"No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" is a song by the Canadian rock band The Guess Who. It was released on their 1970 album American Woman, and was released on the B-side of the "American Woman" single without the "New Mother Nature" section. The single was officially released as "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" and peaked at #1 on the RPM magazine charts (three weeks) and on the Billboard charts. In Cash Box, which at the time ranked sides independently, "No Sugar Tonight" reached #39.
According to Randy Bachman, the inspiration for the song arose after an incident when he was visiting California. He was walking down the street with a stack of records under his arm, when he saw three "tough-looking biker guys" approaching. He felt threatened and was looking for a way to cross the street onto the other sidewalk when a car pulled up to the men. A woman got out of the car, shouting at one of them, asking where he'd been all day, that he had left her alone with the kids. The man suddenly was alone and his buddies walked away. Chastened, he got in the car as the woman told him before pulling away: "And one more thing, you're getting no sugar tonight". The words stuck in Bachman's memory.
Bachman then wrote a short song in the key of F# called "No Sugar Tonight". When he presented the song to Burton Cummings and the record company, he was told that the song was too short. Bachman and Cummings expanded the song by adding to it a song Cummings had written that was also in the key of F#, "New Mother Nature". The song was originally written without the "in my coffee" and "in my tea" wording. The band was ordered to alter the lyrics to make the sexual connotation less obvious.
As Cummings told the audience in a 1995 concert, later released on CD "Up Close/Alone", "Randy Bachman and I each had written a song, and for some strange reason we decided to transwash the two together" and finally successful.
Famous quotes containing the words sugar, tonight, mother and/or nature:
“Naughty Paughty Jack-a-Dandy,
Stole a Piece of Sugar Candy
From the Grocer’s Shoppy-Shop,
And away did hoppy-hop.”
—Henry Carey (1693?–1743)
“Everywhere, everywhere, Christmas tonight !”
—Phillips Brooks (1835–1893)
“1946: I go to graduate school at Tulane in order to get distance from a “possessive” mother. I see a lot of a red-haired girl named Maude-Ellen. My mother asks one day: “Does Maude-Ellen have warts? Every girl I’ve known named Maude-Ellen has had warts.” Right: Maude-Ellen had warts.”
—Bill Bouke (20th century)
“Progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)