No. 65 – Bachman-Turner Overdrive, ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’

Record label folk usually take a lot of flack for interfering in the creative process, but Bachman-Turner Overdrive's entry on our Top 100 Classic Rock Songs list may not have been heard by anyone outside the band's inner circle if it weren't for their A&R guy.

According to an interview credited to the Billboard Book of Number One Hits, Randy Bachman explains that he never intended for the song to be included on the band's 1974 album 'Not Fragile.'

Instead, he recorded it on a lark, complete with stammering "Bu-bu-bu-baby" vocals, as a loving joke / tribute for his brother Gary, who actually did have a stutter: "It was basically just an instrumental and I was fooling around... I wrote the lyrics, out of the blue, and stuttered them through."

But when Mercury Records A&R executive Charlie Fach listened to the supposedly finished eight-song version of the album, he declared that he "didn't hear that magic thing." (We can't understand why the storming brontosaurus of a title track didn't ring his bell, personally.)

Bachman dug out the previously private demo, Fach flipped for it, and after an aborted attempt to re-record it without the stutter, agreed to let 'You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet' appear on the album as originally created. When it started getting more attention from radio than the officially released single 'Roll on Down the Highway,' he was forced to give up all resistance.

As he came to realize, when it comes to writing or even recognizing hit songs, "The magic is out of your hands." BTO officially released the track as a single, it soared to No. 1 on the pop chart and became one of their most beloved tunes ever, hovering around the top of recurrent FM playlists and appearing in a never-ending barrage of movies and TV shows to this day.

No. 65 – Bachman-Turner Overdrive, ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet’ – Top 100 Classic Rock Songs