Have You Seen Paul McCartney’s Lost Bass Guitar? Tips Welcome.

Earlier than Beatlemania, there was the distinctive Höfner violin bass — the primary guitar that Paul McCartney purchased after changing into the bassist for the Beatles.

That bass will be heard on a few of the band’s most well-known hits, together with “Love Me Do,” “She Loves You,” and “Twist and Shout.”

Mr. McCartney picked up the instrument in a Hamburg music retailer in 1961, and it accompanied the Fab 4 as they rocketed to gorgeous success, changing into probably the most well-known band on the planet. However the guitar vanished eight years later.

A brand new marketing campaign is looking for to seek out the lacking instrument, and a whole lot of individuals have responded, hoping to assist clear up the decades-old thriller: The place is Paul McCartney’s lacking bass guitar?

“It’s a vastly important instrument in its personal proper,” stated Nick Wass, a semiretired advisor for Höfner, the guitar’s producer, who has joined forces with two journalists to attempt to observe the guitar down. “It’s the bass that made the Beatles.”

“The bass was completely on the coronary heart of the origins of the Beatles sound,” stated one of many journalists, Scott Jones, who labored for the BBC. “The smallest items of data can typically result in the largest breakthroughs,” he stated of their enchantment for recommendations on its destiny.

Mr. Jones’s spouse, Naomi, is the opposite journalist behind what they’re calling The Misplaced Bass Undertaking.

The three Beatles followers have urged members of the general public to return ahead with any data that may assist. No tip is simply too small, they are saying, and they’re promising to maintain sources confidential. They are saying they’ve already acquired a number of credible leads because the venture started on Saturday.

The instrument’s treasured place in Beatles mythology is intertwined with the band’s story. After the departure of their unique bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, Mr. McCartney, who had been enjoying guitar, switched devices to interchange him throughout a residency in Hamburg in 1961. For that, he wanted a brand new bass guitar.

“I bought my Violin Bass on the Steinway store within the city heart. I keep in mind going alongside and there was this bass which was fairly low-cost,” he stated in a 1993 interview with Guitar Journal, including that he had not wished to enter debt and will solely afford the Höfner, 500/1 guitar on the time. It price about £30 kilos, or $38, he recalled. “And as soon as I purchased it, I fell in love with it.”

Mr. McCartney took the guitar again to Britain, the place it accompanied the Beatles by a whole lot of gigs — from the band’s early concert events on the Cavern Membership in Liverpool, the place they have been noticed by Brian Epstein, who would grow to be their supervisor, to the recording of their first two albums. It was repaired in 1964, in response to the workforce behind the brand new search, after which used together with different bass guitars.

However the final confirmed sighting of the instrument was in London in 1969, in video footage of the band members writing their last album, “Let It Be.” Rumors have percolated ever since about what occurred to the instrument: The Misplaced Bass Undertaking means that it might have been stolen or misplaced both from the basement of Abbey Street Studios, or from the Apple Corps recording studio on Savile Row.

A consultant for Paul McCartney declined a request for an interview. However Mr. Wass stated he understood, from earlier communications with Mr. McCartney, that he was eager to be reunited with the instrument. “He calls it the traditional one,” Mr. Wass stated.

Among the many leads that they had acquired, Mr. Jones stated, have been strategies that the instrument might have traveled to america or Japan. However he added that each one the leads have to be vetted. “Someplace amongst that data there may be going to be the reply,” he stated.

Different iconic devices have been misplaced and located through the years — one shut instance being a Gibson acoustic guitar belonging to John Lennon, which was purchased in 1962 after which misplaced the next yr. Half a century later, it re-emerged and was bought at public sale in 2015 to an nameless purchaser for $2.4 million.

It’s unclear what the market worth of Mr. McCartney’s lacking guitar can be, however the workforce behind the search insists that the trouble just isn’t for financial achieve, calling the guitar “priceless.”

“We simply wish to know the place it’s,” stated Mr. Wass.