Celebrity Drive: Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive
Driving His Vette Makes Rocker Feel Youthful
No Obligation, Quick & Elementary Free Fresh Car Quote
Daily Driver: two thousand eight Saturn Outlook (Fred’s rating: nine on a scale of one to Ten)
Beloved road journey: Highway one in Canada
Car he learned to drive in: one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford
Very first car bought: one thousand nine hundred fifty five Pontiac
Fred Turner of the Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide, absolutely lives up to the picture his band cultivated with its former gear logo and its “gearhead” fans. Yes, he’s a true gearhead himself.
Now operating under the name Bachman & Turner, the duo behind the rock anthems “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Takin’ Care of Business” had been apart for twenty years, but they’ve reunited with a fresh self-titled album.
Albeit the duo is busy gearing up to support the fresh album, Turner took some time to talk to Motor Trend Online about his cars and share photos from his garage. On the phone, Turner is affable and relatively soft-spoken, a contrast to the thriving rock sounds his band cranks out. He chuckles when he admits he has several daily drivers. Albeit he is a confirmed Vette boy, Turner appreciates cars based on their own merit, such as his more low-key Saturn.
Loyal drivers of the now-shuttered Saturn will be glad to hear this rock starlet is one of them. “I’ve got an orphan, because GM’s dropped it,” Turner says of his Saturn. “I indeed like this SUV. It’s fine. It’s a fabulous vehicle.” It’s his utilitarian rail for errands such as grocery shopping.
“It’s gone now; they’ll never make another one,” he says. “The good thing about it is there’s three other models that if I ever need parts, there will be parts for me. The other models are the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave, and the GMC Acadia. They’re all the same chassis, so if I ever need parts at least I’ve got parts.”
He rates it a 9. “I like it that much. And I haven’t had any problems with it,” Turner says. He could’ve bought any SUV, but opted for the Saturn after he looking at the GMC Acadia. “I realized that the same platform was being used on the Saturn and I liked the look of the Saturn,” he says. “If you didn’t have the roof racks on it, it had that hot-roddy look to it, and that attracted me. It had that stance that I liked. So that drew me and I needed a vehicle to take trips in.”
The trusty Saturn makes the annual Two,400 mile trek from Winnipeg to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Turner winters for a few months.
“I needed something to pack all my stuff in the back of it, so it was big enough,” he says. “There’s such good buys in the U.S. on clothing and things and I’d buy car parts at Vette Brakes in St. Petersburg — it manufactures after-market Corvette parts. So I would bring my parts back in my SUV. I’m one of those crazies. That’s what I bought the SUV for — running around doing that.”
Turner also didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a car he was planning to use for road trips to the States and back. “I use my other vehicles as much as I use that one. I dreamed to buy something I thought was indeed good but wasn’t going to cost me up in the price range that some of the thicker ones cost.”
Turner would have given the Saturn a flawless Ten, but takes off a point because the floor is uneven. “When my wifey gets into it, she says ‘This is awkward,’ he says, with a chuckle. “It’s got a hump in it to one side, so one gam sits higher than the other one. If we’re driving a little bit of a ways, it gets awkward.”
Albeit the Saturn brand is history, Turner isn’t that upset. “It doesn’t bother me. I tend to keep my vehicles for a long time. I have a one thousand nine hundred eighty one 380 SEL Mercedes that has 58,000 miles on it. It’s twenty seven years old. I’m retiring it to St. Petersburg. I’m just getting it back into form so it can make the journey,” he laughs.
Turner bought the Mercedes back in 1981, as his own litmus test to see if European cars are indeed better. “The band had gone through its very first breakup, all the BTO albums were out by that time, and we’d made our money,” he recalls. “I’ve always been an American car dude and always wondered about European cars, if there was truly any value in buying something like a Mercedes. So I thought, ‘I’m going to buy one and see how it long it lasts.’ “
Soon, he will gladfully drive it back to St. Petersburg to retire it, even tho’ it’s still in excellent form. “To this day, I have not had a tune up on that car in twenty seven years and I keep going to the Mercedes-Benz dealer here, because I didn’t want to work on it myself,” Turner says. “I figured this is the car I’m doing a test with, so I take it to Mercedes-Benz and I get the oil switched and if some of the chips would fail, then I’d get them substituted.”
But when he would ask the dealer, is there anything to do beyond an oil switch? “He’ll say, ‘Is the engine stumbling?’ I said, ‘No, the engine’s running fine. I can take it up to two thousand rpm at an idle. And it runs just straight and solid, it doesn’t do anything; it’s flawless.’ He says, ‘So why do you want to tune it?’” he laughs. “‘Are you real?’ He says, ‘Unless it’s providing you problems, why do you want us to do anything with it?’ “
The Mercedes also gets good gas mileage. “It’s a strong car. The motor is a V-8 gasoline engine, but it’s a very petite V-8, it’s only two hundred thirty cubic-inch. So it was always very good on fuel because that was back when the gasoline problems were happening and everyone was attempting to get more mileage than horsepower. So it’s been a wonderful car. Every once in a while it will sit for a while and I will get into it and the leather still has that leathery smell to it. It’s odd,” he laughs. He adds that he never lets any of his cars sit longer than a month, always taking them out to “give them a open up.”
