LUMINATO
TheStar.com | Entertainment | Randy Bachman ready to rock free fest opener


The guitar — and Randy Bachman — will take centre stage at Luminato’s free kickoff concert to be held June 5 in Toronto.

Rock legends highlight Luminato
Steven Page, who recently split from the Barenaked Ladies, highlights an impressive list of artists at this year's Luminato festival.
Guitars will rock and rule at the third annual Luminato.

So who better to kick off the 10-day festival than Canadian songwriter and guitar legend Randy Bachman?

In town yesterday to launch the festival's music program, Bachman, 65, said being the headliner at the June 5 opening night free concert in Yonge-Dundas Square is an "honour ... and a thrill.

"As an artist, you say to your manager, `Why aren't I playing that, why isn't there room for me on this gig?' Like, `Why wasn't I at Woodstock?' you know, those kinds of questions," Bachman said with a laugh.

"Because of the recession, it's great to have a big opening free concert. Then (people) can choose how to spend their hard-earned pennies to see Emmylou Harris, or Taj Mahal or some of the other great acts that are coming here, all celebrating a different world of the guitar," he added.

Festival artistic director Chris Lorway, working with guest curator David Spelman of the New York Guitar Festival, said the guitar was chosen as a major theme because of its "personal connection" to the tens of thousands who will come out for the festival.

"So we thought, how can we have a look at the guitar at this year's festival in a way that looks at it not only from a rock 'n' roll standpoint but brings in world music?" Lorway said.

Bachman, of classic Canadian bands The Guess Who and Bachman Turner Overdrive fame, said his music is being discovered by new fans as a result as his CBC Radio program on Saturday nights, Vinyl Tap.

"The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You'll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm," said Bachman, who just released a DVD called Live at the Montreal Jazz Fest and recently cut another album with guitar greats J. Geils, Gerry Beaudoin and Duke Robillard.

"It is the most popular instrument in the world, it is the one everybody loves. They put their arms around it and they hold it to them. It's like giving it a hug," he said.

Bachman said his first guitar, a Gretsch – bought with money earned delivering newspapers, babysitting and mowing lawns as a teenager – was stolen while recording in Toronto in 1976.

In the ensuing decades, Bachman never found an identical Gretsch to replace it, but bought 380 other Gretsch guitars and instruments dating back to 1928.

Bachman recently sold his collection to the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Atlanta, for "incredible amount of money," to the lifelong gratitude of the Gretsch family.

"The Gretsch family called me and said, `you own our family's legacy because while we were making and