Gary James' Interview With
a member of The Guess Who touring group
for thirty years
Leonard Shaw



Leonard Shaw has one impressive resume! He's performed with a wide range of singers and musicians in the Pop and Rock 'n' Roll music field. In 1990 he played his first gig with the touring version of The Guess Who and joined the band through the '90s and 2004 until 2023. Leonard Shaw spoke with us about his musical journey through the decades.

Q - You credit your parents with the love and support to pursue your music career. Do you realize how fortunate you were to have parents like that? My brothers are musicians. When they were in their teenage years and they were in bands, my father said, "You can make more money stealing hubcaps."

A - (laughs)

Q - It sounds funny, but he was dead serious.

A - Well, yeah. There's all kinds of jokes about musicians. You know, "What do you say when you get your job? Would you like fries with that?" (laughs) The other one I like is, "Why does the drummer leave his drumsticks on the dashboard? So he can park in the handicap zone!" There's no question making money in the music business is a real challenge. It really comes from an earnest and honest desire within to keep wanting to do it. Needless to say, I've had my very lean years as a musician. My parents were both very supportive of everything I did. I was very fortunate to be born to parents who were later in life and more established. My dad was an optician. He was also a musician. He had played in the St. James Symphony and when he heard the Paul Whiteman Big Band he traded his violin in on a saxophone and clarinet instead of playing in dance bands. So, he was quite inspired by music. After he retired he was taking piano lessons, actually organ lessons. He learned how to do the three way split between the right and left hand and foot pedals on the Hammond organ. He actually became quite proficient at that after teaching me how to play the horns when I went into middle school, or junior high school we call it up here in Canada. Sadly, most younger musicians in this day and age have to have a day job to support themselves because the payment for jobs hasn't gone up over the years. It's still the same as it was when I started out, but the difference was when I started playing in my teens and traveling and playing bars, there were six nights and sometimes a Saturday afternoon matinee. You were seven shows a week sometimes.

Q - That's the difference. There were venues.

A - There were venues that supported live music. Actually, in Manitoba it was the law. You had to have live entertainment to serve alcohol after they lowered the drinking age to nineteen. So, it was kind of a perfect storm of live music being popular and young people drinking. It was a match made in Heaven and everybody had fun. Different times.

Q - When the drinking age was raised to twenty-one it killed a lot of business.

A - It's a rough go. You have to be committed and you have to want to do it, but unfortunately that leads to a lot of people who keep at it because they have a support structure in place. They will play for the $100 fee or less per night and that's kind of sad.

Q - And when you were out there, there were a lot of places to play. What decade are we talking about, the '70s?

A - Yeah, the early '70s. I started playing the the '60s, but I was actually on the road in the '70s. I had a piano trio. There was one gig we had in town and it was kind of a rough bar. We did two shows a day. We did 1 PM to 5 PM and 9 PM to 1 AM. We had to do five, forty-five minutes sets, twice a day. At that gig I was just playing keyboards and singing with a bass player and a drummer. It was a lot of work. Fortunately I was young and I guess I had enough tenacity to hang in for all those tunes.

Q - How may days a week did you do that?

A - That was six days. That was a one-off. That was the only gig I've ever done in my life like that where I played that much.

Q - How many weeks did you do that?

A - It was just a one week gig. But most of the gigs, as I said earlier, we were on the road for six nights and then sometimes traveling on the Sunday to get to the next one. Occasionally there'd be a Saturday afternoon matinee or jam thing. Then it snuck down to four nights a week or three nights a week, just weekends. Now it's almost all one-nighters in bars, which still don't pay any money. Locally anyway.

Q - You went to a music college.

