Development
"You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" was written by Randy Bachman. In The Rolling Stone Record Guide, writer Dave Marsh called the song "a direct steal from The Who," but "an imaginative one." The chords of the chorus riff are very similar to the ones used by The Who in their song "Baba O'Riley," and also, the stuttering vocal is indeed reminiscent of "My Generation." Randy insists that the song was performed as a joke for his brother, Gary, who had a stutter, with no intention of sounding like "My Generation." They only intended to record it once with the stutter and send the only recording to Gary.
Randy developed the song while recording BTO's third album, Not Fragile. It began as an instrumental piece inspired by the rhythm guitar of Dave Mason. Randy says "it was basically just an instrumental and I was fooling around... I wrote the lyrics, out of the blue, and stuttered them through." The band typically used the song as a "work track" in the studio to get the amplifiers and microphones set properly.
But when winding up production for their third album, Charlie Fach of Mercury Records said the eight tracks they had lacked the "magic" that would make a hit single. Some band members asked Randy, "what about the work track?" Randy reluctantly mentioned that he had this ninth song, but didn't intend to use it on a record. He said, "We have this one song, but it's a joke. I'm laughing at the end. I sang it on the first take. It's sharp, it's flat, I'm stuttering to do this thing for my brother."
Fach asked to hear it, and they played the recording for him. Fach smiled and said "That's the track. It's got a brightness to it. It kind of floats a foot higher than the other songs when you listen to it."
Bachman agreed to rearrange the album sequence so the song could be added, but only if he could re-record the vocals first, without the stutter. Fach agreed, but Bachman says "I tried to sing it normal, but I sounded like Frank Sinatra. It didn't fit." Fach said to leave it as it was, with the stutter.
Gary Bachman has since undergone speech therapy to conquer his stutter.
Read more about this topic: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)