The one guitar Kurt Cobain considered his “favourite”
Kurt Cobain owned a lot of guitars over the years. That was mostly by necessity: after nearly every Nirvana gig, some piece of equipment wound up broken, smashed, or otherwise pulverised. Cobain was usually leading the charge, so that meant that his guitars were often the first things to get in the line of fire. From early shows in Seattle clubs to their final stadium gigs, Nirvana was in desperate need of cheap instruments.
That gave most of the general public the impression that Cobain favoured pawn shop guitars over sleeker, newer models. As he told Guitar World shortly after the release of Nevermind in 1991, that wasn’t the case. “I don’t favour them – I can afford them. [laughs] I’m left-handed, and it’s not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favourite. I’ve only owned two of them.”
By the early 1990s, Fender Mustangs were largely seen as a failed model. First produced in 1964 and discontinued in 1982, the Mustang was a low-cost Fender guitar explicitly marketed to beginners. Famous figures like Todd Rundgren and Rory Gallagher were known to have played models, but it was only once Cobain became associated with it after playing one in the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video that the Mustang truly became a valuable guitar. Even then, Cobain wasn’t exactly flattering toward his guitar of choice.
“They’re cheap and totally inefficient, and they sound like crap and are very small,” Cobain claimed. “They also don’t stay in tune, and when you want to raise the string action on the fretboard, you have to loosen all the strings and completely remove the bridge. You have to turn these little screws with your fingers and hope that you’ve estimated it right. If you screw up, you have to repeat the process over and over until you get it right. Whoever invented that guitar was a dork.”
When the interviewer points out that Cobain was calling Leo Fender a dork, he lets out a good-natured laugh. Cobain was a keen user of Fender, picking up Stratocasters and Jaguars over the years, but always preferred the Mustang. During the tour for Nevermind, Cobain was asked if the Mustang was his exclusive axe.
“No, I own a ’66 Jaguar. That’s the guitar I polish, and baby – I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd,” Cobain explained. “Lately, I’ve been using a Strat live, because I don’t want to ruin my Mustang yet. I like to use Japanese Strats because they’re a bit cheaper, and the frets are smaller than the American version’s.”
Nirvana wasn’t at the point of performing unplugged just yet, but they did have two notable acoustic songs on Nevermind: ‘Polly’ and ‘Something in the Way’. For those songs, Cobain used a guitar that he had bought in 1989 at the Edgewater Pawn Shop – a Stella Harmony H912.
“That’s a 20-dollar junk shop Stella – I didn’t bother changing the strings,” Cobain laughed. “It barely stays in tune. In fact, I have to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place.”
Check out Cobain using his favourite guitar in the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video down below.
