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Detroit was different in 1992, although musicians getting their gear ripped off is a story that happens everywhere, to this day. But when someone walked out of Saint Andrew's Hall with Billy Corgan's Stratocaster maybe five minutes after the last note was played, you have to admit, no one should have been surprised.
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, playing something other than his lost Stratocaster. (Photo: Wikipedia)
And when the Smashing Pumpkins front man was reunited with his beloved guitar just this week, also in Michigan, that's the story that's hard to believe. But it happened, in Flushing, in Genesee County, Rolling Stone reports.
About a year after Smashing Pumpkins issued their fuzzy, trippy debut, Gish, a thief stole Billy Corgan’s favorite guitar. The band had just finished a gig at Detroit’s Saint Andrew’s Hall in June 1992 when a friend who was acting as a roadie told him, “Somebody just walked out the back door with your guitar.” It hadn’t even been five minutes since the band finished the show, as Corgan recalls. “I was like, ‘How is that even possible? Where’s security? Where were you?'” He filed a police report and offered a $10,000, no-questions-asked reward for its return.
For the past 27 years, he’s heard rumors of the guitar resurfacing. “It got to the point where you started not believing it, because you heard it so many times,” he tells Rolling Stone. “It was like the lost treasure of Blackbeard or something.”
On Tuesday, Corgan’s fortunes changed. A friend of his contacted him with a picture of a guitar that looked like the stolen instrument. But he was still incredulous because he’d been tricked before. “Somebody sent me a picture a couple of weeks ago of another one of my guitars, and I wrote the guy back and said, ‘How did you get my guitar?'” he says. “And he wrote back, ‘Oh, it’s a recreation.’ He’d literally gotten the same stickers, worn them down in the same way and scraped the paint so it looked worn. You could have fooled me.” So he decided to check it out in person. Sure enough, it was the early Seventies Fender Stratocaster that he had been looking for for more than 25 years.
The good deed was done by Beth James, of Flushing, who paid $200 for it at a Detroit yard sale 10 years ago because she thought it would make a cool thing to hang on the wall of her basement. A friend had read a story about the stolen instrument and thought it resembled the one in James basement. James made a connection, this and that happened, Corgan opened the case, froze and said, "That's it."
The Fender has a distinctive paint job Corgan gave it, as well as other distinguishing marks. He's very happy to be back with his "lost love."
