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.
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The author with his group The Guess Who from the hit
American Woman
(1970) traveled to Tokyo for a moving reunion with his dear Gretsch, who was stolen from him in a hotel in Toronto (eastern 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 she suddenly disappears, the magic is gone
".
The star had bought this model 6120 Chet Atkins in orange color at the age of 19, for four hundred dollars, a sum raised by the sweat of his brow 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 stagehand.
"Young love"
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 detective 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. It took 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 “love of youth”.
“
Whoever had it, must have loved it as much as I did, because there are no modifications, no repairs
,” Mr. Bachman commented.
".
The two musicians celebrated the moment on a stage at the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo by playing the song
American Woman
, also known through its cover by Lenny Kravitz in 1999.