Neil Young reunited with guitar 60 years later with a little help from B.C. sleuth

Neil Young performs during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Saturday, May 4, 2024, at the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)

William Long has done it again.

The semi-retired investor from White Rock, B.C., made headlines in October 2021, when through the creative use of software and some dedicated online sleuthing, he located a long-lost guitar that had been stolen 45 years earlier from Canadian rock icon Randy Bachman.

The former Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive founder had bought the orange Gretsch 6120 electric guitar at a music shop in Winnipeg in 1963, years before fame had found him.

On his advice at that time, Bachman’s friend and fellow Winnipeg native Neil Young bought the same one.

Young would move to Toronto, where he sold the guitar in 1965 to fund the purchase of an acoustic instrument, planning to take his career in a different direction.

“I sold this guitar in Toronto to a music store because I was just going to be going into folk music,” Young told the crowd at a Toronto concert earlier this week before launching into the Buffalo Springfield song “Mr. Soul” on the guitar he had sold 60 years prior.

While Young’s folk-rock turn would prove fruitful to say the least, he would evidently regret selling the instrument that became known among his superfans as “the Squires Gretsch,” named for the musician’s early band.

That’s where Long enters the story. Fresh off the success of finding Bachman’s beloved 6120 on an online retail site in Tokyo, the hobbyist searcher turned his attention to locating Young’s guitar.

• Read more: Randy Bachman’s guitar was stolen 45 years ago in Toronto. He just found it in Tokyo

Long began, as he always does, by collecting the few available black-and-white photos of Young with the lost Gretsch, and then comparing them with pictures of the same model and era for sale online.

“I was looking for that thing for three years, since 2022,” he told CTV News in an interview on Friday.

The guitar’s distinct woodgrain pattern is like a fingerprint, never repeated between any two instruments. Young’s guitar featured a prominent tiger-stripe grain across its top, Long noticed.

“I’d look for a couple hours a month, maybe once a month,” Long said. “Because I felt it’s a collectible guitar – a Gretsch 6120, it’s a beautiful guitar, actually – so it’s not going to be destroyed or tossed out. It’s going to cross the internet at some time, somewhere.”

That time was about two months ago, and the somewhere was a guitar reseller in the United States.

“I was out in the yard, building a tomato house for my wife. And I come in the house and I sit down at the computer and I do my little check. And you know, I’m getting a bit tired of doing this checking all the time,” he said.

That’s when he saw on his screen the Gretsch 6120 with the tiger-stripe grain, which Long had by then committed to memory.

“I was looking for so long that it was in my head. The fingerprint was in my head,” he said. “It had just come up for sale. It was just posted like a couple hours before I saw it.”

‘One in a million’

Long contacted Bachman, and the next morning his home phone rang.

It was Neil Young. “He was a bit nervous, but I explained everything to him. I said, ‘This is your guitar,’” Long recalled.

Young was reportedly skeptical, explaining that he had owned at least two other orange Gretsch 6120s after regretfully selling his first one. But the diligent Long had done his homework.

“‘No,’ I told him, and then then I showed him. I emailed him the image,” Long said. “I said to him, ‘I’m 100 per cent sure this is the guitar, but only you would really know.’”

Later that day, Long checked the listing again. “It was gone. So I knew he got it,” he said. “If Neil didn’t buy it, I would have bought it.”

Long would later receive an email from Young, who was then embarking on the European leg of his current tour, thanking him for tracking down the instrument six decades after the musician parted with it.

The guitar made its first public reappearance on Aug. 15, when Young brought it onstage during a concert in Ohio, vaguely crediting Bachman with the find.

“Finally, someone has taken my guitar from the Squires and put it online,” Young says in a video of the performance posted to YouTube. “You could only see the grain, it’s the same.”

Young’s representatives at Warner Records did not respond to emails requesting comment on the discovery this week.

Long, who stresses that he’s neither a musician nor an investigator, and “didn’t even know what a Gretsch was” before locating two of history’s most iconic examples of the 6120 model, says he is relieved to be done with the search and has no plans to pursue a third act.

“It was becoming a burden on me,” he said with a laugh. “I’m talking to you now, explaining this, and it doesn’t even register my brain as being real. It’s one in a million – twice.”