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Comedians Continue Doing the Best Analysis of Trump: Seth Meyers on the 2019 State of the Union Address

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makeitstop2/06/2019 2:27:47 pm PST

I know that Corgan has turned into kind of a whack job, but I’m a sucker for stories of musicians being reunited with stolen instruments - 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.