A smashed guitar has reportedly sold for over $100,000 to a private collector. According to English broker Helen Hall, it is the second highest price paid for Kurt Cobain memorabilia. Pictured above are several documented examples of the musician’s handiwork.
It wasn’t the Nirvana frontman’s widow Courtney Love who benefited by the sale but rather a punk rocker named Sluggo of The Grannies and before that Hullabaloo.
It turns out that Cobain smashed the guitar while on his first U.S. tour. Times were reportedly tough and he needed another instrument to play for his next show. Kurt was renting an apartment from Sluggo at the time and he swapped one of Sluggo’s working guitars for the taped up Fender Mustang guitar in sunburst finish.
The sale was confirmed on Tuesday by the senior curator of the Experience Music Project in Seattle. According to Jacob McMurray, “It’s a really cool looking guitar because it’s smashed and held together with duct tape and Kurt Cobain wrote on it.”
The highest price paid at auction for a piece of Cobain memorabilia was $131,000 in 2006. That item was his Mosrite gospel Mark IV guitar. Kurt purchased the guitar in 1990 in San Francisco.
Check it out below.