“We’ve had to bring in some help”: Gibson hires the investigative journalists who helped find Paul McCartney’s lost Höfner violin bass to aid the hunt for the missing Back to the Future ES-345
Gibson’s Mark Agnesi has issued an update on the firm’s search for the missing Back to the Future guitar, and it’s drafting in the big guns to help bring the iconic ES-345 home.
The search, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, was announced in early June, and Gibson has since been inundated with tip-offs from the guitar community. That led to a first update, revealing a key feature of the guitar that will help narrow down the mammoth search.
The guitar was borrowed from Norman’s Rare Guitars for use in the film’s legendary ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ dance scene. The ES-345 was wielded by Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly to shred Johnny B. Goode in front of a shellshocked audience – and inspired John Mayer and Coldplay’s Chris Martin to pick up the guitar – but hasn’t been seen since. Gibson, however, might have just played its trump card.
“It has been hard to keep up with the submission,” Agnesi reveals. “So hard, we’ve actually had to bring in some help. We’re very, very, excited about this: we’ve brought in Scott and Naomi Jones, two investigative journalists. You may know them from The Lost Bass Project.”
That project, launched in 2022, helped find Paul McCartney‘s one-of-a-kind Höfner violin bass, used on early singles including Love Me Do and She Loves You, 50 years after it went missing. It was ultimately found collecting dust in an English attic – wherever else – and has since returned to the stage in McCartney’s hands. If they can’t bring the chase to an end, it might just be gone forever.
“The person who has this guitar may not know that they have it,” Agnesi adds. “So if you’ve got guitars around the house, open the case, take a picture, and send it to info@losttothefuture.com, and we’ll help identify the guitar.”
Agnesi, whose guitar journey also began after watching Back to the Future, has also addressed a key detail that has thus far not been mentioned: what happens when the guitar is found?
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“We’re not expecting anyone to give this thing back to us,” he underlines. “All we’re trying to do is find this guitar and reunite it with Michael J. Fox. That scene was so important to so many kids from that generation, myself included.”
That suggests that there will either be a fairly tidy amount of compensation to the owner, or that Gibson solely wants to borrow the guitar for a while, shoot some heartwarming promo, and return the instrument, having put the saga to bed.
Fox has spoken about how he used the scene to honor a score of his biggest guitar heroes, while Norman Harris has revealed the faux pas made by the props team that means, fittingly, the guitar used in the scene also has time-traveling abilities. Interestingly, a Stratocaster was almost used, but a last-ditch change brought the ES-345 to set instead.
The search is also being documented for a future film. Readers with information regarding the guitar’s whereabouts can visit losttothefuture.com for more details.
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