"Of War Machines and Ghetto Scenes": English-Canadian Nationalism and The Guess Who's "American Woman"

"American Woman, stay away from me."¹ Grungy and over-driven, The Guess Who's 1970 title track "American Woman" acted as a Canadian call-to-arms, an unofficial national anthem, and became the most popular song in Canadian rock 'n' roll history. Canadian popular culture authors Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond call "American Woman" "probably the most blatant dis of our southern neighbor in recording history," while Chan magazine columnist Aaron Brophy notes that it has become "an anthem of sorts, with us Canadians thumbing our noses at those damn Yankees across the border."² Two recent rankings have affirmed its place in Canadiana: Quirt magazine's July-August 2000 Top 50 Canadian Songs of All Time," and a reader-selected list tallied by Sun Media (publisher of the Toronto Sun and other Canadian newspapers), both placed it as No.1.³

Shaped by their experiences touring the United States and the nationalist period in which the song was produced, The Guess Who constructed an American straw man (or, in this case, a straw woman) of an oppressive, militaristic, ghettoized, superficial society, ready for a lyrical gutting. In return, the song was nationally embraced as a vocal manifestation of communal anti-Americanism. "American Woman" is an important cultural artifact, highlighting the ferocity of a tremendously nationalistic period. It also illustrates the reciprocal relationship between social climate and the production and reception of cultural goods. As a historian, I will not delve too far into an ethnomusicologist's realm of musical aesthetics and audio signifiers — instead, this article will contextualize the lyrics as a textual document created and interpreted within a specific and contentious period of English-Canadian cultural and national consciousness.

Vocalist Burton Cummings, guitarist Randy Bachman, bassist Jim Kale, and drummer Gary Peterson came out of Winnipeg and rocked both the Canadian and American music scenes. They achieved tremendous success with 1968's Wheatfield Soul single "These Eyes" and in 1969 with Canned Wheat's "Laughing" and "Undone," hut it was the title track to their 1970 American Woman release which ensured their position as one of Canada's greatest rock 'n' roll groups.

The song was improvised during a show and almost forgotten, though. Returning to Canada from a tour of the United States, The Guess Who played a gig in a very Canadian location: a hockey arena.[sup4] Bachman replaced a guitar string during a set break, and in the process of re-tuning he worked out "American Woman's" fuzz-laced riff. Kale and Peterson returned to the stage and jammed while Cummings mingled outside in the arena's parking lot. Told of the band's return to the stage, Cummings rushed back and joined the jam with his harmonica and flute. Exhausting his instrumental selection, he stepped to the microphone and improvised the lyrics to what would become the band's most popular song. According to Cummings, the lyrics "came through looking over a Canadian audience after touring through the Southern U.S.A. and just thinking how that Canadian girls looked so much fresher and more alive."[sup5] The song, however, was almost relegated to a one-time jam. "There was a kid in the audience with a cassette recorder," Cummings explained. "He came backstage afterward and played the song to us, and we thought 'maybe there's something there.' If that kid hadn't brought the tape backstage, the song would have just been another jam that would have been forgotten."[sup6]

Developed and refined for an album release, the lyrics reflected several years of touring and traveling in the United States. In 1965 the band — at that time known as Chad Allan and the Expressions — released "Shakin' All Over" under the guise of the Guess Who?, a marketing trick in which the radio audience was to guess the band's identity.' "Shakin' All Over's" success landed them a tour through the U.S. backing up The Shirelles, The Crystals, and The Ronettes, and sharing a bill with The Kingsmen and Dion and the Belmonts." The American South was quite different than the prairie cities the band had been raised in. "When we toured down south with The Shirelles and The Crystals, you'd see the hatred," Bachman has explained.

