Garry Peterson — Canadian Beat

What is it about Winnipeg, the lonely western Canada birthplace of two of the country’s biggest rock bands, a city that musicians leave for success? Maybe it has to do with the deep chill of the prairie winters and the dry cold of winds whipping across a thousand miles of wheat fields: To get warm, you huddle together, because alone you perish. Even those who break out of the healthy local scene, itself a necessity fostered by isolation from major entertainment capitals, tend somehow to stay together.

Thus it was that Garry Peterson, seemingly a lifetime member of the Guess Who, Winnipeg’s first international rock success, teamed up with two Bachmans and a Turner in the ’80s version of BTO. The ’70s Bachman Turner Overdrive had to leave its native Canada to achieve its enormous popularity. (In case you’re wondering why the stress on “leave,” let me explain: In Canada, despite legislation guaranteeing domestic radio content, and a history of grants to whatever the government defines as art, aspiring acts seek to leave; successful ones have left already. For various reasons, the market is elsewhere.)

This time BTO has snared the right drummer. He is clean, simple, and controlled, both in his playing and in his personal life. These are traits important in the company of Mormons, as are the Bachmans. This is a band welcomed at Holiday Inns. Their battle cry, “Taking Care Of Business,” has as much to do with commitment, sincerity, and morality as money.

TBW: It’s kind of ironic. You are finally with the band that you should have been the original drummer for. The route has come full circle.

GP: Quite possibly, if I had been more financially secure at the time that Randy Bachman left the Guess Who, I would have gone with him. He felt that he wasn’t fitting in with what was happening on the road at the time. But he had a source of income, which was writing royalties; I really had no choice at that time. I had put so many years of effort into the Guess Who that it was really tough to give it up. Recently, people have asked me if it feels strange to be playing with BTO, and I say no. Randy and I went to high school together. We were really close friends. We did the things that teenagers do together. We’re quite comfortable. I know pretty well what he’s going to do. I think that, when BTO was formed, if Randy had actually asked me to join, I would have done it, as long as it wouldn’t have hurt the Guess Who; that I wouldn’t do, because I’m a team person.

TBW: That struck me when I was on the telephone with you last night. I suggested that we meet after you had rested, when it was convenient for you, and you said, “No, no; we have to do the things that are important to us and the group.” You had had a really busy day of promo and TV.

GP: Yeah, I’ve always been that way. I come from a show business tradition—”the show must go on.” When I was very young, they had a theater in the town called the Playhouse, which had a pit band and variety performers on stage—an Ed Sullivan kind of thing. This is where I worked from 1949 to 1958, which is when Randy and I met in junior high school.

TBW: This was a part-time thing?

GP: It had to be part-time; I was only four years old when I started! I’ve played drums as long as I can remember. It’s a very strange feeling, you know, because it’s not one of the bodily functions, [laughs] So it’s kind of weird having this thing implanted in you that’s been in there since you were born!

TBW: Did you have any trouble getting instruction?

GP: Winnipeg, in the late ’40s and early ’50s, and probably still today is not a great hotbed of playing. My father was a drummer. He used to take me into the basement and he would show me what he could show me. The things that he couldn’t do he would sing to me. Subsequent to that, there was a fellow in the city who taught me theory and reading for three years. I also got some great experience when I was nine years old in the Manitoba Schools Orchestra, which was otherwise comprised of teenagers. They were fine musicians. When I came in, I was playing side drum and percussion; a year later, I played the whole section myself— timpani, side drum and percussion.

TBW: It seemed to me years ago that you had that kind of control and execution when I saw you with the Guess Who. You also played military-style grip.

GP: I haven’t for years now, but I played that style for a whole year when I was with Lenny Breau and Bob Erlandson, at a place in Winnipeg called the Town And Country. It’s a funny story. The place had a bar/ lounge and a place upstairs that used to bring in acts from New York—a cabaret. The guy who owned the club was hot to have the Guess Who play, but in the bar. Well, everybody in the band was 21, except for me. I was 18, so I couldn’t go in. Chad Allen, who was our singer at the time, played drums, Randy played drums, and everybody switched. I went upstairs because the band had made a stipulation that I must play in this place. They didn’t want to put me out of work, so I read charts for all these singers coming in from New York. It was great because jazz was my first love, and I like all kinds of music.

