The whole world was watching when Courtney Love's husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, was found dead on April 8, 1994.

Two months later, Kristen Pfaff, bassist for Love’s band Hole, died from a heroin overdose. The group were forced to put a tour on hold and pull out of an appearance at Lollapalooza.

But Love refused to let these tragedies define Hole's 1998 album, Celebrity Skin. The last thing she wanted was to write “a grieving widow’s memoir,” as she called it in a 1999 Guitar World interview.

“I think that’s the kind of satisfaction some people would really want. But I’m not in the mood for that. That’s not what I’m about. This isn’t Lucinda Williams. I’m not some confessional singer/songwriter. My whole history in this business has been to find the hook.”

A media circus. The aftermath of two major deaths. A new bass player. An intense touring schedule. Hiatus. Relocation to New Orleans, New York, Nashville, and Memphis. All contributed to Celebrity Skin.

But Love also used Los Angeles, fame, and celebrity culture as her muse. The result was a record that captured the zeitgeist.

And although she didn't want to dwell on her departed partner in the album's lyrics, her guitar work paid subtle homage through her gear choices.

The most poignant of these was a big-bodied Gretsch that few would associate with Cobain – but for the Nirvana frontman, it was the one that got away.

“Kurt would always say, ‘I’m gonna get a Chet Atkins.’ But he never did. I don’t think he could find a left-handed one. It wasn’t until he died that I went and looked at one, and it was really beautiful.”

Love's other primary guitar during this era was her signature Fender Vista Venus – a part Mercury, part Stratocaster, and part Rickenbacker hybrid – which broke new ground as only the second signature guitar ever released for a female guitarist, following Bonnie Raitt.

“I didn’t want it all teched out,” she said of its H/S pickup configuration. “I wanted it real simple, with just one pickup switch. Because I think that cultural revolutions are in the hands of guitar players.”

Another key piece of gear was a solid-state 1976 Randall Commander that formerly belonged to Cobain (“He did like his Randall Commander”).

Meanwhile, the Boss DS-1 Distortion, a firm favorite of Cobain's, was a mainstay, as was the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi fuzz. Love was such a fan of the latter, she reckoned she beat her husband and Celebrity Skin co-writer Billy Corgan to the punch.

“I contend that I was the first person to actually have a Super Fuzz Big Muff, before the rest of the boys. It was when I was in this purist ’60s garage band called the Venerays, with Kat Bjelland.

“And just recently, I started using a box called the Mystic Blue. I like a good box, and I’ll try any one – if it has a good-sounding name. Especially if they made a box with some kind of girly name,” she quips. “If they made one called Cherry Apple Blossom, I’d run with it every night!”

Released on September 8, 1998, Celebrity Skin turned out to be the last album – and most commercially successful – before Hole parted ways in 2002, and featured contributions from Corgan, The Go-Go's guitarist Charlotte Caffey, and frequent Love collaborator Jordon Zadorozny.

“I genuinely did feel antisocial, and the first two albums reflect that,” she says of Celebrity Skin’s more “palatable” sound.

“But now I’m into mainstreaming. I’m just doing mainstreaming correctly… During grunge and during metal, they couldn’t sell shit to us because we were too cynical.

“There’s a way to mainstream things with integrity.”

When Kurt Cobain set out to create what would eventually become Bleach, he was still living in Aberdeen, Washington, and working as a janitor.

His guitar playing, coupled with his introspective songwriting, was attracting attention, however – especially when a nascent Nirvana, comprising Cobain, bassist Krist Novoselic, and drummer Chad Channing, turned Shocking Blue’s Love Buzz into their live showcase track.

A dozen letters to labels later, Sub Pop head honchos Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman decided to take a chance on a very desperate Cobain, who accepted a less-than-ideal deal that saw the band absorb all the recording costs.

Recorded in four sessions in late December 1988 that spanned roughly 20 hours, Bleach is pure rawness. It cost the band – or, rather, Jason Everman, a musician, soldier, early Nirvana fan, and briefly the band’s second guitarist – $606.17, which he fronted.

“We literally tracked it all in three days,” producer Jack Endino told Cobain biographer Charles R. Cross in an interview published in Guitar World in June 2005.

Their rehearsals carried a similar DIY spirit, as the band honed Bleach in an Aberdeen hair salon owned by Novoselic’s mother, which could only be used after hours.

“The place closed at eight, so we’d start rehearsing then and playing until eight in the morning, when it opened again,” recalled Channing.

Perhaps one of the most underrated elements of Bleach-era Nirvana is Novoselic, who not only served as a reliable friend for Cobain but also stood out as a noteworthy bassist who perfectly complemented the rising face of grunge’s angular guitar playing.

When Cobain brought forward the riff for School, Novoselic told him, “That is the most ‘Seattle’ fucking riff I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Despite the band not living in Seattle, the city’s sludge metal scene of the ’80s and early ’90s, spearheaded by the Melvins, served as a clear influence and gave them a much-needed sense of aspiration early in their career.

Novoselic even went as far as to say that “School is the ultimate grunge song,” and thus, consequentially, the ultimate Seattle song.

Bleach, released on June 15, 1989, did not chart upon initial release, and Cobain in particular was frustrated by Sub Pop’s lack of promotional efforts.

