Early Years
Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Karl (Charlie) Bachman and Anne (Nancy) Dobrinsky, Bachman is of half German and half Ukrainian ancestry. At age three, he won a singing contest on CKY's King of the Saddle program and age 5 he had started studying the violin in the Royal Toronto Conservatory system. He studied violin until the age of 12 when he grew dissatisfied with the structured lessons. He found that while he couldn't read music, he could play anything if he heard it once; he referred to it as his phonographic memory.
At age 15, Bachman saw Elvis Presley play on Tommy Dorsey's television show and the sight of the guitar around Presley's neck inspired him. He learned three chords from his cousin, then started practicing on a modified Hawaiian dobro. At age 16, Bachman met up with Lenny Breau; over the next two years Breau taught Bachman finger picking and also introduced him to the music of Chet Atkins.
In 1959 Bachman bought a ticket to see Les Paul in concert at a Winnipeg supper club but was unable to get in as he was too young. He instead helped Paul set up before the show and also helped him reload everything into the car after the show. Still a budding guitarist at this point, Bachman asked Paul if he could teach him a guitar lick; Paul ended up teaching his version of "How High the Moon".
Read more about this topic: Randy Bachman
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)