Randy Bachman (12 page)

Back in the 60s I went to the Winnipeg Arena to see Lonnie Mack. He was a well-known guitar player at the time, so before he comes out on stage, a drummer and a bass player come out and plug in. Then Lonnie comes out and he's got the weirdest-shaped guitar I'd ever seen. It's a Gibson Flying V guitar, sometimes known as a wedge guitar, and it's got a Bigsby tailpiece on it. Along with this guitar around his neck, he's carrying in his hand a Magnatone amplifier. It was small enough for him to carry it like a book. He sets this little amp on a chair, plugs it in, and gets the most amazing sound from it. The amp is vibrating from the
volume but it sounds great. I was enthralled by the sound and by his guitar.

So I get the idea that I'm going to have a Flying V guitar like Lonnie Mack. My dad was in the process of finishing our new house; we were moving from West Kildonan to Garden City, just a little farther north. The doors had been delivered for the new house. So I took what was supposed to be my new bedroom door, carried it down to the basement, and cut it in half. On each half I drew a V with a pencil and then cut them out with a saw. We didn't have a router or anything like that, so on one of the V's I cut out where the pickup would be dropped in. I had a Fender Telecaster that didn't work very well and it was all in pieces. So I dropped the Telecaster pickup into the body then added the Fender neck and bridge. I then screwed the two pieces together and I had a Flying V guitar.

My father came home from work that night and I proudly showed him my guitar like a kid showing his dad his woodworking project. “Hey, Dad, isn't it good?” My dad looked at it and then at me and said, “Where did you get that wood?!”

“I found it leaning against my wall.”

Then he said, “That was your bedroom door!”

But I played it for many years. It looked like a Gibson Flying V but sounded like a Fender. It's in the National Archives of Canada now.

I have a 1952 Telecaster in my collection. Up to that point they were single-pickup models before they made the Esquire.

The Fender Telecaster is still around today and still reason-ably priced. There are lots of imitators, which I guess is a form of flattery, but there's only one Telecaster. It has a sound you cannot help but identify.

FENDER STRATOCASTER

The Fender Stratocaster debuted in 1954. Leo Fender was looking to create a solid-body guitar with a vibrato arm on it: the early
whammy bar. Paul Bigsby had already built a guitar with his patented vibrato, so Leo Fender wanted one as well. With the Bigsby, the strings went over the bridge or saddle and into the tailpiece itself so that you could waver the pitch. Leo Fender put a spring unit in where the strings went through the body, and pulling on the spring-mounted arm allowed you to get a vibrato effect.

The vibrato on Stevie Ray Vaughn's Stratocaster is wound so tight that it only goes down. Instead of wavering the pitch of the note or chord up and down, the spring only lowers the pitch then springs right back in tune. That's a trick Eddie Van Halen uses, too.

The first Stratocasters were all slightly different from each other because they were handmade one at a time. The first time I ever heard a Stratocaster was with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the first time I ever saw one was on
American Bandstand
when Jerry Lee Lewis was the guest. His guitar player, Roland James, was playing a Stratocaster.

The Stratocaster sound was just a little thinner than the Telecaster's. It had three single-coil pickups with a selector switch that allowed you to choose which pickup you wanted. But if you weren't careful sometimes you could move the switch just between two positions and get a whole new sound, known as an out-of-phase sound, where you were getting the partial sound of the two pickups blending together. It was a very cool sound that wasn't intentional then, but nowadays it's the sound of guys like John Mayer and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits. At the time, no other guitar sounded like what an out-of-phase Stratocaster sounded like. Today, though, most Stratocaster models have a five-way switch to give you that sound easily. Hank Marvin played a Fender Stratocaster. He initially wanted to order an American guitar, a Fender Telecaster. But what he got sent to him instead was a fiesta-red Stratocaster. That was the first Fender Stratocaster in the U.K. and the one he used on every Shadows recording.

The thing about the Stratocaster is the wonderful array of sounds you can get from it. Back in the 60s, that sound range was extraordinary. While the Telecaster is more in your face and thicker, the Stratocaster is a little thinner but a lot more varied and versa-tile in sound.

Jimi Hendrix kind of revived the Stratocaster in the late 60s. Not many guitarists were playing Stats until he came along. He played his upside down because he was left handed. In more recent years, another guitarist who took the Stratocaster to new heights is Mark Knopfler. Not only did he get a unique out-of-phase tone, but he played it with his thumb and fingers, which also gave it a distinctive sound. You can tell it's Mark Knopfler right away as soon as you hear that guitar.