Turner is all about his Vettes. “The car that I drive, that I love, that makes me feel youthful is my two thousand two Corvette,” Turner proclaims. But he echoes other enthusiasts in wanting a higher-quality interior. “They could have put a little more into the upholstery. There’s plastic on the side of the driver’s seat that has cracked down and the car has only got 8,600 miles on it. It shouldn’t have cracked down in that time. But it’s a fabulous car.”
He loves what the Vette can do on the road. “What indeed struck me very first was I drove from home to Minneapolis in it. That’s a seven-hour drive; it’s four hundred twenty five miles,” he says. “I drove with the top down, above the speed limit and the computer told me it was getting twenty six miles a gallon. And that’s with three hundred fifty horsepower V-8. When I got there and packed it, I was fairly astonished that it made it all the way there and didn’t take that much fuel. It lightly made it there on one tank.”
Turner has had eleven Vettes. “I have a ’57 I bought it in one thousand nine hundred eighty one and I have a ’71. They’re all in chunks, that’s why I have the 2002. I bought the two thousand two because I wished a Vette to drive because I was tearing the other ones apart.”
Albeit he busy with his reunion with Randy Bachman, if he has spare time, he works on the two old Vettes as his project cars, even driving to Oregon to pick up a front end for the one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvette.
“The original framework on the old Corvette, the early ones, was a ’52 Chevy and it’s not a good chassis, so I got another front end and mounted it into the car with disc brakes and so it’s going to be a lot better-handling car,” Turner says.
He knows how he wants the vintage Corvette to turn out. “It’s entirely different; it’s got a Mustang steering box in it. The car will look stock. I’m not switching the bod, I’m switching the chassis. I have a good concept of it and I want to do the work myself.”
If Turner has questions, he can always tap one of his friends at their weekly get-together. “We’ve got a Saturday bench racing lunch thing — we get together and everybody talks cars,” he laughs. “We go to a Greek restaurant called the Park Tower.”
Turner has always had a thing for Vettes, and in one thousand nine hundred seventy one when he joined the band (then called Courageous Belt), he eventually had the means to treat himself to his fantasy car.
“That’s when I bought my very first Corvette. That was the ’71 that I still own. I wasn’t aware of what Corvettes were like and this ’71 was what they call a ‘big block,’” he says of his initiation into his fresh car. He learned the hard way how to correctly treat it.
“There’s the ‘small blocks’ that they call the ‘mouse motor’ and they call the ‘rat motor’ the big block, which was in this car. A four hundred fifty four cubic-inch engine and it had an independent rear suspension that if you applied too much power going around a corner, it would pull the tires in towards each other and it would lift the traction off of the road and it could go end-for-end. Which I did on the Upper Levels Highway in Vancouver and went five times end-for-end down the highway, just spun-donuts, going around and around,” Turner recounts with a chuckle. “It panicked me pretty bad. It took five minutes to get my heart to stop hammering so swift.”
Turner has a special love for one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvettes. “My love for cars — it just happened,” he says. “I’d see cars on the street and in one thousand nine hundred fifty seven I was fifteen and those are years when you truly embark to get caught on certain things. My neighbor one street over, who was a printer and making a good wage, bought a ’57 Corvette. And that’s my thing with ’57 Corvettes. I always desired a ’57 Corvette and I didn’t find it until 1981.”
The Dakota is the vehicle Turner drives around town to haul engine parts for his project cars. “The Dakota is just a good truck and it does what I need it to do. So it’s fine,” he says.
This pickup truck is another project waiting for Turner. “Randy and I have committed to each other for three years. If I can sneak some car time in I will, but it’s more music now,” he says. “It’s all in one lump; it’s so old that it needs to come apart. There’s tons of parts for it out there. It’s become such a big thing now with older cars that almost any car, you can find someone online who’s making fresh old parts. So it’s superb.”
Car he learned to drive in
Turner was born and raised in Winnipeg, where he learned to drive in his dad’s one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford. “It was just an old four-door sedan and it was pink,” he recalls. “My mother had her choice of what color she desired when my dad bought the car.”
The very first car Turner bought was a one thousand nine hundred fifty five Canadian Pontiac around one thousand nine hundred sixty for $318. He was playing music and working as a car jockey at a dealership. “A lot of Americans don’t know that a Pontiac in Canada was a Chevrolet,” he points out. “It wasn’t like an Oldsmobile. In the U.S. Pontiacs were more like Oldsmobile were. They were a big car, but in Canada the Canadian Pontiacs were put on Chevrolet chassis with Chevrolet engines.”
