Did anyone watch Paul McCartney: The hunt for the lost bass.

[stayathomegardener]

A few things didn’t add up for me and I can’t help but wonder who was paid for information or the instrument itself.

I loved the drawings as well. Presumably, done by Klaus? I liked the way the story was revealed. Clearly, if you're not a Beatles fan, it may not be as interesting to you.

They should have secured the van a lot better than they did originally and I wondered if it was insured , hence why he just shrugged and said ‘ it’s ok , I have another one’ !

I liked the drawings too. Very well done.

I liked the couple who were described as "bass detectives". Is that actually a thing? Apart from this case, how much call is there actually for one bass detective - let alone two! My careers teacher never mentioned this as an option.

Exactly Ive been scouring the job pages since last night and not one job has come up!!

For those questioning PM's response to the thing going missing or forgetting to tell people or whatever it is. Remember these people do a lot of drugs in their careers, he was probably off his face for much of the latter 60s.

When Cath in Hastings said she took it to one of Paul’s houses ‘over the fields he has an estate a few miles away near Rye and this is off the road and up a lane through fields. What isn’t clear is whether she handed the bass to someone on that Rye estate? Otherwise who did she actually hand the guitar over to as this wasn’t made clear?

Just found that Cath did hand the missing bass to staff on Paul’s Rye estate who then got it to Keith Smith, Paul’s technical manager.

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I definitely took ‘over the fields’ too literally.

I started watching this tonight. I love Klaus - what a time to know the Beatles. I am going to be closely watching the chair when I next put it on.

I thought it was really sad that Mike said he and his Dad left their family house where his mum had died, because they had fans outside all the time.

I really enjoyed it, though some of it was hard to follow. And I totally get that McCartney was a bit 'hey ho' when it went. He had bought another of the same model back in '63 as the original one was falling apart - like he said they were cheap guitars - and he didn't use either much anymore. Wind forward fifty years and a simple musing over its fate soon grew into a quest and no doubt fired off an avalanche of memories for him that meant it became some something he'd love to have again. Just amazing it still existed and was found.

In a similar vein I really enjoyed the Repair Shop episode with Dave Greenwood from The Strangler's keyboard. He used it to record all their classic hits and used it on tour until it began to fall to bits and was abandoned at a recording studio. He passed away and when the studio were having a clearcut they were going to put it in a skip - the keyboard was a bit of an odd contraption and thought unrepairable. Someone thought it worth rescuing it and it was gifted to the current keyboard player by the band who had learned to play because he was a huge fan of the Stranglers. It being The Repair Shop of course they got it working.

You're correct. I know what happened to this guitar. Without saying more than I should it wasn't 'lost' and its whereabouts were always known.

To be clear Macca didn't know where it was after the London gig with Wings where it went walkies.

Ohhhh intriguing!

Also very intrigued…

Just seen it. Underwhelmed is probably the best adjective I feel.

An awful lot of soft-focus filler. The whole story could have been told in 30 minutes. With adverts.

And "Guitarisan" ? Pur-lease. It's Luthier. We don't need a new word. One can only speculate how much they had to pay the poor guy for his dignity.

Guitars almost always have serial numbers (Hofner would have). So all of the verbiage about looking at photos, pretending you are some sort of CIA analyst - again pure TV fiction. There is no way someone who moved in the circles McCartney did when the bass "went missing" (yes, the length of the piece was an attempt to obfuscate the story) would not have recorded the serial number. And if they didn't, his management needed sacking.

Amps also have serial numbers. So the contents of the van w(sh)ould have been recorded.

Pleased he got it back. For all the misty eyed romanticism over it's purchase, the real reason was strangely omitted. In 1961, if you were left handed, you were shit out of luck when it came to asymmetrical instruments like the developing field of electric guitars. And even less so when it came to bass guitars. So basically it was buy the only reversible bass guitar on the market, or ruin the aesthetics by playing a Fender Jazzmaster (or possibly Precision) bass upside down.

The "iconic" role of the Hofner bass is really just an accident of chance.

Ultimately, rock and roll is a chaotic business, and things go missing. There is probably space for a book of famous guitars.

https://www.thaliacapos.com/blogs/blog/peter-frampton-s-phenix-les-paul-the-guitar-that-rose-from-the-ashes

I didn’t find the people that had kept it very convincing although I understood why the ambulance driver didn’t want his dad’s memory tarnished. I assumed there was more to the story and they received payment or some sort of reward for their ‘participation’.

I'm read somewhere that the controversial Shout! writer Philip Norman was on the case with it many years ago, perhaps to ingratiate himself with Macca given the depiction he gave of him in the book, and had located it. No mention of Norman in this documentary, however.

PM said in the documentary it was rubbish (or words to that effect), he wasnt making out it was like a Stradivarius or something.
I suppose something becomes iconic because of what it was used for in many case, thats all.