Sir Paul McCartney, former member of The Beatles, has a lost bass guitar that could be worth over £10 million. A worldwide search has attracted the attention of hundreds of people.
From 1961 until 1963, when the Höfner 500/1 electric bass, styled like a violin, mysteriously vanished right before the end of Beatlemania, McCartney frequently brought it on stage.
During the band’s tenure in Hamburg, Germany, McCartney, now 81, made the purchase.
His previous comments about how he “fell in love with it” were predicated on the fact that, as a lefty, its shape seemed more symmetrical to him.
Prior to the 1969 rooftop performance by McCartney, Starr, Lennon, and Harrison atop their Savile Row offices, it had not been seen for some time.
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Since then, the star of “Help!” has been actively searching for the Höfner.
He laid it down for a while during his time with the band, then picked it back up in London during the recordings for their breakthrough album, Let It Be.
Last month’s concert by Sir Paul McCartney / AFP via Getty Images
The guitar also appears in Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary, Get Back.
The instrument, which has a rich musical history and is now worth at least £10m, has been lost, and Höfner has stepped in to aid the musician in his urgent hunt for it.
The hashtag #tracingthebass has been used to initiate a global internet search for the instrument.
Nick Wass, an executive at Höfner, told the Sunday Telegraph, “I’ve worked closely with Paul McCartney’s team over the years, and when I’ve met Paul, we’ve talked about his first Höfner bass and where it could be today.”
“Paul asked me, ‘Heh, because you’re from Höfner, couldn’t you help find my bass?'” And that was the impetus for this massive search.”
The bass has mysteriously disappeared from either the basement of the Beatles’ Savile Row offices or a closet at Abbey Road, according to several rumors.
Mr. Wass elaborated, saying, “This is the bass Paul played in Hamburg, at the Cavern Club, and at Abbey Road,” adding that the instrument could be considered “more like a Van Gogh or a Picasso than just an instrument.”If Paul’s bass could be returned to him, he’d be overjoyed.
Since yesterday’s debut, organizer Scott Jones stated, “We are dealing with hundreds of emails and we’ve already picked out two in particular because we know it instantly marries up with something that we already knew.”
We weren’t anticipating thousands of red-hot leads so quickly… My guess is that anyone with inside information will eventually come forth after some internal deliberation.
The 56-year-old claimed he did not know the identities of the people suggested by “different people” as possible suspects, but did say that they had links to both the United Kingdom and the United States.
Mr. Jones, a writer who looked into the death of Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, said, “The name (has) cropped up a few times now, because it’s disconnected and it’s coming from a range of sources.” Things like that are easily noticeable.It’s still feasible, but the confidence you have in a piece of information grows exponentially when it’s backed up by other sources with no ties to one another.