Even back then Turner liked working on his cars. “I bought this ’55 Pontiac two-door coach and I took the two hundred sixty five V8 out of it and ordered a motor in a crate from General Motors, a three hundred twenty seven Corvette motor, and I put that in. That was my very first joy car.”
That car met its demise when Turner went through a 20-mile-per-hour turn on a moist surface at a high speed. “I put it over the rails and into a telephone poll and I wrote the car off. I was fine, but I left the headlight ring welded to the railing. For the longest time they called it ‘Turner’s Corner.’ It was in Winnipeg,” he laughs. “But I’m not telling you where, because they could still come back at me! It wasn’t a kosher thing to do. It did the framework in and when the frame’s gone, it’s done.”
While he never took photos of his very first car, he does have a picture of his 2nd car, a one thousand nine hundred fifty eight Pontiac that he had just before BTO took off, which he recalls fondly. “I went on and bought a three hundred forty eight Pontiac two-door hardtop. It already had flames on it. A friend of mine was a painter and painted the car. It won fairly a few car shows.”
Turner only had it for a year and a half. “It was just before I moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver to do Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I had no place to put it in Vancouver so I sold the car.”
While the annual road tour to St. Petersburg is done out of necessity, Turner’s dearest road trips in his Vette are on Highway one in Canada. “My beloved drive most likely is driving into Northwest Ontario, into the Whiteshell. The area there is called Kenora on the way to a little town called Thunder Bay,” he says. “When you get into the Whiteshell, it becomes very curvy, very rough terrain roads, up and down rocky, hilly roads.”
While they are now working under the name Bachman & Turner, most fans know the famous story of how they added “Overdrive” to BTO. “We wished to call ourselves ‘Bachman Turner,’ but at the time guys using their own names like ‘Crosby Stills, Nash’ and others, they were more into a softer folk music and we wished our name to portray where we were going and we dreamed to tag something on to ‘Bachman Turner’ and we had no idea what we were going to use. We were having breakfast in a truck stop, we went up to pay the cashier and there was a magazine sitting right on the counter that said “Overdrive” with a big truck on it and we looked at each other and said, ‘There it is — Overdrive,’” he says, with a chuckle.
As for the band’s gear logo back then, Turner explains, “It had that sound to it, that’s why we went with it. It meant ‘turn everything up total and go for it.’”
These days, Bachman & Turner are going on tour to support their long-awaited fresh album, “Bachman & Turner,” which dropped Sept. 7. But don’t be astonished if you see Turner at a local NHRA haul race, since he attempts to attend when he can.
“I’ve done so much to do with automobiles,” Turner says. “I’ve been to Formula one races. I have friends who run a 300-mile-an-hour Funny Car on the big circuit — NHRA, Tim Wilkerson. Anytime I’m near them, I go out and see them. Any of the NHRA haul races. That’s the one that I’m most interested in.”
Turner attempts to make it to some of the big races such as Pomona, Phoenix, Gainesville, and Brainerd. “I’d love to get out to most of them if I can and of course if Wilkerson is running, I get a hold of a duo of guys in his squad. They usually say, ‘If you’re around, we’ll have tickets waiting for you and pit passes, come back, see us, spend the day with us.’”
Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive Celebrity Drive – Motor Trend
Celebrity Drive: Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive
Driving His Vette Makes Rocker Feel Youthfull
No Obligation, Prompt & Plain Free Fresh Car Quote
Daily Driver: two thousand eight Saturn Outlook (Fred’s rating: nine on a scale of one to Ten)
Dearest road journey: Highway one in Canada
Car he learned to drive in: one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford
Very first car bought: one thousand nine hundred fifty five Pontiac
Fred Turner of the Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide, absolutely lives up to the pic his band cultivated with its former gear logo and its “gearhead” fans. Yes, he’s a true gearhead himself.
Now operating under the name Bachman & Turner, the duo behind the rock anthems “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Takin’ Care of Business” had been apart for twenty years, but they’ve reunited with a fresh self-titled album.
Albeit the duo is busy gearing up to support the fresh album, Turner took some time to talk to Motor Trend Online about his cars and share photos from his garage. On the phone, Turner is affable and relatively soft-spoken, a contrast to the flourishing rock sounds his band cranks out. He chuckles when he admits he has several daily drivers. Albeit he is a confirmed Vette dude, Turner appreciates cars based on their own merit, such as his more low-key Saturn.
Loyal drivers of the now-shuttered Saturn will be blessed to hear this rock starlet is one of them. “I’ve got an orphan, because GM’s dropped it,” Turner says of his Saturn. “I indeed like this SUV. It’s good. It’s a fabulous vehicle.” It’s his utilitarian rail for errands such as grocery shopping.
“It’s gone now; they’ll never make another one,” he says. “The good thing about it is there’s three other models that if I ever need parts, there will be parts for me. The other models are the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave, and the GMC Acadia. They’re all the same chassis, so if I ever need parts at least I’ve got parts.”
