Davie504 walked into a Guitar Center in Hawaii wearing what he was convinced was a foolproof local disguise. Within seconds, a customer spotted him, another stopped mid-browse to gawk, and a child stared up at him like he had materialized from the internet itself. This is what happens when the self-proclaimed CEO of Bass attempts to go incognito across the most remote guitar store locations in America, and it turns out that fame travels farther than a round-trip flight to Honolulu.
It started with a comment. After a run of videos where Davie504 walked into guitar shops in Japan and Singapore to slap some bass, a viewer dropped a pointed challenge in the comments: try it in America, where nobody knows who you are. Determined to prove the commenter right, he booked a trip to Chicago first, recruiting fellow YouTuber Rob Scallum as a hired bodyguard-slash-decoy. The plan lasted approximately two minutes inside one of the most famous guitar shops in the world before a staffer looked over and asked, ‘Are you Dave504?’ Scallum’s cover story, that his client’s name was Steven, did not survive cross-examination.
From Chicago to the middle of the Pacific
With Chicago a bust, the mission escalated. If anonymity was impossible in a major city, maybe a guitar store sitting in the middle of the ocean would do the trick. Hawaii has three music shops, and Davie504 worked through them in order of size. The smallest one ended in a handshake and a photo request before he had cleared the doorway. At the second, a staff member greeted him at the threshold with ‘Are you a famous YouTuber?’ The disguise that day, by his own assessment, looked exactly like a disguise. He stayed long enough to try a bass for what he described as multiple hours and ended up buying a tropical bass before moving on.
The final destination was the biggest music shop in Hawaii, a Guitar Center that he framed, with appropriate drama, as the most remote guitar store in the world. Getting there took six and a half hours of travel. He walked in hoping for anonymity and found his own signature bass on display, which he immediately sat down and played. ‘I just played my own song on your bass,’ he told the staffer standing nearby. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ The staffer, to their credit, did not do much about it.
The only mission that actually succeeded
The comment that launched the whole trip turned out to be wrong on every count. American guitar store employees and customers recognized him faster than their counterparts in Asia had. But Davie504 had one final piece of business to conduct in Hawaii that had nothing to do with bass guitars.
Pineapple pizza, he noted, had been haunting him for years. Its real name is Hawaiian pizza. As an Italian, he said, it hurt to admit what he admitted next: ‘This is actually pretty good.’
The tropical bass sitting in the back of the second shop
Somewhere in a mid-sized music shop in Hawaii, a tropical bass that caught his eye after hours of playing still has a price tag on it, or it did until he bought it. Whether it survived the flight back is a different story entirely.
The comment that sent Davie504 across an ocean to find the world’s most remote guitar store was trying to predict his irrelevance in a new country. Instead, it produced a Guitar Center moment where a child froze in the aisle, a staffer laughed off a song played on a signature instrument, and one Italian finally made peace with pineapple on pizza.
