They scored a string of hits on the Billboard Hot 100 as the psychedelic 60s turned into the strung-out 70s, and in their birthplace of Canada they have received the prestigious Governor General’s Performing Arts Award and been inducted into the Music Hall of Fame. But dare to mention today some of The Guess Who’s grand achievements and at best people will reminisce on Lenny Kravitz from the Austin Powers soundtrack or Michael Cera’s faltering voice halfway through Superbad. If their eyes are crying in this instance, it is from the sheer absence rather than the loss of love.
The Guess Who were given their name as a marketing ploy by Quality Records, who in 1965 thought they could fool American audiences with the pretence of another British Invasion. Whatever they were, the band were not one lick British, the mere suggestion a grave slight to a group whose real country was still struggling for full sovereignty from the rapacious Brits. As Pete Townshend and company fiddled with knobs virtually, enticing the young with pinball wizards and yellow submarines, The Guess Who strove for a higher form of rock and roll.
Other names thunk up by Quality Records had included These, That, The Winks, The Liverbirds, and The (Unidentified) Rolling Bones, but it was The Guess Who, initially with a question mark, on which they eventually settled. In fact the group had been billing themselves as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan & the Expressions before Quality intervened, although to this day nobody knows whether the eponymous Chad Allan ever existed or was devised as part of some larger ruse.
Because even back home in Canada, both before and after their change of name, the identity of the various members comprising The Guess Who was never properly discovered. ‘These Eyes’ finally served as the group’s American breakthrough in the spring of 1969, but in all it was already the band’s eighteenth single. And after a couple of years in the spotlight, amid a spate of rumoured personnel changes, The Guess Who began to fade from view.
Their biggest success was a Billboard number one with ‘American Woman’ in early 1970, but as it dawned on listeners that the song decried the dangerous and rapidly ageing properties of American women, and condemned the proud patriotic country’s virulent war machine, The Guess Who were forced to hastily flee back across the border. It hardly helped that the single’s B-side warned ‘No Sugar Tonight’, every dessert-loving American’s worst fear.
They won’t be returning to the good old U.S. of A. any time soon, but we might not be left guessing for much longer. Because perhaps seeing a gap in the Canadian marketplace following the apparent cessation of operations of The Tragically Hip, The Guess Who have reformulated for one last run. In the age of the internet public figures never seem too hard to identify, but that’s our collective brain working in the service of facts and figures. Best leave it to the unconscious and allow The Guess Who to attempt to revive the flagging carcass of rock, being sustained today only by their near contemporaries in the form of Patti Smith and Iggy Pop.
