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  • 2010-06-15 (xsd:date)
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  • Did a Pizza Delivery Man Play Piano on BTO's 'Takin' Care of Business'? (en)
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  • A common type of tale within the realm of urban legendry is the story of the stranger who (despite being a novice or amateur in the field) suddenly shows up and makes a small yet vital contribution to an enterprise — a key idea or suggestion that, simple as it may be, had never occurred to any of the professional experts. (One of the better known examples of this genre is the tale of the stranger who stands the soft drink industry on its head by appearing at Coca-Cola's headquarters one day and offering the company's executives a revolutionary two-word idea: Bottle it!) Another tale in this mode is the anecdote of the pizza delivery man who, having dropped off a pie at the studio where the Canadian group Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO) was in the process of recording Takin' Care of Business (a #12 hit for BTO in 1974), not only offered the suggestion that the song was lacking a boogie-woogie piano part, but sat down at the instrument and proceeded to play it before vanishing into the night, with his musical efforts being retained on the finished track: This version of events has seemingly been corroborated by BTO singer-guitarist Randy Bachman multiple times, including the following 2002 interview with Canadian newsman Peter Mansbridge: However, in another interview given the same year, Randy Bachman's brother, BTO drummer Robin Robbie Bachman, averred that although the recording of the piano track on BTO's Takin' Care of Business did involve a pizza box, the intriguing version of events that has the keyboard part being suggested and played by an anonymous delivery man was an embellishment of Randy's -- the mystery pianist was not someone who had just happened to stop by to deliver a pizza, but rather a musician who was already present in the facility because he was working with the Steve Miller Band in an adjacent studio: Whose version is correct? In September 2010, Randy Bachman and Fred Turner were interviewed on Seattle radio station KZOK in conjunction with their release of a new album and upcoming live appearances, and the radio hosts also undertook a telephone interview with Norman Durkee specifically to ask him about this legend. Durkee's account of his part in the recording of Takin' Care of Business differed in some details from both of the Bachmans', but the gist of his explanation was to confirm that the main element of the legendary version was untrue -- he was not a piano-playing pizza delivery guy who fortuitously dropped off a pie at a music studio on the day Takin' Care of Business was being recorded, but an established professional musician who was present in the studio because he was recording commercials when he was asked to add a piano part to a BTO song: Here's the final version of the song as released, including Norman Durkee's piano part: https://youtu.be/NCIUf8eYPqA (en)
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