I played with the Winnipeg Symphony. When the Guess Who broke up I was kind of bitter, so I tried all sorts of things. It’s real difficult to wake up one day and find everything has stopped. I don’t mean the money and fame. I would probably play for nothing in a little bar somewhere. But it was like a locomotive going down the tracks, and then sticking your arm out and saying “Stop!” It just doesn’t stop that quickly.

TBW: So where do you channel your group-oriented commitment, being that sort of person—into your family?

GP: Yeah, the family is a great deal of it.

TBW: That must be hard, though, because despite the importance of the family, it’s no substitute. It seems to operate on other levels.

GP: That’s correct. You see, I’ll tell you the problem. People don’t see why BTO is back. They say that it’s money. Of course it’s the money, but people writing these reviews claiming we’re doing it for the money are writing these reviews for money! What’s the crime? The real reason is that people who get into bands love to play. It’s their whole life. Then, they make it big and they say, “Now we can sail off in our yachts to the Bahamas, or go skiing, and do all the things that we really want to do.” They do these things for a year until they find out, “Damn it, we really want to play!” That’s what they really want to do, and they had it all the time. So, in answer to your question, yes, it was difficult, but I had played for so long that I kind of needed to step back from it and get away from it in order to see how my life would be without it.

TBW: What did you do in the interim?

GP: I took Hotel Management. For two years I worked front desk, all over, three shifts a week six days a week: two days eight to four; two days four to twelve; and two days twelve to eight on night audit. It was good for me, because I had played and made really good money from the time I was four years old, but it wasn’t work to me. I had never had a real job in my life. I had never punched a clock. So this was a very good experience for me.

TBW: How did you find the transition? Did it happen easily or did you keep too busy to think about it?

GP: I’m a very simple person. I’m comfortable in any surrounding. I like to play golf. I can go to the country club set and fit in. It may not be what I want, but I respect and defend people’s right to do what they want. So it wasn’t really that hard.

TBW: I think that a lot of people don’t realize that you guys do genuinely defend that blue-collar mentality that’s mentioned in the BTO promotional material.

GP: Oh yeah, it’s where we come from. My father was a machinist at Air Canada, you know. The average person in the crowd does not get hipper as time goes on; you can’t play to musicians every night and really do stuff that’s going to make them raise their eyebrows. The kids that come have pressures in school, pressures at jobs, and pressures in their lives; they want to stand there and go like this with the fist in the air! It’s a release. They don’t want to have to think about things. When I go to a movie, I like the odd movie that’s an intricate thing. I want Indiana Jones to be running all over the place doing things that you know can’t happen.

TBW: In that light, what strikes me is that various critics have described BTO as outdated.

GP: How can it be? The Stones are not outdated.

TBW: Perhaps that’s part of the response. The point I’m making is that, if BTO is outdated, then surely a lot of this new dance music is inherently outdated.

GP: Exactly. The critics are right in one way, and they’re also wrong. What they should say is that it’s old music; it’s rock ‘n’ roll which was the roots of today’s pop music. I mean, we don’t really call it rock ‘n’ roll anymore, do we? We gave it all these labels. When it started it was just rock ‘n’ roll. Then as it grew, they took manifestations of it which became acid rock or heavy metal. Every era—every decade—has its own rock ‘n’ rollers—disco, new wave. But in every one of those new sections, in the background there was still rock ‘n’ roll. If you plotted it on a graph, there would be an even line of these fads, which hit with a strong impact but then settle. Look at bass drum playing today: It’s basically four on the floor, which is taken from disco. And disco is taken from samba. Watch I Love Lucy, and listen to the theme song. It’s disco. Everything is related.

TBW: Two things: It must have been a real decision for you to go out with BTO, and secondly, how is it to be promoted these days? As you said, you guys are hovering around 40.

GP: Number one: We all wanted to play again. We want the feedback from people. If you’re an entertainer you need that. As four guys, we are so very, Very similar—down to looking as though we could be from the same family—and we enjoy doing the same things, so this tour has been fun but hard. It’s kind of been thrown together as a trial. We’re groping our way in the dark, but we have laughed so much on this tour. That’s important. As for promoting it, I think that you just go out and do what you do. The people will tell you what they want from you.

TBW: Scott Fish once made the point in this magazine that what often distinguishes the jazz player from the rock player is commitment—not to one’s art or craft, but in rock, to the notion of group endeavor. And here, with BTO, we have an example of guys who have been with each other, off and on, since high school.

