Last year, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page even tracked down one that had gone missing at an airport decades ago.
Tokyo: They say you never forget your first love, and after nearly half a century shopping for his stolen guitar, Canadian rock star Randy Bachman has finally been reunited with the instrument An eagle-eyed fan did the track in Japan.
Bachman, who co-wrote the original "American Woman" with her band The Guess Who, was in Tokyo on Friday for an emotional handover — 46 years after her cherished orange Gresch was snatched from a Toronto hotel.
"Wow," said a stunned Bachchan, lovingly holding the guitar and tuning it on stage, before playing at a special concert at the Canadian Embassy.
The 78-year-old said he was "quite devastated" by the theft.
"With that guitar, I wrote several million-selling songs... It was like my magic guitar. And then when it suddenly went away, the magic was gone."
Rocker bought the now-vintage 6120 Chet Atkins model as a teenager in the early 1960s, saving $400 from painstakingly mowing the lawn, washing cars, and taking care of the kids.
He had long admired the instrument, spending hours staring at it in a shop window in Winnipeg with his friend and fellow musician Neil Young.
It mattered so much to Bachchan that he would connect it to hotel toilets on tour. "Everyone in the band made fun of me, but because I worked so hard to get this guitar, I didn't want it to be stolen."
But in 1976, he handed the guitar over to a roadie, who kept it in a room with other belongings while the band checked out.
Before they knew it, it was gone.
- Some sleuths and a handover -
For decades, Bachchan hunted down his Gretsch, which has a small, deep knot in the grain of the wood in front, but to no avail—until a Canadian fan decided to help with the search from his home in 2020. .
William Long compared old images of the stolen instrument to new and archived photos of the models on Guitar Shop websites around the world.
"Yeah, I'm a sleuth," said Long, 58. "I believed I was going to find it. I got through the process so quickly—I went through 300 images of orange gratches."
No one was a perfect match until he found one with the tell-tale mark on the site of a Tokyo guitar shop.
Further searches pointed Long to a Japanese musician named Takeshi, whom he had seen in a YouTube video playing Bachchan's favorite guitar.
Takeshi, who has always wanted a vintage Gretsch, says he bought Bachchan's guitar in 2014 for about 850,000 yen ($6,300).
Bachman had long been alerted to his discovery, and the musicians met in Tokyo to arrange for Bachman's original guitar to be swapped with another of the same type, also produced in 1957.
The pair shared a big hug and then jammed together at an event held on Canada Day on Friday.
They performed songs including "American Woman", a 1970 hit later covered by American singer Lenny Kravitz, and "Takino Care of Business" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Bachman isn't the only rock star to be reunited with a long-lost guitar: Last year, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page also tracked down a down that disappeared at an airport decades ago.