‘American Woman’: the accidental origins of a classic rock hit
Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs turns toward the camera, holding a copy of Morrison Hotel like a dead pigeon. “The Doors?! Jim Morrison?! He’s a drunken buffoon who thinks he’s poetic…” He gestures towards his T-shirt after the record goes sailing over his shoulder: “…Give me The Guess Who. They have the courage to be drunken buffoons… which makes them poetic!”
Cameron Crowe channelling his mentor doesn’t just give the great American actor one of his most beloved roles but arguably one of his best pieces of music criticism ever. The Guess Who, up there with Chris Jericho and Anna Paquin as Winnipeg’s greatest-ever exports, were as charming as classic rock gets. With their thunderous riffs and Burton Cummings’ whiskey-soaked howl, they were there to start a party and vanishingly little else.
Fittingly for a band whose very name came from a publicity stunt trying to con unsuspecting record buyers into believing this band was secretly the Rolling Stones playing hard to get, The Guess Who were a garage rock outfit at heart. Even when they expanded their sound to essentially define the sound of 1970s hard rock, it was built from a foundation of guitar and organ hooks shot through with undeniable melody.
For a band whose key was simplicity, it makes sense that their defining hit would come to them entirely by accident. The group were playing a gig in Southern Ontario (in a curling arena, as if the whole tale wasn’t Canadian enough) when the nightmare of every lead guitarist happened. A string on Randy Bachman’s Les Paul broke, and there wasn’t a spare axe to switch to.
Without an option, Cummings announced that they’d take a quick break, upon which Bachman frantically replaced the string. While tuning the guitar back up and testing it out with some cowboy chords, Bachman stumbled upon a tasty riff made up of a B-D-E chord pattern and knew that he had something there.
While the audience were still talking amongst themselves, he stood up and hollered at the rest of the band to start playing. The rest of the band crashed in, and the first words that came to Cummings’ mind, the first words he howled over the band pummelling out Bachman’s riff, were “American Woman”.
The band thundered through a jammed version of the song, and after their set was finished, they immediately found a punter they’d spotted recording the show. After plying said fan with enough beer to kill a moose, they asked him for the tape and immediately set to work building the song from a half-formed jam into their most defining song.
Honestly, the lyrics of the song probably didn’t progress much past Cummings’ initial howling, at least that’s what it sounds like. It hardly matters, though, when the rest of the song goes so incredibly hard. It’s an origin story not only fitting for the band that wrote the song but also for the way Crowe’s Lester Bangs describes the song in a deleted scene in Almost Famous: “The most brilliant piece of gobbledegook ever!”
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