Back in the 70s component of takin’ care of small business for Bachman-Turner Overdrive meant performing underneath a big steel replica of the band’s gear-shaped logo, with flashing lights — a visual gimmick as heavy as the opening chords of “Not Fragile” or “Four Wheel Drive.”

The quartet applied the prop all through its arena-filling heyday, when it had 3 albums in the Top 50 of the Billboard 200 chart (BTO II, Not Fragile, Four Wheel Drive) and “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” lodged at No. 1. “that thing weighed tons,” Randy Bachman tells UCR. It was tonnage. It was constructed on a single-inch plywood all bolted with each other, and it had true sockets and wire and true lightbulbs and true neon. It was out of Army Navy Surplus you get a significant round chunk of wood or a significant overdrive gar from a saw mill in British Columbia, exactly where they are cutting logs to make lumber. You go with what you got, appropriate?”

By 1976, however, the going was getting tougher with hauling around the gear around the world. So the final gig of the tour wound up being the last hurrah for BTO’s signature stage accoutrement.

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“Someone had invented superior lights that had been lighter and stuff,” Bachman recalls. “So when we completed our final gig (of the tour) we’re driving by means of Texas, like Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner sort of territory, and there had been these cactuses out there. We backed up to a single, took the BTO issue and threw it more than a cactus and left it there in the middle of the desert and drove off.

“So that gear is somewhere. We replicate it now onstage, but everything is so much lighter and faster and easier.” Bachman nonetheless says that recovering the original gear “would be incredible. I would pay to get that back right now.”

Why Bachman Turner Overdrive is Back on the Road

Bachman is touring once more beneath the BTO name, playing the band’s hits as nicely as some favorites from his days in the Guess Who and “She’s So High,” a hit from his son Tal Bachman, who’s component of the band. The shows also develop a medley about BTO’s “Hey You” that contains a quantity of other rock hits from AC/DC, Free, the Steve Miller Band, the Rolling Stones, Frankie Valli and extra.

“I’d been playing a good 12 years as the Randy Bachman Band, but because of my brothers’ (deaths in 2023) and different things going on I got the rights to BTO back,” Bachman explains. “So why call it the Randy Bachman Band when I’m doing the same songs. The (BTO) name has a ka-ching to it that people recognize. It’s really rewarding to go out and play 15 or 20 hit songs that everybody just sits there and hungers for and consumes it and breathes it and gets up and screams and dances.”

Watch BTO Perform Live

Bachman and firm have the blessing of former bandmates C.F. “Fred” Turner and Blair Thornton, who he says “might” make guest appearances for the duration of occasional BTO shows. “They both have had health issues, and Fred lost his wife in the last six months so he’s recovering from that,” says Bachman, who himself underwent profitable cancer treatment options lately. “Hopefully they’ll make it out, but when we’re on stage we’re showing old films of BTO and Blair Thornton’s there, Fred Turner’s there, my brother Robbie’s there, on drums. We’re celebrating, just like if you go see Queen, Freddie’s (Mercury) gonna come out (on screen) and everybody sings ‘BoRap’ (‘Bohemian Rhapsody’) with him. Lynyrd Skynyrd does the same thing.”