First, tune of the day...Guess Who..."Just Let Me Sing", a largely unknown but great glimpse of the Guess Who and Burton Cummings at their finest, from "#10".
Now, as to Burton Cummings, 9/14/24 at the Paramount Theater in Denver.
The GW are one of my favorite bands. They had a couple dozen hits, ranging from fluffy pop to heavy rock and Canadian-spiced blues. They could charm teeny boppers, but still get DOWN and rock, too. Their albums were not filler and much of their best music was never heard on radio. There's still a lot of GW hits deservedly being played on stations today, and that ain't chopped liver. Most of their albums are still regularly in rotation in my house.
Burton's show last night was the second stop on the tour. His band was competent, two good guitar players capable of channeling Randy Bachman's (and subsequent guitarists) classic grooves and riffs. The drummer was steady, but not flashy, a click closer to a drum machine than I like. Another guy played a conga drum all night, but I never heard it in the mix. The bass player (alumnus of Ocean, remember "Put Your Hand in the Hand"?) may have been good, but as with most contemporary live mixes, was reduced to a cavernous, thumpy swamp that concealed whatever virtuosity he displayed and covered much of the other playing on stage. Most members sang back up, but the harmonies on the original recordings was more complex and interesting than the simple triads they sang. Burton can still pound the piano, Jerry Lee Lewis-style, standing as a good bedrock, driving the tunes' rock pulse.
Burton was in good spirits, having recently settled his long dispute with Jim Kale, ex-member bass player who discovered that the name Guess Who had never been registered with the trademark office and pounced on the name himself, so that he could tour as an ersatz-Guess Who, enraging Cummings and Bachman.
The backbone of the GW's energy was always Burton's voice, spanning beauty and growl, slurred snarls and Jim-Morrison like scats, chants and boozy-romance. Burton can still sing, but the high notes and flash aren't there. He took lower notes in the chords and didn't attempt a lot of the higher stuff (remember, "These Eyes", how it ended with him singing "These eyes", jumping up a sixth to, "Ah, I'm crying", circling back to a higher key, repeating higher and higher to a fade out? Didn't happen). He used a transposable keyboard and probably lowered the keys of some songs a step or two...a couple times, he checked his tuning with the guitarist to make sure they were in the same key. His voice cracked a few times and wasn't as strong as before. At times, he was a bit out of breath here in mile-high Denver.
His between-song patter was repetitive and annoying. Many invocations of his gold records and, "this one's been played a few million times so I bet at least one of you has heard this...", and "I got a comment on Facebook saying I'm going to be at the Denver show and would you be sure to play [fill in the blank], and so forth. He even broke out a flute and played the solo from "Undun"...cool, but watered down by a cheesy story that a guy offered to buy him a flute if he played the solo, and here's the flute so I'm going to play it even if I can't get through it. Yeah, yeah, we got it, sigh.
He gets around pretty well, considering he's 77 years old, but don't expect him to jump on a piano or strut around the stage IN YOU FACE. Hell, you could break a hip.
You'd be a fool to expect that 60 years hasn't worn and burnished the artist but, after all that, I had a good time and was glad to be there. Hit after hit after hit for a bit more than 1 1/2 hours. It was great to hear all those songs. And, they were good, if not as great as you remember or have heard recently on the radio. Burton's heading into his yacht-rock-cruise sunset, and the concert will be better appreciated if you bring your nostalgia with you. But it's still music that's created, not manufactured (cf. Chicago...I'm an ardent fan of their first 8-9 albums, but you couldn't give me free tickets to hear them play note-perfect but grindingly soul-less versions of scared rock anthems like "25 or 6 to 4", a cover band version of themselves).
Bottom line, a creaky, somewhat arthritic thumbs up.
P.S. I also enjoyed the warmup, a young bluesman from New York, Solomon Hicks. Tasty, clean electric guitar and nice vocals, accompanied only by a bass player. Good tunes, a nice set.
