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Chad Allan and the Reflections
Tribute to Buddy Holly / Back and Forth - 7"
Canadian American - 1962
Michael Panontin
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As the Silvertones, and then as Allan and the Silvertones, singer-guitarist Chad Allan assembled an early rock and roll band that included fellow Winnipeggers Randy Bachman, Jim Kale, Gary Peterson and Bob Ashley, essentially (minus Ashley) a teenaged nucleus that would one day become the Guess Who. By 1962, with the focus more on Allan as leader, and their name changed to the more egocentric Chad Allan and the Reflections, the band had released their debut seven-inch, 'Tribute to Buddy Holly'.
The song was first issued in the UK by Mike Berry and the Outlaws. It reached a respectable #24 across the pond, and likely would have climbed higher had it not been banned by the BBC for being too morbid. But as Bachman would later reveal in his Vinyl Tap Stories, it struck an extra chord in a group of budding musicians living so close to Holly's tragic death site. "I remember some friends of mine and I were going to drive down for Buddy Holly's show in Fargo [ND] when we heard the news that morning that his plane had crashed."
Winnipeg at the time hadn't yet gelled into the "mini Liverpool" that Bachman remembers. Like pretty well all Canadian cities, it lacked a proper recording studio. Radio stations CKY and CKRC both had facilities, but they were only mono or two-track. So the guys hopped into a Buick borrowed from Bachman's girlfriend's father and headed down to Minnesota's Kay Bank Studios, which with a three-track recorder must have seemed positively state-of-the-art.
"I borrowed my Uncle Jack's little box trailer for the equipment," Bachman writes, "[and] I asked my dad if we could borrow his canvas tent. We set up the tent in the trailer, put the equipment inside it, and collapsed the tent over it all with a couple of bricks on top to keep it from blowing away. And off we went to Minneapolis."
Things were hardly much better for the band in the studio, with Allan indisposed with a sore throat and Bachman struggling with his guitar. "There was something broken in the wiring," he recalls, "so I had to use Chad's new Jazzmaster electric guitar while he strummed my Gretsch acoustically." And though Bachman was never really happy with the Jazzmaster's "thinner sound", the group managed to walk away with four or five tracks, including of course the cuddly eulogy, 'Tribute to Buddy Holly', which they would release on the Canadian American imprint.
The Winnipeggers' rendition may have failed to top the original, but it did manage to mix those Ricky Nelson croons, Mr. Holly's nervous guitar licks and a bit of Elvis' posturing into a decent enough piece of wax. It even managed a bit of radio play up in the 'Peg, which to a 19-year-old kid like Bachman must have been pretty exciting. "What an amazing moment for me when I heard that record and my guitar playing on the radio for the first time," he gushed. "We thought that was the big time for us."
Other singles would follow on the Quality label with modest results, but it was not until 1965, as Chad Allan and the Expressions, that the lads struck gold - on both sides of the 49th - with their version of Johnny Kidd's epochal rocker 'Shakin' All Over'. Though of course in an attempt to dupe deejays into thinking that four cute Liverpudlians might have been responsible for this, Quality mailed out a limited number of promo copies with the words 'Guess Who?' listed where the band's name should have been, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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