He rates it a 9. “I like it that much. And I haven’t had any problems with it,” Turner says. He could’ve bought any SUV, but opted for the Saturn after he looking at the GMC Acadia. “I realized that the same platform was being used on the Saturn and I liked the look of the Saturn,” he says. “If you didn’t have the roof racks on it, it had that hot-roddy look to it, and that attracted me. It had that stance that I liked. So that drew me and I needed a vehicle to take trips in.”
The trusty Saturn makes the annual Two,400 mile trek from Winnipeg to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Turner winters for a few months.
“I needed something to pack all my stuff in the back of it, so it was big enough,” he says. “There’s such good buys in the U.S. on clothing and things and I’d buy car parts at Vette Brakes in St. Petersburg — it manufactures after-market Corvette parts. So I would bring my parts back in my SUV. I’m one of those crazies. That’s what I bought the SUV for — running around doing that.”
Turner also didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a car he was planning to use for road trips to the States and back. “I use my other vehicles as much as I use that one. I desired to buy something I thought was truly good but wasn’t going to cost me up in the price range that some of the thicker ones cost.”
Turner would have given the Saturn a flawless Ten, but takes off a point because the floor is uneven. “When my wifey gets into it, she says ‘This is awkward,’ he says, with a chuckle. “It’s got a hump in it to one side, so one gam sits higher than the other one. If we’re driving a little bit of a ways, it gets awkward.”
Albeit the Saturn brand is history, Turner isn’t that upset. “It doesn’t bother me. I tend to keep my vehicles for a long time. I have a one thousand nine hundred eighty one 380 SEL Mercedes that has 58,000 miles on it. It’s twenty seven years old. I’m retiring it to St. Petersburg. I’m just getting it back into form so it can make the tour,” he laughs.
Turner bought the Mercedes back in 1981, as his own litmus test to see if European cars are indeed better. “The band had gone through its very first breakup, all the BTO albums were out by that time, and we’d made our money,” he recalls. “I’ve always been an American car boy and always wondered about European cars, if there was indeed any value in buying something like a Mercedes. So I thought, ‘I’m going to buy one and see how it long it lasts.’ “
Soon, he will cheerfully drive it back to St. Petersburg to retire it, even tho’ it’s still in excellent form. “To this day, I have not had a tune up on that car in twenty seven years and I keep going to the Mercedes-Benz dealer here, because I didn’t want to work on it myself,” Turner says. “I figured this is the car I’m doing a test with, so I take it to Mercedes-Benz and I get the oil switched and if some of the chips would fail, then I’d get them substituted.”
But when he would ask the dealer, is there anything to do beyond an oil switch? “He’ll say, ‘Is the engine stumbling?’ I said, ‘No, the engine’s running fine. I can take it up to two thousand rpm at an idle. And it runs just straight and solid, it doesn’t do anything; it’s flawless.’ He says, ‘So why do you want to tune it?’” he laughs. “‘Are you real?’ He says, ‘Unless it’s providing you problems, why do you want us to do anything with it?’ “
The Mercedes also gets good gas mileage. “It’s a powerful car. The motor is a V-8 gasoline engine, but it’s a very puny V-8, it’s only two hundred thirty cubic-inch. So it was always very good on fuel because that was back when the gasoline problems were happening and everyone was attempting to get more mileage than horsepower. So it’s been a wonderful car. Every once in a while it will sit for a while and I will get into it and the leather still has that leathery smell to it. It’s odd,” he laughs. He adds that he never lets any of his cars sit longer than a month, always taking them out to “give them a spread.”
Turner is all about his Vettes. “The car that I drive, that I love, that makes me feel youthfull is my two thousand two Corvette,” Turner proclaims. But he echoes other enthusiasts in wanting a higher-quality interior. “They could have put a little more into the upholstery. There’s plastic on the side of the driver’s seat that has violated down and the car has only got 8,600 miles on it. It shouldn’t have violated down in that time. But it’s a fabulous car.”
He loves what the Vette can do on the road. “What truly struck me very first was I drove from home to Minneapolis in it. That’s a seven-hour drive; it’s four hundred twenty five miles,” he says. “I drove with the top down, above the speed limit and the computer told me it was getting twenty six miles a gallon. And that’s with three hundred fifty horsepower V-8. When I got there and packed it, I was fairly astonished that it made it all the way there and didn’t take that much fuel. It lightly made it there on one tank.”
Turner has had eleven Vettes. “I have a ’57 I bought it in one thousand nine hundred eighty one and I have a ’71. They’re all in lumps, that’s why I have the 2002. I bought the two thousand two because I wished a Vette to drive because I was tearing the other ones apart.”
Albeit he busy with his reunion with Randy Bachman, if he has spare time, he works on the two old Vettes as his project cars, even driving to Oregon to pick up a front end for the one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvette.
