After years of legal wranglings over The Guess Who name, Randy Bachman is thrilled that it’s finally been resolved.

The saga pitted Bachman and Burton Cummings, the band’s principal songwriters, against drummer Garry Peterson and bassist Jim Kale. It’s a complicated tale involving trademarks, accusations of tainting the group’s legacy, cover band allegations and more. But a settlement, announced Wednesday, has been reached, which will allow Bachman and Cummings to tour again as The Guess Who.

“I can’t give a lot of the details because I don’t know a lot of them,” Bachman said Tuesday from Victoria, British Columbia. “I just showed up with Burton. We had a mediation in L.A. maybe two months ago now where everything was agreed to and settled.”

Behind the scenes, the wheels are in motion with transferring ownership, trademarks, website passwords and other minutiae, but Bachman said new music and a tour with Cummings and other alumni of the Guess Who is tentatively slated for late 2025 or 2026.

Bachman, who also recently resurrected Bachman-Turner Overdrive after getting those rights back, views the happenings as a renaissance for himself.

“I’m so thrilled to be going to my high school reunions because I think like one of my high schools was The Guess Who and then my years in college were BTO,” said Bachman, 80. “To go back to these reunions and not be the fat guy or the ugly, bald guy, to be the guy who’s made it and still making it on the radio, it’s really a thrill. I’m really overjoyed with life and the music.”

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Now that the legal battle is over, Bachman feels a sense of relief.

“To have that karmically coming back is such a restoration of faith in the world and that there is karma out there, that things do go cyclically in the circle, and you just got to be patient,” he said. “They don’t go as fast as you want because you hang in there and are patient, dreams do come true and they do come back.”

Bachman, who will bring Bachman-Turner Overdrive to the Palace Theatre for a nearly sold-out show on Sept. 22, talked about what to expect from a BTO show, a new documentary on a lost-and-found guitar, his son joining the band and much more:

On what to expect at a Bachman-Turner Overdrive show:

It’s quite a celebration and a collective consciousness when we’re playing for the crowd. We’ve been playing solid basically as BTO, but because of the fans knowing my previous history, we do all my hits from The Guess Who. And so basically what they get is an evening of the history of Winnipeg in the ‘60s when I started with The Guess Who.

Neil Young was with The Squires, Burton Cummings was with the Deverons, Fred Turner was with the Rocking Devils. And all those bands evolved in how I ended up being in different bands and different configurations with each of them. And then having big success with The Guess Who, No. 1 album and single and then later with BTO, the same thing. Just basically celebrating and telling the story how every song was written, where it was written, why it was written, how it interacts with Burton Cummings or Neil Young or Fred Turner and things like that.

When we’ve been together a good two decades, me and the band, so we sound like the records. I mean, it’s exactly what you’re going to hear. You’re not going to hear any new arrangements like guys do in Vegas. We sound like the records.

On the nostalgia factor of his shows:

Nobody knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow. Nobody, with the wars, with the vaccines, with whatever’s happening to the world, so it’s today and yesterday. So when we do the show, it’s like “Happy Days.” It’s like going back in time and remembering happier times, because the music takes everybody’s consciousness back to when they first heard the song, which were happier days. We were alive and things were seemingly better because we didn’t know what’s ahead of us.

So it’s a real trip down memory lane. And for me, it’s wonderful. It’s like basically celebrating my life and four decades of hit songs that everybody knows and sings along with us really. We’ve got video from all that time, we’ve collected all the video, stills and old camera shots and television appearances, so it’s a multi-sensory show in that I’m telling the stories, we play the music and it’s behind us on a great big screen.

On playing with his son, Tal, (who has his own hit song with “She’s So High”) in BTO:

There’s pictures of him when he was 2 years old playing drums with BTO. My brother Robbie would sit him on the drums and teach him how to play, so he’s always been there when the music was being created, written, practiced and rehearsed by his father and his uncles, my brother Tim, my brother Rob.

And there’s times in my life when I’d be on the road and my drummer would do something stupid like skydive or ride a motorcycle and break his leg that I would phone Tal in college and say, ‘Hey, would you mind leaving college now? I need a drummer.’ He’d come out and play drums just boom, because he grew up playing drums.

And then when I needed him to play guitar when I fell and injured my elbow and my left arm was numb like when you bang your funny bone, but I had bruised it and I couldn’t play properly. ‘Would you come and play guitar and sing?’ So he just showed up and did it and he just evolved in being used more and more. He’s always been there.

On the “Takin’ Care of Business” documentary, which premieres Sept. 12:

Now my documentary is coming out next week at Toronto International Film Festival, which is the story of my Gretsch guitar, which was the first guitar I got when I was about 17 back in Winnipeg, an orange one like Eddie Cochran played or Duane Eddy or Chet Atkins and later Brian Setzer. And I learned to play on it, and I wrote and played all the hit songs on it: “These Eyes,” “Laughing,” I’ve done “American Woman,” “Let It Ride,” “Taking Care of Business,” and then that guitar was stolen in 1976 from a hotel room in Toronto and gone.

And I got it back 46 years later, found it in Japan, flew there, had to wait for two years till covid allowed us to go there, went and got the guitar, traded the guy, and got it back. And that was documented and filmed. And so that’s coming out at TIFF next week.

It’s a story of my guitar coming back to me. And with that guitar, I wrote and played on No. 1 albums and singles with two different bands, one in the ‘60s, one in the ‘70s. And now that the magic guitar is back after 50 years, we’ll have another No. 1. It’s magic. And even if this documentary is No. 1 on Rotten Tomatoes, it won’t matter because it with me will have had another No. 1.

On his famous Gretsch guitar:

I would never take it out (on tour). It’s probably, once this documentary comes out, this is going to be the second most valuable guitar in the world next to Brian May’s Red Special, which is one-of-a-kind in the world. This guitar is really special. I am taking it out: Air Canada is giving us a seat on the plane next Sunday. We’re flying to TIFF, where we’re on the red carpet on Sunday. And then the big documentary’s on Thursday at the closing dinner. I’ll have it there to show everybody.

And it is throughout the documentary because it’s the BTO film that was shot in the mid-70s when we were No. 1, and all the Guess Who videos, they all have this guitar in it. I’m playing it on every video that was shot back then and on stage. So the guitar is pretty evident. It’s a beautiful pumpkin orange. It’s just like a pumpkin. And so it really stands out amongst all other guitars.

It got made very famous by the Traveling Wilburys, where they were doing their big thing with Rolling Stone and Time and Newsweek. They all needed guitars. They went into Norman’s Rare Guitars. They all picked out Gretsch guitars. And so Gretsch guitars became very, very prominent. They were in all the videos then on MTV. And guitarists wanted them because it’s a bright orange, and it just stands out. It’s a beautiful guitar.

On regaining the rights to Bachman-Turner Overdrive:

It’s great to get BTO back. Unfortunately I lost my three brothers in the last three years through covid, so they’re kind of with me on stage, and we have a lot of videos showing my brother Robbie on drums and Tim and Fred Turner, and we’re all kind of there and we’re celebrating, it’s kind of like a family band going with Tal in it. And it’s kind of like what (Lynyrd) Skynyrd are doing or ZZ Top, you just kind of keep going. You lose somebody, they’ve gone to rock and roll heaven and you just keep playing the songs.

On new releases from Bachman-Turner Overdrive:

When we were in Japan two years ago getting my lost guitar … I was asked about BTO live in Japan ‘76 at the Budokan and given the tapes. I’ve got 18 songs of BTO live at the Budokan that I’m remixing to put out on vinyl next year. And now they’ve asked for a new BTO album, so I’m writing stuff with Fred Turner, and we’ll see how it turns out. It’s amazing.

On pleasing the audience:

We have incredible response from our fans that send us requests to play album cuts from the Guess Who and BTO that they’ve never heard on stage. And I even say that to them in the reply, we’ve never played these on stage, because when you have an album you have like 10 or 12 songs, two or three get airplay. That’s what everybody wants to hear and the other ones just fall by the wayside. And to have it be a hit song in Boise, Idaho, or something, we’re playing there and somebody says, will you please play “Shotgun Rider?” And we go, what? I’ve never played it. OK, let’s learn it.

And we played for the people because they’ve already paid for it, you know, they bought the album, and they’re coming to the gig and they’re coming to see that one song. So, and I say to them, if I can’t do it at the show, come backstage, I’ll get a guitar and sing it for you personally. And I’ve done that before with “Four Wheel Drive” and a couple of our other songs that you can’t always fit into a show because sometimes when you’re closing the show, you have a curfew and they pull the plug and they shut that you down at 11 or 10 o’clock because of noise. And the previous band hasn’t gone off when they’re supposed to. So you gotta cut your set short. So you leave out a song or two. People just come backstage and I sing it for them there.