     We would play gigs in Chicago or Minneapolis...and there
     were race riots right there, black against white and we'd
be
     onstage playing....Police would come in and shoot everyone,
     there were guns going off overhead. It was a big shock for
     us Winnipeg guys. We didn't understand it.[sup9]

Their experiences were reinforced a couple years later while touring the U.S. at the height of the Vietnam War. "We had green cards and had to run away from selective service," Bachman explained to biographer John Einarson, "that's how badly they were looking for young men to serve in the war."[sup10] Culture shock left its impression: "we'd never seen ghettos in Winnipeg before and suddenly we're in Savannah, Georgia, witnessing real poverty."[sup11] According to Bachman,

     as Canadians, we thought we were going to the great big
     wonderful USA, and instead we were finding the bad side of
     the USA The Vietnam War, the racial tension, all those
     problems. To be down south and actually hit your first
     ghetto, it was unbelievable. I think later on it might have
     come out in "American Woman" — "I don't want your war
     machines, I don't need your ghetto scenes."[sup12]

Indeed, "American Woman" drew upon American social, economic, and military conflicts through metaphor and allusion. Starting with an acoustic prologue and an easy-going chant of "American woman gonna mess your mind, American woman, she gonna mess your mind," Cummings spells out "American" before returning to the initial chant. Suddenly, the song becomes electrified and over-driven, with Cummings yelling out in anger and loathing:

     American woman, stay away from me
     American woman, mama let me be
     Don't come hangin' around my door
     I don't wanna see your face no more
     I got more important things to do
     Than spend my time growin' old with you
     Now woman, I said stay away
     American woman, listen what I say
     American woman, get away from me
     American woman, mama let me be
     Don't come knockin' around my door
     Don't wanna see your shadow no more
     Colored lights can hypnotize
     Sparkle someone else's eyes
     Now woman, I said get away
     American woman, listen what I say
     American woman, said get away
     American woman, listen what I say
     Don't come hangin' around my door
     Don't wanna see your face no more
     I don't need your war machines
     I don't need your ghetto scenes
     Colored lights can hypnotize
     Sparkle someone else's eyes
     Now woman, get away from me
     American woman, mama let me be

The song ends with a chant for separation from the American woman:

     "Now woman, get away from me
     American woman, mama let me be
     do, gotta get away, gotta get away, now go go go
     I'm gonna leave you woman, gotta leave you woman
     Bye bye, bye bye."

The song's creation and popularity were intimately entwined with the nationalist atmosphere of its production and reception. "At the end of the Second World War nationalism was generally judged a conservative, even reactionary, phenomenon," historian Ramsay Cook has noted. "By the 1960s, however, the wheel had turned full circle, with nationalism once again viewed as it had been by nineteenth-century liberals — as a force for progress and reform."[sup13] George Grant's 1965 Lament for a Nation, outlining the loss of Canadian sovereignty and its economic colonization, acted as an intellectual catalyst and waking-point for many English Canadians. A year later, Liberal party politician and one-time Minister of Finance Walter Gordon — the most important nationalist economist of the period — released A Choice for Canada, outlining the problems of economic dependence and the need to correct American control over the Canadian economy.[sup14] A 1967 poll showed that 60 percent of Canadians believed that foreign ownership of the economy could endanger national sovereignty, while 47 percent thought it was a major issue needing to be dealt with." By 1970 there was an even greater desire to "buy back" the Canadian economy from foreign — mainly American — investors.[sup16]

English-Canadian nationalism was led by an influential elite and fueled by strong youth-based grassroots movements.[sup17] Nationalists like philosopher George Grant, author Margaret Atwood, and academic Robin Mathews called against the "American empire" and warned of Canada's shift from British to American colonialism.[sup18] American social upheaval, race riots, and the chaos of Vietnam reinforced the nationalist desire to reclaim Canadian sovereignty from the U.S. "Into these chinks in the imperial suit of armor," Myrna Kotash explained in Long Way Home: The Story of the Sixities Generation in Canada, "the Canadian new left inserted and twisted the blades of its nationalist logic. And it was the war in Vietnam that had handed them the knife."[sup19] As the first widelytelevised military conflict, Vietnam was brought into the living-rooms of many Canadians, showing them a militarily dominant "Superpower" using its weight against a peasant society.[sup20] In addition, Canada was a popular retreat for draft resisters and deserters, providing them with housing and support.[sup21] Many Canadians also participated in anti-war protests. During his visit to Expo '67's "United States Day," for example, American President L.B. Johnson's "perfunctory speech was almost shouted down by teenage protestors chanting, exactly as their counterparts south of the border, 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?'"[sup22]