GP: You can’t make a fair comparison between the jazz and rock players. Rock players have the ability to earn a great deal of money quickly; jazz never will.

TBW: That begs the question. There have been so few jazz groups with which you could identify—maybe ‘Trane, Miles, Weather Report—because jazz is seen as music in which you could make a living with your case over your shoulder if you’re good. Whereas in rock, players with, in many cases, limited abilities have managed to stick together and really push their product.

GP: Sure. It goes back to what I said about audiences not getting any hipper. The majority of people cannot understand what’s going on in jazz—you know, “Where’s the beat?” When I first played with Randy, it was the first time in my life when I could play with people my own age, and play music of my own age; before that I had been playing big band stuff.

TBW: Some of the Guess Who tracks, like “Undun,” show the jazz influence.

GP: There are things on albums that are further out there. Listen to “Artificial Paradise.”

TBW: Yeah, and you used to do those solos.

GP: I did, but they were totally lost. Someone like you would know what I was doing. We’d play Washington, D.C., opening for a band called the Grass Roots, and I’d do this technically really good solo. The guy from the Grass Roots would come on and do this very basic thing, but he’d get up from behind the drums and play his sticks on the microphone. The crowd would go wild. All he was playing was [demonstrates straight 16ths] and the crowd loved it, so people don’t understand as a rule.

TBW: The Iron Butterfly syndrome.

GP: When I was younger, I used to wonder how they could go wild over that. But after Randy left the Guess Who for BTO, I saw that he played simple and straight, and the crowds loved it. I realized that I had to take my playing down. I was playing too much in the Guess Who. It was immature playing, really, if that makes any sense. I wanted to play jazz style within a rock band.

TBW: Did you like the drum sound on the older Guess Who albums?

GP: Not really. It seemed as if the drums were always quite far back in the mix.

TBW: What did you learn in the studio with Guess Who versus BTO?

GP: I’ll tell you a story that will sum up what I learned in the studio. We went to record an album in Los Angeles. We started in New York with Phil Ramone. “These Eyes,” “Undun,” and “Laughing” were all done at his studio. Anyway, we came in one day and we had gotten a pretty fat snare drum sound on a previous album. They wanted to get this same sound. Do you know how hard that is? So they got a turntable and they put the record on. My snare drum at that point was very loose, almost to the point where the tension rods just “caught.” I set everything up like that and we started whacking the snare drum. This went on for eight hours! We moved the drumset all over the studio. They had this thing in my headphones and I started to get mad. It was ridiculous. So finally Jack Richardson, our producer, said, “That’s it. Pack it up.” They put the drumset where it was when we started. The next day we came in. They turned on the machine. I hit the snare drum, and they said, “That’s it!” So you tell me what I learned in the studio! I learned that there are a lot of variables that nobody takes into account—like drugs, like guys with blown ears, like guys with no sleep, like who knows where they were the night before and if they’re hearing things; the same as you.

On this last BTO album, the engineer was Dave Slagter. He’s been at Little Mountain studio forever. He knows the studio, he knows the room, and he’s a drummer. I would tune the drums to a point and then I would let him do it. I’m not above that. There’s no point in being at odds with the engineer. Then I would come in and tune a little; maybe I would hear an overtone here and maybe loosen one lug. You never know what’s going to work. That’s my experience. Other drummers could tell you that there’s a set way to tune. There are so many ways to tune a drum. If your bearing edge is not correct, there’s one problem. If you’ve got a warped hoop, there’s another problem; you’re not going to get even tensioning. You haven’t got a chance. It’s a difficult job for a drummer in the studio, and it’s real critical; that’s why they take so long to get drum sounds.

I’m still discovering how much things have changed, because I stopped recording in 1975, which is just approaching the explosion of everything. Later, when I recorded with Burton Cummings, I was basically a sideman and not really part of the creating of things. Therefore, I played a very basic drumset and didn’t get involved in technical things. I did what I was supposed to do. With BTO, I’m discovering and experimenting with different things. Randy is a great inspiration to me because Randy has been into these things for quite a while. He did a whole new wave album by himself. It’s phenomenal. He took it to a lot of places, and they loved it until they found out it was him. They want Randy Bachman to be BTO! Although we would like to step out a little further from BTO and be a little more creative and current, we’ll try to maintain that tunnel which is BTO. Everybody in the band is really open-minded.

