Randy Bachman Read Free

every Saturday. I didn’t even know where I was going, but I remember my parents telling me not to daydream on the bus because I might miss my stop: “Pay attention!” Every Saturday I was terrified I might miss my stop, and then what would I do?
    One Saturday that happened. I wasn’t paying attention and I missed getting off at the toy soldiers. Crying, I ran to the driver. “Stop! Take me back to the soldiers! I have to get off at the soldiers!”
    â€œI can’t,” he told me. “It’s a trolley bus. It doesn’t back up.”
    I thought I was lost forever and would never see my parents and my house again. The driver managed to stop the bus in the middle of the street and let me off. Here I was, this hysterical little kid with a violin case, walking back to the toy soldiers. As I’m walking I look up and see the Corydon bus pass me by. I was panicking because in my mind I thought that was the only “Cor” bus and I’d missed it. Nowadays even little kids have cell phones. I had nothing. I didn’t know where I was going or even how to get home. So I started running after the bus. The driver saw me and stopped to let me on. He recognized me, the little kid with the violin from every Saturday morning. The sheer terror of that moment has never left me. It astounds me to this day that a six-year-old kid rode the bus in a big city like Winnipeg all alone. I would never let my kids or grandkids do that today.
    But of course, I wasn’t going to be playing the violin forever. Music was changing. There was a television commercial a few years ago that I used to get a kick out of watching. It was of a young boy, supposedly Jimi Hendrix, looking in the window of an accordion store, and across the street is a guitar store. He’s trying to decide which one to go with: accordion or guitar. I think the commercial was for a soft drink, but it was one of those ads that are more than the product. In the background someone is playing Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” on an accordion. I can relate to that scene. Can you imagine hearing “Takin’ Care of Business” on a violin?
    My mother always had the radio on around the house. I grew up with the radio. We didn’t even have a television for several years. My brothers and I would come home at lunch and tune into CKY or CKRC for a whole hour listening to rock ’n’ roll. Country music was still big in Winnipeg and the Prairies, but they were starting to play rock ’n’ roll.
    I used to go to all the country-and-western package shows at the Winnipeg Auditorium to see the fiddle players. Ray Price, Patsy Cline—they all had great fiddle players. On one occasion they introduced this fellow with neat curly blond hair who sat down at the piano and played “You Win Again” and a Johnny Cash song. Then he jumped up, kicked the piano stool aside, and started pounding “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” with his hair falling over his face. It was Jerry Lee Lewis. I’d never seen anything like him. It was a country show where people sat there and politely applauded Kitty Wells or Patsy Cline. The next day on CKRC, Doug Burrows played “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Rock ’n’ roll was just catching fire in Winnipeg, and the phones lit up. So he played it again back to back. I was mesmerized.
    I had a friend, Shelly Ostrove, whose dad was an electrician, and they had the first television set on the block; it was black-and-white TV only back then. Needless to say Shelly’s place was the place to go after school for all us kids to watch Range Rider and Howdy Doody . One Sunday night I got invited to his house to watch The Ed Sullivan Show and saw Elvis Presley for the first time. That moment inspired me. It was the first time I heard “Tutti Frutti.” Forget the violin, I wanted to play this!
    My brother Gary had some friends who went