Legendary guitarist and instrumental musician in Canada’s rock culture, Randy Bachman is animated in recounting the story of how he was reunited with his long-lost Gretsch guitar after 45 years.

“A guy emailed us from one of our YouTube (live streams) and said ‘I found your lost Gretsch.’ I’d been searching for it for 45 years.”

The icon behind The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive first bought his 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins, in a gorgeous orange, when he was a 19-year-old upstart in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It would be stolen from a locked hotel room during a BTO performance in Toronto in 1977.

The Gretsch

Decades later, and a fan out of B.C., William Long, used facial recognition technology to track down the exact Gretsch, tracing it all the way to Japan, where it was now in possession of renowned guitarist Takeshi. 

With the help of his daughter-in-law Bachman would contact Takeshi, and over a zoom call would see his treasured instrument for the first time in four and a half decades.

“The guy brings my guitar on the zoom and I can’t breathe. I haven’t seen this guitar for four plus decades. He shows me the guitar and I say ‘that’s my guitar!” He says ‘I’m an honourable guy, I’ll give it back to you’. I said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a brand new Gretsch’, and he says ‘I don’t want a brand new Gretsch.’ ‘Well what do you want?’ ‘I want the same guitar. Can you find its sister?’

Easier said than done, but when you’re Randy Bachman, corners of the musical community are more easily reached. 

Through a vintage guitar dealer in Ohio, Bachman would procure a 1957 Gretsch with only two digits off from the serial number of his original. 

Takeshi, overjoyed, agreed to the trade, but with one caveat. Bachman would have to travel to Japan to collect. 

The swap would take place on Canada Day in the Canadian Embassy at Tokyo’s Oscar Peterson Theatre.

“They won’t let me see him until the day. And I say why not? They said ‘this must be like a wedding. The bride does not see the groom until she walks down the aisle with her father and he goes, Oh, man, is she rockin’ beautiful!’

“So they wanted that first reaction, so I don’t get to see this guy or my guitar. So on Canada Day (Takeshi) goes up and plays a couple of songs,” Bachman recalls, emotionally. “Then he plays Takin’ Care of Business a little bit and he stops. I walk out, meet him on stage. I look at him, he’s got my guitar. I’ve got the twin sister guitar. I get my guitar back. I can’t move, I can’t breathe. I’ve got it. It’s beautiful. He gets the twin sister. We both finished playing Takin’ Care of Business. We’re both in tears. We’re both pretty verklempt. This is like a really incredible moment.”

The entire situation – from the loss, to the long-awaited reclamation – has the noted storyteller nearly lost for words.

“I tried to find the guitar for 40 years and couldn’t. And then the guitar found me,” he shares with a smile.

Lost & Found

The incredible story will be the subject of an independent documentary, with Randy and his son, fellow rock-star success Tal Bachman, set to write songs for the proposed film, Lost and Found, with the famed guitar-god joking that his son contends that his father “lost his magic” when his guitar was stolen in 1977.

“Tal contends that when that guitar was stolen in ‘77, they stole my magic. With that guitar, I learned to play guitar. I learned my vocabulary, so to speak…

“And then every song I wrote and recorded; These Eyes, Laughing, is all on this guitar. So when it was stolen my son said to me, ‘You haven’t had a number one hit since American Woman and You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet. Your magic is gone, but when it gets back!’”

Overcoming COVID-19, whooping cough and double pneumonia in recent years, Bachman, at age 78, is as active now as he was in his heyday between reunion-esque tours alongside Burton Cummings, continued successes in radio (Vinyl Tap anyone?) and perhaps most notably, his father-son tandem Bachman & Bachman.

“We wrote basically a retrospective album as what has happened to me as the father, what’s happened to my son who’s followed kind of in my footsteps in and out of bands and up and down and good manager, bad manager, label signing, label dropping, all that stuff. What we went through with our family, with our domestic divorces, because all rock and roll leads to divorce. 

Bachman & Bachman

“You’re never with your wife or your family all the time. Unfortunately, that’s the big downside of it. And you look at these women you loved and they loved you, but you stopped the love because of the gigantic distance between you physically and in mileage, if you know what I mean, like not being there. And so we wrote what you call an Americana album with very touching lyrics.”

Pillars of our rock n roll history like Bachman continue to reap the rewards of a lifetime of entertaining adoring fans. Catching up with The Herald before his island return at the Churchill Park Music Festival (which he rocked!!!), the architect of American Woman and Let it Ride explained that, in the pandemic era, the world seems primed for a rock renaissance.

“I think the Roaring Twenties are coming back because if you look at the Roaring Twenties a century ago, it was after a war, it was after a pandemic. People were dying from the flu and everything, and they were all restricted. They couldn’t go out. They were all vaccinated. It’s happening again,” Bachman shared, impassioned.

As for the man who more than a few musicians can call mentor, role model and overall inspiration, there’s more than enough gas in the tank for a man who’s still Takin’ Care of Business. “I always said I don’t want people saying, ‘I wonder what he’s doing now?’ I want people saying ‘look at what he’s doing now!’”

For all things Randy Bachman visit randybachman.com. For part one of our interview visit our website at nfldherald.com

Randy Bachman, architect of over 120 platinum, gold and silver album/singles globally, with #1 singles in over 20 countries and total record sales exceeding 40 million albums and singles through his work alongside legendary acts The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner-Overdrive, is high atop the pantheon of icons deserving of praise.