I wrote and recorded “Let It Ride” with BTO on my old Stratocaster. I wrote the song in New Orleans when we were on tour opening for the Doobie Brothers. If you listen to the opening chords you can hear that clean Strat sound.

There's something about the Strat sound that just rings out. If you take that same guitar and run it through a small tweed Fender amp cranked right up, you get a really great bluesy sound. That's what Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher did and got a very distinctive blues sound. We played a lot of shows in a lot of dives with Rory Gallagher in the early 70s, back in the days when BTO was just getting going. Rory would come into the dressing room—we also shared a lot of dressing rooms—in clothes just like us and then change into a funky old flannel shirt and ripped jeans. He was dressing the part of a poor blues guy. Here we are putting all these clothes on to make ourselves look cool onstage and he's dressing down to look funky and streetwise. We got to know Rory quite well. He had a 1950s Stratocaster that was so worn that most of the paint had peeled off, eaten away by thousands of hours of sweat playing in clubs all over the world. But what a sound he got from that old Strat and little amp.

I had a Fender Stratocaster guitar back in the late 60s and I
wanted it to sound like many other guitars. So I took a chisel to it and made room for a Telecaster pickup by the bridge and a Gibson Les Paul humbucking pickup farther down the body towards the neck. I left the middle Stratocaster pickup on it. So I could get a Telecaster, Stratocaster, or Gibson Les Paul sound all from the same guitar with just the flick of a switch. That was called my “Legend” guitar. It's lost now, unfortunately. It was stolen.

GIBSON GUITARS

In the 1940s and 50s guitars began to be miked or amplified. But there were a lot of problems to work out. Acoustic guitars were hollow-bodied and relied on the sound box or body vibrating to get the sound out. But when you placed a pickup on them they often created feedback because the front and back vibrate, and when they do, the pickup vibrates and results in something called a microphonic feedback loop, which is usually an unpleasant squeal. Solid-body guitars eliminated that. But hollow-body electric guitars have a sound that has body to it. It's not just the pickups on a plank of wood. Hollow-body guitars have a rich sound that comes from the bigger body; you can hear the air coming from that body. The thicker the guitar body, the thicker the sound. Gibson was among the first companies to make hollow-body electric guitars. They'd been making acoustic guitars and mando-lins since the turn of the century.

Chuck Berry had that thick, fat hollow-body guitar sound. He used a big blond Gibson L5 jazz guitar with black P90 pickups. P90s were single-coil pickups inside a black plastic cover that had a little triangle on top to screw it into the body. They were called “dog's ear pickups” because they looked like the ear of a dog. I just called that Gibson model a Chuck Berry guitar. He played it in all the early rock 'n' roll movies. But if you turned those guitars up too loud they'd still give you feedback because of the hollow body.

Les Paul was trying to stop his big-body jazz guitar from feeding back. So he got a piece of wood he called “The Log,” put a pickup on it and a bridge, strings, frets, and tuning pegs, and took it to Gibson and said, “I want you to manufacture this.” They said no because to them it looked like a fence post or a plank of wood with a pickup. Les then went to a pawn shop, bought a cheap arch-top guitar, and sliced it right down the middle from the neck to beyond the bridge. He put half on one side of the log and half on the other so that it looked like a guitar. But the real guts of the thing was still the log. Les took it to Gibson, and this time they agreed to make it.

But they soon realized that the body wasn't important to the sound, so they started making just the solid-body guitar, or the Les Paul guitar.

The first Gibson Les Paul guitars looked like a regular Spanish guitar but smaller, as if it had been shrunk down, and made out of solid wood. They were still using the P90 single-coil pickups that could create feedback, so Les decided to take two single-coil pickups, rewire them together, and place them side by side. This cancelled out the hum that would cause the feedback, so they were named humbucking pickups. They bucked or got rid of the hum. The Les Paul Standard solid-body guitar with humbucking pickups became the standard-bearer for rock guitar. It had a much different sound than a Fender or a Gretsch, especially when played through a Marshall amplifier. There's nothing like it. It's the sound of hard rock. One of the best examples of that sound is “All Right Now” by Free with Paul Kossoff playing a 1959 Les Paul Standard through a Marshall stack.

