The Real Guess Who Finally Have Their Name Back

To a passerby, the Guess Who‘s Jan. 31, 2026, gig at Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls, Ontario, probably didn’t seem like a significant event. After all, the Guess Who have been mainstays on the oldies circuit for decades, playing hits like “American Woman,” “These Eyes,” “No Time,” and “Share the Land” at clubs, casinos, and fairs all over North America.

But for the Guess Who faithful who traveled to Niagara Falls for the show, it was an evening of triumph many thought they’d never live to see. That’s because the band masquerading as “The Guess Who” since 2003 was little more than a group of competent ringers assembled by original bassist Jim Kale. Guitarist Randy Bachman and singer Burton Cummings — the heart of the real Guess Who and the songwriting duo behind all the classics — were completely frozen out and had to hopelessly watch from the sidelines.

But a legal maneuver finally gave them back their rightful name last year. Niagara Falls was the first of many shows they’ll play in 2026. Weeks after the gig, as they prepare to travel from their homes in Canada down to the Caribbean where the Guess Who are booked on the Rock Legends Cruise alongside the Gene Simmons Band, Rick Springfield, Art Garfunkel, and Blue Oyster Cult, Bachman and Cummings are still in a state of semi-shock that this is really happening.

“It’s surreal in many ways,” says Bachman. “Our songs have become the soundtracks to peoples lives. We look out from the stage and they know every word of them.”

This was the dream back in 1967 when the Guess Who took a job as the house band on the Winnipeg version of the Canadian television show Let’s Go. “You had to play the Hit Parade every single week,” says Bachman. “And our producer came to us and said, ‘If you guys start writing songs that are good enough to fit in between ‘Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Let It Be,’ I’ll put it in there.’”

That was a tall order, but Cummings and Bachman had spent much of their downtime trying to do exactly that. “I was still living with my mother and grandmother, and one Saturday morning Randy came over with his guitar in his hand,” Cummings says. “He started playing this riff and singing the line ‘No time left for you.’ And I started answering over the top of it, “On my way to better things…’ We started answering each other. I’ve told this so many times, but it still excites me to tell it.”

Right around this same time, they also wrote “These Eyes” in much the same fashion. It was good enough for the Let’s Go producers to let them play it on the air. “This is where fate comes in,” says Cummings. “It’s the God’s truth what I’m telling you, but it sounds like I’m making it up…Jack Richardson, who ended up producing all 15 Guess Who albums for the RCA label, just happened to hear us 1,500 miles away in Toronto. He heard us do ‘These Eyes,’ and he believed so much in the song that somehow he put it together to take our band to New York City and record Wheatfield Soul, our first album for RCA.”

Things happened very quickly from here. “These Eyes” hit No. 6 on the U.S. Hot 100. Follow-up singles “Laughing,” “Undun,” and “No Time” were also smashes. Their days of playing cover songs on Winnipeg television were over. They were now playing large halls across North America, and raking in real money. But the members of the group didn’t all feel the same way about the rock & roll lifestyle.

“Randy had married his wife Lorayne, and had converted to Mormonism,” says Cummings. “He wouldn’t even have a Coca-Cola or a Pepsi or a cup of coffee or tea, nothing. And Jim Kale and I were not exactly living the life of a Buddhist monk. Before HIV, there was far more crazy casual sex. It was a wilder world. And things didn’t go all that smoothly for the band.”

“To this day, I’ve never done any drugs or drank or smoked,” says Bachman. “The late ’60s was ‘Let’s go cuckoo.’ I was too afraid to do any of that. So I never did it.”

For a brief moment in early 1970, they were on top of the world when the title track to their 1970 LP American Woman hit Number One on the Hot 100. But the tour was a hellacious time for Bachman. “I had a gallbladder attack every night on the road for two weeks,” he says. “My daughters have had them, and also had children. They said to me, ‘You can’t compare having a child to a gallbladder attack. Because you have a child once. You have a gallbladder attack, you have it every single night.’ And that happened for two weeks on the road. I couldn’t get any medical attention.”

He finally went home to Canada to see a doctor, and learned he’d have to wait two months for surgery. The Guess Who were booked at the Fillmore East in four days. He flew out to New York for the show, unable to eat anything but sugar-free Jell-O and crackers, per instructions from his doctor.

