Growing up in Winnipeg, Canada, Randy Bachman had the kind of guitar-playing friends most teenagers could only dream of — guys like Neil Young and Lenny Breau. Like many young players, he also had his heroes: Chet Atkins, Barney Kessel and Merle Travis.
But Bachman — who would go on to play with the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive — also experienced something few young guitarists ever do: a chance encounter with one of his biggest idols, Les Paul.
It happened in 1959, when Bachman was just 15.
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“I had just met Lenny Breau, who was a really great friend of mine,” Bachman tells Guitar Player. “He was 16, and I was 15, and he was teaching me Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, Les Paul, Barney Kessel, and all that kind of stuff. I was just a beginner on guitar, but I’d played violin since I was five, which is also a melody instrument.
The guy says, ‘Where’s your parents? You gotta be over 21 to sit at a table.’”
— Randy Bachman
“We heard that Les Paul and Mary Ford were coming to town to play a nightclub called the Rancho Don Carlos, and I figured, ‘That’s it — I’m not even going to tell my parents. I’m going to get on the bus after school with my Les Paul album under my arm and get him to sign it.’”
The fact that he was too young to enter a nightclub didn’t deter Bachman.
“It’s 5:30, and I get to the club and knock on the door. The guy says, ‘Where’s your parents? You gotta be over 21 to sit at a table.’”
Dejected, Bachman walked back to the stop to wait for the next bus home.
“I’m sitting there, and a Cadillac pulls up,” he recalls. “The window rolls down, and it’s Les Paul. He says, ‘Hey, kid, what are you doing here?’”
Bachman was understandably shocked to see his idol in the flesh. But unlike many established stars, Paul liked to chat with anyone within earshot. He was famously approachable — and if you didn’t go up to him, he was just as likely to come to you.
The stunned teen stammered. “‘What? You?’” Bachman finally managed to say. He held out the record he’d brought along. “‘I’ve got your album here. Will you sign it?’
Les said, ‘Tell you what. Carry my guitar and come in the back door.’”
— Randy Bachman
“Les said, ‘Sure, I’ll sign it. Are you coming to the show tonight?’”
When Bachman explained what had happened, Paul made him a proposition.
“He said, ‘Tell you what. Carry my guitar and come in the back door.’
“So I carried the guitar in, but of course I couldn’t be in the audience,” Bachman says with a laugh. “I watched the whole show from the kitchen through these big swinging doors with the big round windows, like portholes. I was basically watching Les Paul’s rear end and Mary Ford’s rear end. And she was wearing like a prom dress.”
Bachman remembers that at one point Les came into the kitchen covered in sweat, toting his electric guitar. “He hands me his guitar and says, ‘Hold this, kid,’ and wiped his head with a napkin. I gave him the guitar back, and he said, “Thank you very much.’”
Once the show was over, Les offered Bachman a quick lesson.
“I said, ‘Could you show me the opening run from ‘How High the Moon,’ please?’ So he showed me.”
Nearly 30 years later, on Saturday, August 2, 1986, Bachman-Turner Overdrive were supporting Van Halen on their 5150 tour. During a show at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York, Les — then a regular performer in Manhattan, first at Fat Tuesdays and later at the Iridium — stopped by to visit Eddie Van Halen when he spotted Bachman.
“He comes up to me in the dressing room, and he goes, ‘Hey, kid, do I know you?’” Bachman recalls. “I go, ‘Yeah, from the Rancho Don Carlos.’ He remembered. So he said, ‘Come to my show tomorrow night.’”
Les then put him through his paces.
“He calls me up onstage, and we do ‘How High the Moon,’ and gets me to play the opening part,” Bachman says. “Then he says, ‘Now let’s play one of yours!’ So I played ‘Takin’ Care of Business,’ and he played it with me. It was fantastic.”
That reunion would turn out to be the last time Bachman saw Paul, who died in 2009.
“I was invited to his place in New Jersey in September 2001,” Bachman explains. “The next day was 9/11. I was at the Marriott in Times Square and it was like the world had stopped. So I never got to go to Les’s house.”
