A bass guitar used by Paul McCartney at the beginning of his Beatles career, stolen in 1972, has been found and returned to the legendary rockstar.
Mr. McCartney bought the instrument, a Hofner 500/1 bass guitar, in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961 and used it in gigs there and Liverpool, England, according to CBS News.
“The guitar has been authenticated by Hofner, and Paul is incredibly grateful to all those involved,” Mr. McCartney’s representative wrote in a statement on his website Thursday.
The Lost Bass Project aiming to find the Hofner was started by guitar expert Nick Wass in 2018. A pair of journalists, husband and wife Scott and Naomi Jones, joined in 2023.
In addition to being used in live sets, the recovered bass can be heard on early Beatles hits “Love Me Do,” “Twist and Shout” and “She Loves You,” plus the “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” albums, according to the Lost Bass Project.
The piece became Mr. McCartney’s backup guitar after he bought a second Hofner in 1963, one that he would use the rest of his time with the Beatles, who broke up in 1970.
Before the project’s investigative work, the popular theory was that the bass was taken out of the basement of the Beatles’ headquarters during 1969 recording sessions for the hit songs “Get Back” and “Let It Be.”
Ian Horne, who worked with Mr. McCartney as a sound engineer for Wings, told the investigators otherwise. In October 1972, the band was preparing for its first tour of the U.K. and Europe when the guitar went missing from its van parked in the London neighborhood of Notting Hill.
“I knew it was Paul’s original Hofner bass that had been stolen, and I knew what it meant to him. … We had to go to Paul’s house … and tell him that the gear had been stolen from the back of the truck. … He told us not to worry, and we kept our jobs. He’s a good man, Paul. I worked for him for six years after the bass went missing. But I’ve carried the guilt all my life,” Mr. Horne told the Lost Bass Project in a news release last October.
From that starting point, the guitar was tracked to the person who bought it from the thief, a London pub owner.
From there, the guitar ended up in private hands. After the search gained public attention last September, a resident of Hastings in southern England reached out to Mr. McCartney’s company and returned the instrument, the Lost Bass Project said.
“When Paul got it back, he phoned me, which is quite unusual. He was excited as a schoolboy: ‘I got the bass!’ They asked me to come over to England to make sure it was the bass and authenticate it,” Mr. Wass told Dutch magazine de Bassist.
The Lost Bass Project didn’t say why it took so many months to announce the find.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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