“If you got caught with marijuana back then, you couldn’t cross the border and work,” Bachman says. “And we were earning all our money in the States. John Lennon got to New York, and he couldn’t leave. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t do anything. He was screwed up. So that was alway going through my head. I was the leader of the band. And then getting married and having children also makes you aware of money. Where’s it going to come from? Where is it going? You’re not just paying for yourself anymore. You’re taking other people on a ride. Burton was single and I wasn’t.”

Bachman quit the band after the Fillmore show in May 1970, fed up with the rigors of touring, business disputes, and lifestyle clashes. Cummings and the rest of the Guess Who recruited guitarists Kurt Winter and Greg Leskiw to fill the void and scored hits with “Share the Land,” “Hand Me Down World,” and “Hang On to Your Life.” “By 1972 and 1973, the bubblegum aspect of the perception of the band had changed,” says Cummings. “We were being taken much more seriously as a rock & roll band.”

Bachman, meanwhile, formed Bachman-Turner Overdrive with his brothers Robbie and Tom, and singer Fred Turner. And just as the Guess Who were winding down in the mid-’70s, B.T.O. released the enormous hits “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” which have been staples of classic-rock radio for five decades. (They’re also favorites of Homer Simpson.)

Relations were rocky between the former Guess Who bandmates when B.T.O. were ascendant, and Burton Cummings was struggling to launch his solo career. But it was short-lived, dismissed by them both today as a silly spat. “We were both dedicated musicians,” says Bachman. “And shared the same dream.”

They made peace in the late 1970s, appeared on each other’s solo albums, and signed on for a Guess Who reunion tour of Canada in 1983. They sold a lot of tickets, but it was a miserable time for Cummings. 

“I remember it as ‘The Nightmare Tour,’” he says. “We were all feuding with each other. We weren’t friendly. And they were pushing us so hard to sell Molson’s. “We’re doing this interview backstage in Toronto and they’ve got [drummer Garry] Peterson with a Molson shirt on and Jim Kale with a Molson cap. I was more like a Jim Morrison guy. I’m not going to be paraded around with logos on me. I was furious. At that same time, Kale and I were drinking too much and probably into some other nasty stuff. It just wasn’t a happy band in ’83.”

Bachman has a wildly different take on the tour. “I loved it,” he says. “Burton had a drinking problem at the time, at that time. He didn’t like it. I’ve got the tapes, we’ve got the video. He won’t let me put them together. It would be a great thing to have the Guess Who ’83 together with all those songs. We did four new songs. And the guy who made the 16-track tapes gave them to me. I had them transferred to digital. I’ve got the film. All I got to do is remix it. Maybe he’ll want to do that one day for prosperity’s sake.”

For the next 16 years, the Guess Who again went dormant. Bachman largely blames the chaos of his personal life. “I had six kids, and I was going through my first divorce,” he says. “Music became very secondary. I was just like, ‘I’m losing my kids, I’m losing my money.’ You go through all kind of weird stuff when you’re going through that, and you don’t want to share your feelings with anyone.”

They reformed again when the Pan American Games came to Winnipeg in 1999, which sparked a series of tours that culminated at the SARSfest concert on July 2003 where they played for half a million people at Toronto’s Downsview Park. “We were there with AC/DC, Rush, and the Rolling Stones,” says Bachman. “And we rocked as good as any of them. When I did ‘Takin’ Care of Business’ and said, ‘Clap your hands,’ and the hands went up in the air, there were a million hands in the air.”

It was his last happy moment with the Guess Who for a very long time. In the years that followed, Kale — who secured the Guess Who trademark in 1987 when he realized nobody else had bothered to do so — put his own version of the Guess Who on the road with Peterson on drums. They played with them at first, but eventually stepped aside and kept it going as a zombie band. Cummings and Bachman, meanwhile, went out under the name Bachman Cummings in 2006, but discovered it was tricky to get bookings if they didn’t own the name to their own band.

“The fake band was using music that we wrote, and Burton sang on, to promote their shows,” says Bachman. “And some of these guys weren’t even born when those things were hits. These clowns, they were actually taking our real albums to meet and greets and signing our pictures. I was in Philadelphia one time and I opened a Live at the Paramount album. I was going to sign it for this kid. And I opened the album and someone else had already signed my picture.”

