Randy Bachman

Remembering Lenny: A Guitarist’s Ghost Song

When I first crossed the northern threshold into Canada—a tangle of nerves, worn chords, and vague notions of reinvention—the name Lenny Breau was already slipping through the smoke rings in musician circles like a spectral whisper. Everyone, it seemed, spoke of him not with the blunt force reserved for guitar gods but with a hushed awe, like one does when speaking of the man who disappeared into the forest and returned humming to the trees.

Me? I was a Wes Montgomery disciple with Grant Green’s grease under my fingernails—tethered to that earthy groove, linear and locked in. Lenny? I hadn’t a clue. Not until a fortuitous detour to Bourbon Street—back when the ghosts of the Crescent City still held court in Toronto on rickety barstools and upright pianos—that’s where the veil lifted. I was tipped off by a weathered jazz hound in town for reasons murky and possibly fugitive. “You ain’t heard Lenny?” he asked, like I’d confessed to never tasting gumbo. “He plays like a man trying to coax God’s breath outta six strings.”

That encounter sent me digging. The legend unravelled like a bop solo—twisting, sublime, and bruised. Lenny Breau was born in Auburn, Maine, in 1941. His folks were country entertainers, the Hal Lone Pine and Betty Cody show—road-bred troubadours. By '57, they’d migrated to Winnipeg, a frozen frontier town where Breau’s imagination thawed and bloomed. There, he absorbed everything—Chet Atkins’ fingerstyle wizardry, the modal tapestries of Bill Evans, Ravi Shankar’s ragas, the greasy slide of Delta blues. He wasn’t so much influenced as infused.

Breau took harmonic risks that made lesser players tremble. He played the guitar like it was a piano, a sitar, a church organ. Octaves and artificial harmonics rained like sleet off rooftops, cascading in ways that made time and meter seem optional. The word was, he could make a string moan repentance, then dance a jig on a dime.

Still, there was darkness. You could hear it. Like all authentic originals, he bore burdens that rhythm and praise could not lift. There were the whispers—drug troubles, brushes with the law, on-again-off-again gigs with Anne Murray’s show band, the slow-motion burn of a life too wide open.

And then—August 12, 1994. A pool in Los Angeles. A breath never taken. The coroner’s cold, unflinching word: strangled. Murdered. Just like that, Lenny became a myth. Not Hendrix-myth. Not the Cobain myth. Something quieter. Something Canadian. A secret passed between musicians with reverence and pain.

Were it not for Randy Bachman—yes, that Randy of Guess Who and BTO—Lenny might have faded to whispers altogether. But Bachman, a teenage friend and acolyte, made it his mission to collect, restore, and resuscitate Lenny’s recordings. Basement tapes. Reel-to-reel demos. Bootlegs. Like Alan Lomax, for a haunted guitar genius. I once sat across from Randy, both of us sipping black coffee like penitents, as he recounted the moment he uncovered the first hidden stash of Breau tapes. “It felt like finding a Van Gogh behind a motel painting,” he said.

And that’s precisely it. Lenny Breau was Canada’s Van Gogh of the fretboard. He painted in sound what others couldn’t dream in colour. But like so many visionaries, the world gave him little sanctuary—only brief refuge in the applause before the lights dimmed and the ghosts resumed their vigil.

Years later, I unearthed a tape myself—an old cassette buried in a weathered trunk I’d forgotten since the Reagan years. The voice was soft, philosophical, broken in the right places. It was Lenny, and he was speaking of music like it was a living being—fragile, holy, beyond the reach of convention.

“I play to feel something I can’t name,” he said.

You and me both, Lenny. You and me both.

Bill King: Your connection to Breau?

Randy Bachman: I was fifteen, and he was sixteen, and I had just moved to Winnipeg and discovered Elvis, seeing him on Ed Sullivan. I’d played classical violin since the age of five to about fourteen and felt very restricted in playing note-for-note the same things with junior symphony. When I saw Elvis on television, I asked, “What is that music?’ It’s called rock n’ roll - Scotty Moore on guitar. I was attracted to it because it was ‘wild’ and it looked like they were doing anything they wanted – the audience was screaming, and they were cool. Then Lenny Breau came to town playing with his Family Band. His father’s stage name was Hal Lone Pine – his mother’s stage name was Betty Cody, and Lenny was Hal Lone Pine Jr. They played all over Winnipeg in these kinds of barn dances and rockabilly dances, and I got to know Lenny. He moved across the street from a girlfriend of mine. We became friends because he had no friends, anyone his age to hang out with. He was always playing with his parents. You can imagine what that was like when you’re sixteen. He’d been out of school since he was ten.

It wasn’t like we had a teacher-pupil relationship. It was two guys who liked to hang out – one knew a lot about model cars, and the other guy knew a lot about playing guitar. I didn’t realize at the time what an incredible guitar player he was. I took it for granted that everybody could play this way. Over the two years I spent with him, he taught me every Chet Atkins and Merle Travis lick, and then on to Barney Kessel, Howard Roberts, and Tal Farlow. I then got into the Shadows and the Ventures – Duane Eddy and Chuck Berry. Lenny eventually moved to another part of town and left his parents’ band. It was a big step – one that allowed him to play jazz.