A - Yeah. I started off playing Rock music like pretty much everybody in my generation, inspired by The Beatles and The Stones and The Animals. I was always into the keyboards. I loved The Doors. I joined a Blues band and then I got to solo. I said, "Hey, this is cool." Then I got turned onto Jazz music, the classics, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Roland Kirk. When Miles went electric and the Jazz fusion thing broke, that's when I was completely hooked. I loved Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jeff Beck and all of those early Miles Davis records and Herbie Hancock. I got more inspired by that. Then Steely Dan came out in the early '70s, seemingly adding those elements to real Rock music with vocals and very intelligent lyrics, and it was very inspiring again. I was working with a coupe of guys who were in university. One went on to become an oral surgeon and the other one was an art student and has done many great things in his life. The drummer I was working with at the time said, "Let's go to music college. Let's do this. Let's get better at what we do and learn more about what we're doing." I'm really happy I did that. We chose to go West instead of East to Toronto and went to a school there called Grant MacEwan (University). I did graduate and took saxophone as my principal instrument, even though I'd been playing keyboards in Rock bands prior to that. Anyway, when I graduated, the band wanted to move to Toronto because of the volume of people and the work in that vicinity, and we did. So, it was kind of a faux pas, shall we say. If we would have moved to Toronto and gone to Humber College, we might have made some other connections and broke into the scene a little faster. But, I lived in Toronto for fifteen years and toured all over the province of Ontario, going into Quebec and going into the East Coast and doing those gigs and traveling across Canada with various tours. The schooling was wonderful. I had a great experience at Grant MacEwan.

Q - You can read music. You've got a leg up on everybody else.

A - I can read music and write charts and do arrangements. That helped me, although I was working mostly in bars where that wasn't really required. I'm happy to have that experience. I continued to do so in my time in Toronto and when I got back doing some band leading and arranging gigs for the bands I was working with. Putting together charts. It's another world of gigs if you have that skill set. There's other doors that are open to you, shall we say, as opposed to playing with some guys and memorizing all the stuff they're doing and playing it the same every night. It's nice to be able to have the ability to know other scales and chord options. That skill set is a wonderful asset to any musician.

Q - When you worked with people like Ben E. King, Del Shannon or Leslie Gore, were you touring with them or in the studio, recording with them?

A - No. In Toronto I ended up working with some wonderful groups of local musicians who were called Backstreet. They were hired to do a summer series at Ontario Place. It was called the Molson Waterfall Show Place. Great gig. A case of beer in the dressing room every night. Monday afternoon these artists would come into town and we'd do a rehearsal at a studio, run through their charts. Sometimes we'd have some stuff we'd look at earlier, but usually it was that day we'd look at the charts and then we'd jump up with them and do the opening act, our band, and join the headliner for their set. We did four nights, Monday through Thursday. We got to hang out with Peter Noone and all those acts you just mentioned, and just basically read their charts and do their gigs and sometimes get to know them a bit more. (laughs) Del Shannon, The Crystals. The Stylistics. There's so many bands. Quite a great run.

Q - Did you go into the studio to record with any of them?

A - Not those classic artists, no. I was in the studio with Ian Thomas, who was one of the best Canadian songwriters whose written many songs that other people have recorded. Very talented guy. I recorded with Dianne Heatherington and toured with her. A girl named Terry Crawford I toured with. With most of the Classic artists I just worked with onstage and later with The Guess Who. Some of them were still touring and I'd recognize and play with on a bill, on a multi-band bill shall we say, for car shows or city festivals or State Fairs.

Q - When you'd get these gigs, was it word of mouth or did you have an agent?

A - There was always an agent involved. They would pursue those gigs. Some in Toronto. You pretty much had to go through an agent to get any work.

Q - I don't know how old of a guy you are, but did you understand how popular The Guess Who were?

A - I'm from Winnipeg. I grew up in Winnipeg and The Guess Who were icons. They had huge songs that were getting played on the radio all the time. I lived in the neighborhood where three of the guys from the famous quartet lived lived in, the North End. So, I was familiar with them. Garry (Peterson) is about six years older than me and Jim (Kale) is about ten years older than me. They were just a few years ahead of me in the game, but they were doing major things with all the gigs they had with the TV shows and the touring. When they broke with "American Woman" they were on the top of the Pop charts. Of course we were aware. Winnipegers were very proud of The Guess Who.

Q - You played your first gig with the touring version of The Guess Who in 1990. Does that mean that maybe there were only one or two of the original members in the group at that time?