Things started to shift after the British music press began touting the band as rising stars, and Bleach became a staple on many US college radio stations.

Then, following the release of their many-times-Platinum album Nevermind in 1991, Bleach finally received the widespread attention it deserved and became a cornerstone of the grunge movement.

In more recent news, the backline used on Nirvana’s Bleach tour hit the auction block just two months ago.

With Foo Fighters fresh from the release of their 12th studio album, Your Favourite Toy, Dave Grohl is looking back on his decades-long career.

Specifically, he’s reflecting on his roots with Nirvana – and how the pain that came with Kurt Cobain’s death, plus the band’s end, led to a whole new guitar-driven chapter he didn’t necessarily expect.

“There was a time once, when Nirvana ended, where I'm like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do music anymore… that hurts,’ and I'm like, ‘No, what am I talking about?’ That's the thing that always saved my life,’” he says in a new interview with the Broken Record Podcast. “I have to do it.”

Grohl also touched on his transition to Foo Fighters and being the sole songwriter in his then-fledgling post-Nirvana project.

“Time went by where I was just like, ‘God, what do I do? If I sit behind the drums, it makes me sad. If I listen music, it makes me sad,’” he says. “Then I wrote songs – [like] when I was a kid with those stupid journals. I wrote my way through it.”

Adamant on not becoming just another drummer-for-hire, Grohl re-acquainted himself with the guitar – the instrument he had started out with and served as his companion since age 10.

“When Nirvana was on tour, I'd bring a guitar with me," he told Guitar World in a 1997 interview, “so in hotel rooms, late at night, I'd have something to do. I love playing the drums, but you can't really sit down at home with a snack and play the drums.

“So I've never been without a guitar. Eventually, I was living with a person who had an 8-track in the basement. And these songs just started coming out.”

In more recent news, Grohl revealed why he never expected Pat Smear – who, back then, was Nirvana’s touring guitarist – to accept his invitation to join the band he was going to call the Foo Fighters.

Adrian Smith might be a member of one of the most iconic heavy metal bands of all time, but the Iron Maiden guitarist – whose journey is documented in the new documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition – has recently looked back on a time when the band was impacted by the explosion of grunge.

“In South America and Europe, the band was still big, but in America, I think it struggled,” Smith tells Forbes. “Nirvana came along, and that changed everything.

“It was like punk in the late ’70s. I’d been probably playing in bands for about five years, and our bands were getting to a certain level [of success].”

He continues, “You work hard and all of a sudden, bang! You couldn't get a gig unless you had spiky hair and played punk. You thought, ‘Who are these people?’ They've only been playing for a year, and they're proud of it that they can't play. And yet everyone's buying their records, and they're selling out gigs.”

Ultimately, Smith likens the grunge era to the punk movement, calling it a “changing of perspective”.

“For bands like Maiden, it was hard,” he admits. “But like I said, the driving force is still there, and you just got to weather the storm a little bit.”

As for the experience of Maiden falling out of favor in the ’90s and being forced to play smaller venues, Smith says he cannot directly comment on that, as he left the band in 1990 – right before grunge went mainstream.

“I never did it with them. I never did the club thing,” he explains. “I mean, I’ve done clubs since then. I did a club tour with Bruce [Dickinson] in the States in the ’90s.

“So I did have a taste of that, but I just like playing whether it’s in a club or in a stadium, obviously I’d rather play stadium,” he adds with a laugh.

Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition will be released in cinemas worldwide on May 7.

In more recent news, Iron Maiden will finally be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, after more than two decades of eligibility.

It was a case of ‘game recognizes game’ over the weekend as Alice Cooper surprised fans by dishing out a shock rock-ified take of a grunge classic.

Just a few gigs into his latest tour, which sees 22-year-old Brit Anna Clara handpicked as Nita Strauss’ maternity cover, the veteran rocker paid homage to ’90s rock legends Nirvana by covering Smells Like Teen Spirit at his Coopstock festival in Phoenix.

Coopstock is the School's Out songwriter's annual charity fundraiser, where he leafs through his Rolodex to raise funds for his Solid Rock Teen Centers to put on a star-laden show. Ultimately, the event is designed to help the next generation reach their full potential.

Alice Cooper and his band headlined the 28th edition of the festival at the Las Sendas Golf Club in Mesa, Arizona, with Kiss guitarist Tommy Thayer, and Rock Hall of Famer John Oates also on the bill.

The Nirvana cover was a shock, but a pleasant one at that. Kurt Cobain had drawn from the Pixies for its juxtaposition of quiet verses and loud choruses, but, though not a direct influence, a little of Alice Cooper’s teenage angst – see I’m Eighteen – also bleeds into the track.

It was long-serving guitarist Ryan Roxie who broke out into the song's unmistakable guitar riff on his Sunburst Les Paul, and Coop certainly makes its tense verses that little bit creepier. Roxie stayed faithful to the simplistic guitar solo that ices the song's bridge.

As for Cara, she’s limited to a supporting role here, but she’s taken her dream gig in her stride. Strauss has hailed her “precision and soulful, emotional playing,” as the young shredder was welcomed into the band, having previously worked with Cooper’s other guitarist, Tommy Henriksen.

In related news, Cooper’s Trash era guitarist John McCurry has lifted the lid on the iconic Poison riff’s unlikely origins.

