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1962 Chad Allan and the Reflections cut our first record, a 45. It’s a cover of a song we heard from England by Mike Berry and the Outlaws about Buddy Holly’s 1959 plane crash. I remember some friends of mine and I were going to drive down for Buddy Holly’s show in Fargo when we heard the news that morning that his plane had crashed.
    We recorded the song in Minneapolis at Kay Bank studios. We’d bought the Trashmen’s record “Surfin’ Bird,” and on the label it said“Recorded at Kay Bank Studios, Minneapolis.” Winnipeg lacked a decent studio. CKY and CKRC had recording studios, but the best you could get was mono or two-track recording. So we phoned down to Kay Bank and inquired about their studio. They offered three-track recording. “Wow, one more track!” So we pooled our money and booked a couple of dates over a weekend in late 1962. My girlfriend Claudia Senton’s dad worked at Birchwood Motors and he loaned us a Buick to use. I borrowed my uncle Jack’s little box trailer for the equipment. We used to go on tenting trips as a family, so I asked my dad if we could borrow his canvas tent. We set up the tent in the trailer, put the equipment inside it, and collapsed the tent over it all with a couple of bricks on top to keep it from blowing away. And off we went to Minneapolis.
    At the studio session, Chad Allan had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well. And my Gretsch guitar wouldn’t work. There was something broken in the wiring, so I had to use Chad’s new Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar while he strummed my Gretsch acoustically. His Jazzmaster had a thinner sound because it had a solid body, so I wasn’t happy with the sound I got. But we managed to record four or five tracks. We signed with Canadian American Records and released our first single, “Tribute to Buddy Holly.” By the time we released it, we were Chad Allan and the Reflections. What an amazing moment for me when I heard that record and my guitar playing on the radio for the first time. We thought that was the big time for us.
    Between 1962 and 1964 we recorded further singles at Kay Bank and released them on the REO and Quality Records labels. They all charted in Winnipeg and the Prairies, but none had a national impact until “Shakin’ All Over.”
    â€œSHAKIN’ ALL OVER”
    Recorded under very minimal conditions in the middle of a chilly Winnipeg winter night at a local television studio, “Shakin’ AllOver” was the song that catapulted us to national success and gave us our name, the Guess Who. “Shakin’ All Over” was released in January 1965 and represents the thriving 1960s Winnipeg community club dance scene. Imagine the movie That Thing You Do multiplied by a thousand, and that’s what the 60s Winnipeg music scene was like.
    Chad Allan had a friend named Wayne Russell who had an amazing record collection from overseas. He also had all these reel-to-reel tapes of the British hit parade. As a Christmas present each year, his cousin in England would tape her favourite 45s and send them to him. Or she’d tape British radio and send him those tapes. As I mentioned earlier, for rock ’n’ roll–crazed kids like us, it was like discovering buried treasure. These were songs we never ever heard in Winnipeg. We used to learn the songs right off the tapes, sometimes without knowing the title of the song. That’s how we learned “Till We Kissed” and found out much later that the title was actually “Where Have You Been All My Life.” And that’s how we first heard the Beatles in early 1963, a full year before their records hit over here. In amongst Wayne’s collection we found “Shakin’ All Over,” a hit in Britain for Johnny Kidd and the Pirates back in 1960 that never crossed the Atlantic. That song just leapt off the tape at us. The guitar riff still turns heads