Review: Burton Cummings rocks baby boomers with Guess Who hits and that mustache

Like David Crosby and Tom Selleck, rock singer Burton Cummings of the Guess Who is a noted mustache.

The Guess Who? you ask.

The Winnipeg rock band was the first Canadian group to have a No. 1 hit song in the United States, with “American Woman” in 1970. The Guess Who had a run of seven Top 10 singles in the States from ’68 to ’75. They were Canada’s biggest band until Rush came along, and they remain a staple on oldies radio stations.

Celebrating his 60th Anniversary Hits Tour, Guess Who frontman Cummings showed up with that mustache Monday night at the Medina Entertainment Center. He treated a full house of 2,000 baby boomers to an evening of heartwarming hits from the 8-track and cassette era, as he called it.

Engaging and gracious Cummings, 77, had plenty of corny jokes and the right spirit with the right nostalgic, sing-along repertoire. While he sang with commitment and animated eyebrows, his voice is thinner and not as rich as in his heyday, when he had one of most splendid and underappreciated voices in rock ‘n’ roll. In his Guess Who days, he could deliver ballads with heartfelt lows and operatic highs as well as rock out like a full-tilt screamer.

Monday’s 95-minute set was filled with Guess Who classics, an obscure J.J. Cale tune and one selection from last fall’s commendable “A Few Good Moments,” Cummings’ first album of new material in 16 years. He surprisingly didn’t offer “Stand Tall,” his adult contemporary solo smash from 1976. As for the new number, “Blackjack Fever” was a lumbering rocker featuring Cummings’ piano pounding punctuated with showy glissandos.

That tune underscored what the amiable Cummings shared about his life story: that his mom made him take piano lessons as a child but he went to school on early rockers Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino.

Cummings talked about life in Winnipeg, dreaming of becoming a hockey player and making trips to the “big city” of Minneapolis as a kid. He was particularly struck by the Foshay Tower, then the city’s tallest skyscraper. “Is it Foe-shay or Fawsh-eh?” he asked the Medina audience.

Guess he might know a little something about classic buildings since a 1,600-seat Winnipeg venue, built in 1907, was renamed the Burton Cummings Theatre for the Performing Arts in 2002.

Backed Monday by a solid five-man band who provided superb vocal harmonies, Cummings played mostly electric piano, as well as a little electric guitar, harmonica and flute, for a jazzy 16-bar solo on “Undun” (after warning that Jethro Tull’s “Ian Anderson has nothing to worry about”).

Sporting a Jim Morrison T-shirt under a black unbuttoned shirt decorated with patches for Queen, the Doors and others, Cummings and his band got lost in a mysterious Doors groove as a prelude to “American Woman.” Guitarists Joe Augello and Tim Bovaconti fired up the epic piano-less rocker before Cummings chanted “goodbye American” three times near the song’s end.

The Canadian did not broach the topic of tariffs or his country becoming the 51st state. He twice mentioned that it was good to be back performing in the United States after what he called a “fake” Guess Who, led by its former bass player, had been touring under that name for many years. Last year, Cummings and Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman, the principal songwriters, earned the exclusive rights to use the moniker.

On Monday, Cummings dug into the catalog of the Guess Who, a grown-up garage band that was neither hip nor hippie-ish in the Woodstock era. With its Beatles-y intro, “Hand Me Down World” evoked the Fab Four as did the goofy “Albert Flasher,” almost a nod to “Rocky Raccoon.” Cummings didn’t try for his high notes on “These Eyes,” but the emotions still connected; he did salvage an uneven “Undun” with a big held note near the end.

The standouts were the blistering “American Woman,” the hippie-ish encore “Share the Land,” the rocking “No Time” with vocal harmonies evoking Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a souvenir T-shirt with a high-contrast photo of a vintage Cummings and that mustache.