When Kurt Cobain gear hits the auction block, it tends to fetch a pretty penny, and the grunge icon’s Bleach-era touring backline could be the next lot to do so.

For evidence, before the mega bucks auction of Jim Irsay's humongous and historic gear collection earlier this year, his MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E and Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, which originally sold for a collective $10.5 million, were the world's two most expensive guitars.

Granted, there are some outliers: his 1989 Takamine acoustic, featured in one of the most recognizable photos of the late guitarist, was estimated to sell for ‘just’ $500,000 last year. Still, there’s an aura that surrounds Cobain-themed bidding wars.

This lot is expected to turn a few heads. It features black-and-silver-paneled Fender Twin Reverb combo amps, each kitted out with JBL speakers, and a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet. For good measure, bassist Krist Novoselic’s Ampeg SVT has also been thrown in.

The amps are being sold off via London’s Denmark Street Guitars today (April 10). Posting on Instagram, it tempts those with cash to spare to bid on its auction to “own a piece of grunge history,” although there is no mention of expected prices; it’s an open book.

As MusicRadar points out, Bleach – Nirvana’s ear-gratingly raw debut album recorded for just $600 – was recorded with a Utah speaker-leaden ’67 Fender Twin. Cobain pivoted to a slightly different flavor for the proceeding tour.

Released in the summer of ‘89 (not to be confused with the Bryan Adams song), Bleach initially sold a respectable 40,000 copies, but when the polished powerhouse that is their sophomore album, Nevermind, dropped two years later, the record enjoyed a retrospective glow-up. It's since been certified Platinum in the US, UK, and Australia.

Live tracks from the tour were included in the record's 20th-anniversary deluxe edition, suggesting that this backline was put through its paces at – among many other shows – the Pine Street Theatre in Portland, Oregon, on February 9, 1990. Their set included Love Buzz, About a Girl, and their Vaselines cover, Molly's Lips.

Cobain once described Bleach as “straight-ahead garage grunge”, and its raw, abrasive textures, coupled with Cobain's lyrical themes of alienation, societal standards, and mental health, made for a powerful statement. Machine Head would go on to cover the hammerblow track Negative Creep, giving the song a thrashy makeover.

The auction takes place today (April 10). Interest can be registered by emailing sales@londonvntageguitars.com.

And don’t worry, Aaron Rash has already been informed.

Aaron Rash, the guitarist who has been obsessively chasing Nirvana's In Utero guitar tones, has uncovered the amp Kurt Cobain used to track its peculiar cleans – and it was hiding in plain sight.

While 1991's chart-smashing Nevermind is widely regarded as the grunge giant’s magnum opus, it’s the record’s successor, In Utero, that has so enraptured Rash’s imagination.

He’s been on the case of its clean tones for four years now, and as his latest video explains, it's been an uphill battle.

“There are no official records,” he says, “nothing was documented. [There were] only eyewitness accounts [and] 90% of what I've been told, I believed to be false.”

Fortunately, he had the record’s producer, Steve Albini, on speed dial to help with his tireless quest, which led to one strange quirk – the Fender Quad Reverb combo amp that Cobain used for the record featured only one working power tube.

“I didn't really know what to think when Kurt told me about the Quad with one tube,” Albini states. “But when I looked in the back of it, sure enough, there were three shattered tubes and one working one pumping away.”

The issue is that a single power tube wasn't enough to produce clean tones, and that, alongside a Randall RG-120 PH Commander head, was dismissed. But there was faint hope.

“On a song-by-song basis, Kurt would decide which amp would be the main sound and which would be the overdub sound,” Albini notes. “So the Randall, Quad, and one other amp – I forget which – would be done live, the other guitar part overdubbed.”

So, what was the mystery third amp? Well, for four years, Rash hit dead end after dead end. A Marshall Plexi modded by Cobain’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, designed to be a clean amp, was ruled out, as was his beloved 1982 Ultra-Linear black-panel Fender Twin Reverb. And there was no evidence that Cobain used an amp belonging to Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.

“I started to feel pretty hopeless, like I'd wasted four years trying to figure out this stupid guitar tone,” Rash sighs. “I can’t tell you how many times I was close to giving up.”

The answer came from an interview with Bailey, in which he mentions a Rivera Twin Reverb, a dramatic revamping of the Fender amp by esteemed amp builder and modder, Paul Rivera. Billed as the Twin Reverb II, and released in the early ’80s, the joyous laugh that comes out of Rash after plugging into the amp says all you need to know.

“I felt like I'd just found the cure to cancer,” he beams. “I literally cried tears of joy.”

Photos from the studio sessions show the Twin Reverb II lurking in the corner, confirming that this was the amp that produced the tones that have been turning Rash inside out for four whole years.

Rash has previously produced an IR pack for other players chasing the album's tones and vowed to update it with the new discovery.

In recent Nirvana news, Kurt Cobain’s 1969 Competition Mustang from the Smells Like Teenage Spirit video recently sold for a record-breaking sum.

“The drama and chaos of Courtney Love and Hole are infamous, but to me it all felt familiar,” writes Melissa Auf der Maur in her newly released memoir and homage to the ’90s, Even the Good Girls Will Cry.