TBW: I guess the sort of thing you’re moving toward now—the incorporation of the modern technology on stage, in the form of the Simmons and the Linn, with the primitive drum sounds—was pretty much impossible with the previous drummer.

GP: Robbie Bachman was brought into music by Randy—I don’t know this but I feel this—and Randy probably taught Robbie how to play drums by singing. When Robbie reached a certain point that was adequate, it was up to him. There’s no question about it. Robbie did a very good job with the tools he had to work with. You have to give him credit; he didn’t have any formal training as far as I know. I knew him since he was a little boy and gave him his first set of drums—an old set of Yamahas.

TBW: He was quite ambitious apparently; I remember reading in an old issue of Recording Engineer Producer that Robbie was going for a Bonham sound on a particular album. The engineer seemed to be saying that he was a good player, but maybe not aware of the variables, and that maybe he was a looser, more unrestrained player. I guess you’ve been sought out for this tour to bring a level of control to the band.

GP: I’m a very steady drummer. I’m not going to let the band run away, and I’m not going to let them slow down. We may play the tunes every night a few clicks off the tempo but nothing drastic because I listen to vocals, to words, and to the rhythm of the words. I also know where the singer is comfortable. If it’s a song with a lot of words, the singer can’t get it out if the song’s too fast. It’s the same with guitar solos; they have to be in a certain pocket for them to be effective. From that point of view, it will make the band relax.

TBW: We talked before about changes in drum technology, in drum sounds over the years, and even in the way we approach drums.

GP: Other than our technical assists such as LinnDrum machines and those kinds of things, it’s the technical end of things that has changed drastically, not the drummer.

TBW: Some people say that the technical end is so important that, say, if you go in with a Ludwig 400 5 1/2″ metal snare, they’re able to make it sound like a Premier Royal Scot, 15 inches deep.

GP: Who would know the difference? [laughs]

TBW: People listen.

GP: I guess, but you’re a drummer.

TBW: Do you have your own sound?

GP: I don’t know that I ever look for a brand-name sound. I hear a sound and I want that sound; maybe I should pay more attention to whether it’s a Ludwig . . . .

TBW: Okay. Touche.

GP: People will ask me how I get a particular sound. I don’t know. I can sit down at just about any set of drums and make it sound like something. I don’t mean to be bragging or anything, but it’s a feel that I have with the instrument. Each set of drums has to be played differently. There are some drums that you can really hit hard, and some that you have to adjust to a bit. People ask me if I’ll teach. No. I find it very frustrating, because I find it hard to translate what I do into words that you might understand.

TBW: That is consistent with the way you learned—nonacademic, on-the-job training, and so forth.

GP: Exactly, I never thought of it that way before.

TBW: Last night, you mentioned the importance of the shop Drums Only, in Vancouver.

GP: They are a dream. Ray Ayotte, who lends his name to the drums they make, and his brother George, are the owners. They are good for the world of drumming. There will be great drummers coming from Vancouver because of them. They have a concept there that’s a total store for drummers, right from a factory that makes drums all the way to studios. They help both the top end of the drum world and people who are starting. They have 11,000 square feet; at any one time, they can display 100 drumsets.

TBW: How did they make it on that scale? Did they sell a refinery?

GP: They believe in it, and they struggled. Ray had this dream of a total-concept store for drummers. If I were a young drummer starting to play, I would think, “What a place to come to!” There is a great exchange of information and ideas there, right down to making drums. Right now, they’re not making shells, but buying them and putting the tune-lock on them, which Ray invented. They veneer them there. They can do virtually anything you want on a drum; next they’ll be making their own shells.

TBW: So you’re saying their success is due, not just to having the products and space, but to attitude as well. I’m wondering why so many cities of equivalent size, such as the one we’re looking out at right now, don’t have such a facility or anything near it.

GP: These guys are not making a killing, but they believe in it. It’s their life. From a business point of view, a lot of times I’ll tell Ray he’s crazy, but it was his dream for a long time. All the drummers who come to town with the big bands come in. Billy Chapman, my drum roadie, worked there at one time. I watched him around the shop. He’s a good drummer. I had this gut feeling that here was a guy who would make a good drum roadie.

TBW: Billy’s very excited and enthusiastic over your drumset design and maintenance.

