I’ll kill your kid sister,

I’ll murder your dad I’ll rip the lashes off your eyes,

I’ll slaughter all your cattle,

And I’ll burn your crops

If you’re dancin’ with another guy.*

If you happened into a Macon diner one night, do you suppose you could pick Butch Trucks out of the assembled suppers and slurpers? Would you recognize Ken Hensley or Ritchie Blackmore in a London bookstall? Lori Lieberman’s face in a subway train, Chris dagger’s speaking voice? What’s the name of the Sha Na Na fatso who looks like Victor Buono?

The problem is the proliferation of trained rock personnel. Attached to groups or floating solo, there are so

many singers, writers, percussionists, synthesizers and slide players, you can’t tell ’em apart.

Like this one group. They’ve sold millions round the globe, charted close to twenty single hits and are on their fourteenth album this very minute, yet

"

Next year I’ll have spent half of my 28 years in this band.

"

they trek about in their Mapleleaf showbiz shoes virtually unrecognized. High sales and low profile. Raise your hand if you know who wrote “These Eyes,” who handled 'the speaking part in “Rain

Dance” or who grafted that steely solo onto the midsection of “Share The Land.” It ain’t easy.

“I was like 20 years old and everytime I’d turn around I was getting a gold record, and that really didn’t sink in until about a year ago. We’d be flying all over the country, hearing our stuff as flashbacks everywhere. And it started dawning on me that, ‘wait a minute, those were pretty big records.’ But it seemed very easy to us at the time.”

Not John Fogerty. Not Danny Hutton. But Burton Cummings, 26 in 1974, trim at 165, laying on the bed in his Sacramento motel room, nine hours before he takes the stage in front of 15,000 Guess Who fans at the California State Fair. By then it’ll be 10 o’clock, the temperature will have dropped to 85 dry heat degrees and he’ll front his group through 100 minutes, giving the tanned t-shirt crowd what he’s got to show for nine years’ playin’ in the band; “Hand Me Down World,” “Undun,” “Star Baby,” “American Woman,” “Glamour Boy.”

Everybody’s in the room, checking out the Gucci traveling bags, compliments of booking agent Jerry Heller, sniffing cologne in dark-glass guitar bottles, courtesy of some longtime female fans from Cleveland. Bill Wallace picks at his cordless bass in a striped surfer shirt, new guitarist Dom Troiano adjusts his beret, accepts a joint and worries about the band having to back up Wolfman Jack for his two numbers during the show.

Drummer Garry Peterson has probably seen it all. “Next year,” he laughs, “I’ll have spent half of my 28 years in this band.” The pay’s good and it’s fun. Cummings coughs up his last toke: “We’ll have to get you a gold watch, Peterson,” he sputters. “ ‘May the next 14 be a good as the first 14!’ ”

Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand

Maybe I’ll be there to share the land

That they’ll be giving away

When we all live together.*

Don Hunter, the portly manager who swears he discovered Cummings when the Winnipeg lad delivered his evening paper, strolls in, beaming. “Clap For the Wolfman” has just jumped from 18 to No. 1 at KIMN, Portland. It’s all frosting. An hour earlier Cummings was notified that he’s set, for sure, to score and star in A Fool, A Fool, I Met A Fool, a full-length feature. Hunter’s been busy all afternoon, trying to get the fire marshall and fair officials to make more tickets available for tonight’s concert.

It wasn’t always like this. There’d been a slight slump, about two years ago, after “Rain Dance” when the hitstream slowed to a trickle, when cowriter/guitarist Randy Bachman quit after hurling a couple of well-publicized brickbats at Cummings.

TURN TO PAGE 78.

CReem

(“Sure, I said that,” Cummings later tells a kid backstage who’s inquired if he meant what he said about the B.T.O. leader in Rolling Stone. “I hate the guy. He was down on the rest of us ’cause he thought we were blowing it with dope and all this ridiculous shit. He was like some kind of Mormon or something.” And the dismissal of guitarists Kurt Winter and Don McDougal? “They were drunks. We got tired of babysitting them.”)

The turnaround came with the success last year of the dynamite “Star Baby” single and “Clap For the Wolfman,” together with a couple of strategically placed Midnight Special appearances. People, suddenly, were ready to take the band.seriously once again. And they looked and sounded better than most people had remembered; hungry for hits, with Burt in short hair, Hawaiian sportshirt and hush puppies, pounding out certified gold at a white baby grand like an amped-up Brian Wilson. They were visible again, even hard to dismiss.

Anybody here seen the fuzzy wuzzy lovin’ cup explosion?

I think we missed it..