Like all great memoirs, Auf der Maur vividly encapsulates the pivotal moments that saw her transcend from DIY venues in Canada to joining Love and co. in front of 65,000 people at the UK’s Reading Festival in 1994. It all happened mere weeks after the tragic deaths of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and Kurt Cobain – and that’s just the first chapter.

“I found comfort in the chaos. My upbringing was the perfect training ground to be in a rock band and immersed in the world of Courtney. Despite how new I was to the band, I fitted right in,” she continues.

Indeed, Auf der Maur's grunge Cinderella story depicts a series of full-circle moments: her encounter with Billy Corgan at a low-lit punk venue in her native Montréal – and her becoming absolutely enthralled with the Smashing Pumpkins' music – led to a recommendation to join Hole, and later, the Pumpkins as their touring bassist, before she plunged into a solo career at the turn of the millennium.

“There's a reason why the introduction to my book, which is the Reading Festival, is [called] ‘Through the Looking Glass,’” Auf der Maur tells Bass Player, as she dials in from a room lined with photos – vignettes from those heady days.

“It was David Lynchian, Alice in Wonderland… I just stepped into another dimension. I went from a tiny town to a global stage with grief and chaos and death and everything.”

In the book, you describe feeling chosen by the bass. What was it about the instrument – its physicality and frequency – that felt like destiny rather than a practical decision?

When I was awarded Female Bass Player of the Year by Gibson, in the limo ride on the way [there], I started writing my acceptance speech, and that's when I came up with [the idea that] the bass is the mother of all instruments. So in my acceptance speech, I described the bass as the glue and the connector.

The bass is the connector that connects the singer to the drummer, to the audience, to the rhythm, and to the melodies, all at the same time… The place in which the bass sits in any music, not just rock music, but especially dance music or even jazz, the bass brings you on a different kind of journey. It brings you on a feeling journey. You fucking feel the bass.

Geddy Lee has a TV show called Are Bass Players Human Too? [and] he came to Hudson [New York, where Auf der Maur currently lives]. At the end of the visit, I was like, well, ‘Bass is so easy. That's why I picked it up.’ And he looked at me, he's like, ‘Well, that's a secret. Don't tell anyone.’ But he also said, ‘Bass isn't easy for everybody.’

I then realized, even during all my years in Hole, when it was clear that I was so young and had only played six concerts in my life, I played the bass, and didn’t make a mistake. When I joined the band, I only had five days to rehearse with them, and people say, like, ‘How did that happen?’ I was like, ‘I don't know. It was easy.’ So I feel my way through a song.

What did bass playing give you that the other art forms didn’t?

It entirely connects me to a deep way of feeling human connection, because the best of bass is when you're playing with a drummer and playing with a band and playing in front of an audience – that is the magic.

Me alone in a room with a bass; it means absolutely nothing to me. It does not please me nor make me feel anything. That’s my relationship to the instrument – it’s to connect with human beings.

How did you come across your first bass?

I had borrowed basses from older men. I was a DJ, a cassette DJ, at the local dive bar where all the older guy musicians worked with me. And I started plugging into their amps with their instruments.

Then, one day, the guys just said, ‘Hey, it’s time to get your own bass. You're turning 21, you've been borrowing all this time. Let's go find you a bass.’ And so they brought me to this second-hand shop. We walked into this giant music room. It just called me. She had the same color as my hair.

I said, ‘What about this? Is this a good one?’ They're like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, vintage Squier Precision, made in Japan, high quality…’ And then I said, ‘Great, my father, I'll just tell him it's my birthday present.’

My father [Canadian journalist and politician Nick Auf der Maur], who is a very adventurous, courageous, weird person, was having lunch, and I said, ‘Can I have $500 for this bass for my birthday? I'm turning 21.’ That was the bass I played in Hole until I was sponsored by Fender.

You joined Hole amidst unimaginable grief. How did you manage to adapt to the circumstances?

A switch flipped, and I was just the exact same person, but in a completely different environment. I was not raised in a suburban, boring family. I was raised by radical people who did radical things.

When I saw the Smashing Pumpkins and Hole play in 1991, when I worked as a ticket girl, and I saw both of them play in front of 20 people, I knew what was happening.

The world was changing, and something huge and magical was happening for my generation. I picked up the bass because I wanted to be part of the movement of radical noise-making for my generation. So I felt at home. I'm like, this is where I belong.

I was not a drug addict [but I was] watching what money and fame did to all these fragile people who were already, for the most part, coming from broken families and didn't have love and support, so their band and their community and their generation and the stage and the audience were their only family. I adapted very quickly because I understood what was happening.

What gear were you using during that time?

I only ever played the same thing, an [Ampeg] SVT tube amp – with the drive knob, not without. I had been playing a vintage one that was one of the boys' back home. I only ever borrowed until I joined Hole, so I knew what I wanted to buy when they bought me my amp – it's an SVT Pro tube head and SVT cabinet. My Fender Precision, Boss tuner pedal… that is it.

I didn’t use any distortion until later, when SansAmp made these cool distortion pedals. I also love phaser and chorus. I didn’t use anything else. [More recently] Geddy gave me all of his [signature] pedals, so I have some Geddy Lee pedals.

How did your sense of rhythm evolve once you locked in with Hole drummer Patty Schemel?

