First off, let me make this clear, I am, by no means, a music aficionado. I love music, and I listen to a wide variety of it, but I don't spend much time getting to know the people who make it. Maybe it's my loss, but I've always felt music was a personal experience, much like staring at a painting. And when I'm staring at a painting, the last thing I want is the artist hanging over my shoulder telling me what I'm seeing.

Having said that, I decided to take on the task of reviewing The Guess Who - The Hits, based on a prior experience I had with their music. Let's revisit shall we?

The year is 1978. I'm eight years old and standing on the remnants of a pier that juts sharply outward to a lake. Black flies are buzzing and biting intermittently as the summer sun beats down on my head. I want to go swimming, but the leeches are too plentiful close to shore and the flies are not opposed to following you out, into the deepest part of lake, in order to take a chunk out of you as soon as you resurface.

As far as I was concerned, the whole situation sucked. This was supposed to be a vacation to our family cottage. But what it came to be was a small wooden house with no plumbing, and only an hours worth of electricity each night, via a gas powered generator. There were no neighbours, save a few black bears, and the nearest town was over a half hour away. We were living the bush life, and anyone who's lived the bush life can tell you that there are only a few things that you can do: eat, drink alcohol, sit in the sun, and fish. Of that list, I could only do two things, and sitting in the sun was now hampered by those damn flies.

My mom, seeing the look of boredom on my face, suggested I go and listen to some music, and wait for my grandfather to return to take me fishing. I complied, and scrambled to the family van trying to outrun the numerous carnivores circling me.

Safe in my new locale, I searched for something to plug into the old eight track player. Digging through a pile of pop cans, beer bottles, and empty cigarette packages, I found two cartridges. One was Steppenwolf, and the other was American Woman by The Guess Who. Having already been inundated by the former, for the entire eight hours it took to get to the cottage, I decided on The Guess Who.

For the next hour, I listened to this eight-track and found myself rewinding certain songs as their appeal reached past my young ears, and resonated somewhere in my brain. That whole afternoon, stretched out on the bed in the van (yes, it was one of those kinds of vans), I listened to them, never once thinking about swimming, fishing, or the flies. I didn't know why I liked them, I just knew I did. And in the twenty-seven years that have passed, since that day, I can say that I still like them.