Kurt Cobain’s wrecked Fender Stratocaster guitar sold at auction for $595,900, more than 10 times its original estimate.
The Nirvana frontman’s left-handed electric guitar was vandalized while the grunge pioneers were making their seminal album Nevermind in the early 1990s. Reassembled but unplayable, it was expected to fetch between $60,000 and $80,000 at Julien’s auction at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York over the weekend.
It features the signatures of all three Nirvana members, Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, along with an inscription by Cobain addressed to the late Screaming Trees lead singer, Mark Lanegan. According to Julien’s Auctions, Cobain gave the guitar to Lanegan during Nirvana’s Nevermind tour in 1992.
Cobain, who took his own life in 1994 at the age of 27, was known for his frenetic performances and destroyed several Stratocasters during his hugely influential career.
Nirvana’s handwritten list of the band’s 1991 debut «Smells Like Teen Spirit» also sold at the same auction Saturday for $50,800, twelve times its original estimate.
The guitar that Cobain played during a legendary live acoustic concert on MTV Unplugged in 1993, just five months before his death, sold two years ago for $6 million.
A trove of music memorabilia sold over the course of Julien’s two-day auction, including guitars played by Bono and Eddie Van Halen, and Michael Jackson’s «Dangerous» world tour jacket.