Patty and I played really well together. We [even] had a little side project when Courtney was becoming a Hollywood movie star – it was called Constant Comment. It was harder to adjust to [Smashing Pumpkins’ drummer] Jimmy Chamberlin. Me and Patty were easy.

By the time I was playing with the Pumpkins, it was a much more complicated catalog with a very complex drummer. Jimmy is a jazz-prog drummer. He's crazy cool. The sound of the Pumpkins is so Jimmy. So that was an interesting adaptation because Jimmy, like jazz drummers, does not play to a click. Patty's actually very tight. She's very, very rhythmically solid. Jimmy is like a wild animal.

It's like you're following this wild creature through two-hour sets of changing songs every setlist, and it took so long for me to figure out, ‘How do I keep up with this dynamic band?’ Because Jimmy is also following Billy, and Billy speeds up, and it's like this weird machine.

But when I did Billy's podcast [recently], I learned something about myself musically that I've never learned before. He told me about my specific pocket, which I knew nothing about. I'm on top of the beat. I’m ahead. I'll take it as a compliment, because [Led Zeppelin’s] John Paul Jones and [John] Bonham, who are one of the most famous rhythm sections, Bonham is behind, and Jones is above. I guess I naturally sit on top of the drums.

What are your memories of writing the bassline for Celebrity Skin? It’s unusual for a bassline to follow the vocal melody.

I don't remember anything. I'm very, very proud of my bass playing on that album, because I had so much time, because some of those songs, we'd be playing for hours and hours and hours.

You just play for Courtney to find her lyrics. She's someone who needs to be screaming to find the whole song for like 20 hours, so as a rhythm section, you're sitting there just playing in a loop over and over and over. So I had a lot of time to find melodic licks.

We were brought to see a Fleetwood Mac rehearsal with the producer, Michael Beinhorn [renowned producer who worked with the likes of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Hole, and Ozzy Osbourne]. I was not a Fleetwood Mac fan because I'm more of a heavy, visceral rock fan, but I recognized being in that room watching the drums and bass, [their tracks] could be seen as simple, airy songs, but this is not simple.

What they are doing, the complexity of it when you step back, when you do a melodic line, when you open it up, when you push it… Through just one sitting and watching that rhythm section, it opened my mind to the power of less is more, but also [that] minimal changes make huge impacts on a song.

Billy Corgan famously recommended you to Courtney, and you later joined the Pumpkins. I'm curious how your dynamic with him changed across all these chapters of your life…

Our bond started when we discovered we were both born on St Patrick's Day. We're both pretty tripped-out hippie people that get a little romantic and convoluted and [are all] about the stars and destiny and astrology… He's a trip of a guy, and I am a trip of a girl, I guess, and so I think our relationship reflects this ebb and flow. Sometimes he feels like a soulmate, and then sometimes he's a total stranger.

What did you learn from him about bass playing?

I learned how to be an incredible bass player. Learning that catalog and playing 183 shows with those incredible players totally defined me as a bass player. I was a good bass player, and I am proud of my Celebrity Skin work, but oh my God… I mean, it changed my level of musicianship forever and opened my repertoire of understanding what my hands can do.

My solo records most certainly were expanded by having to learn that catalog and play it with them. So I always say the Pumpkins was my “Master’s in Music”… just phenomenal music training.

How did that impact on your solo career?

Living in the shadow of my grunge parents, Courtney and Billy, who made me, who found me out of nowhere… it was a complex and exhausting shadow to come out from under.

I made those solo records myself for myself, even though I put one out on Capitol [Records] and one on Roadrunner [Records]. I paid for them myself, because I was not going to let other motherfucking people tell me who I am or what I'm going to do and be.

It was done in protective force fields of independence so that I could explore, authentically, what it is to be me, alone, as the captain of the ship. So those two albums were completely self-exploration.

Especially my first record, being able to work with [Queens of the Stone Age’s] Josh Homme and [record producer] Chris Goss… I got to invite the people I admired the most. John Stanier from Helmet, one of my favorite drummers ever… having my favorite drummers play on my solo record was pretty much the coolest thing a bass player could ever do.

From its title to its content, your book, and, by extension, your career, have a feminist overtone. Did you feel a strong sense of responsibility in that respect when you were playing in Hole and Smashing Pumpkins?

The people from the record industry realized that the money is with the women, the money is with the girl fans. They turned the whole music industry, the pop music industry, into a female-led [industry].

Billie Eilish, I think, is a woman you couldn't even invent in the ’90s, because she's a product of a new world where, actually, women can be empowered and protected from a horrible system. She's a product of a new world, of a very special kind of world that didn't exist for women [before].

My mother, which I write about in the book, she wanted to change the way women were. She raised me, saying over and over, ‘No man should ever define a woman. You have to be your own person. Do not be defined by a man.’ So that's how I was raised, and that's what I did.

I felt a responsibility to continue what my mother had started. I just saw myself as a continuation of new feminism, and it still has to happen right now. I got very nervous in the past 10-20 years watching, well, rock music dying. So then, visceral, strong women kind of died and went more into pop.

