(Tokyo) One does not forget one’s first love, the saying goes, and it is not Canadian rocker Randy Bachman, reunited in Japan on Friday with the favorite guitar that was stolen from him 46 years ago, who will say the opposite.
Posted at 8:30 a.m.
The author with his group The Guess Who of success american woman (1970) had traveled to Tokyo for a moving reunion with his beloved Gretsch, who had been stolen from a Toronto hotel in 1976.
“I was devastated,” the 78-year-old musician told AFP. “I’ve written several million-selling songs with this guitar. […] It was like my magic guitar. And when it suddenly disappears, the magic goes away”.
The star had bought this model 6120 Chet Atkins in orange color at the age of 19, for 400 dollars, a sum collected with the sweat of his brow by mowing lawns and washing cars.
The artist had long coveted this guitar, spending hours admiring it in a Winnipeg store window 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.
PHOTO PHILIP FONG, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Japanese musician Takeshi and Canadian rocker Randy Bachman swap guitars.
It was thanks to a fan that Mr. Bachman found his Gretsch: his compatriot William Long reviewed hundreds of images on the internet until in 2020 he identified the instrument, thanks to the particular location of a knot in the wood.
The amateur sleuth traced the guitar from the website of a music store in Tokyo 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 in person to offer an identical guitar to Takeshi, and find his childhood love.
“Whoever had it must have loved it as much as I did, because there are no modifications, no repairs,” 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 womanalso known through its recovery by Lenny Kravitz in 1999.