“This guy comes up and I’m thinking, ‘He wants me to sign his guitar.’ He said, ‘I bought your Les Paul years ago. Would you like to buy it back?’” Bryan Adams sold his Summer of ’69 guitar in the ’80s – but it found its way back to him

There are some guitars that just hit different. For Bryan Adams, his two main guitars from the career-making Reckless era – the one that spawned Billboard Top 20 hits like Run to You, Somebody, Heaven, and, of course, Summer of ’69 – still hold a special place in his heart.

“I have a 1960 [Fender] Stratocaster, which was the guitar – well, pretty much. There were two guitars on Reckless,” he explains in a new Guitar World interview. “One was that Stratocaster, and then, I have a 1980s [Gibson] Les Paul that’s stock off the shelf.

“Those two guitars are really cool. And the interesting thing about the Les Paul is that around the end of the ’80s I sold it. I thought, ‘I’m never going to use this… I mostly use Strats.’ And I also started to fall in love with my ES-295, and I just didn’t play the Les Paul anymore. So, I sold it.”

Fast forward a couple of years, and the regret started to sink in: “The Internet started coming about and I started seeing pictures of myself playing that Les Paul live,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘Shit, I think I sold that…’ and sure enough, I had sold it. It was gone. I had no idea where it was.”

Bryan Adams - Summer Of '69 (Official Music Video) - YouTube

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However, things would soon take a turn in 2005, when a record store signing gave him the chance to do right by his long-lost Les Paul. “I was signing records, and this guy comes up, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, he wants me to sign his guitar.’ He said, ‘Hey, I bought your Les Paul years ago. I’m really in hard times, would you like to buy the guitar back?’

“I was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ So, we did the deal right then and there, and it had taken a bit of a beating since I’d had it, but the best thing about getting that guitar back was that I re-recorded Summer of ’69 with it!”

Speaking of perhaps his most popular song, Adams recently shared the name of the pop star who he thinks is the “only person I can think of who did a version of Summer of ’69, and did it justice.”