The nationalist movement was enhanced by the Canadian Centennial celebrations and the excitement of Expo '67, engaging Canadians in ideas of national identity, patriotism, and a glowing place in the international spotlight. "In those years it was still possible to dream about Canada doing better than the United States," historian Michael Bliss has reminisced.[sup23] Some of the empowerment and enthusiasm found a place in the political left of the New Democratic Party and its socialist splinter wing "the Waffle." As historian Doug Owram has commented, the Waffle's Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada was "very much in tune with the mood of the new radicalism of the 1960s. First and foremost, it was nationalist, but in a particularly anti-American way."[sup25] While most Canadians did not advocate socialist reforms, they were increasingly part of a nationwide nationalist consciousness which stressed Canadiana and a growing unease with things American.[sup24]

Nationalist pressure for state intervention led to the Canadianization of culture in a number of spheres. Canada Council grants were increasingly targeted towards groups engaging in material of Canadian origin, the Canadian Film Development Corporation was created in 1968 as a means of fostering feature film production, and Canadian Studies programs were developed to promote Canadian subjects and Canadian literature. Not surprisingly, while Canadian content regulations were originally instated for television in 1959 to ensure a specific quantifiable amount of Canadian material was broadcasted, there was pressure for regulations in radio broadcasting.

Private broadcasters, led by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, had long fought against government intervention forcing them to play unprofitable Canadian music.[sup26] In the nationalist climate of the times, however, the Canadian Radio-Television Commission (CRTC)[sup27] held hearings into the possibility. "American Woman" coincidentally hit No. 1 on the Canadian CHUM Radio chart on April 25, 1970 — one of the hearing dates. At a session two weeks later, coinciding with "American Woman's" topping of the American charts, CRTC Chairman Pierre Juneau was grilled about "well-known and good Canadian music that the Canadian people would want to listen to." He retorted that there was plenty of good music, and that "on the American listings this week the top record is a Canadian one. It is called 'American woman' by the Guess Who." The opposition, confused by the song's title, reiterated their question, asking for a song by a Canadian band-Juneau made it clear that the song was indeed Canadian.[sup28]

Later that year the CRTC passed legislation requiring AM radio stations to broadcast at least thirty percent Canadian material. "Canadian" songs were determined by a four-point system requiring at least two of the points to be met: "the instrumentation and/or lyrics were principally performed by a Canadian(s)," "the music was composed by a Canadian(s)," "the lyrics were written by a Canadian(s)," and "the performance was recorded in Canada."[sup29] While thirty percent may seem small, broadcasters argued that it would be impossible to find enough good Canadian music to fill even that amount of airtime.[sup30] They responded by seeking out songs with established popularity — and profitability — and over-playing them. This included, of course, The Guess Who's hits. As Pevere and Dymond commented in Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, "if you listened to pop radio in the early seventies, it was easy to believe that Burton Cummings was the voice of Canada."[sup31]

Indeed, it was Cummings' voice chanting out "American Woman" to the listeners, and the lyrics resonated in the nationalist atmosphere. Cummings has claimed that "American Woman" "was never meant to be a political tune," and instead "people read their own meaning into that song...as opposed to an anti-American sentiment, it was more of a positive Canadian statement."[sup32] While correct about the audience "reading" the song, Cumming's attempt to cleanse himself of antiAmericanism in favor of pro-Canadianism is quite dubious — it likely reflects the contemporary disproval of explicit anti-Americanism. After all, Canada is not mentioned once in the song; Bachman has detailed the impact of American poverty, race riots, and governmental persecution on the band and the song's creation; and in concert Cummings often went into very anti-American rants, characterizing American women as "hookers" and "sluts."[sup33]

Audiences form identities, including national ones, within and outside of musical discourses — they are "the product of the marking of difference and exclusion."[sup34] They answer "questions of identity," as theorist Simon Frith has noted. "We use pop songs to create for ourselves a particular sort of self-definition, a particular place in society."[sup35] In fact, Frith argues that "music can stand for, symbolize and offer the immediate experience of collective identity" more effectively than other cultural forms, because only through music can you "feel" "shared values and pride."[sup36] Whether nations are "invented" or "imagined," as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson have famously theorized, they are, to be sure, modern ideological constructions which promote forces of internal definition and the identification of an external "other."[sup37]

