A very Burton birthday

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This article was published 25/12/2022 (729 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The cold winds of Moose Jaw in December 2022 are galaxies away from Hollywood’s glamorous nightclub scene in 1972.

But the soon-to-be 75-year-old Burton Cummings says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

He started out as “an innocent Anglican kid from the North End of Winnipeg,” and became one of Canada’s most famous rock stars who once called Los Angeles home.

He has since become Moose Jaw’s most famous resident.

“L.A. is different when you’re young. I told myself years ago, silently, ‘I don’t ever want to get old here,’” Cummings says in an interview with the Free Press prior to his two concerts at the Burton Cummings Theatre, an unplugged show Wednesday night and a birthday bash to celebrate his 75th birthday on New Year’s Eve.

“I’ve had enough of the big city and I like the fact that Moose Jaw is only 30,000 people. I’ve played to bigger crowds than that.”

A car crash in 2018 — which left the front end of his sports car smashed against a light standard and Cummings glad to be alive but emotionally scarred — helped him realize it was time for the slower pace of Saskatchewan.

“There’s no traffic here. That’s the thing about L.A., the traffic gets overwhelming. You can be on the freeway and accidentally miss your turn, you can lose an hour, just like that,” he says.

“I think this is a better place to be older. I see a lot of older folks here, living well into their 80s or longer, and still pretty healthy.”

One thing that hasn’t changed for Cummings is his zest for music and performing.

The added treat of performing at the Burt, the 115-year-old former vaudeville hall that was named in his honour in 2002 and is now home to some of his personal mementos (see sidebar), makes him proud, excited and anxious, all in equal measures.

“You know, 75 is a milestone birthday, and so what better place to do it than in the theatre that bears my name in my hometown?” says Cummings, who last performed at the Burt in 2017 but also has rehearsed there with Randy Bachman before headlining the Unite 150 concert at Shaw Park in August 2021.

“I used to go there as a kid to see movies, when it was called the Odeon. I think I actually saw Help!, with the Beatles there. Now to be in the same building but it has my name on it, it’s an honour, and I’ve never really gotten over that. I’ve never taken it lightly. I’m very proud of that.”

Cummings says he’s tickled by the many acts who’ve performed at the Burt and have recognized his name, whether they know him personally or remember him as the rocker who co-wrote and sang such hits as American Woman, These Eyes and Share the Land.

He wishes he got to see John Hiatt, “one of my favourite artists,” perform there, as well as Neil Young, another old Winnipeg rocker who moved to California, who played the Burt in 2019.

It was at that show when Young wondered why Cummings didn’t name the old cinema the Deverons Theatre, after the band Cummings fronted before a fateful phone call and invitation to join the Guess Who in 1966.

“Oh really? That’s excellent,” Cummings says of the shout-out, before taking a trip down memory lane, remembering going to see Young’s Winnipeg band, the Squires, at a St. Vital joint called the Twilight Zone.

Revisiting those early years reminds Cummings what’s on the line for the concerts this week. He feels the pressure with every homecoming.

“I’m still nervous playing my hometown because a lot of people remember me from the Deverons days,” he says. “A lot of people I went to school with will be there. It’s like, you come home, and they sit there, and I always feel like they’re thinking , ‘OK prove it to us, why did you get so famous? Why did you get so successful?’

“I’m not saying people are thinking that, but I sometimes think they’re thinking that.”

The rock ’n’ roll resumé Cummings feels he must live up to includes Juno Awards, a SOCAN lifetime achievement award, and being named an officer of the Order of Canada and the Order of Manitoba, as well as being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

As part of the Guess Who, on July 17, 1970, Cummings also performed at the White House while Richard Nixon was president, an event also attended by a 23-year-old Prince Charles and his sister, Princess Anne.

A photograph of the event was posted on Twitter by the Richard Nixon Library shortly after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, with Cummings and other Guess Who performers posing with VIPs in their finery, the future King Charles III in a tuxedo and Cummings in the casual duds of a rock star.

It’s an event that brings mixed feelings.

“Our manager had what he thought was a brilliant idea, that we would tell the press that we were forbidden to play American Woman,” Cummings recalled.

“I mean, that was bull. That backfired on us. We didn’t play American Woman and there was no such thing as the White House telling us not to. I think that was one of the reasons Tricia Nixon wanted us there. I think she liked the record.”

The United States was in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1970, and the Nixon administration was a regular target of antiwar demonstrations. Cummings said the stunt would prove costly for the band.

“We didn’t play it nonetheless and we were just s—- on by Rolling Stone and the underground press world, about ‘What a bunch of p———-, they didn’t play American Woman,’” Cummings says. “I think in the hippie world, it worked against us.”

The prince of Canadian rock met the prince of Wales that day, Cummings says, and the band got to tour the home of the U.S. president, which after 52 years in and out of the entertainment spotlight, remains one of many career highlights.

To this day, the singer of so many hits gets a charge when one of his tracks turns up on the radio.

It’s the same feeling he got when the Deverons’ Blue Is the Night made the No. 11 spot on CKY Radio 58’s Instant 11 countdown in 1965, or from the anticipated warm reception at his two shows this week in Winnipeg.

“There’s nothing like when you play the first few notes of a song and the crowd starts cheering and that applause goes up,” he says. “Not everybody gets to experience that. I understand how unique that experience is and I’ve never taken it for granted and never taken it lightly. I appreciate it, every minute.”

Alan.Small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall