This song about moving on and finding your true calling was written by Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman (Bachman-Turner Overdrive) and lead singer Burton Cummings.
In an interview with Bachman, he explained that musically, the song was inspired by two tracks on the Buffalo Springfield Again album: "
Rock & Roll Woman" and "
Hung Upside Down." Neil Young of Buffalo Springfield (a fellow Canadian) played an acetate of the album for Cummings and Bachman when his travels took him to Winnipeg. The they heard it, they loved the country-rock sound and set out to write something like it. "That was our country-rock song," Bachman said. "Me and Burton trying to be like Neil and Stephen Stills."
According to Randy Bachman, the guitar lick on this song is an inversion of what Stephen Stills played on the Buffalo Springfield track
"Hung Upside Down". When Bachman heard the theme song to the TV show Law & Order (composed by Mike Post), it sounded familiar. "It's the same riff," Bachman told us. "It's just recycling the riff in a different context."
Note that Bachman doesn't fault Post for lifting the riff: Randy believes that just about any modern music music is based on something that came before.
HughBriss 0 points 3.7 years ago
I usually hate the Guess Who's songs because they were Canadian socialists and dirty hippies, but I really love this song. Good post, man.
(I think of their commie song "Share the Land", which is all about seizing land from property owners and redistributing it to "the people", and the communist paradise they'll be living in "when we all live together". Fuck that. But I do love "No Time, though.)