Hometown hero Cummings turns back the clock

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This article was published 27/12/2022 (728 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They pulled the plug on Burton Cummings Wednesday night, but Winnipeg’s favourite almost 75-year-old son is alive and well and continues to rock on.

Cummings played a two-hour plus concert of “unplugged” rarities, covers and favourites at a sold-out Burton Cummings Theatre, transforming the old vaudeville venue into one of the community centres he played at during his early rock ’n’ roll days in Winnipeg.

In between Guess Who favourites like Clap for the Wolfman, Laughing and Albert Flasher, Cummings and his five-piece band covered songs by Bob Dylan and J.J. Cale and the Kingsmen.

“This night is going to be a little different,” Cummings said as he bathed in huge applause from a sold-out crowd at the theatre that’s named after him.

When it came to doing something different, he didn’t disappoint.

Cummings kicked his set off with a deep cut, Bad News, from his 1981 album Sweet Sweet, before taking the crowd back to his early days as a struggling rock ’n’ roller by singing Blue is the Night, the first single by the Deverons, the band he was part of before joining the Guess Who in 1966.

He said he was nervous throughout the show, and spent plenty of time between songs turning back the clock to good times, such as when the Guess Who received a gold record from Dick Clark on the American Bandstand television show and about hearing the pop standard Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — which he also crooned Wednesday night — while growing up on Lansdowne Avenue in the North End.

“I hope you won’t get tired of my in-between-song rattling,” he said.

Cummings has every right to rattle on about his memorable career, and he deserves credit for offering an odd, yet entertaining, set of songs that will likely differ greatly from what he will play during his 75th-birthday bash Saturday at the Burt.

Cummings didn’t hold back when it came to rarities and covers, mimicking Dylan’s voice on Knocking on Heaven’s Door (“If I sound like Burton Cummings, I’ve failed,”); J.J. Cale’s Trouble in the City, Painted, Tainted Rose, by Al Martino and She Might Have Been a Nice Girl, a rarely performed Guess Who track from 1971’s So Long, Bannatyne.

He even debuted a fragment of a new song, Arrogance, which name-checks the Deverons.

“If this building didn’t have my name on it I would never get away with this,” he said prior to performing it.

Cummings kept throwing curveballs as the night wore on, bringing his band onstage to perform a swingy, shuffle version of American Woman instead of the standard rocker that made him and the Guess Who superstars.

The concert kicked into a higher gear after American Woman, when he performed No Time, and he hearkened back to living on Bannerman Avenue when he wrote the song with Randy Bachman.

While Cummings mentioned that age and the long hiatus from performing caused by the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t done any favours for his singing voice, his aging corps of fans have also felt the effects of Father Time, if their response to some of the songs is any indication.

Just over a year ago, when Cummings and Bachman teamed up to headline the Unite 150 concert at Shaw Park, fans jammed the stage and stood for two-plus hours yet still had energy to sway along with Share the Land, the Guess Who’s hippie favourite from 1970.

On Wednesday, fans were mostly glued to their seats, with some swinging their hands half-heartedly to the chorus “Shake your hand, share the land,” only rising at the end of the song to cheer for the obligatory encore, which was Louie Louie, the Kingsmen standard.

Winnipeg singer-songwriter Boy Golden, who earned two Western Canadian Music Award nominations in 2022, opened the evening with 30 minutes of pop, folk and blues.

He played solo instead of with his band, the Church of Better Daze, and he set a chill vibe for the promised unplugged evening.

“Time to lower your expectations one notch,” he joked after the crowd greeted him with warm applause.

Boy Golden, the stage name for Liam Duncan, alternated between guitar and a keyboard — half the size of Cummings’ electric piano behind him — and finished with cool renditions of his 2021 favourites KD and Lunch Meat, complete with a tasty keyboard solo, and Church of Better Daze, the title track to his 2021 EP that got radio airplay, which he turned into a snappy guitar boogie.

Cummings returns to the Burt stage Saturday night, which is both New Year’s Eve and his 75th birthday, for a fully electric birthday bash.

Expect him and his band to rock harder, and for him to maintain his sentimental mood, as he blows out the candles and flips the calendar to 2023.

Alan.Small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall