The theft of Paul McCartney’s 1961 Höfner bass is a 50-year-old mystery that spans from Hawkwind to the Who. Guitar Player tells how the Lost Bass project filled a gap in rock and roll history.
BY CHRISTOPHER SCAPELLITI
MOST FANS KNOW it simply as “the Beatle bass.” To Paul McCartney, it’s “the Ancient One,” the instrument that dates back to the guitarist’s musical rebirth as a bassist, at age 19. The 1961 Höfner 500/1 violin bass is the first bass guitar he owned and the one he played as he helped lead the Fab Four to international fame in 1962 and ’63. Its round, resonant tone was the indelible pulse that drove the group’s earliest hits, from “Love Me Do” to “Please Please Me” to “I Saw Her Standing There,” where McCartney nimbly plucked out the arpeggiating riff he lifted from Chuck Berry’s 1961 B-side “I’m Talking About You.” With a shape as distinctive as the early Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, the 500/1 became McCartney’s signature instrument. To this day, the Höfner is the 81-year-old’s bass of preference in the studio and onstage.
But for more than 50 years, the Ancient One has been missing, stolen presumably in January 1969, while the Beatles rehearsed and recorded the music for Let It Be. Like Eric Clapton’s “Beano” Les Paul, the celebrated electric guitar that graced the grooves of 1966’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, McCartney’s Höfner has taken on mythic proportions, becoming a holy grail for those who think, talk and dream about rock’s lost treasures.
That fanbase has grown considerably since the launch of the Lost Bass project, a global search for the ’61 Höfner that brought the cold case to the masses this past September. At the head of the search are one-time Höfner GmbH marketing manager Nick Wass, former BBC journalist Scott Jones and television producer Naomi Jones.
Although McCartney is not involved, he instigated the hunt with a simple question to Wass in 2019. “Höfner were making a backup bass for him,” Wass explains, “and we were just sitting drinking coffee in the studio when he suddenly popped the question: ‘Do you know what happened to my lost bass, the one that got pinched?’ ”
Wass didn’t know, but he was intrigued enough to launch a search for it on Höfner’s website and in the German media. The buzz drew few leads, but it attracted Scott and
