Paul McCartney's bass guitar has been found: 5 decades later in a loft
No one seemed to know what had happened to one of the most important bass guitars in music history, though in the decades since it went missing, there had been some dramatic rumors.
Was the Höfner violin bass, which had accompanied Paul McCartney and the Beatles to worldwide fame, tucked away in a private collection? Had it been secretly shipped to a wealthy fan in Japan?
It turned out the bass was passing time in a more unassuming locale: the loft of a family home in East Sussex, England. The family reported the guitar in late September after a couple of journalists and a guitar expert started a new campaign looking for it in 2023, more than 50 years after it last was seen.
The guitar, which has been authenticated by its manufacturer, has been returned to McCartney, according to a statement posted on his website Thursday.
The Höfner 500/1 guitar is a precious part of Beatles lore.
“I got my violin bass at the Steinway shop in the town center,” he recalled in a 1993 interview with Guitar magazine. It cost the equivalent of 30 pounds — cheap enough for him to afford.
“And once I bought it, I fell in love with it,” he said. “For a light, dinky little bass, it has a very rich sound.”
A sound engineer who had worked with McCartney remembered that the guitar had been left in the back of a van in 1972 and that thieves then had broken in.
Another tip, Scott Jones said, suggested the guitar had been stolen in the neighborhood and then sold for a little money and “some free beer” to Ronald Guest, the landlord of a local pub.
Then, in late September, the landlord's family, reached out to McCartney's studio: Could the guitar in its loft be the missing bass?
“We thought this bass would have gone off on a more glitzy journey,” said Jones, adding that in fact, the research indicated that the guitar had stayed in the same family.