In 1963, John Lennon’s guitar went missing. The 1962 Gibson J-160E acoustic disappeared during a December Christmas show in Finsbury Park (London). It was the guitar Lennon had used to write many of the Beatles’ early hits, including ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘All My Loving’ and ‘Please Please Me’. It can be heard on the recordings of ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘P.S. I Love You’.

gitar

The guitar’s journey following (what presumably was a) theft is unknown until the mid-70s, when a man named John McCaw picked up an acoustic guitar for what he said was ‘a couple of hundred dollars’. There it sat, in his collection, for about 40 years before a friend miraculously recognized it last year when going through a book called Beatles Gear by Andy Babiuk, an expert on Beatles memorabilia.

McCaw took the guitar to Babiuk, who sees this kind of thing all the time and says that ‘99% of the time’ it turns out to be nothing. But in this case, the serial numbers matched, the guitar looked exactly the same, and an analysis of the wood grain made it definitive – this was the long lost John Lennon guitar.

The guitar will now be going up for auction in November at Julien’s auction house (the 6th and 7th) in Los Angeles, and will be on tour this summer, getting displayed at the LBJ Presidential Library in Texas in June and the Grammy museum in LA from July-September. It will then be showcased at Julien’s November 2nd – 6th before going on sale.

The guitar, bought by John McCaw for ‘a couple of hundred dollars’ is expected to fetch between $600,000 & $800,000 at the auction.