For Peterson, the decision to perform as the Guess Who was a way to preserve a legacy. “The Guess Who is kind of unique in the way that it’s had four or five successful versions with different members. There was no one definitive band, unless you just want to say the people that recorded ‘American Woman’ are the definitive version of the Guess Who,” he told Goldmine magazine in 2024. “We’re just a continuation of a long legacy.”

The situation for Cummings and Burton seemed hopeless until 2023 when they teamed up with attorney Helen Yu and sued Kale’s Guess Who for $20 million, alleging false advertising, unfair competition, and violation of right of publicity. Before the case could be adjudicated, Cummings took the wildly unprecedented step of terminating the performing rights agreements for all the Guess Who songs he wrote. It meant that nobody could play Guess Who songs to a paying audience since there was no way to properly compensate the rights holders.

“I’m willing to do anything to stop the fake band; they’re taking [Bachman and my] life story and pretending it’s theirs,” Cummings told Rolling Stone at the time. “They’re not the people who made these records, and they shouldn’t act like they did. This doesn’t stop this cover band from playing their shows, it just stops them from playing the songs I wrote. If the songs are performed by the fake Guess Who, they will be sued for every occurrence.”

This left Kale and his legal team hopelessly cornered. They agreed to a settlement that finally allowed Cummings and Bachman to tour as the Guess Who. They rounded out the lineup with member of Cummings’ solo band, including drummer Sean Fitzsimons, bassist Jeff Jones, percussionist Nick Sinopoli, and guitarists Tim Bovaconti and Joe Augello. “We now have three lead guitar players,” says Cummings. “Randy leads a guitar army. It’s very powerful.” 

The set includes the three biggest Bachman-Turner Overdrive songs (“Let It Ride,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” and “Takin’ Care of Business”), and Cummings’ 1977 tune “My Own Way to Rock.” But the rest of the show is dedicated to Guess Who classics. “The set is a celebration of me and Burton: Wheatfield Soul, Canned Wheat, and American Woman,” says Bachman. “Between us, we’ve sold 40 or 50 million records.”

Cummings is 78, but his voices shows shockingly few signs of wear and tear, and he still hits every high note without struggle. “It’s luck, practice, and exercise,” he says. “I’m still getting people telling me, ‘Hey, Burton, you still sound like you did when I was a kid,’ or, ‘Hey, you still sound like the guy on the records.’ And I’ll tell you, man, I think that is something every singer yearns to hear.”

Many singers also yearn to earn a spot in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But the Guess Who haven’t even been nominated despite being eligible for the past 36 years. “I don’t really think about the Hall of Fame that much,” says Cummings. “I have enough awards on my doors and walls in my house that I’m not hurting for any acceptance, put it that way. And logically, who would be up there? Certainly I’m not going to stand on stage with Peterson and Kale as the Guess Who.”

Bachman feels the same way. “There’s people in there we love, like Dolly Parton and Leonard Cohen, who’ve never rocked in their lives,” he says. “They are great artists, but should be in a different Hall of Fame. And don’t hold your breaths waiting for us to get in. You might turn purple.” 

Right now, his focus is on gearing up for an extensive Guess Who tour of Canada, and more dates are expected to be added in North America in the summer. Later in the year, he’s headed to Japan for a run of Bachman-Turner Overdrive shows. 

Fred Turner no longer tours because he suffers from vertigo, and both Tim and Robbie Bachman died in 2023. But Randy’s son Tal Bachman now tours with the band, and there’s talk of cutting a new B.T.O. album with Turner contributing his parts remotely. “Half of my year this year is with the Guess Who, and the last half of this year will be with B.T.O.,” says Bachman. “I’m working like I’m 32 years old.”

There are no plans for a new Guess Who record. “Randy and I will be together for hours and hours on the tour bus,” says Cummings. “Sometimes he picks up a guitar, starts playing riffs, and I start singing over them. So we could capture some of that wonder of the old days. You never know. I never say never.”

Just don’t expect to hear anything new this year when the Guess Who tour. “There was a big record by Ricky Nelson called ‘Garden Party’ and he said something in that song that always surprised me,” Cummings says. “He said, ‘If memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.’ I’m so opposite of that. First of all, that’s a little bit demeaning to truck drivers. And secondly, Ricky, your whole life was creating memories for people. I’ll be glad to sing the memories forever.”