Kurt Cobain’s smashed guitar sells for more than £400,000
The guitar that late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain destroyed on the band’s first tour has sold for $486,400 (£413,926) at auction, over double the original estimate of $200,000 (£170,174).
The 1973 Fender Mustang was shattered onstage by Cobain when the Seattle band were on tour in the US in 1989 and was auctioned at New York City’s Hard Rock Cafe on Friday, November 11th, for Julien’s Auctions ‘Icons and Idols: Rock’ N’ Roll’ event.
Cobain only played the guitar at two shows during their 1989 tour, on July 8th at Club Dreamerz in Chicago and July 9th at Sonic Temple Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. At the end of the show in Wilkinsburg, he decided to wreck the guitar. Per Consequence, after the Wilkinsburg show, Nirvana stayed with Sluggo Cawley of the band Hullabaloo, where Cobain came across his equally as mashed-up Gibson SG.
Believing he could repair the SG enough to break it once more, Cobain offered to trade his guitar for Cawley’s, a request he eventually accepted. Notably, Cobain wrote on the six-string: “Yo Sluggo, Thank for the Trade! IF its illegal to Rock and Roll, throw my ASS in JAiL … NIRVANA.”
Cawley would later retell the story in 2020 when speaking to Innocent Words, as reported by Julien’s themselves: “Kurt asked me if he could have the smashed Gibson SG I had hanging on my wall. So I said, ‘Sure, but now I won’t have one for my wall.’ Kurt replied, ‘I’ll be right back.’ He went out to their van and presented me a 1973 Fender Mustang that he deemed beyond repair. In sort of mock guitar hero worship, I asked him to sign it for me.”
Elsewhere, in October this year, the estate of Kurt Cobain slammed London’s Royal Opera House for adapting Gus Van Sant’s dramatised film Last Days. It labelled the production an “unauthorised attempt” to exploit a fictionalised account of the Nirvana singer’s final days.
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