A LEGEND COMES HOME

After a 46-year search, Randy Bachman is reunited with his long-lost 1957 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins.

- TIM HORNYAK

RANDY BACHMAN SHUFFLED across a Tokyo concert stage and quietly embraced his long-lost girlfriend for the first time in 46 years. It was a quiet, somewhat awkward moment, and the aging Canadian rocker, perhaps overcome by emotion, said little. He was finally holding his hit-making Gretsch guitar, an instrument he'd once compared to a lover. After decades of fruitless searching, the guitar had been located and would at last be going home.

Bachman's July 1 reunion with his Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model brought one of the guitar world's greatest mysteries to an end. In 1976, the guitarist was on top of the world. His band Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO) had topped the U.S. and Canadian charts the year before with Not Fragile and followed it up with the successful jazz-influenced single "Lookin' Out for #1." He built a mansion with its own recording studio and bowling alley.

Then came the a gut punch: In a hotel outside Toronto, a thief stole his treasured Gretsch guitar. Bachman was devastated. The Gretsch had made him a star. He looked everywhere for it, enlisting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and searching through guitar and pawnshops across North America for years. But the guitar was gone without a trace.

Bachman grew up in Winnipeg. He played classical violin until one day in 1956, when he saw Elvis Presley gyrating and strumming his Martin D-28 on The Ed Sullivan Show. His parents told him it was rock and roll. Bachman borrowed a cousin's guitar and was hooked. "I found out the guitar is the most intimate instrument there is," Bachman says from his home in British Columbia. "It's the only one you hold next to you, with both arms around it, like a person. Your whole body resonates with what you're playing, and it's very special."