Growing up in a musical family (her grandfather Albert Hews McCann, Sr. was a professional
cornet player and singer in
Shreveport, Louisiana), McCann was part of the McCann Family Orchestra that accompanied traveling vaudeville acts at the Shreveport theatre. McCann's family moved to Castro Valley, California during her teen years. After graduating from high school in 1967, she moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury region. McCann became part of the
hippie movement when she worked at the
Magic Mountain Festival on Mount Tamalpais and then at the
Monterey Pop Festival, where she befriended a nervous
Jimi Hendrix just before his seminal performance. She appears in the
D.A. Pennebaker documentary "
Monterey Pop!" McCann went on to become a folk singer and songwriter, appearing many times at famed
San Francisco folk clubs such as The
Holy City Zoo, The
Drinking Gourd, and The
Coffee Gallery, where she would play her distinctive
Gibson J-50 guitar and sing her original songs. McCann joined with Bob Smith and Roy Michaels of "
Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys" to form a new group called "Rich and Famous (and Denise)". The group only played a few gigs before going their separate ways. After moving to
Kitsilano, a neighbourhood of
Vancouver,
British Columbia, McCann became a fixture performing at local clubs such as
Rohan’s Rockpile and The
Commodore Ballroom. In Vancouver, McCann teamed up with Guy Sobell, who produced her first single, the country-tinged "It Still Hurts" and its proposed B side "Tattoo Man". But her record label,
Polydor Records in Montreal, decided the second song was too rock and roll oriented to serve as the B side to this country song, and they asked Sobell to extend it by adding a 2-minute percussion break in the middle so they could market it in the new clubs that were springing up all over
Montreal. These clubs were playing a new genre of music that was called "
Disco" for the
discotheques where the beat-heavy dance music was popular and they wanted long, extended pieces that could be mixed by the club DJs to make them seamlessly meld into one another. Sobell complied with the request and "Tattoo Man" was released as a five-minute extended play LP that became a hit on the disco charts across
North America. McCann's follow-up record was "I Don't Wanna Forget You", a song that featured a four-octave vocal improvisation. This second release received more commercial radio exposure than "Tattoo Man". McCann was signed to the ill-fated and short-lived Disco specialty label "
Butterfly Records" in Hollywood, and was thereafter dogged by having her record label go out of business twice just as her albums ("Midnight Madness" and "I Have A Destiny") were released. She continued to work professionally in
Canada in many bands, including the Basil Watson Revue, Mad Ivan and the Hornets, Denise McCann Band, Denise McCann and the Dead Marines,
Headpins, and The Night Train Revue. She also appeared as a featured performer on many Canadian TV shows, including The
Alan Hamel Show and its replacement The
Alan Thicke Show, the
Wolfman Jack Show, The
Paul Anka Show, and the
Rene Simard Show. She performed at the famed
Studio 54 nightclub in 1982. McCann met
Randy Bachman of The
Guess Who and
Bachman–Turner Overdrive at a Christmas fundraiser concert and they married in 1982. She became a Canadian citizen in 1989. Bachman and McCann separated in 2011. Prior to their separation, McCann was heard on CBC Radio as a contributor to Bachman's program
Vinyl Tap. ==References==