LEGENDARY LOWS
Has there ever been a musician as closely associated with an instrument as Paul McCartney and his Höfner bass? You see a picture of McCartney, and you aren’t at all surprised to see him holding the Höfner... it’s almost as if he was born with it.
All the Beatles have been put under the microscope again and again over the years. Their lives have been examined in the most detailed way for books, magazine articles, movies, and now, of course, for social media and the internet. This scrutiny has included, on countless occasions, McCartney and his Höfner basses. From this has come numerous legends and myths, many of which are now copied and stated as facts simply because they have been around for years.
For this article, I thought we might try to look at what we know as actual facts, and add to those a little of what we might reasonably suppose to have occurred in the past. I will only include the four Höfner basses that I know McCartney has played in public. He owns several others, but they are in his private collection and as such, I believe it is his business to discuss them, not mine.
The four basses are:
1The one he purchased in Hamburg in 1961—the ‘61 bass’.
2The bass he acquired in the autumn of 1963—the ‘63 bass’.
The ‘Jubilee’ bass given to him by Höfner to