If the recent uphill climb has been long and hard, it wasn’t accomplished without the help of the legion of Guess Who freaks, the hardcore fans whose persistence and tenacity have thrust the band (like Grand Funk first time out or the recently re-arrived Beach Boys) through some unguarded backdoor into the pop limelight. Cummings once explained them to me as “about 200,000 loyal fans who buy everything we do.” Everybody knows one and they’re as dissimilar in costume and attitude from one another as they are in musical taste from the Allman, Bowie, Cooper of Tull crowds. All over the world they congregate, listening over and over to Artificial Paradise, No. 10 to Greatest Hits Vol. 1 and worn singles of “American Woman”/“No Sugar Tonight.” Their ears perk up to those weirdo lines in both versions of “Don’t You Want Me,” to the goofy alliteration in “Attila’s Blues,” to the chords and Cummings’ insanely beautiful singing on “Glamour Boy.”

And they pack air-conditioned concert halls on the West Coast and sweaty hockey arenas back East, insuring preshow fever pitch and fulfilling the promise of hysteric encores. They generate pandemonium in Detroit, Chicago and Long Beach; juvenile, rowdy, racially mixed, college couples, hip-tailored longhairs and greaser chicks with cromag foreheads and frowns, the perfectly crossbred AM-FM audience, earnesteyed guitar and piano kids who’ve ‘just gotta ask Cummings what he was talking about in “Orly” with that line, “better get to Rome and have a look at younger sister of my Dad.”

Take it off of my shoulders

I don’t need your heavy load*

Cummings, one gets the idea, used to protest, but it seemed inevitable he’d carry the weight himself of being the Guess Who. At 17, he auditioned for Allen and Bachman and the rest with an organ xerox of a Manfred Mann hit; six months later Allen, envious of the Winnipeg whiz kid’s class and style, split. When Bachman left it became Burton’s show, an unstated but definitely preexistent state of affairs regardless of Bachman’s presence.

It’s Cummings’ unique and incredibly varied professional personna the Guess Who freaks have come to know. It’s a curious character blend that can stand with equal grace and balance on all the bases. He can compose and perform everything from classic lovesongs to dorko political tracts, from genuine sentimentality to labored attempts at drawing a given response. And, so complete is the fans’ identification with him, his occasional excesses — the Jim Morrison phase and its effects onstage several y6ars back — are received more with affection than resentment. And he sings, all the time, like a mother.

Well, have you ever seen a Madras monkey Have you ever seen an orlon eel 1 had a pet pitiful penguin and I taught him how to pick and choose

And drink my booze I got the “help preserve ’em, don’t deserve ’em, try and serve ’em, love ’em all blues.*

“Our audience is growing up with us,” he admits, “arid that will happen with anybody who develops some real staunch fans. They read the lyrics. Like last week; some guy calls me up at 3 am. He and his friends had been sitting around all night listening to all of the albums and he wanted to know what I meant in the fourth line of such-andsuch. That’s great.”

“There’s this kid in Virginia who’s been a fan since the beginning. He calls himself Mark Mars and he’s always writing to. me. So I put this line in ‘Road Food’ about ‘Old Mark Mars is alive and well, Sir.’ You know he must’ve dug hearing that. Stuff like that is just fun to do.”

Mark Mars probably didn’t make it out to the California State Fair? but 15,000 Guess Who freaks did. They’ve sat through JElvin Bishop and Montrose, about 2000 of them have scaled the cyclone fence circling the racetrack grandstand and they’re ready.

At the barbeque thrown backstage by the promoter, Bill Wallace is antsy to get going, ready to do it again like in Chicago and Minneapolis. Peterson, decked out in t-shirt and tennis shorts, looks like Bobby Riggs, Jr. He taps his drumsticks on his plate. Troiano’s in good spirits, though he’s still* suffering from the identity crisis of being the new Guess Who guitarist.

“One reviewer in Milwaukee thought I was Kurt Winter,” he explains. “He said I played well and looked good after losing all that weight. That’s almost as good as when I was in the James Gang. People’d ask me, ‘where’s y6ur Les Paul, Joe?’ ”

After a roaring welcome, they walk onstage, receive a Wolfman Jack intro (“How ya doin’, Sacramenna?! Here de are: da Guess Who!!”), plug in and fire away. The sound onstage, Wallace and Troiano will later complain, is terrible, but it goes unoticed.

Wise set programming or killer performance, the audience goes crazy. After four songs, half a dozen joints hit the stage and roll toward Cummirigs’ penny loafers. He talks, to the crowd for the first time, stretches back and announces “Glamour Boy,” the antiBowie song. “This next one is dedicated to the kind of people who’ve made the record industry the stinking pile of shit it is today!”

Much later, after the round of backseat congratulations is over inside the departing Caddie, Cummings falls back, contemplates dozing off, then starts singing to himself. First, a languid verse from the Beach Boys’ “Warmth of the Sun,” then oldies from the Cookies and Ray Charles. The car reaches the freeway, en route to the party the promoter’s throwing. Wide awake, Cummings laughs and breaks into one more selection: in a nasally tenor:

You get up every momin’

From the alarm clock’s warnin’

Take the 8:15 into the city ...

We been takin’ care of bizness .. .**

* Cirrus Music, 1970, 1972, 1973, & 1974.

** Top Soil Music, 1974.