The Gibson Les Paul guitar is the pick 'n' shovel of rock 'n' roll guitars, the ultimate in rock guitars. Whether it's a gold top or a sunburst ('burst), they sound the same. Jimmy Page played a 1959 Les Paul in Led Zeppelin that was given to him by Joe Walsh.
He was able to get sounds out of his Les Paul that nobody else gets because the pickups were put in backwards and so produce this cool out-of-phase sound. He was able to reverse the polarity in his pickups and get a very distinctive sound, the sound of Led Zeppelin.

Peter Green, of early Fleetwood Mac and before that John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, gave his 1955 Les Paul to Irish blues rock guitarist Gary Moore in the mid 70s. That guitar recently sold for $1 million. The previous owner who sold it to Peter Green was the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards.

I have a 1959 Gibson Les Paul with a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece. I still play that guitar to this day and it's probably worth $250,000 to $300,000. That's the guitar I played the lead on for “American Woman.” It's amazing that a guitar that probably cost $350 new is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once you play certain hits with these guitars, they take on a life of their own.

In the late 60s the Guess Who played a lot around Vancouver and the West Coast, and that's where I acquired my Gibson Les Paul. I'd broken my Rickenbacker and was using a blue sparkle Mosrite, which was a funny-shaped guitar that the Ventures used. It looked cool, but the neck was like a bow and arrow. I had it along when we played a church basement gig in Nanaimo. We were onstage playing our set when from the back of the hall came a young man with a little brown guitar case. I knew what was in that case; every guitar player back then knew what a Les Paul case looked like. The Les Paul guitar was the sound of Eric Clapton on the
John Mayall's Bluesbreakers
album, and of Cream, Jimmy Page in Led Zeppelin, and Peter Green—the heavy blues-rock sound.

The kid opened the case and I could see it was an original '59 Les Paul with a factory-installed Bigsby tailpiece. He gestured at the Mosrite and back to the Les Paul. I knew what he wanted. In mid-song I took off the Mosrite, he handed me the Les Paul,
and I tuned it up and played it the rest of the night. It had incredible sound. It was heavy to hold, but it rocked. After the show I handed it back to him, saying thanks for letting me play his guitar.

“You mean you don't want to trade with me?” he asked, surprised.

“What?! You want to trade me your Les Paul for my Mosrite?” He then told me how he'd seen me playing the Mosrite on television and wanted a guitar like that. His uncle had given him the Les Paul and the kid didn't think it was very cool.

“Just a minute. This isn't a fair trade,” I told him. “I've got $75 in my pocket. I'll trade you the Mosrite and $75, but I want someone to witness the deal and to sign a paper attesting that we both agreed to the trade.”

The minister witnessed the exchange and signed the paper. The kid went home happy and I got the guitar that would become the sound of “No Time” and “American Woman.” That guitar became associated with my sound, the sound of the Guess Who.

Many years later while I was playing in BTO, out of the blue I received a letter from a lawyer seeking redress, claiming I had taken advantage of the kid who was now his client. I sent him a copy of the paper signed by the minister and never heard back from him.

Neil Young has this old black Gibson Les Paul that he's had absolutely forever, at least since the late 60s, but it's a 1950s model Les Paul. It has a Bigsby vibrato tailpiece on it because Neil likes to use vibrato. He's kept the original neck pickup since it has a fatter tone, very bassy, which Les Pauls have. But he replaced the bridge pickup with a Gibson Firebird guitar pickup, which is wound differently and sounds different from a standard humbucking pickup. It has a more trebly sound, brighter. He calls this guitar Old Black; it's his main guitar and has been for decades. If you listen to “Down by the River” you can hear him switching from one pickup to the other and the differences in sound.

As experiments, Gibson made a bunch of weirdly shaped guitars in the late 50s and early 60s, including the Flying V, the Firebird, and the Explorer. But they made only a few of these models because they didn't sell. Today they're worth a fortune. A kid's father bought him an Explorer back in 1960. The kid didn't want it, so he put it in its case and left it under his bed. Decades later he found the guitar in the ruins of his parents' house following a hurricane. The house was destroyed, but the guitar was in perfect shape and had never been played. He contacted an auction house, which sold this original Gibson Explorer with a factory-installed Bigsby for $610,000.