'American Women'.
In 1970, Bachman left the band, or from Cumming's perspective, "He was kicked out," replacing him with two Winnipeg musicians, Greg Leskiw and Kurt Winter. The group then ventured into new musical spheres with an album entitled, Share The Land.
Through the next year or two, the group gained recognition with tunes such as: 'Albert Flasher', 'Raindance', 'Sour Suite', and 'Glamour Boy', which helped fill a second volume of the Guess Who's Best.
In 1972, Jim Kale and Greg Leskiw left the band. Replacing them were two friends over the years, Don McDougall and Bill Wallace. The new power-packed Guess Who made their debut with an album, Guess Who Live At The Paramount, which paved the way for subsequent LP's as: Artificial Paradise, No. 10,000 and the group's 1974 offering, Road Food.
The Guess Who has recently undergone another major personnel change with Domenic Troiano replacing both McDougall and Winter. Dom is a veteran of Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, Mandala, Bush, and the James Gang.
"This is the best incarnation of the Guess Who," Cummings said. "The new LP contains a variety of different musical forms, and with Domenic playing the musicianship has improved tremendously. Dom and Bill have sung lead with other groups over the years, and in this group we now have a strong vocal contingent."
Domenic added, "The James Gang was a lot of fun for a while, but musically it was kinda narrow. In the Guess Who there's more room to try new things."
Flavours was written in five days. "I dig writing with Dom. I think we're just beginning. We're doing four songs from Flavours on this tour and getting good crowd reaction especially on 'Dancin' Fool', and 'Long Gone' mentions the dark haired multi-talented (piano, flute, guitar, vocals) Cummings.
On stage Burton Cummings can be a combination of Mose Allison, Joe Cocker, and Fats Domino rolled into one. "After studying ten years of classical piano, I discovered the real rock 'n' roll piano players, and they knocked me out. People like, Fats, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Little Richard.
"Around 1960 the guitar took prominence and the piano was pushed in the background."
Lyrically Burton, the focal point of all Guess Who activity, was influenced by the British boom in the sixties, and now, by mid-sixties lyrical giants as Dylan, "Mainly 'cause he wasn't just sitting down and writing love songs," as well as Jim Morrison, Pete Townshend, and currently, the writing team of Fagen-Becker of Steely Dan.
Until recently the group still was pegged as a singles band, with their albums regarded as secondary activities. Burton said: "We're not a singles oriented band. After our initial success of six years ago, we swayed more to the LP. We do albums, and the singles get picked from them. Just because a group enjoys a large degree of success on AM radio does that make them a 45 band? What group doesn't want exposure on AM radio or crack the music chart?"
Burton in many past vinyl efforts has mirrored the Canadian life style. Songs such as: 'Guns Guns Guns', dealing with Canadian gun legislation, 'Eagle All Gone/And No More Caribou', 'Glace Bay Blues', 'Runnin Back To Saskatoon', and 'Light-foot', a song written in 1968 about 1974's most popular folk singer, "His hair blondish and poetic/He is the image of Alberta/I sit softly waiting for him to paint his pictures/He is an artist," show the scenes, situations, and environment of growing up in Canada.
"You must understand the Winnipeg psyche," Cummings explains, "It's not like growing up in London, Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago. Winnipeg is a small town. It's the prairies in Canada. I was locked up there so long that's all I wrote about.
"Neil Young was in a group with Garry's brother and I was a paper boy from nine to 12 and one of my customers was Don Hunter, now our manager. Everyone has gigged with each other at one time or another." Garry responded, "The first thing I recorded in 1962 was a record called, 'Tribute to Buddy Holly'."
The year is 1974 and the music from Canada is sweeping up the charts. The Band, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Lightfoot, Ann Murray and Terry Jacks et al. "There's really no such thing as 'Canadian Rock'," says Domenic "Rock and roll is basically an American music form. Five years ago, there was an attitude that you were terrible if you're from Canada. Now...it's totally chauvinistic. You're great if you're from there. The Guess Who was the first group to make it from over the border, even though we're only 69 miles away from the States."
The group first tried to gain American recognition in 1967. Burton who was only 18 at the time recalls cutting three sides in England including, 'Flying On The Ground Is Wrong',' a Neil Young Composition which later surfaced on the first Buffalo Springfield LP. "We went to England to do an album and tour. The record deal and tour fell through. We were £25,000 in debt"
Canada around 1967 and 1968 exhibited geographical prejudices that hampered the band.
"In Canada then, east was east and west was west. If you were a western Canadian band, you couldn't get a booking west or east of Ontario. You were the darlings and heroes from Montreal up to British Columbia. If you were an eastern Canadian band, you played places like Buffalo. Our manager, Don Hunter had an idea to make the band nationally accepted in Canada. That was to do television.
"The Canadian Broadcasting Company kept the group together. We did 80 TV shows at 5.30 every Thursday for two years. In some major Canadian cities, we couldn't walk down the streets. Kids asking for autographs. It was like the Monkees.
"The first year we did mostly cover versions of the top 30 tunes and the second year we got a chance to open up," Burton looks back fondly. Long before Procol Harum fused Rock with an Orchestra, Burton and the boys performed one week, with an orchestra and did one half of Sgt. Pepper in 1968.
"We also did a concert then with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It was a 50 piece ensemble with the Contemporary dancers." So, after failing to reach America through the back door, by going to England, the two years of TV paid off. RCA signed the Guess Who and the first record they released, 'These Eyes,” (covered also by Junior Walker and The All Stars) sold a million.
Besides the performing group, there are a lot of people behind the Guess Who, who make it all happen. One is their producer, Jack Richardson, (of Alice Cooper and Poco fame) "A lot of people believed in the Guess Who. Jack mortgaged off his house so we could do the Whitfield Soul album. We didn't find out he did that until two years later. I was floored. We've grown up with him, and work well together. He's taught us a lot, and we've taught him a lot.
(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015's Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016's Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017's 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble.
Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock ‘n’ Roll TV Scenes) is scheduled for January 2026 publication.
Harvey Kubernik wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival. During 2006 Kubernik appeared at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation. In 2017 he lectured at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing director Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz music documentary.
Kubernik is in The Sound of Protest documentarynow airing on the Apple TVOD TV broadcasting service. https://tv.apple.com › us › movie › the-sound-of-protest. Director Siobhan Logue’s endeavor features Smokey Robinson, Hozier, Skin (Skunk Anansie), Two-Tone's Jerry Dammers, Angélique Kidjo, Holly Johnson, David McAlmont, Rhiannon Giddens, and more. Harvey is interviewed along with Iggy Pop, Bruce Johnston, Johnny Echols, the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs and Victoria Peterson, and the founding members of the Seeds in director Neil Norman’s documentary The Seeds - The Seeds: Pushin' Too Hard a DVD/Blu-ray for release via the GNP Crescendo Company).
