We do not forget his first love, the saying goes, and it is not the Canadian rocker Randy Bachman, reunited Friday in Japan with the favorite guitar that was stolen from him 46 years ago, who will say the opposite.
The author with his group The Guess Who from the tube american woman (1970) had made the trip to Tokyo for a moving reunion with his dear Gretsch, who had been stolen from him in a hotel in Toronto (Canada) in 1976.
“I was devastated”the 78-year-old musician told AFP. “I wrote several songs that sold millions with this guitar (…) It was like my magic guitar. And when it suddenly disappears, the magic goes”.
The star had bought this model 6120 Chet Atkins in orange color at the age of 19, for 400 dollars, a sum raised by mowing lawns and washing cars. The artist had long coveted this guitar, spending hours admiring it in a store window in Winnipeg (central Canada) in the early 1960s, with his musician friend Neil Young.
The instrument, which he chained as a precaution to the toilets of the hotels where he stayed during his group’s tours, had been stolen from him when he had briefly entrusted it to a roadie.
A fan-led investigation
It was thanks to a fan that Mr. Bachman found his Gretsch: his compatriot William Long reviewed hundreds of images on the internet until he identified the instrument in 2020, thanks to the particular location of a knot in the wood. The hobbyist sleuth traced the guitar from a Tokyo music store website to a Japanese musician named Takeshi, spotted playing it in a video posted on YouTube in 2019.
We had to wait for the health situation to improve to allow Randy Bachman to come to Japan to offer an identical guitar to Takeshi, and find his childhood love. “Whoever had it must have loved it as much as I do, because there are no modifications, no repairs”, Mr. Bachman commented. “She is magnificent”.
The two musicians celebrated the moment on a stage at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo by playing the song in particular American Woman, also known through its recovery by Lenny Kravitz in 1999.