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

looking, sporting dapper clothes and a string bow-tie, with hair well groomed and a pencil-thin d’Artagnan moustache. He was playing the most beautiful guitar I’d ever seen, an orange Gretsch Chet Atkins model 6120 almost bigger than him. And as he’s playing, I’m hearing bass lines and chords plus a melody lead line, but he’s doing it all by himself. That was my introduction to Lenny Breau. That day he played “Caravan” and covered all the parts simultaneously by himself. I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen or heard.
    Afterwards, as the band was packing up, I approached Junior.
    â€œCan I ask you something?” I said.
    â€œSure, man,” Lenny replied in this hushed, hipster-sounding voice.
    I asked him what that style of playing he did was called. I wasstill a beginner, but I’d had years of violin so I had the finger dexterity.
    â€œIt’s called Chet Atkins,” Lenny replied.
    I thought it was one big word, like flamenco. Chedatkins. I’d never heard of Chet Atkins and thought it was just a particular style of playing. Nonetheless, I wanted to learn it. He told me to get a “chedatkins” record and get that style into my head first before I could learn it.
    â€œGo to Eaton’s record bar and ask for a Chet Atkins record,” Lenny directed me.
    So one day after school the next week, I took the bus down to Eaton’s department store on Portage Avenue and said to the woman at the record bar, “I need a ‘chedatkins’ record.”
    â€œYou mean Chet Atkins?”
    â€œNo. Chedatkins. It’s a kind of guitar style, like flamenco.”
    She grinned at me and replied, “I think you mean Mr. Chet Atkins. He’s a guitar player.”
    She went behind the counter, pulled out an album, said “Listen to this,” and put it on. “That’s Chet Atkins.”
    So I bought the record, took it home, and learned “The Third Man Theme” all by myself, figuring out first the bass line and then the melody and putting them together.
    A couple of weeks later, the CKY Caravan played another car lot in the North End. After their set, I approached Lenny again. He recognized me, so I asked him if I could come over to his house sometime and learn a few things from him. To my eternal good fortune, Lenny had moved across the street from two schoolmates of mine, the Schmolinger twins, Carol and Karen, on Airlies Street in the North End. What was further cool about Lenny was that even though he was still a teenager, barely sixteen, he didn’t go to school. The guitar was his life. That’s what I wanted to do, quit school and play guitar all day.
    I went to school the following Monday morning, but at lunchI made my way to the Schmolingers’ house. After lunch as they returned to school, I went over and knocked on Lenny’s door. He was in his bedroom with his guitar and a record player. I showed him what I had worked out, “The Third Man Theme,” and he showed me what I was doing wrong because I didn’t know the proper chords.
    From that moment on I was the hunger and Lenny was the nourishment. I visited his house many times over the next couple of years. Everything I wanted to learn I would struggle at and then have Lenny show me what I couldn’t get. He would show me the simpler way of playing it. And he had an incredible ear. Lenny could literally hear something once and play it, invert it, solo over it, everything. No formal lessons, just Lenny and me in his bedroom with a guitar. I have no tapes, no notes, no pictures of him and me together, only my memories of this gentle, soft-spoken young man sitting in his bedroom showing me where to move my fingers. It was probably the greatest couple of years of my life in terms of my learning curve, and it gave me the foundation for my playing style today because I started integrating those ideas and styles into my stage playing