It was a rare moment in the ’90s where women were being given a bridge into a very male form of expression, and it was so fucking powerful. [Nowadays] there's Picture Parlour, Wet Leg… of course, there are tons of women playing guitar. Thank God. But there was a dead moment there, between this and that, there weren’t any. When I was putting out my solo records, all of a sudden, I was the only woman on the bill again.

There’s this beautiful description in your book of the bathroom stall at Reading Festival as a liminal space – transitioning pre-fame Melissa into a public-facing bass icon. Looking back at that life-changing moment now, what would you tell 22-year-old Melissa?

I would tell her that she's doing it all right. It is her who has the answer. No-one in the future outside of her has the answer. The greatest thing I learned writing this book is that I already knew what I was and who I wanted to be.

I had all the tools, and I began to realize that my 22-year-old self was a teacher to me now. So I would basically tell her fucking follow your wildest dreams, listen to the craziest ideas you have in your head, and trust yourself.

I've already been everywhere in my life and back, and I'm just trying to ride the right wave to have meaningful experiences and share something of my perspective and my love of life with other people so that I can have good energy in my lifetime.

• Melissa Auf der Maur's memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry: My 90s Rock Memoir, is out now.

For many, this is the Nirvana guitar, made iconic by its appearance in the video for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. This week, it sold for $6,907,000 at the Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame auction.

Forever associated with offset Fenders that were typically modded for extra output by various means, Kurt Cobain opted for a student model for that historic video performance, sporting the so-called ‘Competition Stripe’ that marks it out as a 1969 instrument.

However, a closer examination of its parts reveals a more complex story that reflects how Fender made guitars in the mid- to late 1960s after CBS bought out Leo Fender, especially its rarer left-handed instruments.

“So the neck is in fact dated 1966 and it is marked ‘Special’,” Amelia Walker of Christie’s observes. “The left-handed necks [from that period of Fender’s history] typically say ‘Custom’ or ‘Special’ because they were so seldom made and used. So they often had older necks [in storage] that they then would put on slightly later-dated guitars.

”The pots are ’66 as well. But that’s logical because, again, they would just reach into their box of [correct-spec] pots and grab whatever was in stock. But the Competition Stripe was definitively a ’69 thing and serial number is also ’69, so we’re calling it a ’69-made guitar with an earlier neck and earlier pots,” she explains.

Guitar historian Tony Bacon adds some further context on the slightly tangled story of Fender’s student model electrics: “The Mustang was the third model in Fender’s early line of budget ‘three-quarter-size’ electrics. It was launched in 1964 to join the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic, which had appeared eight years earlier, and was in effect a two‑pickup Duo-Sonic with vibrato bridge.

Those two earlier models had 21 frets on a short 22.5-inch (571.5mm) scale, but from ’64 they were offered optionally with longer 24-inch (610mm) scales and 22 frets – and the new Mustang, too, was available in either style. The Mustang stayed on Fender price lists until 1981.

“In 1969, Fender offered a new finish option for the Mustang,” Tony explains, “and called the result the Competition Mustang. It had contrasting ‘racing’ stripes and came in three striking variants – Burgundy (pale blue stripes on a darker blue body); Orange (red stripes/orange body); or Red (white stripes/red body) – with the headstock finished to match the body colour. They lasted in the Fender line into the early ’70s.

“Around 1990, Kurt Cobain bought a blue (Burgundy) left-handed 24-inch scale Competition Mustang. It became a favourite, alongside a Jaguar, and was seen prominently in the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit. He had various mods done to this Mustang, including a Duncan single-coil-size humbucker swapped in at the bridge as well as a Gotoh Tune-o-matic-style bridge, with the tailpiece bar flipped.

“Further into the early ’90s, Kurt ordered 10 left-handed Mustangs from Fender, planned to be delivered in batches of two, in Fiesta Red or Sonic Blue finishes (in other words not Competition models). Reportedly, only six were supplied before Kurt’s untimely death in 1994. He played several, with similar bridge and pickup mods, though often with a regular-size humbucker at the bridge.

“Around the time of his death, Kurt was developing a hybrid Jaguar/Mustang, and Fender would release the result as the Jag-Stang in 1996 – aptly described in the company’s promo material at the time as ‘a collision of contemporary features fused together to create a combination of Jaguar and Mustang’.”

• Christie’s auctions The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame starting 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie’s.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

During his lifetime, the late Indianapolis Colts owner and CEO Jim Irsay used his considerable wealth to amass the most valuable private guitar collection in the world.

Three of the 10 most expensive guitars ever sold at auction – including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang and David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, numbers 2 and 3 on that respective list – belonged to Irsay, and the value of his whole collection has been estimated at a billion dollars.

After his death last May, questions swirled as to what would become of the collection, given that Irsay was adamant that even the most valuable guitars in it be played onstage, and not merely sit encased in glass.

Earlier this year, though, it was revealed that the whole thing – the jewels included – would go under the hammer at Christie's auction house in New York. As the auction unfolded today (Thursday, March 12), we were live on the floor.

The big question on our minds was, inevitably, will we see the great big record – the $6 million shelled out for Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E in 2020 – fall?

Did it ever! The previous record holder now finds itself in 4th place.

On top once again is David Gilmour's Black Strat. Having set the record as the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction back in 2019, for a measly $3.975 million, the Black Strat reclaimed its record once again with authority, selling for an astonishing $14.5 million.