“The original framework on the old Corvette, the early ones, was a ’52 Chevy and it’s not a superb chassis, so I got another front end and mounted it into the car with disc brakes and so it’s going to be a lot better-handling car,” Turner says.
He knows how he wants the vintage Corvette to turn out. “It’s fully different; it’s got a Mustang steering box in it. The car will look stock. I’m not switching the figure, I’m switching the chassis. I have a good concept of it and I want to do the work myself.”
If Turner has questions, he can always tap one of his friends at their weekly get-together. “We’ve got a Saturday bench racing lunch thing — we get together and everybody talks cars,” he laughs. “We go to a Greek restaurant called the Park Tower.”
Turner has always had a thing for Vettes, and in one thousand nine hundred seventy one when he joined the band (then called Courageous Belt), he eventually had the means to treat himself to his fantasy car.
“That’s when I bought my very first Corvette. That was the ’71 that I still own. I wasn’t aware of what Corvettes were like and this ’71 was what they call a ‘big block,’” he says of his initiation into his fresh car. He learned the hard way how to correctly treat it.
“There’s the ‘small blocks’ that they call the ‘mouse motor’ and they call the ‘rat motor’ the big block, which was in this car. A four hundred fifty four cubic-inch engine and it had an independent rear suspension that if you applied too much power going around a corner, it would pull the tires in towards each other and it would lift the traction off of the road and it could go end-for-end. Which I did on the Upper Levels Highway in Vancouver and went five times end-for-end down the highway, just spun-donuts, going around and around,” Turner recounts with a chuckle. “It frightened me pretty bad. It took five minutes to get my heart to stop hitting so swift.”
Turner has a special love for one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvettes. “My love for cars — it just happened,” he says. “I’d see cars on the street and in one thousand nine hundred fifty seven I was fifteen and those are years when you truly commence to get caught on certain things. My neighbor one street over, who was a printer and making a good wage, bought a ’57 Corvette. And that’s my thing with ’57 Corvettes. I always dreamed a ’57 Corvette and I didn’t find it until 1981.”
The Dakota is the vehicle Turner drives around town to haul engine parts for his project cars. “The Dakota is just a good truck and it does what I need it to do. So it’s fine,” he says.
This pickup truck is another project waiting for Turner. “Randy and I have committed to each other for three years. If I can sneak some car time in I will, but it’s more music now,” he says. “It’s all in one chunk; it’s so old that it needs to come apart. There’s tons of parts for it out there. It’s become such a big thing now with older cars that almost any car, you can find someone online who’s making fresh old parts. So it’s good.”
Car he learned to drive in
Turner was born and raised in Winnipeg, where he learned to drive in his dad’s one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford. “It was just an old four-door sedan and it was pink,” he recalls. “My mother had her choice of what color she desired when my dad bought the car.”
The very first car Turner bought was a one thousand nine hundred fifty five Canadian Pontiac around one thousand nine hundred sixty for $318. He was playing music and working as a car jockey at a dealership. “A lot of Americans don’t know that a Pontiac in Canada was a Chevrolet,” he points out. “It wasn’t like an Oldsmobile. In the U.S. Pontiacs were more like Oldsmobile were. They were a big car, but in Canada the Canadian Pontiacs were put on Chevrolet chassis with Chevrolet engines.”
Even back then Turner liked working on his cars. “I bought this ’55 Pontiac two-door coach and I took the two hundred sixty five V8 out of it and ordered a motor in a crate from General Motors, a three hundred twenty seven Corvette motor, and I put that in. That was my very first joy car.”
That car met its demise when Turner went through a 20-mile-per-hour turn on a moist surface at a high speed. “I put it over the rails and into a telephone poll and I wrote the car off. I was fine, but I left the headlight ring welded to the railing. For the longest time they called it ‘Turner’s Corner.’ It was in Winnipeg,” he laughs. “But I’m not telling you where, because they could still come back at me! It wasn’t a kosher thing to do. It did the framework in and when the frame’s gone, it’s done.”
While he never took photos of his very first car, he does have a picture of his 2nd car, a one thousand nine hundred fifty eight Pontiac that he had just before BTO took off, which he recalls fondly. “I went on and bought a three hundred forty eight Pontiac two-door hardtop. It already had flames on it. A friend of mine was a painter and painted the car. It won fairly a few car shows.”
Turner only had it for a year and a half. “It was just before I moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver to do Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I had no place to put it in Vancouver so I sold the car.”
While the annual road tour to St. Petersburg is done out of necessity, Turner’s beloved road trips in his Vette are on Highway one in Canada. “My beloved drive most likely is driving into Northwest Ontario, into the Whiteshell. The area there is called Kenora on the way to a little town called Thunder Bay,” he says. “When you get into the Whiteshell, it becomes very curvy, very rough terrain roads, up and down rocky, hilly roads.”
