Randy Bachman by Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap Stories Page B

for a teenager in the 1950s. I remember seeing a local band, I don’t even recalltheir name, but the guitar player was Eugene Hywarren. I thought he was absolutely cool. He had flat-top hair with the sides slicked back and he was playing a cool-looking Harmony electric guitar. At that time I only had an acoustic guitar. So I went up to him and asked if I could come to his house and play his electric guitar, and he said sure. He later found me that Silvertone guitar. I still have it. It’s funny, but the cheap guitars back in the early 60s— Silvertone, Harmony, Hagstrom, Supro, Danelectro, Kay—are much sought after today. These were the beginner guitars back then and are hard to find now. I guess everybody threw them out once they moved up to a better model. But these beginner guitars had their virtues.
    I just loved the sound of an electric guitar. I would go to the country-and-western music shows at the old Winnipeg Auditorium and watch the guitar players. When Bonanza came on the television every Sunday night everything stopped at our house. We all watched it. For me, though, I loved the theme song played on electric guitar by Al Caiola. He had so much reverb on his guitar that it sounded as if he were playing in a cave or a tiled bathroom just to give it that depth and big sound. My dad would say that one guitar was the same as another, but I knew early on that different makes and models produced different sounds.
    In the spring of 2008 I introduced one of our most popular themes with Vinyl Tap listeners. Over several weeks I featured profiles of the guitars that changed the sound of rock ’n’ roll. There are three or four makes of guitars that every player knows should be in your guitar arsenal. They’re like your tools: your hammer, your saw, your screwdriver. Most guitar players need a Fender Telecaster and a Fender Stratocaster, a Gibson hollow-body electric and a solid body, a Gretsch, and a Rickenbacker. In Vinyl Tap ’s “Guitarology 101” we explored all these guitars—the sounds that made them unique and the recordings that were made using them.
    FENDER TELECASTER
    Our first guitar is the Fender Telecaster. Some of the people who’ve played Telecasters for years are known as the Masters of the Telecasters. Some you know and some you don’t. The Telecaster has a very bright, clean, trebly sound. But there’s a thickness to it as well. The first time I ever heard a Telecaster sound was Luther Perkins backing up Johnny Cash in the Tennessee Two. It was in the first song I ever learned on guitar. My cousins, the Dupas brothers, had a guitar, and they taught me the three chords to “I Walk the Line . ” Once I learned those three chords I was on my way.
    I later played with Johnny Cash in Brandon, Manitoba, way back when I was in the Silvertones with Chad Allan, before we became the Reflections (then the Expressions, then the Guess Who). It must have been about 1962. Johnny came out with these two guys, Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass. When they’d first started with Johnny back in the 50s none of them knew much about playing their instruments, but Luther knew a bit more than the others, so he got to play lead guitar. His lead playing was so simple that it appealed to everybody and helped define Johnny Cash’s sound. It was that LCD thing, the lowest common denominator.
    The first Telecasters were called Broadcasters. There was also a single-pickup model with the same body called an Esquire that had the bridge pickup only.
    When Fender issued its Broadcaster, Gretsch already had a guitar of that name, and Fred Gretsch sent Leo Fender a letter informing him that he couldn’t use the name. So Leo changed the name to Telecaster. He didn’t change the guitar, just the name. But nowadays an original Broadcaster, or better yet a “No-caster,” which were the handful of models he made in between the name change, sell