On requests for “Not Fragile,” an influential heavy song by BTO:

A lot of people ask for that. And that is kind of like the classic, that song turned on so many bands. I’ve heard from AC/DC, Metallica, Megadeth, that they wanted to play bass in a band because of “Not Fragile” and how [risky] it was to start an album called “Not Fragile” with a bass riff. The first song, Side One cut, it starts with a bass and so you reach over and you turn it louder. Then you turn it louder and suddenly the snare and the guitars come in and it blows your speakers out, and you love it when you’re a kid and a teenager and your parents are saying, what’s that? So that inspired a lot of bands. So we love doing that on stage and “Four Wheel Drive.” And there’s certain songs that weren’t hit singles but they were like, those were the days we had album cuts, like, it was our own “Stairway to Heaven.” You know, it wasn’t a single but it got played every four hours and everybody recognizes it.

On the origins of “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”:

Well, the song was a throwaway song, it wasn’t even written as a song, it was just a guitar part that was soft and with a lot of chords and jangly and then a heavy chorus. And I’m the producer, so I’ve got to go and have a work song where I listen to the sound of the rhythm guitar, the bass guitar, the kick drum, and then you go and you change the mic or you move it around the kick drum or the snare drum. You and your engineer trying to get a sound, you go back and listen to the song, played back and played back.

And so I would have a format to play to, you can’t just go and play eight bars, you’ve got to play like two or three minutes of a song so you can be adjusting things and then go listen to it over and over. And I just went out and sang anything and I thought I’d stutter to tease my brother, who stuttered, and I’d send him only one copy of this, it’s going to be mixed on a cassette. So I mix this and I put it aside and it’s not even on the album.

So we played the third album, “Not Fragile,” for Charlie Fach, who’s the head of Mercury, who’s coming and saying, you’ve got to have a great album. It’s got to have a better song than “Let It Ride” and “Takin’ Care of Business,” which is on “BTO II,” got to have a better song than “Blue Collar” and “Gimme Your Money Please,” which is on “BTO I.” We play him the album and he goes, well, I like “Sledgehammer,” I like “Roll On Down the Highway.” I don’t really hear a great single for Top 40 Radio. If you can get on Top 40, it’ll open your bank account and your wallet hugely.

And I say, that’s it, we’ve got eight songs. There’s four a side. It’s on vinyl. You’ve got 22 minutes aside and you can’t put any more on there. And the engineer says, play him the throwaway cut. And I say, you’re kidding. He said, no, play the cut. So we go get the cassette and play for Charlie Fach. And he says, I want to put that on the album. It sounds like nothing I’ve heard on the radio. It’s a fantastic song. I said, it won’t fit. He said, here’s what you do. Let’s get the four longest songs and put them on one side. We’ll add this and it’ll be the fifth song. We’ll put the five shorter ones on Side Two. So that’s the first BTO album that has a ninth song. And the ninth was “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

And it went to No. 1 in 22 countries and sold a couple of million copies. And so it proved to me, I really didn’t know a lot about the magic of a song because every song I write, I feel that magic in it, or else you wouldn’t finish writing. You’re trying to write a hit and be like, “We Will Rock You” or “Johnny B. Goode.” You’re trying to write a song like “Don’t Be Cruel” or some hit song. And you have to think it’s that, even though when it comes out, it’s not and it falls by the wayside and the radio picks what they want to play and the public picks what they want to buy and hear, and you end up playing those songs forever.

Literally, I play those songs every single night, 16 or 17 or 18 or 20 of them in a night, and I absolutely am so overjoyed and thrilled that I managed to write them. Sometimes I marvel at the lyrics and what they mean to the people. I see them singing along, some are laughing, some are crying.

And we played just two weeks ago in Toronto at a big outdoor festival. And there was a couple of women in the front row, and one of them just cried through the whole evening. And when we went to the end of the stage at the end of the night, we go to the front and kind of bow, so you can kind of talk, I said to her, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she put her hand on her heart and said, it was so perfect. But she’s sang every lyric and every song and I went, holy cow, this really means a lot to these people.

The collective consciousness that the audience goes into when you play “These Eyes” or “American Woman” or “Takin’ Care of Business,” they go back to happy days of their life because nobody knows what tomorrow’s gonna be and today is today, but yesterday and going back is like all their happy days and the songs are there and they’re still on classic radio, so that’s why I think classic radio is still around and still so strong. It reminds you of better days.

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