Free Randy Bachman by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories

didn’t get much time to talk or hang out.
    Then in 1993, Neil’s guitar tech and roadie, Larry Cragg, got in touch with me. He was looking for a couple of Gretsch switch tips for Neil’s Gretsch guitars. Switch tips are the ends of the toggle switches guitars have to change from one pickup to another, thus changing the tone of the guitar. The tip can fall off after a lot of use and you just screw it back onto the switch. If you put a little nail polish on them when you screw them in, they stay longer. Being the “Gretsch Guru” and owner of hundreds of Gretsch models, I did have some tips, so I faxed Larry back telling him I’d send him a few. In the package I also put in a copy of the lyrics to a new song I’d written about growing up in Winnipeg called “Prairie Town.” I had no other intention but to show it to Larry Cragg, whom I’d known for a long time. Amazingly enough, the next day a fax came through for me saying, “Hi Randy. I love the lyrics to ‘Prairie Town . ’ I’d like to be part of this song. Call me. Love, Neil.”
    In the lyrics I talk about things like learning to drive in the snow, freezing at the corner of Portage and Main, how I grew up on one side of Winnipeg and Neil on the other side, Neil and the Squires playing the Zone, which was the Twilight Zone club on St. Mary’s Road he used to play at all the time. So Neil invited me down to his ranch, Broken Arrow, just outside San Francisco. I told him I had a slow and a fast version of the song, acoustic country and electric rock. That’s something he’d done with songslike “Tonight’s the Night,” “Hey Hey, My My” and “Rockin’ in the Free World . ” He said he wanted to play on both versions, and so we did the slow version and the fast version of “Prairie Town . ”
    When I came home I was so thrilled to have Neil Young on my solo album that I sent a copy of the song to my attorney, Graham Henderson, who had secured the deal for me with Sony Music in Toronto. The next night my phone rang and it was Graham, and he said, “Listen to this.” Over the phone I heard “Prairie Town” with me and Neil singing. But between our two voices I heard a female voice. Graham was married to Margo Timmins, singer with the Cowboy Junkies. Graham was playing my tape and Margo was singing live in the kitchen. “She doesn’t know I’m calling you and letting you listen,” he said. So I told him to please interrupt her and ask her if she’d like to come out and sing on the track. I was mixing it in two days. She flew out to Vancouver and added her voice to the track. Her beautifully ethereal voice is like the sweet icing on the cake.
    Years later, when I was visiting Neil’s ranch to record “Spring Is Nearly Here,” a song we recorded together for a Shadows tribute album, I told him about a song I’d written called “Made in Canada,” a real grungy guitar rocker. We were sitting at the dinner table and Neil said, “Why don’t we record it right now?” He’s a spontaneous guy, so I seized the moment and replied, “Great! Let’s do it!” My son Tal was with me on drums and Richard Cochrane on bass. We recorded it in a barn with farm animals roaming around outside. In fact, before the take, the recording engineer had to go outside and shoo away the goats and chickens so we wouldn’t pick them up on the tape.
    I ran through the song, showing Neil the chords. It’s pretty simple. We did it one more time and then Neil said, “Okay, let’s go.” As we got to the end of the song where he was supposed to solo, he became transfixed, like he was in a trance. His hair fell over his face as he kept going on and on soloing like a maniac.
    The three of us just kept following him. He was soloing with wild abandon, as he does in his song “Like a Hurricane” with