Randy Bachman Reunited With Cherished Guitar 45 Years After It Was Stolen
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Loading... - Alexandre Aarle
- 06 Jul 2022
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Rock legend Randy Bachman’s long search came to an end Friday when he was reunited in with a cherished guitar 45 years after it was stolen from a hotel.
“My girlfriend is right there,” said Bachman, 78, a former member of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, as the Gretsch guitar on which he wrote “American Woman” and other hits was handed to him by a musician who had bought it at a store in 2014 without knowing its history.
He said all guitars are special, but the orange 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins he bought as a teenager was exceptional. He worked at multiple jobs to save money to buy the $400 guitar, his first purchase of an expensive instrument, he said.
“It made my whole life. It was my hammer and a tool to write songs, make music and make money,” Bachman told the Associated Press before the handover at the Embassy.
When it was stolen from the hotel in 1977, “I cried for three days. It was part of me,” he said. “It was very, very upsetting.” He ended up buying about 300 guitars in unsuccessful attempts to replace it, he said.
Bachman talked frequently about the missing guitar in interviews and on radio shows, and more recently on YouTube programs on which he performed with his son, Tal.
In 2020, a fan who heard the story of the guitar launched an internet search and successfully located it within two weeks.
The fan, William Long, used a small spot in the guitar’s wood grain visible in old images as a “digital fingerprint” and tracked the instrument down to a vintage guitar shop site. A further search led him to a YouTube video showing the instrument being played by a musician, Takeshi, in December 2019. Read More...