Breau played his style of jazz, which involved trying to emulate pianist Bill Evans' passages by playing what he heard on vinyl on the guitar. I kept saying this is impossible – you can’t do this – this guy is playing with all of his fingers up and down the piano and has all this range. He’d say, “I’m going to do it, going to do it.” He’d have these walking bass lines and these chords and play melody on top. I said, “That’s great.” Then he said,” I’m going to improvise over that” – I was stunned watching him do this.

We separated and went our ways, but the stuff he left behind was short touchdowns, so to speak, into jazz. To write a song like “She’s Come Undone” or play the guitar in ‘Blue Collar” or to write “Looking out for #1” – top twenty, top thirty Billboard hits for the Guess Who and BTO and everybody saying how cool it was to have this jazz/pop stuff out – that’s basically what Lenny gave to me.

When CDs first became available, I tried to obtain Lenny Breau’s RCA recordings on CD. They weren’t going to be released - RCA didn’t think they were marketable. I went to them and asked for the rights, saying I’d start a little guitar label. I know all these guitar players who want to hear these Lenny Breau albums – because all I wanted for myself were the album jackets – and lent them the vinyl, but I never got it back. They said, “Sure; we’ll lease it to you.” That never happened because the person in question was eliminated when the company was acquired, and my request remained at the bottom of the pile. I felt confident enough, so I went to Winnipeg on other business, assuming I had a deal, and announced that I was starting a label called Guitarchives – essentially a guitar archive of Lenny Breau’s music. Then I heard from people who thought it was cool and said, “Well, we’ve got recordings of Lenny from this club and that club – he let us record him, and we’ve got them at home – do you want them?” I said, “Sure.” Then, when the RCA thing fell through, I still had all of these hours and hours of Lenny Breau. One came from Toronto, courtesy of a radio guy named Ted O’Reilly (CJRT-FM), and it featured Lenny Breau and Dave Young on bass, playing at Bourbon Street in Toronto. It was the first digital recording done in Canada. It was the first machine to come in, so he took it to the club that night and tried it out on Lenny and Dave. I acquired that tape because it was the best in terms of playing and reproduction. That was my first CD on Guitarchives.

B.K.: The other tapes?

People started bringing me more tapes. I got one from Glenn McDonald that was Lenny alone in a cabin after busted. He was drying out and pawned all of his guitars for a big party where the bust had occurred. Somebody bailed him out of jail and took him to a cabin to dry out, and he needed a guitar. They retrieved his Ramirez guitar from the pawn shop, set up a tape recorder, and Lenny played for fifty-eight minutes. His father had passed two weeks before that, and there’s all this anguish in the playing. You can hear Lenny talking and crying, and when I started mastering in Toronto, I decided I didn’t want to cut anything out. Each of these portraits of Lenny Breau is a different phase of his life. One is electric guitar and bass, the other Cabin Fever – he, locked in his cabin, and the next is him and Tal Farlow, Chance Meeting, where he went to meet his idol. I was then lucky enough to get offered a recording from Maine when Lenny was fifteen, just before he moved to Winnipeg, and I met him. It’s all the Atkins–Travis fingerpicking - a lot of country swing and jazz. I call that one Boy Wonder because I had a photo of him when he was about four with a guitar, and he had just started.

I heard that when he lived in Nashville, he stayed at the Cottons – Darcey and Richard Cottons. I took one of my songwriting trips to Nashville and went into Cotton Music, where everyone hangs out because they have great teachers, teaching in the back and sell musical goods – a great guitar shop. Nashville is a custom-made guitar city, and they are all in there.

I walked in and asked for Richard Cotton and was greeted with dead silence – I didn’t know he had passed away a short time before. The family was in mourning, so I left the Lenny Breau CD collection and said that if anyone wanted to call me back, I was staying at Shoney’s in Nashville. Two days later, I got a call at Shoney’s, and it was Darcey Cotton – Richard’s widow who said she thought it was incredible what I was doing. She was curious where I was getting the tapes. I explained that people were giving them to me as a kind of custodian. I created a royalty fund for Lenny’s children to get paid royalties twice a year. She said it was touching, and it caused her to look in Richard’s closet, and she found a box of tapes. She said, “I guess you didn’t know, every show Lenny played in Nashville, Richard went out and taped.” She decided it should go into the right hands. She said she thought I was spiritually connected to it and had no financial motive, and that it was about expressing gratitude to someone who had given me a great deal during my early years of playing the guitar.

I waited, waited and waited, and three weeks later, this box came, and I was stunned. It had hundreds of ninety-minute tapes, all meticulously documented, including the recording locations, the musicians who played bass guitar and drums, dates, and everything else, all compiled by Richard Cotton. There was continuity to everything. I called Darcey, and we both were in tears. I told her, as a favour, that the first release would be Lenny and her husband, and I wanted to call it 'Pickin' Cotton.' She thought it was fabulous. They are both on seven-string guitars, and it sounds magical. I have thousands of hours of Lenny Breau. I want to make each one radically different from the previous. Those who knew Lenny would go by his house, and one day he’d be dressed like a bullfighter – a flamenco guy sitting there with a Carlos Montoya album learning the music, like an actor going into a trance teaching what they were doing. I’d go by the next day, and he’d be all dressed up in tie-dyed and experimenting with feedback and psychedelic things. The next day, he’d be dressed in a formal suit, playing classical music, and the day after that, he'd just be dressed up. He was a stylist who conquered and mastered every style.