The Guess Who’s founding singer, Burton Cummings, and guitarist Randy Bachman have settled their lawsuit with fellow original members Jim Kale and Garry Peterson and acquired the trademark to their former band’s name, ending a bitter dispute over the legacy of one of Canada’s most famed classic rock acts.
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The settlement comes nearly a year after Cummings and Bachman first sued Kale, Peterson, and the band — which they called a “cover band” — over false advertising claims. Cummings and Bachman alleged in their lawsuit last October that the band had used recordings that Bachman and Cummings wrote and performed to “give the false impression that Plaintiffs are performing as part of the cover band.”
“It’s been a very stressful period, but I’m relieved that it’s behind us and confident that I can come back to the states with my band and play all my songs,” Cummings tells Rolling Stone. “There’s been a fake band out there for a long time using the real records to promote their shows, and it handcuffed me in many ways. We’re trying to preserve the history and the legacy of the Guess Who for our fans all over the place have who have followed the real band and the real songs.”
Bachman and Cummings declined to give details about the settlement beyond confirming that they acquired the trademark through the settlement. Cummings says he, Bachman, and Peterson spent
“many hours” in mediation in Los Angeles to reach the agreement.
“It was an impossible task, and suddenly the impossible became possible,” Bachman tells Rolling Stone . “We fulfilled our dream of writing hit songs and performing them, then to have it kind of fall apart. To be able to come back together as partners and shut down the bad reputation being formed by the false advertising and fraudulent band is really good, and I look forward to what’s ahead.”
The dispute over the Guess Who name goes back years. The band had apparently never filed a trademark claim for its name during the height of its fame in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and by 1986, Kale had filed a trademark request for the Guess Who name. Kale had arranged tours with a heavily rotating lineup since then, with Peterson also joining in the late Eighties. Kale retired in 2016, leaving Peterson as the sole original member in the band. But Peterson played infrequently with the band, Cummings and Bachman said, leaving the Guess Who with no original members for some shows.
After filing their lawsuit, Bachman and Cummings had taken a particularly aggressive and unprecedented approach to stopping the band from performing their previously scheduled shows. Cummings — who owns the publishing rights to the Guess Who’s biggest songs, including “American Woman,” “These Eyes,” and “No Time” — had terminated the performing rights agreement with his performing rights organization, effectively removing the ability for the band (or anyone else) to perform the songs at concert venues.
In doing so, Cummings sacrificed any royalties he’d make not just from public performances at concerts, but also from radio airplay and placements in films and TV shows. While it was a personally costly move, it proved effective, with the band being forced to cancel gigs since they couldn’t play the hits.
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“It was painful, but we’d have done it indefinitely just to stop that fake band from taking over our history,” Cummings says. “They took over streaming sites; they were using old photos of me and Randy. It gets me going thinking about it, but that’s over. It’s a painful success. It cost a lot of money with lawyers and I gave up a lot of publishing money, but we finally won this terrible battle.”
Some outstanding questions remain, though. For one, what becomes of the band that had been calling themselves the Guess Who for all these previous years? Would they continue touring as another act?
The band’s Facebook page has been updated as the name Plein D’Amour, the same name of an album the band put out under the Guess Who name last year. The band’s X account has removed all its tweets minus one video of one of the band’s newer members promoting Plein D’Amour. As for what happens with that album, Cummings says the former band “is going to have to rebrand anything they’ve done that says Guess Who on it.” As of this story’s publication, the album is still on the Guess Who’s streaming profiles.
An attorney representing Kale, Peterson and the Guess Who did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.
When asked about what comes next for what they called the cover band, Cummings and Bachman seemed uninterested. “I’m not concerned with the other band. Don’t even know who they are, it doesn’t matter to me,” Bachman says. “When you’re a football player, you’re not thinking about who gets traded for you when you get signed by a team. As far as I know, they’ve been earning a living for decades, trading off the Guess Who names and playing the song that Burton and I wrote, pretending they were us.”
Cummings and Bachman haven’t confirmed any tour dates but are hopeful to be playing the songs again. The two have been busy with their own projects, with Cummings touring on his own while Bachman is touring with his other group Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Bachman has also been working on a documentary on the lost guitar he finally got back 45 years after it was stolen from him. The documentary is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this month. He said he “looks forward in the future to Burton and I touring as the Guess Who.”
As Cummings adds: “If there is a group out there calling themselves the Guess Who, it’s going to have the lead singer who wrote the songs and the guitarist who made the riffs. It’s going to have Bachman and Cummings in it. I say ‘if’ because we don’t know. Randy has a lot of bookings, and I’ve got solo gigs. What we do know is that Randy and I are happy because there isn’t a fake Guess Who out there anymore.”
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