AS A GUITAR-OBSESSED teenager in Winnipeg, Canada, in the late 1950s, Randy Bachman would make weekly Saturday pilgrimages to the local music store, Winnipeg Piano, which is where he met two lifelong friends. One was another budding area musician named Neil Young; the other, a used 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins Hollow Body electric guitar that would become his closest and most treasured musical companion.
“Neil lived on one side of town, I lived on the other, and we would both take the bus downtown and look in the window of Winnipeg Piano at this guitar and go, ‘Man, if we could ever play that…,’” Bachman, now 80, recalls. “We had seen Duane Eddy play ‘Rebel Rouser’ with a 6120 on American Bandstand, but that was black-and-white TV, right? So when we saw the actual guitar in the window, and it’s orange, it’s in the sunshine, it’s glowing… It was stunning.”
Bachman bought that stunning Gretsch, managing the $400 price tag with money he earned mowing lawns, babysitting, delivering newspapers “at six-in-the-morning in 40-below-zero weather” and doing other odd jobs. Young, meanwhile, picked up another ’57 6120 that came into the store around the same time. “In the middle of ’57, Gretsch switched from DeArmond pickups to Filter’Trons,” Bachman says. “So I bought the DeArmond one and Neil.”
