Rowan MacLachlan was a teenager when he asked to borrow a guitar strap from his father so he could play a pep rally with his friends at Walter Murray Collegiate in Saskatoon.
His dad said yes, not realizing MacLachlan would choose a strap signed by Joan Baez in 1985, long before he was born.
“He didn’t lend me that specific guitar strap. I think he probably said ‘Take one of my guitar straps’ and I took that one, maybe not knowing,” MacLachlan said in an interview with CBC’s Saskatoon Morning.
“I was just playing music with my friends. It was Grade 10, it was 2010 … I was 15 years old. We’re playing at a pep rally. After the show, I think I didn’t pack it up carefully with the rest of my gear and it just disappeared.”
That guitar strap was a piece of his father’s past.
When Dave MacLachlan was a young musician, his band, MacLachlan Grace Read, played six nights a week at a Saskatoon club called the Artful Dodger.
“Joan Baez was in town for a couple of shows at Centennial Auditorium,” MacLachlan said. “I guess after a show one night, she came in and listened to them play for a bit.”
That night, her entourage asked if she could perform a couple songs with the band, and of course they agreed, he said.
“My dad, he mentions how he told my mother this, that Joan Baez had come in and that the next night she should be ready to go, to leave the house, to get dressed and come down to the Artful Dodger in case she came again,” he said.
“She came a second night. So my mom got to see her too. And then I guess she signed my dad’s guitar strap.”
The strap stayed with his father for years after that, until MacLachlan borrowed it, and lost it.
“I don’t remember how I felt, but I feel ashamed of it now, I’ll say that much,” he said.
“Now I feel very regretful about it. Of course, I lost stuff all the time back then.”
He tries not to think about having regrets, because that’s life, he said.
“But I just think about how happy my dad would be to see this guitar strap again. Because I think for him, it was a very real, very tangible artifact. I think about it kind of like an heirloom; it was a very strong connection to that part of his life, which was from before I was ever born.”
MacLachlan said he knows it’s a long shot to hope for its return after more than 15 years, but he’s hoping for a miracle, which is why he turned to Reddit, making a public plea for the long-lost treasure.
Saskatoon man searching for long-lost guitar strap signed by Joan Baez
Especially since one of his father’s former bandmates is no longer living, it holds a special place in his dad’s memory, he said.
“It would be a huge redemption for me,” he added. “I think for my dad, he would just be happy with me, and I think he’d just like to have it back.”