GP: He’s great for the band. The other guys are kind of jealous because he’s working on my stuff.

TBW: From talking to him, I get the feeling that he introduced you to some of the new products—the electronics—or at least made the transition a little easier.

GP: After I got back with Randy, he was an influence on me with the new music in the album that he had done. Billy has kind of continued that. I’m not a great person with the technical and electronics things: I want to know how I can get what I want out of it. I leave how it works to the technicians; I want to use it as a tool.

TBW: We should mention that you know your way around a reasonably complex kit, with all the outboard gear. We should run it down.

GP: It’s basically a five-piece drumset. I have a 7 1/2″ snare drum. I bought some old Radio King snare drums from Paul Jamieson, double lug, which were 7 1/2, so I got Drums Only to make me a 7 1/2; I don’t like it too much bigger. Some smaller snare drums really sound neat, though. The toms are 12″, 13″, and 16″, and are one inch deeper than conventional sizes. The bass drum is 24″. Around the five-piece set, we’ve taken the Simmons and placed them in spaces between the drums; there’s one between the hi-hat and first rack-mounted tom-tom, one that is almost superimposed over the two rack-mount toms, and one between the 13″ and 16″ toms. I didn’t think I’d want to play the electronic kit by itself, but I can do that within the same song as it is now, with the Simmons bass drum there. The beauty of the electronic drums is that you can assign any sound you want to them: The bass drum doesn’t have to be a bass drum. It could be a handclap! The pedals are the old Asba Caroline; I have about seven of them at home. A place like Drums Only has parts for them. We invented that pedal board, which all my pedals are bolted to, and they never move. They go into the case like that.

TBW: Then there are two pedals to the left of that—non-drum pedals.

GP: We call that the “subversive digital.” [laughs] That’s really a beat extractor. For instance, if you plug in the pads from the Simmons to the Linn, they have trouble recognizing it. We wanted to get something where you could put some sort of detonator on the acoustic drums, so I could blow up the whole studio. I wanted to be able to play my acoustic drums so that they could trigger both the Linn and the Simmons, and I could mix and match. What the extractor allows us to do is to play the Simmons pads and have them play the Linn sounds, or the Simmons sounds, or both together. There are another two buttons on the subversive unit that I can use by hand, although Billy does much of that.

I’d like to be able to say that I can do wild things with it now, but I’m just experimenting. I want to get a Roland 909 as well. There are some neat sounds in that, and Roland is coming out with an attachment that will be percussion. I think it will be the greatest tool on stage for us, because a lot of records have percussion and you don’t hear it on stage, unless you have a percussion player.

TBW: In your tunes where, say, the Linn starts off like thunder rolling, and then you join it, did the other guys have trouble adjusting to that, especially since the Linn takes some of the elasticity out of the time?

GP: We do waver with the Linn, as humans will. I think that they listen to me and they rely on me. I don’t think that they have too much of the electronic stuff in their monitors.

TBW: That’s interesting because it’s gangbusters out front! What do you do in a song when the Linn is programmed to play start to finish, and someone screws up?

GP: Once on this tour, in Winnipeg, we played “Blue Collar,” which is programmed as a song, not as a loop on the Linn. The band got excited and took off. I was sitting wondering whether to play with the band or the Linn, and there were 16,000 people there going wild, so I just reached over, turned the machine off and played. I mean, I could play before there were machines.

TBW: Back to acoustic sound, you use Sabian cymbals. (14″ hi-hats, 14″ closed hi-hats,16″ HH crash,18″ HH crash,18″AA crash, 20″ AA crash, 22″ AA heavy ride, 20″ Chinese) I told you last night that the two brilliant HH cymbals, which you just got, were particularly fat sounding. Why do you use Sabian?

GP: Drums Only is selling them. I got to meet Sally Zildjian, in the Sabian family. Sabian asked me if I would like to be an endorser. I said, “Let me hear the cymbals first.” Amazingly enough, they were equal to Zildjian. Cymbals are strange animals; everybody has their favorites, and not all are the same or react the same. I liked the sound of the 16″ thin. What I wanted now was the same sort of sound that complements that. They picked another one in Meductic that sounded great: I’m a believer in letting someone who has expertise pick something for you. If you go in and try a hundred cymbals, you get confused, so I let them pick those two out—the HH—and when we got to rehearsal, Billy suggested that I add something a little bit more than that. So we got an 18″ and 20″ AA medium crash, just to give us that added embellishment away from the other two cymbals. I picked them up at Drums Only; I needed them then.