The "American Woman" woman was the embodiment of American society, bringing with her militarism, poverty, and superficiality. The song invoked images of Vietnam violence, cities rife with drugs, prostitution, and guns, and a superficial "Las Vegas" emptiness of glittering baubles. Its semiotic signs — or signifying concepts — were overt and easily interpreted within the Canadian nationalist climate of the time. As Jean-Jacques Nattiez described, the musical semiotic process is not only about transmitting ideas, it engages the listener into thinking about and processing the ideas and their meanings.[sup38] In "American Woman," the signs constructed an American "other" through examples of what Canada was not to be: violent and militaristic, class-divided, racially-chaotic, and morally empty. Likewise, "symbols of nationality," Karl Deutsch noted in his classic work Nationalism and Social Communication, are "labels attached to objects or things."[sup39] More precisely, the "objects or things" are interpreted, the meaning, or "labels," becoming national through semiotic interpretation.

Nations are often gendered and familial, "born" through the "blood" of its members who, in turn, are born into the "motherland" or "fatherland" — it is the national meta-narrative.[sup40] They can also be given human form, such as America's Uncle Sam or Britain's John Bull. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Canada was characterized as a virginal Miss Canada, daughter of the Empire and the target of a decrepit Uncle Sam.[sup41] In "American Woman," however, it was been inverted, with Canada as the masculine victim of an aggressive American female. It was a twist on the masculine and virile Canadian "Jack" or "Johnny Canuck" of the mid-twentieth century. Cummings's masculine voice calls out against the American woman, telling her that he has "more important things to do/ Than spend my time growin' old with you." A temptress with eyes that "hypnotize," she is placed in the roster of women who lead men to their demise — the sirens in Greek mythology and Eve in the Biblical garden are but two examples.

The maternal "mamma let me be" can invoke an idea of authoritative repression and overbearing guidance, one which fits in with the youthquake of the 1960s. RCA Record's advertising campaign drew upon this aged female construction, featuring an image of the Statue of Liberty with a menacing, wrinkled face of a bitter old woman superimposed upon it.[sup42] The picture established a repulsive, satirical, and even possibly enlightening reaction. Of course, "mamma" is also slang for an attractive female — as in "hot mamma" — which is inline with the American temptress, the shinnybaubled figured of attraction, illusion, and emptiness rejected in the song. Given the cliché of women as sexual objects in male-dominated rock 'n' roll music, such an expression of masculinity and heterosexuality is easily placed.

While popular music can act as an outlet for empathic emotional joys and crises through palpable love songs or songs of celebration, songs like "American Woman" can express and negotiate popular discontent.[sup43] It was especially true for the 1960s American counter-culture and protest movements. John Storey has gone so far as to argue that "music was [the counter-culture's) principal ideological weapon in its struggle to dislodge the Johnson-Nixon hegemony on Vietnam," facilitating the popular rejection of "conventional political structures and channels of American society."[sup44] Yet, as non-revolutionary protests both by and against the middle-class, the musical manifestations of these movements were more symbolic of unrest and the desire for change than a force to bring about that change.[sup45] Some of the more famous protest and counter-culture songs from the period include Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" (1963), Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" (1965), Country Joe and the Fish's "I-FeeULike-I'm-a-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" (1965), Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" (1967), Jefferson Airplane's "Volunteers" (1969), and James Brown's "Say it Loud" (1969).

Coming at the cusp of the 1960s protest and counter-culture movements, and in the wake of the more forceful songs, "American Woman" was not cutting-edge lyrically or aesthetically.[sup46] Still, the song had strong lyrics which fit into the anti-establishmentism of the period, and catchy aesthetic elements which likely had much to do with its popularity. "American Woman['s]...misogynistically framed anti-Yank stance...in no way hindered its fuel injected flight up the American charts," Pevere and Dymond have noted. "In contrary, this slick slice of hosehead chauvinism cracked the U.S. market wide-open for the band."[sup47] The song topped the American charts the week of May 8, 1970, and stayed at number one in Billboard magazine for three consecutive weeks.[sup48]

By the time of "American Woman's" release, the rebellious and independent music scene of the 1960s had given way to extremely organized commodification and marketing strategies, the splintering of musical genres, and the growth of FM radio with "disk jockey" personalities spinning easily digestible and palpable music. Large transnational conglomerations which calculated production and distribution, carefully fostering branded contestation where profitable, were taking root.[sup49] Music production has become an increasingly contested process as the American-based "multinationals" confront and integrate small foreign music industries.[sup50] As Marcus Breen noted in "The End of the World as We Know It: Popular Music's Cultural Mobility," "the music industry...moved from a peripheral position to consolidate itself at a central position in the international economy, where it became part of a global industry agenda."[sup51] The music industry is but one element of the new cross-media conglomerations which integrate — and orchestrate — the production, distribution, and consumption of music, television, and film.

