Randy Bachman Turned Career Around After ‘Intervention’
Randy Bachman admitted he’d lost his “essence” for several years as a result of a difficult divorce, and only turned his career around after his manager and lawyer staged a joint “intervention."
Since then, the former Guess Who guitarist has gone on to release two well-received albums, 2015’s Heavy Blues and this year’s By George by Bachman, a tribute to Beatles icon George Harrison.
“I had a confrontation with my manager and my lawyer, and they're both Buddhists,” Bachman told Billboard in a new interview. “I’m having lunch with them and they say, 'This is your intervention,' and I go, 'What? I don't drink or smoke or do drugs,’ and they go, 'No, but you're angry and you got this cloud over you everywhere you go. You want to change the past and you can't change the past. Let it be. All you can do is change yourself and change tomorrow and live in the now.’”
In the new documentary, Bachman, his son commented about his dad losing that essence. “Yeah, because I'm near the end, I think, of a seven-year divorce," Randy confirmed in the new interview. "That hits you over the head or hits you in the face with a shovel every day you wake up and the thing still isn't resolved. There's still legal, financial, anger and regret issues. … And I've come out of it, or have been coming out of it for three years. Heavy Blues was a real leap into the unknown for me to write and record a blues album in one week with two unknown female musicians.”
He said the Harrison album "was another step out." "I'm not really showing my feelings, except in one song, ‘Between Two Mountains,’" he noted. "I wrote that first verse, I think, with the spirit of George in the room. I was wakened up at three in the morning. I sensed something is in my room, so I wake up and I come to the room next to mine, and there's my typewriter and I sit down and I type these lyrics, ‘Between two mountains,’ and I go, ‘Wow, this isn't my normal songwriting style.’ I look at the lyrics and they're clearly not me -- they're not my thoughts, they're not in my vocabulary, I've never written about this before. ... It's one of the best songs I've ever written.”