“Every Gretsch from the mid-’90s onwards is a copy of one I had in my collection”: How Randy Bachman saved Gretsch after its factory burned down

Randy Bachman has explained how his obsession with hunting down his stolen Gretsch 6120 electric guitar inadvertently saved the company from an uncertain fate.

The tale of Bachman’s 1957 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 is the stuff of guitar legend. The six-string, Bachman’s most cherished possession, was stolen from a hotel room in Toronto in 1976, and its whereabouts remained a mystery until, in 2021, it was recovered and returned to the Bachman-Turner Overdrive leader.

But in the 45-year interim that Bachman went without his prized Gretsch, the guitarist took matters into his own hands and set about buying any vintage 6120 he could get his hands on, in the hope he’d come across his O.G.

As Bachman remembers in the new issue of Guitar World, he collected literally hundreds of examples, all sourced from leading vintage gear experts.

“My guitar was stolen in 1976 in Toronto,” Bachman explains. “So I went to the Ontario Provincial Police and the Mounties, and they said, ‘Your guitar’s probably gone east to Montreal,’ because it was really easy to cross the border then.

“So, my guitar was gone. I got a letter every month from Gruhn Guitars in Nashville, Norman’s Rare Guitars in L.A. and Pete’s Rare Guitars in Minneapolis, saying, ‘Hey, man, we’ve got a Gretsch here that we paid some guy $100 on a trade-in. We want to make $50. Will you pay $150? We’ll send you the Gretsch.’”

Bachman said yes every time. As he recalls, during that era, the Gretsch factory in Brooklyn had burned down, so guitars were being made in Arkansas at a sub-par quality. Nobody was buying them, so he had the pick of the lot.

He continues, “I’d say, ‘OK,’ and send them $150 when I was on tour, and when I got home, there were 20 guitars at my house. I’d open each one up, and it was never my guitar. The years went by, and my midlife crisis wasn’t a young blonde chick and a red Corvette; it was finding my Gretsch. It became an obsession. I ended up with 350 of them over the years.”

His collecting obsession wouldn’t be in vain, though. He didn’t find his Gretsch – but he did inadvertently save the company, which was still reeling from the factory fire.

“I got a call in the mid-’90s from Fred Gretsch and from Duke Kramer, who was the head of his production at the time,” Bachman says. “And he said, ‘Do you really have this many Gretsch guitars?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s my obsession, because I still haven’t gotten back my 1957 6120.’

“Fred says, ‘We want to come and see them,’ so he comes to my basement, where I’ve got a white wall that’s all White Penguins and White Falcons, I’ve got an orange wall that’s all 6120s and 6121s, and I’ve got a sparkle wall of gold and purple and champagne Sparkle Jets.

“He looks at it and he goes, ‘This is truly amazing. I’ve only been able to make Gretsch drums for the last 10 years, but through corporate shuffling and divorces and people owning the copyright, I can now make Gretsch guitars again, but all my templates are gone. They were burned in the factory. Can I borrow your guitars and we’ll copy them, and then we can put out new Gretsches?’

“I started lending him five or six at a time, so every Gretsch that’s out in the world from the mid-’90s onwards is a copy of one I had in my collection.”

It was a happy ending for everyone involved. Gretsch managed to produce the same guitars it had been prior to the factory fire, and Bachman was reunited with the O.G. 6120 that inspired the collecting spree in the first place.

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