Randy Bachman is selling more than 200 guitars from his collection, including the axe he used to create the famous riff on American Woman.
The 80-year-old former Winnipegger, who is a co-founder of the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, has teamed up with Julien’s Auctions of Beverly Hills, Calif., for the sale, which will take place May 29 and 30 at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York.
Online bidding will also take place at juliensauctions.com, which will begin in early May.
“I have so many guitars I can’t play them (all) anymore,” Bachman says from his home near Victoria. “The last couple of years I had a couple of health issues where I thought I wasn’t going to be on this Earth very much longer and I said to my kids, ‘Who wants a guitar”’ and they said ‘We have enough guitars.’”
American Woman rose to No. 1 for the Guess Who in Canada and the United States after its release in March 1970 and its heavy guitar sound comes from a 1959 Les Paul Special Bachman bought in 1967 from a fan who brought it to a Guess Who gig in a Nanaimo, B.C. church basem*nt.
It had been part of an exhibition of Bachman’s guitars at the National Music Centre in Calgary, which opened in 2016 and ended in February. Before that, it had been on display at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
Julien’s estimates its price as between US$200,000 and $400,000.
The auction house hasn’t inspected all the guitars Bachman wishes to sell, so it has provided no estimate on what the entire collection could earn once the auctioneer bangs the gavel the final time.
The guitarist got one last chance to jam with a few of his old favourites, including the American Woman guitar, for a video to promote the auction.
They brought back so many memories that he would have hung onto them if they only weren’t so heavy. The 65-year-old Les Paul axe weighs close to seven kilograms.
“The thing about those Les Pauls, there were three years of magic: 1958, ‘59 and ‘60. They used a certain kind of wood and a certain kind of glue. That stuff permeated the wood, all the pores, and then it petrified, so the guitars are very heavy. So heavy I couldn’t play it anymore. I played it for 20 years and screwed up my back,” Bachman says.
“(But) they’ve got a vibe that’s just magical.”
Also on the auction block will be the first guitar Bachman owned, a 1957 Harmony H1215 acoustic archtop guitar. He bought the sunburst-coloured instrument for $34.95; it is now estimated to be worth between US$600 and $800.
“I learned to play on it but you couldn’t hear me over the drummer, so I had to get an electric one,” he remembers. “That one broke in half and so I glued it with airplane glue.”
Bachman is also selling several acoustic guitars made by German and Dutch luthiers in the auction that are works of art, according to Laura Woolley, Julien’s managing director of consignments and appraisals.
Not for sale is the orange 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins electric guitar he bought at Winnipeg Piano on Portage Avenue for $400 in 1964 that was stolen from his Toronto hotel room in 1977.
A forensics investigator used old film footage to search for the guitar, which turned up with Japanese guitarist Takeshi and Bachman traded an almost identical vintage orange Gretsch for his original during a Canada Day ceremony in Tokyo in 2022.
Julien’s, which describes itself as the “auction house of the stars,” has sold seven of the 12 priciest guitars in history, including the left-handed Martin D-18E used by Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged in New York television special. It fetched a record US$6,010,000 in a 2020 auction.
Vintage guitars played on famous songs or owned by celebrities who are divesting their collections have become valuable commodities for collectors and investors.
In February, Mark Knopfler’s passel of 122 guitars and amplifiers earned more than US$11 million at a Christie’s sale in London.
He played a sunburst-coloured 1983 Gibson Les Paul Standard on Dire Straits’ 1985 hit Money for Nothing; it proved to be worth US$749,000 to the winning bidder.
”The first watershed moment for our business was the 1999 Eric Clapton sale he did for his charity. Blackie, which was his most famous guitar at that time, didn’t crash a million dollars,” Woolley says.
“Now we’re in a land where there are 12 guitars that have sold for seven figures.”
Bachman has kept about 100 guitars, so he’ll still have plenty to choose from when he leads BTO on tour later in 2024, which includes a Nov. 24 show supporting Heart at Winnipeg’s Canada Life Centre.
He has joined former bandmate Burton Cummings in a lawsuit against the Guess Who and co-founders Jim Kale and Garry Peterson, but he says the proceeds of the sale will go to his descendants, not legal bills.
“I have got eight kids, 26 grandkids and eight great-grandkids and you’re going to ask me what I’m going to do with the money?”
Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com
X: @AlanDSmall
Alan Small
Reporter
Alan Small has been a journalist at the Free Press for more than 22 years in a variety of roles, the latest being a reporter in the Arts and Life section.
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