While English-Canadian nationalism declined during the late 1970s and 1980s, the productivity and strength of its musical market dramatically increased. The Canadian Content regulations fostered an entire music industry where barely any had previously existed. The need for Canadian music led to the creation of recording studios and record distributors, and the increase in "air time" resulted in greater popularity and performance opportunities. The Canadian market, however, became even more linked to the American one, and popular Canadian acts were usually undeciferable from their American counterparts. While there are exceptions, such as some of Gordon Lightfoot's work and the Canadianism of Stompin' Tom Connors, much of the youth-directed music, especially disco, punk, and glam rock, avoided national associations.

Canadians have long been able to achieve popularity in the American market, yet it usually required relocating there. In fact, during the 1960s Canadian-born but American-based artists produced some of the most important American popular music of the period. Neil Young's "Ohio," written as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," stand as two of the top protest and counterculture songs, while others, like The Band and Steppenwolf, placed themselves fully within the American-based rock and roll genre without drawing on any apparent Canadian elements. Indeed, Steppenwolf's band name was taken from the Herman Hesse novel popular in the 1960s American counterculture. It is paradoxical, then, that some authors have located a "distinctly" Canadian sound by looking at the work of those who were most successful in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s by blending into the musical scenes there. Douglas Fetherling argues that there exists a "conscious Canadianism" and a distinct Canadianness in the "sense of polite, distracted anguish"[sup52] in the work of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Robbie Robertson, and Gordon Lightfoot.[sup53] He goes so far as to ridiculously argue that "a truly sensitive listener, for instance, should be able to feel if not articulate the Canadianness of Judy Collins' rendition of 'Some Day Soon,' a tune rich in implication and intellectualized emptiness, even though it is not immediately recognizable as an Ian Tyson song and all the place names are American."[sup54] Some have attempted to identify the Canadian sound as a sense of folkness and outdoorsness. Fetherling points to a "sense of isolation" and "the loveliness of the landscape," Marco Adria argues that there is a "frontierness," while Robert Wright attempts to place the popular late-1960s early 1970s folk artists like Young, Mitchell, and Lightfoot within a distinctively Canadian "folk" ruralism." Yet, in doing so they ignore the lack of Canadian monopoly on the frontier and isolation experiences, and what Bart Testa and Jim Shedden point out to be "the inconvenient fact that the same folk and protest forms also underwrote U.S. pop music in the 1960s."[sup56]

Barry Grant, on the other hand, moves beyond Canadian music itself to argue that there is an overall Canadian cultural irony which is found not only in music but also other areas of cultural expression as a rejection of American cultural hegemony. While he gives examples like comedian Rich Little and television show SCTV, one could update his list by adding the Barenaked Ladies and Kids in the Hall. Grant argues that "American Woman" is an example of how "Canadian rock artists have sought to distinguish themselves from the dominant American sounds by taking an ironic distance toward these musical forms themselves."[sup57] Yet, as Testa and Shedden note in their analysis of Grant's position, "the trickle of Canadian rock irony does not offer much national-cultural distinction when we compare it with the steady flow of parody underwriting American rockers" from Bo Diddley to Frank Zappa. Indeed, they convincingly argue that rock is "inclined to ironic selfsubversion without respect to national cultures."[sup58] Finally, Timothy Rice and Tammy Gutnik have argued that Bruce Cockburn's eclectic musical styling is part of a reaction to both Canadian social developments and as a statement of anti-American hegemony, but even they acknowledge that it is "not the source of his Canadianness, but rather a tool for making musical statements that speak symbolically to and for Canadians."[sup59]

