Randy Bachman sheds his vintage guitar collection

[Ol' Fret]

Music Icons: The Randy Bachman Collection (juliensauctions.com)

[vernon]

Interesting… that’s kind of an odd selection of guitars to use as a tease… out of 200 guitars?

[jads57]

I thought he was a Gretsch guitar collector?

[Ol' Fret]

I thought he was a Gretsch guitar collector?

Yes, Bachman was a Gretsch guitar collector, until he sold them off - more or less the whole collection, AFAIK.
He has also picked up many German made guitars by help of his daughter and a JGF member. It seems that he's getting rid of just a handful of the nicer ones.
Maybe it's a sentimental thing; Randy has German roots, like Friedrich Gretsch had. About 20 years ago Randy initiated a small relaunch of rare guitars by help of a Japanese luthier: BIANKA PROJECT-2005 (k-server.org)

[ThatRhythmMan]

The text says “nearly 200 guitars”. Sounds like more than a handful!


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[Ol' Fret]

The text says “nearly 200 guitars”. Sounds like more than a handful!


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Sorry, ThatRhythmMan, I meant "a handful of the nicer ones"!

[Hammertone]

I'm the JGF member responsible for most of the German archtop guitars in Randy's collection. I'll post some background about the collection later. The auction includes all sorts of other, less interesting instruments as well - his '59 Les Paul, '55 Stratocaster, ex-Keef Les Paul Custom and so on.

[sgcim]

Randy was a close friend of Lenny Breau's, so he might have some interesting guitars for auction.
He's also Canadian, so maybe he's even got a Beauregard in there.

Randy and the great vocalist Burton Cummings are very upset about a band including two former members of the Guess Who touring, using the name The Guess Who at their gigs.
They're so upset, that they're forfeiting the publishing rights to some of their top hits in protest over what's going on. I wonder if this auction has anything to do with this?
Thanks Ole Fret and Hammertone for informing us about the auction!

[sgcim]

Cummings has taken a nuclear action, terminating the performing rights agreements for all the Guess Who songs he wrote, removing the copyright protections that allow the band (or anyone else) to perform hits like “American Woman,” “These Eyes,” and “No Time” at a concert. In effect, he shot himself in the foot to try to shoot the band in the face.“I’m willing to do anything to stop the fake band; they’re taking [Bachman and my] life story and pretending it’s theirs,” Cummings tells Rolling Stone. “They’re not the people who made these records, and they shouldn’t act like they did. This doesn’t stop this cover band from playing their shows, it just stops them from playing the songs I wrote. If the songs are performed by the fake Guess Who, they will be sued for every occurrence.”
Cummings’ strategy is both very aggressive and particularly rare. Two music attorneys with no affiliation to the case tell Rolling Stone they’d never seen such a strategy before. Cummings’ attorney Helen Yu spent several months working to get the license properly terminated. She adds that part of why it’s so unheard of for artists to consider such a strategy is that often, writers don’t own the publishing, which is required to pull both ends of the license.
“Not a lot of artists are both the writer and the publisher on their songs, and Burton Cummings fortunately is, so this is a very rare case where the artist can take this action,” Yu says. “And I think this situation shows the direct nexus between their false advertising and who they say they are.”
The move is focused on agreements set through groups called performing rights organizations (PROs). The termination targets all the venues the band would play. Almost every concert venue in the country has blanket agreements with various PROs such as BMI and ASCAP, who collect royalties on behalf of songwriters for the public performances of their works. If a venue has licensing agreements in place, the venues’ artists are free to cover any song from the PROs’ repertory.
But when Cummings and his publishing company Shillelagh Music terminated their performance agreement with their PRO, they removed the venues’ permission to house any performances of the songs Cummings wrote. Cummings’ counsel sent a note to the band’s lawyers earlier this week explaining that as of April 1, “none of the venues in which The Cover Band is currently scheduled to Perform possess the requisite license needed to publicly perform” Cummings’ songs, and that “Should the individual members of the Cover Band publicly perform any of Shillelagh Music’s Compositions, Shillelagh Music intends to institute legal action to protect its copyright interests.”
The strategy, to the group’s chagrin, seems to be working, at least for now. Two shows were canceled over the weekend, with the Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall in Cyprus Lake, Florida, announcing that the show was canceled “due to an unforeseen issue with the music licensing.” The Sunrise Theatre in Fort Pierce, Florida, similarly made a last-minute cancellation Wednesday night, also citing the licensing dispute.
By Thursday morning, the Florida Theatre in Jacksonville, the Saenger Theatre in Mobile, Alabama, and the Peabody Auditorium in Daytona Beach, Florida — who would’ve hosted the Guess Who’s next three shows — announced cancellations as well. Tickets for shows beyond those dates remain on sale as of this article’s publication.
An attorney for the Guess Who didn’t respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment regarding the shows. In December, the band took to social media calling Cummings’ and Bachman’s suit “meritless.” In a memorandum, the band argued that “there is no dispute that Defendants lawfully own ‘The Guess Who’ trademark,” and that Consumers who see an ad for a concert by the Guess Who would not reasonably assume that Bachman and Cummings are performing merely because they were in the band many years ago.”
Assuming the group does play the classic-era songs at their upcoming shows, both the band and the venue they played at could be on the hook for legal recourse, Cummings and his team tell Rolling Stone.

[Ol' Fret]

Thanks, sgcim, for shedding light on this sad background!
This shows once again how important it is, especially for musicians, to continue to develop themselves; to carry not the ashes, but the fire further.
There is probably enough love and friendship in the world - their stability is the problem.

[nyc chaz]

Very interesting post scgim.My question is who is buying tickets to see that sham.I remember last year there was a Yardbirds tour which only had the drummer from the original band.Better off and cheaper just to go and see a good bar band.

[sgcim]

Very interesting post scgim.My question is who is buying tickets to see that sham.I remember last year there was a Yardbirds tour which only had the drummer from the original band.Better off and cheaper just to go and see a good bar band.

Yeah, that's the same thing that all the people said who went to see the sham Guess Who.

[alpop]

Here is a bitter sounding Burton Cummings from a CBC Radio interview:

[Ol' Fret]

It looks like Bachman's guitar collection auction was thoroughly prepared in advance, e. g.

Four Lang 'Super' models hanging there on the wall, but it looks like Hammertone had never recommended a Lang 'Super Deluxe' to Bachman. Not that the latter were so much rarer, and some players do even consider all Lang archtops to be 'Deluxe' archtop guitars, tonewise.

Even after 60 and more years the differences between the Super and the SDL could be interesting for alert luthiers eager to learn - not talking about the blantant visual differences. Both models of Lang's one-man operation sport very similar fully carved bodies and necks. Both sound "Lang-like", yet the acoustic differences are there.