What: Burton Cummings with Wil
When: Sunday, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Alix Goolden Performance Hall (907 Pandora Ave.)
Tickets: $99.50 at Lyle’s Place and the Royal and McPherson box office; online at hightideconcerts.net, ticketweb.ca, and rmts.bc.ca; by phone at 1-888-222-6608 or 250-386-6121
Note: Cummings also performs Monday at the Cowichan Theatre
Burton Cummings is back in Canada this week for a stretch of dates he’s calling the In Your Backyard Tour.
When he sits behind his Yamaha piano Sunday for his Alix Goolden Performance Hall concert, the 67-year-old won’t be far from his actual backyard. Though he lives most of the year in California, the former Guess Who frontman also has one Canadian residence at the moment: a 10-acre homestead near Elk Lake that he has owned since the early 1980s.
“I feel very at home in Victoria,” Cummings said this week from Los Angeles.
He no longer maintains a home in his native Winnipeg, which boasts a theatre named in his honour. His familial ties to the city disappeared when his mother died two years ago, prompting Cummings to sell his longtime residence in the city.
Vancouver Island is his Canadian home nowadays, for about three months a year.
“I don’t miss the 40 below,” he said of Winnipeg. “I really don’t.”
The relationship dates back well before he purchased land on Vancouver Island.
The first time he visited Victoria, in 1966, Cummings was just 18. He would visit many more times during the Guess Who’s early days, prompting a writing session with bandmate Randy Bachman that resulted in the Guess Who’s second U.S. Top 10 single.
“We wrote Laughing on our old bus, after we had either played Victoria or Nanaimo or were about to play in Victoria and Nanaimo,” he said.
“Randy and I started messing around and before the ferry left, we had written it.”
The band’s first U.S. hit, These Eyes, is never far from his memory bank (nor, for that matter, is American Woman, the proceeds from which allow him to live comfortably).
Cummings doesn’t forget anything, actually. He’s a likable raconteur, with no shortage of stories, like the one about the night he drove Doors frontman Jim Morrison around for five hours one night, in the singer’s Shelby Mustang, or the nine dates he played as the keyboardist in Ringo Starr’s all-star band.
“If you hang around long enough, you’re going to have a lot of stories to tell,” he said with a laugh.
Lately, generous offers have seen him work extensively on the casino circuit south of the border, something Cummings overwhelmingly enjoys.
His upcoming tour of Canada took months of lead time and great amounts of planning to arrange. When you arrive for a one-off casino gig, however, everything is taken care of well in advance, he said.
“I’m becoming a regular in Vegas. I’ll be there in May for the third time in a year and a half. There are so many casinos now that want entertainment. As you travel around the States, there’s a casino on every corner, it seems.”
What most fans love about Cummings are both his catalogue of hits and his willingness to play them. He’s tired of hearing about rock stars who eschew their famous songs for deep album cuts or new material. In this day and age, with record sales at an all-time low, performers need to thank their audience for keeping the faith.
The easiest way to do that is to run through the hit parade in concert.
Cummings has always been a strong singer and performer, having learned his craft at a young age. He took piano lessons at age five, and was in the church choir a few years after that, before becoming the lead singer of the Guess Who at just 19.
Cummings appears to be in fine shape vocally; he no longer tours for months on end, preferring to pick and choose his spots, which keeps him fresh, he admitted.
His skills are coming in handy at the moment, as he watches performer after performer take to the stage without doing their homework.
“The absolute apex of importance in any career now are the live shows. I’ve kept myself in pretty good shape, so we put on a good live show. I’m still hitting the notes, and people tell me I sound as good if not better than ever.”
That task is less cumbersome than one would imagine, Cummings said. Even his most ardent fans have grown right along with him, so it’s not as if he’s playing to the same people every night.
“Every year that goes by, the songs become more special, and the lives of the people in the audience change. Life changes, so when I come back every year and sing those songs, it’s like a time machine for people. And I don’t shy away from the hit records.
“I’m not into shoving a lot of new stuff down people’s throats, not at this stage in my life. I know why they’re coming to see us. We try and send everybody home happy. So they are going to hear the songs they came to hear.”
His strong cast of supporting musicians allows him to move in a variety of directions on stage. During his Vancouver Island dates (he also plays Monday at the Cowichan Theatre), he’ll run through the Guess Who catalogue and selections of solo material; he might even throw in a few cover songs from time to time.
He’s having a blast playing music these days, and even though Cummings has plenty of projects on the go at the moment — a book of poetry, due later this year; a documentary video series about his career, shot over 11 years; and another new album — he is committed to playing hits like These Eyes, No Time, Laughing, Break it to Them Gently, Stand Tall and dozens of others until people ask him to stop.
“What I hear a lot is: ‘Oh my God, I forgot he sang all those songs.’ Through the Guess Who years, there’s still about 15 of those songs that are on the radio all the time, and then all my solo stuff after that. It’s been a remarkable 50 years or so.”