Legendary Canadian guitarist Randy Bachman has no mixed feelings whatsoever about playing heavy rock at age 80. “It feels really freakin’ great. And you know what’s good about it? I’ve lost the top end of my hearing, so now I can really let it blast. Just like (the late Who bassist) John Entwistle used to do when we were in Ringo’s band: He was pretty deaf, so he had amps the size of refrigerators. His volume had the rest of us rolling around in pain.”

There should be no lack of volume when the modern version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive hits the Chevalier March 9. Bachman put the band back together last year, though without the other original members: His brothers Tim and Robbie both passed during the pandemic, and co-frontman Fred Turner has retired. (Son Tal Bachman of “She’s So High” fame has joined on guitar). For Bachman it’s all about playing the vintage songs again, including a handful of hits that he wrote with his previous band, the Guess Who.

“I’ve written fifteen classic songs that everyone recognizes,” he said. “And you know how you do that? You write fifteen hundred. You think everything is the greatest song in the world when you’re writing it, or else you wouldn’t finish it. Then you put it out and nobody likes it but your girlfriend and your mother, so you move on to the next one. Then you’re bewildered and befuddled when one of them gets on the radio.”

His most famous song, “Takin’ Care of Business” actually took years; it began as a Guess Who song called “White Collar Worker” that just wasn’t working. “It was terrible. People were gagging on the chorus, it sounded like ‘Paperback Writer’ and I said Lennon and McCartney would sue us if we ever put it out. So you flash forward a few years, I’m driving to a BTO show, and I hear my favorite DJ on the radio say, ‘We’re taking care of business!’ So that night I tell the band to go into ‘White Collar Worker’ and I start singing those words. Suddenly the audience is singing it back to us and I’m shouting back, ‘Every day! Every way!’ So I guess the angels of song felt sorry for me: I work on the thing for six years, then I write  it in three minutes onstage.”

He remembers one particular honor associated with that song: “It wound up becoming a pretty big karaoke song, and I remember getting my first check from Karaoke, Ltd — a check for 81 cents. I had that check framed and it’s still on my wall.”

Recently he and former Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings made headlines by suing the current version of the band, which includes neither of them. “It’s gotten to the point of false advertising, they’re using pictures of us and the old records to promote the shows, so the fans don’t know we aren’t there. They lease out the name to a bunch of heavy metal guys who couldn’t make it with their own bands, guys who weren’t even alive when we did ‘American Woman’.”

But Bachman is still having the time of his life playing the classic rock circuit. “When I play one of those cruises and see my old buddies like Lynyrd Skynyrd and ZZ Top, it feels like we were all on the same hockey team. We’re giving people several decades of music, and it’s an ongoing celebration.”