Happy Birthday Blair Thornton!

Blair Thornton, gutiarist for Bachman-Turner Overdrive is 61 years old today.  I suspect that he still looks 20+ years younger than he is.  I've met him on a few occasions and is approachable.  However, he was never one to seek the spotlight during his time with BTO and we know very little about him.

We do know that he still lives in the same neighborhood in west Vancouver where he grew up.  He's an avid golfer, and I'd guess that he's a fixture on one of the golf courses in the Vancouver area.  His guitars of choice in the 70s were the Gibson models, particularly the SG and the Les Pauls.  Later on he switched to a customized Fender Strat.  When I asked him why he switched, he told me that the Gibsons weren't holding up on the road as well as he would have liked, and that he had a couple of them break on him.  He then went into a detailed technical description of the how he had his Strat customized.

Any BTO fan will readily acknowledge that he's one of the top guitarists, and I can personally attest to that.  One time when he was playing in Tucson, he was ripping out the solo for the song "Gimme Your Money Please" and he broke a string.  He never broke stride, he stayed true to that solo (which I'd seen him do before) and did NOT miss a note.  It was like he didn't need that string after all.  After the song guitarist Randy Murray loaned him one of his guitars, and Randy played his backup while Blair did the next song with Randy's #1 guitar.  Then with the song after that, one of the techs handed back Blair the strat with the string replaced.

One other anecdote is worthy of passing along.

After a show that they did in Las Vegas, I was hanging around the band after their "meet and greet".  They were delighted that three of us had come all the way up from Tucson to see them, and we were invited to stay and chat with them a while.  I was telling Blair that a song that he co-wrote, "Four Wheel Drive", was the first song that I played in my truck when I got my CD player put in....after all, it's a 4WD truck and I felt that no other song could be the first one played in it.

He liked hearing that, and as we were conversing a drunken fan then came up to us.

This drunken fan had mistaken *me* for a member of BTO!  He started shaking my hand, telling me that I had played really well that night, and that he had followed us for a long time.  Ole Blair went right along with that, saying "Oh yeah.....I haven't heard him play that good for several years now.  He hasn't played that well since 1997".  The fan thanked me again, and left, and probably was bragging to his friends the next day that he had gotten to shake hands with one of the guitarists from Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

So......can I say that for a brief moment, that I was a member of BTO?

Happy Birthday, Blair!  And thanks for memories that will last me a lifetime!

Here's a YouTube video of "Four Wheel Drive", live in 2004.  Blair's the one with the sunglasses.

Four Wheel Drive