“It’s been going on for a long, long time, and we hear from fans who say they spent money on tickets and [Cummings and I] weren’t there,” Bachman tells Rolling Stone. “Enough is enough. I get my kids seeing these ads asking me if I’m playing Park City, Utah, next week. The fans are getting ripped off over and over, and Burton and I lose because we can’t tour the Guess Who even though we want to. We wrote the music for this band and want to give it to the fans. The clones that are up there weren’t even alive when these were hits, it’s kind of a joke.”
The Guess Who were one of the most successful and celebrated bands in Canadian history. The band enjoyed its most fruitful period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, releasing the popular album American Woman and recording hits like the album’s title traqck alongside “These Eyes” and “No Time.” Bachman and Cummings were the songwriters on most of the band’s tracks. Bachman left at the height of the band’s fame in 1970 and founded the popular group Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Cummings left to pursue a solo career in 1975, at which point he said the group disbanded.
The Guess Who’s original lineup of Cummings, Bachman, Kale, and Peterson played several reunion shows for more than three decades. According to the suit, while Kale played several reunion shows in the 1980s and another show in the early 2000s, he was removed from the band’s 2000-03 reunion tour just before it began.
While infringement isn’t a listed claim in the suit, the dispute itself stems from a bitter decadeslong trademark issue. Kale, having left the group in 1972, formed new lineups of the band by 1977, two years after the Guess Who’s best-known era ended when Cummings left. Evidently, the Guess Who had never filed any trademarks over their name throughout their tenure, and in 1986, Kale filed a request and got the rights to the name himself.
As the suit alleges, Kale “falsely misrepresented to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, among other things, that The Guess Who was first used in commerce for entertainment services in November 1977. But by that point, the Original TGW — which used the mark exclusively and continuously from 1965 through 1975 — had already disbanded.”
Cummings and Bachman claim to Rolling Stone that they recall Kale asking about using the name to perform with fellow Guess Who members Donnie McDougall and Kurt Winter in the 1970s, and that they were busy with their own projects at the time, but that they’d never spoken with Kale about trademarks.
“The way Kale put it was he wanted to use the band’s name for a while. Randy was with BTO and I was carving out a solo career, so we both had moved on by then,” Cummings says. “We thought Kale playing with Donnie and Kurt, it wasn’t really the Guess Who, but it’s not a completely fake thing. Never was there a sniff in that conversation about him trademarking the name, never ever.”
Kale had organized his own tours with the band with a heavily rotating lineup from the 1980s onward, and by the late Eighties, Peterson had joined them. By 2005, per the suit, Kale signed the rights to the Guess Who trademark to partnership between him and Peterson, and the two applied for more trademarks through 2012. Since Kale secured the trademark, the band released several albums, among them 2023’s Plein D’Amour.