While they are now working under the name Bachman & Turner, most fans know the famous story of how they added “Overdrive” to BTO. “We dreamed to call ourselves ‘Bachman Turner,’ but at the time guys using their own names like ‘Crosby Stills, Nash’ and others, they were more into a softer folk music and we desired our name to portray where we were going and we dreamed to tag something on to ‘Bachman Turner’ and we had no idea what we were going to use. We were having breakfast in a truck stop, we went up to pay the cashier and there was a magazine sitting right on the counter that said “Overdrive” with a big truck on it and we looked at each other and said, ‘There it is — Overdrive,’” he says, with a chuckle.
As for the band’s gear logo back then, Turner explains, “It had that sound to it, that’s why we went with it. It meant ‘turn everything up utter and go for it.’”
These days, Bachman & Turner are going on tour to support their long-awaited fresh album, “Bachman & Turner,” which dropped Sept. 7. But don’t be astonished if you see Turner at a local NHRA haul race, since he attempts to attend when he can.
“I’ve done so much to do with automobiles,” Turner says. “I’ve been to Formula one races. I have friends who run a 300-mile-an-hour Funny Car on the big circuit — NHRA, Tim Wilkerson. Anytime I’m near them, I go out and see them. Any of the NHRA haul races. That’s the one that I’m most interested in.”
Turner attempts to make it to some of the big races such as Pomona, Phoenix, Gainesville, and Brainerd. “I’d love to get out to most of them if I can and of course if Wilkerson is running, I get a hold of a duo of guys in his squad. They usually say, ‘If you’re around, we’ll have tickets waiting for you and pit passes, come back, see us, spend the day with us.’”
Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive Celebrity Drive – Motor Trend
Celebrity Drive: Fred Turner of Bachman-Turner Overdrive
Driving His Vette Makes Rocker Feel Youthful
No Obligation, Swift & Elementary Free Fresh Car Quote
Daily Driver: two thousand eight Saturn Outlook (Fred’s rating: nine on a scale of one to Ten)
Beloved road journey: Highway one in Canada
Car he learned to drive in: one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford
Very first car bought: one thousand nine hundred fifty five Pontiac
Fred Turner of the Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which has sold more than thirty million albums worldwide, absolutely lives up to the picture his band cultivated with its former gear logo and its “gearhead” fans. Yes, he’s a true gearhead himself.
Now operating under the name Bachman & Turner, the duo behind the rock anthems “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” and “Takin’ Care of Business” had been apart for twenty years, but they’ve reunited with a fresh self-titled album.
Albeit the duo is busy gearing up to support the fresh album, Turner took some time to talk to Motor Trend Online about his cars and share photos from his garage. On the phone, Turner is affable and relatively soft-spoken, a contrast to the flourishing rock sounds his band cranks out. He chuckles when he admits he has several daily drivers. Albeit he is a confirmed Vette man, Turner appreciates cars based on their own merit, such as his more low-key Saturn.
Loyal drivers of the now-shuttered Saturn will be blessed to hear this rock starlet is one of them. “I’ve got an orphan, because GM’s dropped it,” Turner says of his Saturn. “I indeed like this SUV. It’s excellent. It’s a fabulous vehicle.” It’s his utilitarian rail for errands such as grocery shopping.
“It’s gone now; they’ll never make another one,” he says. “The good thing about it is there’s three other models that if I ever need parts, there will be parts for me. The other models are the Chevrolet Traverse, Buick Enclave, and the GMC Acadia. They’re all the same chassis, so if I ever need parts at least I’ve got parts.”
He rates it a 9. “I like it that much. And I haven’t had any problems with it,” Turner says. He could’ve bought any SUV, but opted for the Saturn after he looking at the GMC Acadia. “I realized that the same platform was being used on the Saturn and I liked the look of the Saturn,” he says. “If you didn’t have the roof racks on it, it had that hot-roddy look to it, and that attracted me. It had that stance that I liked. So that drew me and I needed a vehicle to take trips in.”
The trusty Saturn makes the annual Two,400 mile trek from Winnipeg to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Turner winters for a few months.
“I needed something to pack all my stuff in the back of it, so it was big enough,” he says. “There’s such good buys in the U.S. on clothing and things and I’d buy car parts at Vette Brakes in St. Petersburg — it manufactures after-market Corvette parts. So I would bring my parts back in my SUV. I’m one of those crazies. That’s what I bought the SUV for — running around doing that.”
Turner also didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a car he was planning to use for road trips to the States and back. “I use my other vehicles as much as I use that one. I dreamed to buy something I thought was truly good but wasn’t going to cost me up in the price range that some of the thicker ones cost.”
Turner would have given the Saturn a ideal Ten, but takes off a point because the floor is uneven. “When my wifey gets into it, she says ‘This is awkward,’ he says, with a chuckle. “It’s got a hump in it to one side, so one gam sits higher than the other one. If we’re driving a little bit of a ways, it gets awkward.”
