This month marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's third album, 1974's Not Fragile.
Randy Bachman says the title was inspired by fourth album by Yes, 1971's Fragile, which "had a world breaking up on the cover. Fred Turner said, 'Well, I want to call this album Not Fragile and show that it’s the opposite.'"
Bachman goes onto say, "Yes are phenomenal musicians, incredibly skilled. BTO was and is bare-bones rock. We were playing really heavy stuff. Yes used very intricate vocals and harmonies, and our stuff was like four guys in the garage playing banging crashing guitars and just rocking out. It was anything but fragile. You could drop it and kick it around and it wouldn’t break. So, just as a pun, we called our album Not Fragile, and then had a box of gears on the cover.
"Fred wrote the song ‘Not Fragile,’ and out of that came ‘Roll on Down the Highway’ and then the mistaken song that was never even supposed to be on the album, ‘You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.' It became a number-one single. So that was like the peak BTO moment."
Not Fragile remains BTO"s biggest album, hitting number-one on the Billboard 200.
Bachman, minus Turner and any of the other members from any incarnation of BTO, is touring as BTO with another round of shows getting under way August 20th in Vancouver.
Check out the original post here from BTO's official Instagram.