TBW: You’ve spent many, many years in the business, and have had the unique opportunity of watching the Canadian music industry grow and then spending time on the American side of it. You’re fortunate because you kept working through it all.

GP: I feel really lucky. Not many people get a chance to do what I’ve done. And they could be much better drummers than I am; therefore, I have to say that I was lucky to be able to do all the things I’ve done. Maybe it’s a bit selfish, but I’d like to do it all again.

TBW: Maybe you will.

GP: Well, that’s what we’re working on. You have to do what you enjoy and keep working at it, but you have to be prepared for the fact that you may never make it to that top pinnacle—the real big time. So I think you have to love playing enough to say, “I’ll play anywhere, anytime” and be satisfied with it.

TBW: That would seem to be a good closing point, but I think we should say that you have kept your nose pretty clean through all the years. Often, frustrated people will begin to dabble in this and that—drugs and so forth—with the effect that they lose sight of goals.

GP: Yes, and we all have solid families behind us. I have my wife Nadia and my son Cory. Nadia and I have been married for 18 years. That’s quite a good foundation and support for anyone during times when you have the down moments. All musicians should have a wife like my wife. I think, at times, I kind of take for granted how she handles the whole situation. I got away from playing when the Guess Who broke up; there was a point when she came to me and said that I should be playing again. I would never have noticed; she could see that what I was doing was not for me.

TBW: What will you do when BTO is over, or between gigs?

GP: I’d like to play with really outstanding musicians—jazz, funk or fusion, I don’t know. That’s one of the reasons I moved to Vancouver. So far, I haven’t done too much. Burton kept me working just enough so that I couldn’t commit myself to much else. I’m not the type of person who can get something going and then say, “Oh, Burton called me; see you!” I can’t do that. I feel guilty about that.

TBW: Maybe having done projects that have achieved such huge success, you might find it hard to hit the first rung of the ladder in the club scene again.

GP: No. As long as I can play, I like to play anywhere. There’s no problem. I enjoyed last night at Barrymores, where there were 400 people, as much as the night before in Toronto, where there were 13,000, because you can see the whites of their eyes!

TBW: Do you see the current BTO working out? What are the indications thus far?

GP: It’s too soon to know, really. There seems to be opposition here in Canada. It’s going to take a while; it seems that records take a while. ZZ Top’s was around six months before anything happened. I think that people would like to know that we’re not just fooling them. This is not a reunion. That’s why we did the album first. We figured that would be enough for people to know that this is a serious thing. I think we have to go out and play.

TBW: Is your bargaining position jeopardized, as far as getting the rate you want is concerned?

GP: We’re not concerned about that.

TBW: But that’s an enormous PA to be carrying around, you need a certain amount of money.

GP: It is difficult from that point of view, but we will go out and do whatever has to be done. If we have to do it like the Guess Who did when it started out, and like BTO did, then we’ll do it. We’ll go to the States first.

TBW: Well, if there’s anything to democracy, then you’ll be successful. I’ve rarely seen such a display of collective behavior as last night. The crowd was ecstatic. It was really moving. On the other hand—this might be partly frivolous, in this age of New Equality—you are putting out men’s music and alienating part of your potential audience. You mentioned that your following tends to be male.

GP: I think the band does appeal to a male crowd. I was told this before I got into the band. There’s evidence of that. You see guys in the front row “playing guitar.” It’s like “You, too, can play in a band.” I mean, you look at guys in other bands. We’re husky guys. We could be working in construction. We’re not the typical image of a band on stage with the leathers, skinny legs, and stuff like that. I’m not putting that down; there’s an area for that and for us too. ZZ Top is a similar band. When I went to see them in Vancouver, out of every five people in the crowd, four were guys.

We have fun on stage. We may be a little out of tune at times, but so are the Rolling Stones—and on record! They don’t give a damn. They’re there to create a feeling; we’re there to create a feeling as well. Everybody comes to get a magic going. And everybody walks away with a slightly different feeling or interpretation, the same as if you were looking at a painting. I remember a guy coming up to us when we were in the Guess Who and saying, “Would you play Levis?” He was referring to “These Eyes.” He though it was about blue jeans! You don’t want to destroy his world.