Also going for eight figures was Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, which fetched $11.5 million. Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, previously #2 on the list with a selling price of $4.55 million, went for a cool $6.9 million.

Read on for our live report from the floor, as it happened, and check out our full overview of the auction here.

The room's filled up since this writer took this photo. Recognize those guitars up there in the front?

No blockbuster guitar sales yet, but we've just seen one of Ringo Starr's drum kits sell for north of $2 million!

Owned by John Lennon and used by him for the Beatles' 1964 Christmas show – then later gifted to Ringo Starr – this 1964 Rickenbacker has become the first mega guitar sale of the auction, with a sale price of $1.27 million.

Aaaaand the 1964 Gibson SG pictured below – used extensively by George Harrison from 1966-1968 – has said, “hold my beer!” $2.27 million! This was well over its estimate. Will that be a theme as the evening goes on?

Though not the most valuable guitar in the lot, this custom, prototype guitar made by Vox for the Beatles in 1966 is certainly one of the most unique. Someone's just parted ways with just about $600k to grab it.

One of the most iconic guitars of the 1960s, Eric Clapton’s The Fool SG, has just sold for a whopping $3 million, after a massive bidding war. This is also far above its estimate. One of the most significant six-strings in the lot, it will forever be associated with Slowhand's tenure in Cream.

So, I'm not supposed to curse, but holy shit. David Gilmour's Black Strat, the guitar most synonymous with the Pink Floyd legend, has just sold for $14.5 million, after 21 minutes of bidding. This more than doubles – destroys, really – the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

Well, the excitement from the Black Strat sale lasted about 10 minutes. Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar has also obliterated the pre-auction record mark, selling for $11.5 million. Two guitars have more than doubled, or come close to doubling, the previous record for the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, in less than 15 minutes.

It almost doesn't feel noteworthy at this point, but the $6 million flat high water mark set by Kurt Cobain's MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E six years ago has been eclipsed a third time – by the Nirvana man's Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, previously the second most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. It's fetched $6.9 million.

The Martin 000-42 Eric Clapton used for his beloved, enormously successful MTV Unplugged performance has also fetched a princely sum: $4.1 million. Classic rock-affiliated six-strings in particular have blown well past their estimated values this evening.

And that about wraps this sucker up, in terms of blockbuster guitars. We figured going in that this would be the biggest guitar auction of all time, and truly, nothing else comes within the zip code of this sale. For the first time (at least publicly), we've seen individual guitars sell for eight figures. We only hope that some (all, ideally) of the new owners of these instruments follow in the footsteps of their previous owner in not keeping them permanently behind glass.

Until then, we uh, need to completely re-write our list of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction...

Many famous guitar collections are simply impressive – but some go far beyond that. So far, in fact, that they become as culturally important as anything found in a museum and raise questions about the role private guitar collections play in preserving pillars of modern culture.

Jim Irsay, who died last year, was that kind of collector. The catalogue of his collection reads like a roadmap of American pop culture and includes everything from the original paper-roll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road to Miles Davis’s Martin trumpet and, of course, some of the most important guitars the world has ever seen.

“As a very wealthy individual, Jim Irsay had the means to collect so many iconic objects, which most of us can only dream of,” says Amelia Walker, who is specialist head of the Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s.

“But I think he was genuinely just a really nice guy who loved guitars, loved music, and felt a responsibility to look after these things and steward them onto their next home. I think he was aware that you can’t be buried with these things – you are but the temporary custodian of them.

“So I think his main aim was to bring them together and let people access them, and he did a lot of touring exhibitions. He got the instruments played by The Jim Irsay Band, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd played the Black Strat. So I think he was very open to sharing them. And because he was also a player, I think he knew that, where the instrument’s condition allowed, these things should be played – they should be loved and warmed up and all of that sort of thing.

“While he was definitely somebody who had them behind glass in his office – which I think is every guitarist’s worst anticipation of what happens at auction – he did also play them.”

Eleanor Jane, founder and editor of Eleven magazine and the book Superstar Guitars, concurs, recalling her time documenting Jim Irsay’s instruments in a similar light.

“His office was like a museum – but one in which you were encouraged to interact with the artefacts,” she recalls. “I photographed the guitars up close and personal – a phenomenal collection of hitmaker after hitmaker. After the photoshoot, Mr Irsay arranged for a private concert for me and the team, demonstrating the most iconic guitars and flying in some of the best musicians around to perform and jam, including Kenny Wayne Shepherd.

“He even drove in Hunter S Thompson’s iconic ‘Red Shark’ car as an incredible backdrop for the event. This turned out to be the first of many, much larger, free concerts and exhibitions across the USA, in which Mr Irsay brought in artists such as Billy Gibbons and Tom Bukovac to perform, allowing thousands of fans an experience of a lifetime.”

All very commendable, but surely a collection of this calibre represents, in the final analysis, a cultural commonwealth of the kind that typically belongs in museums. Now that it’s all up for sale, is it likely that major pieces from the collection will end up in public hands again?

“Well, it’s interesting – and I’ve had the same conversations with people here in LA and in London,” says Amelia Walker. “You looked around the room at just a few of the highlights that we had and it was sort of like a museum exhibition, rather than an auction, because each of those items is an amazing item on its own individual merit, like you would see in a museum celebrating the best of the best of whatever category – and so it is museum-quality.