Albeit the Saturn brand is history, Turner isn’t that upset. “It doesn’t bother me. I tend to keep my vehicles for a long time. I have a one thousand nine hundred eighty one 380 SEL Mercedes that has 58,000 miles on it. It’s twenty seven years old. I’m retiring it to St. Petersburg. I’m just getting it back into form so it can make the excursion,” he laughs.
Turner bought the Mercedes back in 1981, as his own litmus test to see if European cars are indeed better. “The band had gone through its very first breakup, all the BTO albums were out by that time, and we’d made our money,” he recalls. “I’ve always been an American car stud and always wondered about European cars, if there was truly any value in buying something like a Mercedes. So I thought, ‘I’m going to buy one and see how it long it lasts.’ “
Soon, he will joyfully drive it back to St. Petersburg to retire it, even tho’ it’s still in excellent form. “To this day, I have not had a tune up on that car in twenty seven years and I keep going to the Mercedes-Benz dealer here, because I didn’t want to work on it myself,” Turner says. “I figured this is the car I’m doing a test with, so I take it to Mercedes-Benz and I get the oil switched and if some of the chips would fail, then I’d get them substituted.”
But when he would ask the dealer, is there anything to do beyond an oil switch? “He’ll say, ‘Is the engine stumbling?’ I said, ‘No, the engine’s running fine. I can take it up to two thousand rpm at an idle. And it runs just straight and solid, it doesn’t do anything; it’s ideal.’ He says, ‘So why do you want to tune it?’” he laughs. “‘Are you real?’ He says, ‘Unless it’s providing you problems, why do you want us to do anything with it?’ “
The Mercedes also gets good gas mileage. “It’s a intense car. The motor is a V-8 gasoline engine, but it’s a very puny V-8, it’s only two hundred thirty cubic-inch. So it was always very good on fuel because that was back when the gasoline problems were happening and everyone was attempting to get more mileage than horsepower. So it’s been a wonderful car. Every once in a while it will sit for a while and I will get into it and the leather still has that leathery smell to it. It’s odd,” he laughs. He adds that he never lets any of his cars sit longer than a month, always taking them out to “give them a open up.”
Turner is all about his Vettes. “The car that I drive, that I love, that makes me feel youthfull is my two thousand two Corvette,” Turner proclaims. But he echoes other enthusiasts in wanting a higher-quality interior. “They could have put a little more into the upholstery. There’s plastic on the side of the driver’s seat that has cracked down and the car has only got 8,600 miles on it. It shouldn’t have cracked down in that time. But it’s a fabulous car.”
He loves what the Vette can do on the road. “What truly struck me very first was I drove from home to Minneapolis in it. That’s a seven-hour drive; it’s four hundred twenty five miles,” he says. “I drove with the top down, above the speed limit and the computer told me it was getting twenty six miles a gallon. And that’s with three hundred fifty horsepower V-8. When I got there and packed it, I was fairly astonished that it made it all the way there and didn’t take that much fuel. It lightly made it there on one tank.”
Turner has had eleven Vettes. “I have a ’57 I bought it in one thousand nine hundred eighty one and I have a ’71. They’re all in chunks, that’s why I have the 2002. I bought the two thousand two because I desired a Vette to drive because I was tearing the other ones apart.”
Albeit he busy with his reunion with Randy Bachman, if he has spare time, he works on the two old Vettes as his project cars, even driving to Oregon to pick up a front end for the one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvette.
“The original framework on the old Corvette, the early ones, was a ’52 Chevy and it’s not a excellent chassis, so I got another front end and mounted it into the car with disc brakes and so it’s going to be a lot better-handling car,” Turner says.
He knows how he wants the vintage Corvette to turn out. “It’s totally different; it’s got a Mustang steering box in it. The car will look stock. I’m not switching the assets, I’m switching the chassis. I have a good concept of it and I want to do the work myself.”
If Turner has questions, he can always tap one of his friends at their weekly get-together. “We’ve got a Saturday bench racing lunch thing — we get together and everybody talks cars,” he laughs. “We go to a Greek restaurant called the Park Tower.”
Turner has always had a thing for Vettes, and in one thousand nine hundred seventy one when he joined the band (then called Plucky Belt), he ultimately had the means to treat himself to his wish car.
“That’s when I bought my very first Corvette. That was the ’71 that I still own. I wasn’t aware of what Corvettes were like and this ’71 was what they call a ‘big block,’” he says of his initiation into his fresh car. He learned the hard way how to correctly treat it.
“There’s the ‘small blocks’ that they call the ‘mouse motor’ and they call the ‘rat motor’ the big block, which was in this car. A four hundred fifty four cubic-inch engine and it had an independent rear suspension that if you applied too much power going around a corner, it would pull the tires in towards each other and it would lift the traction off of the road and it could go end-for-end. Which I did on the Upper Levels Highway in Vancouver and went five times end-for-end down the highway, just spun-donuts, going around and around,” Turner recounts with a chuckle. “It frightened me pretty bad. It took five minutes to get my heart to stop striking so quick.”
