The Guess Who: The band Tom Petty said never got their dues
Fame can be a bit of a tricky beast for any fan of a group. Although a lot of acts get to see the greatest heights that any musician could ever hope to see, there are always going to be a few that never get the attention that their audience thinks they deserve. Tom Petty may have existed on the fringes of rock stardom for a while before breaking onto the scene, but in his mind, he thought that things should have been different when it came to The Guess Who.
But when looking at both groups back to back, Petty seemed to come from a different world. Randy Bachman had built the Guess Who with Burton Cummings on the basis of bluesy hard rock in the vein of acts like The Yardbirds, but Petty was more in tune with the chiming sounds of acts like The Byrds and the rock side of Bob Dylan.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t some overlap to be found. Petty always had a bluesy side buried deep inside him from as far back as his debut record, and if Mojo was any indication, he was more than willing to work on different bluesy affairs that Bachman would have been proud to have played on.
Outside of tunes like ‘American Woman’ and ‘No Sugar Tonight’, though, The Guess Who faded into the background over time. Maybe it was the massive influx of bluesy rock bands arriving around the same time, like Humble Pie and Grand Funk Railroad, but Bachman’s departure from the group to form Bachman Turner Overdrive was the first sign that the group wasn’t going to be the next Rolling Stones by any metric.
Then again, Petty still felt a bit cheated seeing one of his contemporaries not reach the big time like they were supposed to, saying, “They didn’t get that “cool” label. There was a period there when if you were having hit singles, your credibility suffered. A number of late-sixties bands met this fate. The Guess Who had a great singer in Burton Cummings, and Randy Bachman is just a fantastic lead guitarist. I’ll throw them on every now and then because they did make some great tracks.”
In the case of The Guess Who, though, they may have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had started in the late 1960s alongside the future legends of the world, but since Led Zeppelin was about to turn rock and roll into an albums-based genre, the Canadian icons tended to get lost in the shuffle as soon as acts like Cream started to fall by the wayside.
Even if Petty couldn’t give any star power to his friends, he was going to try his best to give the same opportunities to bands whom he thought really deserved it. While none of them reached Heartbreakers levels of success, bringing out acts like The Jayhawks and The Replacements on tour may as well have been Petty’s way of paying it forward for acts that deserved to be given their flowers.
Because that was what the music business was all about for the heartland rocker. The industry can be more than a little bit slimy, so Petty may as well use his position to at least try to make it more manageable for groups rising up the charts.