A - Well, most of the years I was in the band, Jim Kale and Garry Peterson, who were the eventual owners of the name for awhile, were in the band. They had at that time a good friend of mine who was in the gig, who promoted me in the position, shall we say, Dale Russell. He was the guitar player at the time. There's that one album we recorded. Dale, Jim and Garry and a singer name Terry Hatty. That's the "Lonely One" album in Canada. There's some original material there that we played together. Jim retired in 2016 from the touring version of the band I was in. There were some great bass players who came in after him. Jim was in the band most of the time I was in the band.

Q - Is there a Guess Who that's around today?

A - Well, Burton (Cummings) has re-secured the name. Actually, this is the first time in history that he's owned the name The Guess Who. That's in this last year. (2025) I think he just shelved it and works as Burton Cummings, the singer from The Guess Who. That's how he books himself. I'm not really sure in the marketing area how that's done. Jim and Garry have lost the rights to use the name and perform material because Burton stopped them from doing so.

Q - Where do you stand today with your musical career? What do you do?

A - Well, a lot less shall we say, (laughs) at this stage of the game. I was fortunate to have a great run with The Guess Who, almost thirty years. Ten years in the '90s and back in the saddle with Jim and Garry in 2004 and 2023. But, the band was never full-time, if you will. We'd fly and do some jobs on the weekend. It would vary from thirty to sixty dates a year. So, I was always doing other things around Winnipeg. I did kind of a jazzy duo/trio kind of thing. I was in a band called The Ministers Of Cool. We have a CD out of original material. I had a regular Sunday night house gig at The Kings Head pub here with All The Kings Men playing more Blues and Acid Rock, Progressive, jammy kind of stuff. As an arranger and a band leader, I did some tribute shows, put a show together with a wonderful singer doing Tina Turner, Tina Turner Tribute with dancers and musicians. There was a Rod Stewart guy I was involved with for a few shows, involved as a musical director for that. So, I've been playing constantly, doing other songs other than the material of The Guess Who. It wasn't like I was a one trick pony. I had other opportunities to play. And, I'm still doing that. I'm doing local gigs with various people, mostly in the Blues/Rock vein.

Q - Did you ever have a non-musical job?

A - For one year I was just Tour Manager with Kim Mitchell. (laughs) My current situation, The Ministers Of Cool has evolved. The band includes Larry Roy, who is a guitar aficionado and fantastic arranger was also a professor at the University Of Manitoba, teaching guitar and theory and improvisation. A great arranger. He's worked with the Winnipeg Jazz Orchestra here. We have done a couple of jobs with a large ensemble here in Winnipeg last March with WJO. Eighteen people on stage. Twelve horns and a six piece band, two vocalists. So, that's a really exciting project that I'm involved with now and I look forward to doing that.

Q - I just have to ask, did you ever see The Doors, Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix in concert?

A - I saw Janis here. Festival Express came through Winnipeg. Fantastic. Buddy Guy was on that bill, The Band. It was amazing actually. Mountain with Leslie West. Fantastic show. Unfortunately I did not get to see Jimi Hendrix live. I never saw The Doors live.

Q - I don't suppose there was ever an opportunity to interact with Janis, was there?

A - Oh, no. Not for me at that stage. I think I was fifteen when I saw her. I'm quite sure I wasn't driving yet. That day was a fantastic day. It was an outdoor festival. It was at the stadium and it was just wonderful to hear all that live music. That concert and Mad Dogs And Englishmen, the movie, were big inspirations for me wanting to get out and play. I was in the school band when I was in junior high school and high school. We actually took a road trip on a train and went to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. The whole band played at Montreal Expo '68 and that was such a fun thing. I love to travel and play music. I started off doing what I found I love doing at a very early age. I was fortunate to have that opportunity and the support of family and friends and the school system. When The Beatles played on Ed Sullivan there was so much hype about it, my father actually recorded the audio version of the show onto a reel to reel tape recorder. It was such a big deal for him. He wanted to capture it and play it back again. At that point there were no video recorders.

Official Website: www.LeonardShaw.com

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