Randy Bachman (Randy Bachman) is a Canadian rock legend. Recently, he has been in the news in Europe, America and Japan, but it has nothing to do with his songs. 
5 years ago, Bachmann lost his first guitar at the highlight of his career.
Now, with the help of fans and a lot of luck, he has rediscovered it in Japan.
If you never forget it, there will be echoes. This is probably the story...
Bachmann called this piano his "first love", and his fate with it began in 1962.
At that time, Bachman was only 19 years old, an ordinary boy living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
, like most teenagers, loves pop music but does not have his own musical instrument.
However, he knew what he wanted.
Every Saturday, Bachman would pretend to casually walk to Portage Avenue, where there was a musical instrument store called "Winnipeg Piano". In addition to selling pianos, it also sold a variety of guitars, all of which Bachmann coveted.
"I go to see it every Saturday, through the glass door. I don't know if you believe it, but I will really stare for an hour." Bachmann said in an interview, "After that, I will Went to the side window and watched for another half hour. At that time, Neil Young (his childhood friend) and I also watched for an hour.
Bachman took a fancy to a 1957 Gretsch company. electric guitar , named Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins. It is orange in color, has a beautiful sound hole, has a classic and mellow tone, and has an asymmetrical shape with a hint of unruliness.
Gretsch's guitar is very expensive and cannot be bought with pocket money alone.
In order to get Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins, Bachmann saved money in every way he could think of. He babysits other people's children, delivers documents, washes cars, weeds, picks up garbage... all kinds of chores. After saving for almost a year, he finally scraped together 400 Canadian dollars.
Holding the scraps of money, Bachman proudly walked into the Winnipeg piano store, and then came out with the guitar of his dreams.
"It was my first guitar and my first love."
Bachman quickly became self-taught, and his musical talent was amazing. It didn't take long for him to form The Guess Who band with his friends, and he became famous three years later. , the cover song topped the Canadian Music Hot Chart and also ranked 22nd in the United States.
In the following years, The Guess Who released a single that broke into the top 40 in Canada every year. Three albums were successful and gained the attention of the mainstream music circle.
By 1970, the single "American Woman" became number one on the U.S. Hot 100 singles chart, which was also the first achievement achieved by a Canadian band.
Bachmann is the song writer and composer in the band. The demo of each song was played on his first love guitar.
"Those Eyes", "Get the Job Done", "No Sugar Tonight", "American Woman", hit songs engraved in the history of music are all produced by this orange guitar. He believes the guitar made him what he is.
"It is my weapon and a tool for me to write songs, create music, and make money. It is what allows me to achieve everything I am today." Bachman said.
Due to religious reasons, Bachman later quit The Guess Who and formed a new band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, which is still very popular.
One tour after another, they made a lot of money,
but this also led to the separation between him and his first love guitar...
Every time he performed on stage, Bachmann used his first love guitar, in order to prevent it from being stolen. , he has used many protective measures.
“I would strap the guitar in a case with a 12-foot tow chain and put it in my hotel room,” Bachman said.
“I used to put the guitar next to the toilet in the bathroom, thread the chain through the handle of the suitcase, and then wrap it twice around the suitcase and the toilet.This means that if someone wanted to steal it, he would have to remove the toilet from the bathroom floor. "
This protection method is very extreme and very effective. In a city with poor public security, Bachmann was not stolen even once.
But people always make mistakes. In 1976, the 32-year-old Bachmann performed in Toronto On the day of hotel check-out, the agent forgot to bolt the guitar to the toilet.
Just 10 minutes later, the thief stole the guitar when they were checking out at the front desk.
When Bachman went back to get his luggage, he was completely stunned. His first love guitar was gone!
This was a shock, and he started crying. According to him, he cried for three days.
The Ontario police investigated for a month and found that the thief had covered his whereabouts very well. It was found that the guitar was shipped to Texas, and he didn't know anything about it after that.
Bachman was not convinced and started to look for it himself.
He searched through guitar magazines and guitar stores in North America, hoping to find a third party who bought the guitar. I haven't found it for many years. It seems that is not sold in North America at all.
seems to be saying goodbye to my first love guitar.
has lost its sense of absence and made Bachman suffer from "guitar shopping addiction". He will buy Gretsch guitars that are similar to it, no matter how high the price is. So far, Bachman has bought more than 350 "replacements", so many that he built one in Savannah, Georgia, USA. A guitar museum.
In the past few decades, Bachman has changed from a rock prodigy to a rock talent, and then to an older generation rock legend.
He still talks about it from time to time in the program. His first love for the guitar, talking about its tone and appearance, and his regrets.
He didn’t expect to see it again, but fate loved to joke.
During the epidemic, he received a strange phone call from a man named William. · A call from a stranger named William Long, who said he was from White Rock, British Columbia and was a big fan of Bachmann.
In order to make up for the regrets of his idol, William started using facial recognition technology in March 2020. Find Bachmann's first love, the guitar, online.
"You know, the guitar also has a face." These were William's exact words.
He focused on a small wooden scar on the First Love guitar. It was a unique feature. He compared this feature with other Gretsch guitars. If it matched, he found it.
This was a lot of work, but the computer was easy to find. A few weeks later, William found it on the official website of a Tokyo musical instrument store. The
store said the guitar was sold in 2014. After another search, William finally found the buyer, Japanese musician Takeshi.
William sent Bachman a YouTube link that showed Takeshi playing guitar on Christmas Day 2019.
"The moment I saw it, I recognized it instantly." Bachman said excitedly, "He used that guitar to sing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.""
Bachman told his son and daughter-in-law about this, My daughter-in-law happened to be Japanese, and she quickly got in touch with Takeshi.
The two parties met in a video chat. Bachman carefully looked at the details of the guitar and confirmed again that this was his first love guitar. Because he was too excited, he cried again in the middle.
Takeshi expressed regret over the theft of Bachmann's guitar and was willing to return the guitar. But he also bought this guitar with real money. He only had one request, that Bachman should find a guitar of the same style to replace it.
This is fair, but difficult to operate.
Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins is already very rare on the market. Bachman asked a friend who dealt in antique guitars, and the other party said that Gretsch Company only made 35 identical guitars in 1957.
is okay, Bachman is still lucky. He found a sister guitar in the , Ohio, guitar factory that was produced in the same week, had a very similar serial number, and had no modifications.
This made Bachman have to sigh: "Finding my guitar is a miracle, and finding its twin sister is another miracle."
Due to the epidemic, Bachman has been unable to arrive in Japan. Recently, he finally passed.
This Friday is Canada Day. In the theater of the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, Bachmann and Takeshi performed on the same stage and sang a number of classic old songs.
This is the first time the two have met offline, and it is also the first time Bachmann has performed in Japan since the 1990s.
He is very grateful to Takeshi for giving him the opportunity to regain his first love, the guitar. Although Takeshi is not sure whether he can take advantage of the new guitar, he is very happy to part with it and let the 78-year-old man realize his dream.
At the end of the performance, they exchanged guitars. After 45 years, their first love guitar returned to the arms of the rock prodigy.
Both Canada and Japan called this incident a "realistic fairy tale" and an "extremely unlikely event."
After Bachman returned to Canada, he planned to write a new song called "Lost and Returned" with his son, which would include Japanese lyrics.
As for his first love guitar, he will play it once at this year's Vancouver Music Festival, and then stay locked in his home in Victoria City forever.
"I will never take it out of my house again. I will never lose it."
Who can blame him?
The beloved thing that I have been searching for for nearly half a century can finally be returned to my hands properly and permanently.
From teenagers, to adulthood, to old age, this guitar has really carried too much...
