Mccartney’s stolen bass is found, returned
LONDON>> A five- year search by the manufacturer of Paul McCartney’s original bass guitar that was aided by a husbandwife team of journalists helped reunite The Beatles star with the distinctive violin- shaped 1961 Höfner that went missing a half century ago and is estimated to be worth $ 12.6 million.
Mccartney asked Höfner to help find the instrument, Scott Jones, a journalist who teamed up with Höfner executive Nick Wass to track it down, said Friday. Mccartney bought the bass for about $ 37 in 1961 when The Beatles in Hamburg, Germany. The instrument was played on the Beatles’ first two records.
“Because I was left- handed, it looked less daft because it was symmetrical,” Mccartney once said. “I got into that. And once I bought it, I fell in love with it.”
It was rumored to have been stolen around the time The Beatles were recording their final album, “Let it Be,” in 1969.
Jones and his wife, Naomi, launched The Lost Bass Project in September 2022 and within 48 hours were inundated with 600 emails that contained the “little gems that led us to where we are today,” Jones said.
One of those emails came from sound engineer Ian Horne, who had worked with Mccartney’s band Wings. Horne said the bass had been swiped from the back of his van one night in the Notting Hill section of London in 1972. A bigger break came when they were contacted by a person who said their father had stolen the bass. The man didn’t set out to steal McCartney’s instrument and panicked when he realized what he had, Jones said.
The thief ended up selling it to Ron Guest, landlord of the Admiral Blake pub, for a few pounds and some beers.
As the Joneses were starting to look for relatives of Guest, word had reached his family.
His daughter- in- law contacted Mccartney’s studio. Cathy Guest said that the bass that had been in her attic for years looked like the one they were looking for.
It had been passed from Ron Guest to his oldest son, who died in a car wreck, and then to a younger son, Haydn Guest, who was married to Cathy and died in 2020.
The instrument was returned to Mccartney in December, and it took about two months to authenticate it.