The key to a sense of Canadianness, especially given the American origins of much of modern rock aesthetics, is largely based upon knowing that a band is Canadian through semiotic recognition of signs and signifiers associated with the nation. It is on the lyrical level that a distinctive Canadian music can be best identified, including the names of figures and places, as well as popularly known events (although nonCanadians can certainly write songs about Canada, of course). A number of musicians on the Canadian folk and rock scene during the 1960s and 1970s included Canadian elements in their songs, one of the most obvious being Lightfoot's "Canadian Railroad Trilogy" due to its association with the Canadian railway, although much of his music lacks such associations and is firmly rooted in the American folk genre. Stompin' Tom Connors would be a much more explicit example of Canadianness than Lightfoot, although he has never received the airplay Lightfoot garnered. Mainline is another example of a band employing Canadiana in their work at that time, from the title of their Canada, Our Home and Native Land release to the use of Canadian flags and beavers on their show posters. Of course, Mainline was also well known for its pornographic tendencies, including naked, comically-endowed women on their posters and strippers at their shows. Consequently, as Mainline lead singer McKenna explained, "We were never shy about being Canadians, but I think Canada was shy about us."[sup60] They also did not receive much recognition outside of Canada.

Outside of lyrical identifiers, a contextual knowledge of the band or song can foster a sense of Canadianness. As one Letter to the Editor noted during the 1970 radio Canadian content regulation controversy, "who is going to know when Canadian music is being played, unless one announces it? Canadian music is, after all, just North American music which happens to be performed or written by Canadians."[sup61] Contextual knowledge applies to both bands using Canadian signifiers as well as those without them, as it is shaped outside the music, whether through media information or local exposure. Indeed, the knowledge is especially strong for people who have watched a band develop from being a local act to a national or international one. Some people from the Toronto area, for example, can feel a special connection to bands from there which other Canadians cannot.

If one is to look at musical acts at that time, ones which were popular both in Canada and the U.S., and ones which invoked a strong sense of Canadianness, the Guess Who merits as much, if not more, attention than the others, and they managed to do so without relocating to the U.S. — a situation which affirmed their Canadianness in the eyes of others. While they had hits with the generic rock of "These Eyes," "Laughing," and "Undone," "American Woman" still resonates because the lyrics tied into the anti-Americanism permeating the national discourse of the time, and which continues today. The lyrical use of antiAmericanism also empowers the discourse of oppositional self-identification in which Canadians identify what Canada "is not" more so than "what it is".

The tremendous popularity of the recent Molson Canadian "I am Canadian" rant, which contrasts Canadian characteristics against American ones, reflects this trend. The arrogance of the rant is, of course, one example of the hypocrisy of Canadian self-conception as a polite, gentle society which condemns "loud" and "arrogant" Americans. Such corporate nationalism is not a surprise: contemporary Canadian nationalism is increasingly promoted not only by an "ivory rower" intelligentsia but by companies like Roots and Molson which link their product with elements of Canadiana and sell it to a youth market eager to consume it. The anti-American 1960s have given way to a sanitized pro-Canadianism paradox which panders to the conception of Canadians as a peaceful, understanding people who nevertheless increasingly identify themselves through items like "Canada kicks ass" t-shirts. While marketers usually focus on pro-Canadianism and employing "outdoors" elements of the Canadian myth-symbol complex, as the rant shows, they can employ the more emotional and "edgy" anti-Americanism when it is deemed to be profitable.

"American Woman" has recently been reconfigured and commodified into a different national context as part of a comedic film and movie soundtrack. In the popular American-produced but British-themed film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, super-spy Austin Powers falls for a female American spy, only to find out that she was intimate with another character. Hurt and betrayed, he wanders off to contemplate his situation as "American Woman" plays in the background. While this time the song is actually about a specific woman, it is highly nationalized by the film's abundant use of national symbols and images — the woman is a carefully constructed embodiment of American society. Recorded by Lenny Kravtiz, the world-wide marketed song received tremendous international radio and music video airplay, and Kravitz won a "Best Male Rock Performance" Grammy award for it. For Canadians, however, "American Woman" continues on as an unparalleled Canadian creation, its longstanding popularity reinforcing its legitimacy and acceptability, and its status in the rock canon providing it not only with the benefit of nostalgic appeal but a nostalgia which cleanses, or at least distances, the negative taints of its anti-Americanism. The song stands as a cultural artifact from a period increasingly memorialized as one of purer, more authentic, and non-commercial rock. "American Woman" is an always-current voice for anti-Americanism and an outlet of frustration for when-to twist Pierre Trudeau's famous comparison — the Canadian mouse needs to take a bite at the American elephant.

