After 27 Years, Billy Corgan Finally Reunites With Stolen ‘Gish’ Guitar

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.

Corgan knows it’s his guitar because it had certain distinguishing marks beyond the psychedelic paint job he’d given it. He recognized the place where a previous owner had carved the initials “KM” into it, and he remembered the placement of certain cigarette burns on the headstock “that I always thought were unsightly.” These were things he’d never talked about in the press, so it would have been impossible for someone to copy them.

The guitar made its way back to him via Beth James, a mother of three who doesn’t play guitar and lives in Flushing, Michigan, about 80 minutes northwest of Detroit. She’d spotted the guitar at a Detroit yard sale and plonked down $200 for it because she thought it would be a cool conversation piece in her basement. “I thought it was painted cool,” she says. “I literally don’t know anything about the guitar. I actually told my husband I only paid $100 for it because he would have killed me if he found out I paid more.” And there it stayed for the last 10 to 12 years.