Denise McCann
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Denise McCann (Bachman) | |
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 Denise McCann album (1977, Polydor Records)
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Denise Eliane Helene McCann |
| Born | December 16, 1948 |
| Origin | USA |
| Genre(s) | Rock, Disco, Celtic |
| Occupation(s) | Singer/Songwriter |
| Instrument(s) | guitar, mandolin, hurdy-gurdy, percussion |
| Voice type(s) | soprano |
| Years active | 1971-present |
| Label(s) | Polydor Canada, Ltd., Butterfly/EMI Records USA, RCA Canada, |
| Associated acts | Randy Bachman |
Denise McCann (born December 16, 1948 in the small Mississippi riverside city of Clinton, Iowa) is an American-Canadian singer/songwriter.
[edit] Biography
Growing up in a musical family, (her grandfather Albert Hews McCann, Sr. was a professional cornet player and singer in Shreveport, Louisiana) Denise began performing early, taking the stage from the age of eight years.
The McCann family moved to California in 1960, first to Berkeley, then Mountain View, and finally Castro Valley, where she attended high school at first Foothill High in Hayward, then the newly-built Canyon High School in Castro Valley in 1964.
McCann became part of the hippie movement during 1967's "Summer of Love" when she worked at the Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais and then at the Monterey Pop Festival, where she was befriended by a nervous Jimi Hendrix just before his seminal performance. She appears in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary "Monterey Pop!"
She went on to become a folk singer and songwriter, appearing many times at famed San Francisco folk clubs during the early 1970s, such as The Holy City Zoo, The Drinking Gourd, and The Coffee Gallery, where she would play her distinctive Gibson J-50 guitar (named Betsy Gibson) and sing her self-penned songs.
In 1972 she joined with Bob Smith and Roy Michaels of "Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys" to form a new group called "Rich and Famous (and Denise)". The group only played a few gigs before going their separate ways.
McCann travelled to British Columbia in 1973 and discovered that there she could actually make a living as a singer, so she moved permanently to Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood, where she became a fixture performing at local clubs such as "Rohan's Rockpile" (see music of Vancouver) and The Commodore Ballroom.
In 1975, McCann teamed up with Guy Sobell, who produced her first single, the country-tinged "It Still Hurts" and its proposed B side "Tattoo Man". But her record label, Polydor Records in Montreal, decided the second song was far too rocking and intense to serve as the B side to this country song, and they asked Sobell to extend it by adding a 2-minute percussion break in the middle so they could market it in the new clubs that were springing up all over Montreal. These clubs were playing a new genre of music that was called "Disco" for the discotheques where the beat-heavy dance music was popular and they wanted long, extended pieces that could be mixed by the club DJs to make them seamlessly meld into one another. Sobell complied with the request and "Tattoo Man" was released as a five-minute extended play LP that became a hit on the disco charts all over North America during 1977.
McCann's follow-up record was "I Don't Wanna Forget You", a song that featured an astonishing four-octave vocal arpeggio improvisation at the end of the first verse. This second release received far more commercial radio exposure than "Tattoo Man".
McCann was signed to the ill-fated and short-lived Disco specialty label "Butterfly Records" in Hollywood in 1978, and was thereafter dogged by having her record label go out of business twice just as her albums ("Midnight Madness" and "I Have A Destiny") were released, causing her work to vanish before it got to the public's attention.
She continued to work professionally in Canada in many bands, including the Basil Watson Revue, Mad Ivan and the Hornets, Denise McCann Band, Denise McCann and the Dead Marines, Headpins, and The Night Train Revue. She also appeared as a featured performer on many Canadian TV shows, including The Alan Hamel Show and its replacement The Alan Thicke Show, the Wolfman Jack Show, The Paul Anka Show, and the Rene Simard Show.
In December 1981 McCann met Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive at a Christmas fundraiser concert and they married in March of 1982. She became a Canadian citizen in 1989.
Since then she has performed and written exclusively with Bachman. They have one child together, daughter Callianne, born Feb. 10, 1984, and currently co-hosts the CBC Radio One Show on Friday and Saturday nights called "Randy's Vinyl Tap".