Turner has a special love for one thousand nine hundred fifty seven Corvettes. “My love for cars — it just happened,” he says. “I’d see cars on the street and in one thousand nine hundred fifty seven I was fifteen and those are years when you truly commence to get caught on certain things. My neighbor one street over, who was a printer and making a good wage, bought a ’57 Corvette. And that’s my thing with ’57 Corvettes. I always dreamed a ’57 Corvette and I didn’t find it until 1981.”
The Dakota is the vehicle Turner drives around town to haul engine parts for his project cars. “The Dakota is just a good truck and it does what I need it to do. So it’s fine,” he says.
This pickup truck is another project waiting for Turner. “Randy and I have committed to each other for three years. If I can sneak some car time in I will, but it’s more music now,” he says. “It’s all in one chunk; it’s so old that it needs to come apart. There’s tons of parts for it out there. It’s become such a big thing now with older cars that almost any car, you can find someone online who’s making fresh old parts. So it’s fine.”
Car he learned to drive in
Turner was born and raised in Winnipeg, where he learned to drive in his dad’s one thousand nine hundred fifty nine Ford. “It was just an old four-door sedan and it was pink,” he recalls. “My mother had her choice of what color she wished when my dad bought the car.”
The very first car Turner bought was a one thousand nine hundred fifty five Canadian Pontiac around one thousand nine hundred sixty for $318. He was playing music and working as a car jockey at a dealership. “A lot of Americans don’t know that a Pontiac in Canada was a Chevrolet,” he points out. “It wasn’t like an Oldsmobile. In the U.S. Pontiacs were more like Oldsmobile were. They were a big car, but in Canada the Canadian Pontiacs were put on Chevrolet chassis with Chevrolet engines.”
Even back then Turner liked working on his cars. “I bought this ’55 Pontiac two-door coach and I took the two hundred sixty five V8 out of it and ordered a motor in a crate from General Motors, a three hundred twenty seven Corvette motor, and I put that in. That was my very first joy car.”
That car met its demise when Turner went through a 20-mile-per-hour turn on a moist surface at a high speed. “I put it over the rails and into a telephone poll and I wrote the car off. I was fine, but I left the headlight ring welded to the railing. For the longest time they called it ‘Turner’s Corner.’ It was in Winnipeg,” he laughs. “But I’m not telling you where, because they could still come back at me! It wasn’t a kosher thing to do. It did the framework in and when the frame’s gone, it’s done.”
While he never took photos of his very first car, he does have a picture of his 2nd car, a one thousand nine hundred fifty eight Pontiac that he had just before BTO took off, which he recalls fondly. “I went on and bought a three hundred forty eight Pontiac two-door hardtop. It already had flames on it. A friend of mine was a painter and painted the car. It won fairly a few car shows.”
Turner only had it for a year and a half. “It was just before I moved from Winnipeg to Vancouver to do Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I had no place to put it in Vancouver so I sold the car.”
While the annual road tour to St. Petersburg is done out of necessity, Turner’s beloved road trips in his Vette are on Highway one in Canada. “My beloved drive very likely is driving into Northwest Ontario, into the Whiteshell. The area there is called Kenora on the way to a little town called Thunder Bay,” he says. “When you get into the Whiteshell, it becomes very curvy, very rough terrain roads, up and down rocky, hilly roads.”
While they are now working under the name Bachman & Turner, most fans know the famous story of how they added “Overdrive” to BTO. “We dreamed to call ourselves ‘Bachman Turner,’ but at the time guys using their own names like ‘Crosby Stills, Nash’ and others, they were more into a softer folk music and we dreamed our name to portray where we were going and we dreamed to tag something on to ‘Bachman Turner’ and we had no idea what we were going to use. We were having breakfast in a truck stop, we went up to pay the cashier and there was a magazine sitting right on the counter that said “Overdrive” with a big truck on it and we looked at each other and said, ‘There it is — Overdrive,’” he says, with a chuckle.
As for the band’s gear logo back then, Turner explains, “It had that sound to it, that’s why we went with it. It meant ‘turn everything up utter and go for it.’”
These days, Bachman & Turner are going on tour to support their long-awaited fresh album, “Bachman & Turner,” which dropped Sept. 7. But don’t be astonished if you see Turner at a local NHRA haul race, since he attempts to attend when he can.
“I’ve done so much to do with automobiles,” Turner says. “I’ve been to Formula one races. I have friends who run a 300-mile-an-hour Funny Car on the big circuit — NHRA, Tim Wilkerson. Anytime I’m near them, I go out and see them. Any of the NHRA haul races. That’s the one that I’m most interested in.”
Turner attempts to make it to some of the big races such as Pomona, Phoenix, Gainesville, and Brainerd. “I’d love to get out to most of them if I can and of course if Wilkerson is running, I get a hold of a duo of guys in his squad. They usually say, ‘If you’re around, we’ll have tickets waiting for you and pit passes, come back, see us, spend the day with us.’”