2. Geaff Pevere and Greig Dymond, Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture; Odyssey (Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall, 1996), p. 73; Aaron Brophy, "Top 50 Canadian Songs of All Time," Chan magazine, July/Aug 2000, p. 36.

3. Sun Media, Toronto Sun, 2 July 2000.

4. "American Woman's" origin at a Kitchener, Ontario hockey arena has been told with a particular flair in both John Einarson's American Woman: The Story of The Guess Who (Kingston, Ont.: Quarry Press, 1995); and Nicholas Jennings's Before the Cold Rush: Mashbacks to the Dawn of the Canadian Sound (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1997).

5. Einarson, p. 96.

6. Einarson, p. 95.

7. It was a very successful campaign, and "Shakin' All Over" became a hit with Canadian and American distribution. At this time Chad Allan was the lead vocalist, and the "Guess Who?" campaign provided a name which ultimately stuck with the band. Following the 1965 tour, Chad Allan left and was replaced by Cummings.

8. Greg Potter, Hand Me Down World: The Canadian Pop-Rock Paradox (Toronto: Macmillan Canada, 1999), pp. 55, 56.

9. Potter, p. 56.

10. Jennings, p. 215.

11. Jennings, p. 215.

12. Potter, p. 57.

13. Ramsay Cook, Canada, Quebec, and the Uses of Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2nd ed., 1986), p. 211. See ch. 14, "Nationalist Ideologies in Canada," for a look at the transition.

14. Gordon's nationalism ostracized him within the continentalist Liberal party and from his fellow business elite. Distraught at his own party's unwillingness to establish nationalist measures, Gordon left to pursue an influential public position as a popular nationalist speaker author. See Stephen Azzi's Walter Gordon & The Rise of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 1999) for a fascinating look at Gordon's life and his role in the nationalist movement.

15. A 1967 Gallup Poll, cited in Pong Owram, Born at the Right Time (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 300.

• 16. The Canadian Institute of Public Opinion, Gallup Report, 14 October 1970, showed that a large percentage of the population was interested in purchasing back key industries and economic centers. That same year, the Committee for an Independent Canada was formed to push for such policies.
• 17. Sec Ron Verzuh's Underground Times: Canada's Flower-Child Revolutionaries (Toronto: Deneau Publishers, 1989) and Myrna Kotash's Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 1980). French Canada was also undergoing a nationalist movement, a Quebecois "Quiet Revolution" with a nationalist directive and purpose quite distinct from English-Canadian nationalism. Its focus on modernization, French-Canadian cultural expression, and an increase in provincial powers and autonomy separated it from English-Canada's pan-Canadian nationalist project. French-Canadian nationalism was inward and exclusive, with both English-Canada and the United States as cultural and linguistic threats to a Quebecois identity. While French Canada was an important part of English-Canadian pan-national identity, especially as a symbolic distinction to the United States, English Canada acted as an "other" for Quebecois identity construction — not unlike the United States' "otherness" in English-Canadian identity construction.
• 18. Grant's Lament for a Nation, Atwood's Survival, and Mathew's works on the Americanization of universities are but several examples. Al Purdy's The New Romans and Ian Lumsden's Close the 49th Parallel Etc. edited collections are cornucopias of such antiAmerican characterizations.

19. Kotash, p. 195.

20. Interesting readings on Canada and Vietnam include Alan Haig-Brown's Hell No, We Won't Go: Vietnam Draft Registers in Canada (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1996); Victor Levant's Quiet Complicity: Canadian Involvement in the Vietnam War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1986); and Charles Taylor's Snow Job: Canada, the United States and Vietnam 1954 to 1973 (Toronto: Anansi, 1974).

21. Public opinion was sharply divided about Canada's role of welcoming these "anti-American Americans." See J.L. Granatstein, Yankees Go Home?: Canadians and Anti-Americanism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996), especially ch. 7, "The Arrival of the Anti-American Americans: The Vietnam War and Draft Dodgers."

22. Granatstein, p. 180.

23. Michael Bliss, "Is Canada a Country in Decline?," National Past, 30 November 2001.

24. See Ryan Edwardson, "'Kicking Uncle Sam out of the Peaceable Kingdom': English-Canadian 'New Nationalism' and Americanization," Journal of Canadian Studies 37, no.4 (Winter 2002/2003): 131-150.

