Last week we had The Replacements, and bear with me now this one’s a bit convoluted. A replacement is something akin to a substitute, and in the history of rock and roll no substitute made more of a mark than that discussed by latter day trout farmer Roger Daltrey who sang of being “a substitute for another guy“. But really, we’re not featuring The Who here – so with this train of thought who could we feature? Can you Guess Who? Try. Take a Guess, Who could it be? Jeez….it’s the frickin’ The Guess Who.
Lester Bangs, in the form of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, may have described them as “having the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic“, which pretty well mirrors what Lester Bangs in the form of Lester Bangs wrote about them in his review of ‘Live at the Paramount‘, but that backhanded compliment overlooks that The Guess Who could, on occasion, actually attain the heights of pop music profundity and even a rough Canadian beatnik poetry. I know, who knew? And here they are demonstrating that on a lament for impending environmental disasters and the hunting to extinction of wildlife. And lucky for us that they did, otherwise 50 years after the release of this song who knows what terrible position the world might have found itself in. Wildlife hanging on at the brink of extinction, climate change, acid rain, rampant pollution – thank goodness everyone listened to the voices of the ecological saviours of the Sixties and Seventies, eh?
