By MIKE ROSS --
"No sugar tonight in my coffee. No sugar tonight in my tea ..." Now what kind of man drinks both coffee and tea in the same evening? Why, Burton Cummings, that's who.
Having participated in four decades of rock 'n' roll - and counting - the former Guess Who singer is not only enjoying a wide selection of hot beverages, he's having his cake and eating it, too.
Pick your own food metaphor for the 49-year-old singer's unprecedented comeback, which is unlikely to be matched even by yet another Guess Who reunion. The great thing is that he did it all by himself - literally. Supporting Up Close and Alone, an album of all the old favorites rendered with voice and piano only, Cummings performs tonight in the Winspear Centre - by himself. The show is sold out.
"Something's happening," Cummings says on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. "A lot of it, I think, is the purity of what I'm doing. This one-man show has absolutely no gimmicks. I always say that my gimmick is that I have no gimmicks. And maybe, to a certain degree, people are enjoying that."
Oh, Burton, you're being too modest. Even if it wasn't his idea - he says his manager "goaded" him into this - people love it. Cummings says he's been drawing crowds of up to 50,000 fans, coming to hear him play These Eyes and Laughing and Clap for the Wolfman and ... boy, in a decade filled with classic rock comebacks, could it get any better than this? He claims he tends to forget that these songs really made an impression on people, that some of them have even become anthems for a generation.
"And if you're lucky to have a bunch of hit records like that, I think you can sing them for the rest of your life," he says. "I'm finding that out very pleasantly."
Not everyone is so pleased. On a recent CBC Life and Times special, Jack Richardson, who produced many of those hits, chided the singer for dwelling too much in the past. Cummings, who, it must be said, doesn't take criticism very well, begs to differ.
"I don't get it. That's the dream you have when you're a kid in your first band. You dream about having a couple of hit records that get played on the radio so that you can go play them live and when people hear the first few chords, people applaud. That's the big dream that everybody chases that so few of us ever get. Then it happens to me.
"I have about 30 songs that everybody in North America knows and then Jack Richardson comes on and criticizes me for doing that? F--- him."
Right on. Burton knows what his fans want, he's giving it to them and they're eating it up, or should that be drinking?