25. Owram, p. 302.

• 26. Knowlton Nash's The Swashbucklers: The Story of Canada's Battling Broadcasters is a valuable and interesting look at the conflicts which have characterized broadcasting in Canada since its inception.
• 21. Renamed the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission in 1976.
• 28. Canada, House of Commons Standing Committee on Broadcasting, Films, and Assistance to the Arts, 5 May 1970.
• 29. Canadian Radio-Television Commission, Decision 70-99, May 20, 1970. In 1975, a similar system was instituted for FM radio.
• 30. See Marc Raboy's Missnd Opportunities and Herschel Hardin's Closed Circuits for more on this conflict and the arguments the broadcasters used to maintain their economic profitability.

31. Pevere and Dymond, p. 71.

32. Potter, p. 110.

33. Potter, pp. 109, 111.

34. Stuart Hall, "Introduction: The Rise of Cultural Theory," in Andrew Milner, ed., Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: UCL Press, 1994), p. 4.

35. Simon Frith, "Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music," Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, eds., Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 140.

36. Frith, 1987, p. 140.

37. See Gellner's Thoughts and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964) and Nations and Nationalism (London: Basil Blackwell, 1983); and Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). For an interesting re-evaluation, see Anthony D. Smith's "The Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed.'" in Marjorie Ringrose and Adam J. Lerner, eds., Reimagining the Nation (Open University Press, Buckingham, UK, 1993).

38. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 128.

39. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1966), p. 173.

40. See, for example, Hayden White's work on the topic, especially Metahistory.

41. For examples, see J.W. Bengough, A Caricature History of Canadian Politics (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1974).

42. Pevere and Dymond, p. 73.

43. See Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music, as well as Christopher Ballantine, Music and its Social Meanings (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1984).

44. Storey, "Rockin' Hegemony: West Coast Rock and Amenta's War in Vietnam," in Alf Louvre and Jeffrey Walsh, eds., Tell Me Des About Vietnam: Cultural Battles for the Meaning of the War (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1998), pp. 185, 186.

45. See, for example, Katrina Irving, "Rock Music and the State: Dissonance or Counterpoint?," Cultural Critique, Fall 1988.

46. Folk singers had made controversial lyrics commonplace by the mid-1960s, while hands like the Jimi Hendrix Experience and The Who raised the bar of aesthetic experimentation and forcefulness.

47. Pevere and Dymond, p. 70.

48. Einarson, pp. 95-96.

49. Marcus Breen, "The End of the World as We Know It: Popular Music's Cultural Mobility," Cultural Studies 9, no. 3, p. 487.

50. Roger Wallais and Krister Malm's Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries is a fascinating look at this process. (London: Constable and Co., 1984).

51. Breen, p. 488.

52. Douglas Fetherling, Some Day Soon: Essays on Canadian Songuniten (Toronto: Quarry Press, 1990), p. 10.

53. Fetherling, p. 8.

54. Fetherling, p. 11.

55. Fetherling, p. 10; Marco Adria, Music of Our Times: Eight Canadian Sitiger-Sangwricen (Toronto: James Lorimer fit. Co., 1990); Robert Wright, "'Dream, Comfort, Memory, Despair': Canadian Popular Musicians and the Dilemma of Nationalism, 1968-1972," Journal of Canadian Studies (Winter 1987): 27-43.

56. Bart Testa and Jim Shedden, "In the Great Midwestern Hardware Store: The Seventies Triumph in English-Canadian Rock Music," in Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds., Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002), p. 179.

57. Barry K. Grant, "'Across the Great Divide': Imitation and Inflection in Canadian Rock Music," Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no.1 (Spring 1986), p. 122.

58. Testa and Shedden, p. 179.

59. Timothy Rice and Tammy Glutnik, "What's Canadian about Canadian Popular Music?: The Case of Bruce Cockburn," in Timothy J. McCee, ed., Taking a Stand: Essays in Honour of John Beckwith (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. 253.

60. McKenna, quoted in Jennine's, p. 227.

61. Brandon, Manitoba Sun, 17 February 1970.

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By Ryan Edwardson