You know the singles his godly-bestowed hands have birthed: “These Eyes”, “Laughing”, “Undun”, “No Time”, “American Woman”, “No Sugar Tonight”, “Let it Ride”, “Roll on Down The Highway”, “Takin’ Care of Business”, “Looking Out For #1”, “Hey You” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”, among countless others.

Now, Bachman returns to Newfoundland and Labrador to kick off the inaugural Churchill Park Music Festival this Friday alongside Ann Wilson, David Wilcox and Harlequin in St. John’s, but not before sitting down with us for a deep dive into his storied life and career.

“I was there (in St. John’s) in the early 2000s with The Guess Who,” Bachman recalled during a lengthy and spirited interview/storytelling session with The Herald.

“We reformed in 1999 for the Pan Am games in Winnipeg just to do four songs at the closing. Everybody kind of went nuts and said, ‘Why are you only doing four songs? You got like 30 songs. Would you come back and play?’ So that year was ending. It was 1999, right? Nobody thought there was going to be a 2000. Everyone thought all the computers were going to nuke out in 2000, there’s not going to be anything. We said, Yeah, we’ll come back next year in 2000. There’s not going to be a next year. And lo and behold, January 1st came, nothing happened. It wasn’t the end of the world. And we ended up playing, I think, July 1st. That went on sale early in January, July 1st in Winnipeg, Canada Day, and it sold out in 10 minutes.

“And I remember the tour started in St John’s. I think we went there in late July. It was freezing. That cold wind when it comes off the Atlantic. I was explaining it to my son, because we’re all flying there in a couple of days, even though it’s July and August, you look out there, you see icebergs. They’re coming from Iceland or Greenland or they’re coming from the Arctic. And they actually come by there and there’s actually cold air around the ice. And even though the weather’s nice, it’s chilly there. I mean, I’ve been to Iceland in July and August and everybody said, take a hoodie. When the sun goes down, it is chilly. And if there’s wind, it’s bad. So I’m hoping we have good weather.”

Reflecting on sixty plus years in the music business – one fraught with insurmountable highs and predictable industry lows – and Bachman happily reflects on his days with BTO and The Guess Who, and the numerous reunions and high profile tours in subsequent eras.

“It’s all been quite dreamlike, because when you leave a band you think that’s it, and everybody’s got their chips on their shoulders, everybody’s got their baggage, and after a while the chips fall off, the baggage becomes lighter, and you go, What the f**k? We were great. We did like two or three albums that sold millions of copies. We put Canada on the map. We fulfilled our childhood dream. Then it happens in another band. You figure, well, that was really great. Hell freezes over. Great. And then ten years later, somebody calls us and says we want to hear the music again. Do you want to get back together? And you go what the heck? Sure, let’s do it! And you get back together.

“And the vibe is so good when you get back together because you’ve lost the baggage and the chips and the way you were pissed off, you realized it was 50% pissed off. I pissed them off. They pissed me off. It’s just like any breakup or any guy leaving a team or a marriage or a relationship or leaving your family or whatever, you run away from home. Sooner or later you go home because you like mom’s cooking. You know what I mean? And like her doing your laundry or whatever, you just like being in that comfort zone.”

Back in the glory days, when BTO would top global charts in the 70s, the daily grind of touring – and the far off future tech of global telecommunications – meant artists like Bachman would not realize the true fruits of their labours in real time.

“Everybody says you’re doing great. You’re on the road, you have no idea. We were doing 300 gigs a year. We had no idea that we were big and famous everywhere. You don’t know that everywhere the radio is playing your songs everywhere in every city and town in the world. “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” went to number one, we had no idea. It went to number one in 22 countries and we were on the road. There was no Internet. There was no newspaper. You couldn’t get Billboard magazine. You’re on the road, they didn’t sell it in drugstores. We just went on tour and every day we’d get a fax saying, ‘here’s where you’re going the next three days.'”

As for today, Bachman is honest about his interpretation about the current state of rock music.

“Everybody is going back (to the classics) because, let me be blunt, the new music is lousy. All the country music sounds the same. It’s the same guys in the studio with a different vocalist written by the same team of songwriters,” Bachman explained, delving into why the classic rock of the 60s and 70s still holds such allure five-six decades later.

“Everybody’s very reminiscent and going back to the 70s, which is the era of classic rock from about 62. The ending of Elvis is a big thing and The Beatles coming in 63, 64, going to about 76 when disco came in. There’s like 15 golden years of music for all the guys like me who were copying the Elvis’s and Chuck Berry’s and Bo Diddley’s and Jerry Lee Lewis’s and making it our own music and making it white boys prairie music because we’re from Winnipeg or Neil Young or Glenn Frey or Don Henley.

“You’re copying the black music that came out of Chicago and everywhere else and down south. You’re making it your own. And out comes this new pop rock music that now is called classic rock. And it is so good and so diverse because it came from so many sources and was then translated by so many messengers like me or Neil Young or Peter Frampton or The Doobie Brothers guys who just took that music and made it their own. That will last forever on classic rock radio. It’s a complete genre now, and everybody’s going back to embrace that.”

For part two of our one-on-one with the legendary Randy Bachman – including the story of how he reunited with his long lost guitar, and planned new music with son Tal – stay tuned to an upcoming print issue of The Newfoundland Herald.

Catch Bachman and his band at the Churchill Park Music Festival on Friday August 12th! Tickets still available!