The Guess Who - "The Best of the Guess Who"

Songwriting is important. That may be trite, but I am a firm believer in the theory that mediocre songwriters don't just wake up one morning and write "Yesterday." Great songs (and great albums) rarely just come out of nowhere. Part of the fun of listening to all the random LPs I own is listening to the albums where there are multiple songwriters on one record, and hearing how the song quality shifts accordingly. For example, before starting this blog (but following the same precepts), I listened to Huey Lewis and the News' Picture This, which I pretty much hated, except that it contained one of the most infectious pop singles of the 80s in "Do You Believe in Love?" I was baffled, because this one song was on a completely different level from literally every other song on both that album and the other Huey Lewis album I own. Then I read the songwriting credits and discovered that it was also the only song on either album that was written by producer Mutt Lange and not by Lewis or one of the other regular band members. In the end, all was right with the world, and I made a mental note to check out other music Lange had made on his own.

I had one of those 'aha' moments with this compilation of Canadian rock band The Guess Who, as nearly every song on the first side was written or co-written by guitarist Randy Bachman, whereas he wasn't credited at all on the second side. And indeed the first side is phenomenal, which made me wonder if The Guess Who were a seriously underrated band, but the second side is just not as good, despite possessing superficially similar elements. 

I call this a controlled musical science experiment, and my conclusion is that Bachman was a damn good songwriter, at least in the late 60s. The group's most famous singles are "American Woman" and "These Eyes" and those are definitely good, but really everything on the first side is great, and surprisingly diverse, as they draw on elements of soul (thanks to lead singer Burton Cummings' quavering tenor), jazz, and rock. What is odd to me in this case is that Bachman later went on to form Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which I know only for the execrable single "Takin' Care of Business." So maybe it's time to reassess the work of BTO, but regardless, Bachman was on his game in the late 60s.