One of the biggest B-sides of 1970 started with a street scolding. Randy Bachman of the Guess Who has said he heard the line “you ain’t getting no sugar tonight” from a woman about five feet tall as she hauled her biker husband away from his friends on a California sidewalk, and it became “No Sugar Tonight.”
The anecdote is circulating again this week on Reddit’s r/todayilearned, and it matches the guitarist’s own account as recorded in the song’s documented history.
The sidewalk scene
As Bachman tells it, he was walking down a California street carrying a stack of records when three bikers he described as “tough-looking biker guys” came toward him. Feeling uneasy, he was looking for a gap to cross to the other side.
Then a small car pulled up. A woman got out and lit into one of the men: where had he been all day, why had he left her alone with the kids, why was the trash still sitting there, and what was he doing down here looking at girls. His friends quietly drifted off. Alone and deflated, he climbed into the car, and before she drove off she delivered the parting shot: “And one more thing, you ain’t getting no sugar tonight”.
Bachman never forgot it.
Too short, so they stitched on a second song
He turned the phrase into a brief tune in F-sharp. When he played it for singer Burton Cummings and the band’s label, RCA, the verdict was that it did not run long enough. The fix was a happy coincidence: Cummings had his own unfinished piece, “New Mother Nature,” in the same key. The pair joined the two, and the medley “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature” landed on the 1970 album American Woman.
Here is how the two versions compare:
- Album medley with “New Mother Nature”: 4 minutes 52 seconds.
- Single side without it: 2 minutes 4 seconds.
In other words, the album cut is more than twice as long as the bare song RCA had called too short, about 2 minutes 48 seconds longer.
Riding on the back of “American Woman”
For the single, RCA put the shorter “No Sugar Tonight” on the flip side of “American Woman,” the band’s own improvised hit. That song had been born onstage in southern Ontario when Bachman, retuning after replacing a broken string, stumbled on a riff and the band jammed around it while Cummings made up the words. Bachman remembered the venue as a show in Kitchener; Cummings has placed it at a curling rink in Scarborough.
Released in March 1970, the double-sided single went to No. 1 on both the US Hot 100 and Canada’s RPM chart, holding the top spot for three weeks starting May 9. At a time when one US trade chart still ranked each side of a single separately, “No Sugar Tonight” registered there on its own at No. 39.
The record was certified gold in the US on May 22, 1970, less than two weeks into its run at the top. “No Sugar Tonight” alone later went gold in Canada.
A line that kept traveling
Other artists picked the song up quickly. The Shirelles covered “No Sugar Tonight” on a 1971 album, the band Bang recorded it in 1972, and jam band Widespread Panic has played it on live albums. “New Mother Nature” got its own cover from the Friends of Distinction in 1970, and reggae singer Nicky Thomas reworked it as “Lonely Feelin’.”
Canadian rock songs with unlikely origin stories are a recurring theme here; see our piece on Gordon Lightfoot’s recording of his Edmund Fitzgerald ballad, and Ann Wilson’s account of how Page and Plant reacted to Heart’s “Stairway to Heaven”.
The single was recorded in 1969 at RCA’s Mid-America Recording Center in Chicago, with Jack Richardson producing. The woman on the sidewalk was never named, but her parting line became the hook of a 2-minute-4-second B-side that went gold in Canada.
Further reading
Image: Kevin Payravi, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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