“People have all sorts of different thoughts and feelings about where collections such as this should end up, and I imagine there will be some participation from institutions.

“But people also forget that museums don’t have any money and it’s often down to generous philanthropic donations that they get pieces like this, like The Met collection donation from Dirk Ziff, which is one of the most incredible philanthropic donations ever, in this world [of iconic guitars].

“So it’ll be interesting to see who bids on these items. I suspect it will be a huge, varied mixture of guitarists, collectors, museums and investors.”

Indeed, the authenticators behind high-profile sales of this kind have to employ the sort of forensic approach normally reserved for academics.

With many of the modifications made to famous guitars taking place over decades on dim backstage workbenches or even at the hands of DIY-oriented players themselves, how do latter-day specialists determine what changes have been made (and when) in order to establish provenance?

Sometimes techs keep methodical, detailed notes over the years, but that kind of evidence is rare when it comes to fully confirming the backstory of iconic guitars.

“It’s a really good question and it keeps me up at night a lot of the time,” Walker says. “But we do our utmost to talk to every single person who’s touched that instrument, in terms of the techs, the roadies, the restorers, the dealers. Obviously, with the Black Strat, Phil Taylor wrote a whole book about it, so he was very, very involved, so we’ve obviously spoken to him recently.

“We do everything we can to get to the bottom of modifications, and we’re really lucky to be able to call up people like Seymour Duncan and ask, ‘Do you remember doing this? Is that what happened?’ And most of the time, people are so kind and generous with their recollections or their records, and it’s part of our due diligence process.

“But we do have to include a caveat that we will never be able to fully list every modification that would have happened since 1970, for example. This was a big issue with the Jeff Beck sale because they were Fenders [Beck’s Strats] and he continually swapped necks around and continually swapped the pickups around, and did it himself without telling his techs most of the time.

“I had such a nightmare trying to marry things up. We have a very clear line that we try to be spot-on with everything, but we cannot possibly list the full modifications, and part of being a touring and recording artist’s instrument is being modified for their needs. So that’s what we do. Basically, we go to pretty extreme lengths to try to get to the bottom of everything.”

• Christie’s will auction The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall Of Fame, including the iconic guitars in this feature and others, plus some of the most important cultural objects of the 20th century, on the evening of 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie's
• Photographer and editor Eleanor Jane’s new book, The Guitar Chronicles, is due to be released on 17 September via Welbeck.
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Last year, Spiritbox’s Mike Stringer teamed up with Aristides for his first-ever signature guitar lineup – the STX Series – available in six-, seven-, and eight-string models. And, signaling offsets’ ever-growing popularity in metal, the lineup also served as a nod to Kurt Cobain.

“I was kind of going for a Jag-Stang kind of like Kurt Cobain style shape,” Stringer tells Premier Guitar.

“They were kind enough to not only give me my own model, but an entire line. We're doing sixes, sevens, eights [strings], multi-scales, straight scales, the whole nine [yards].”

Stringer reveals he's more than put the model through its paces, as he's been touring with three of them.

“The last North American tour that we did last fall, we were playing with Korn, and they sent the first one out to me. I think it's probably one of the easiest-playing guitars I've ever played, and it's just so insane to me that it's mine. It's crazy – I road-tested it for a while, and it just feels great.”

The seed for this collaboration was planted over a decade ago, before Spiritbox was even a thing. The brand piqued his interest because, spoiler alert, their guitars use zero wood, instead employing a proprietary material called “Arium,” which is a blend of resins and microscopic glass bubbles, injected into a carbon fiber/glass exoskeleton.

“I started my relationship with Aristides in 2015,” he recalls. “I was playing in my old band [Iwrestledabearonce]. I was playing an actual wood guitar. We were touring, and I didn't have a tech, and I was having a really difficult time with neck dive.

“I was introduced to this brand through my buddy Aaron Marshall from Intervals. And he was like, ‘Dude, apparently these necks don't move.’ And so, obviously, I looked into that, and I was like, ‘I need one.’ And I did the craziest thing – DM the owner, which is nuts. Thankfully, he was super-kind and really liked what we were doing. And he was like, ‘You know what? I actually have one kicking around. I'm just gonna send it to you.’”

Precisely a decade later, Stringer's signature model launched on the market – complete with a newly reconfigured EverTune bridge for rock-solid tuning, a brand-new neck profile, his signature Bare Knuckle Halcyon humbuckers, and even custom Spiritbox inlays.

Last year, in an exclusive Guitar World interview, Stringer dispelled the illusion of the band’s “overnight success”, detailing their 12-year struggle just to pay rent.

Mosrite Guitars is back in business after being acquired by lap-steel guitar makers Sho-Bud, ushering in a new era for the cult brand.

The company was founded by Semie Moseley in Bakersfield, California, in 1956. Having cut his luthiery teeth at Rickenbacker in Los Angeles, his namesake firm gained notoriety throughout the ‘60s, establishing a presence in the surf rock, grunge and punk rock scenes.

Johnny Ramone was a fan, Kurt Cobain recorded much of Nevermind with a 1960s Gospel Mark IV, and Jimi Hendrix had a Joe Maphis 12/6 Doubleneck. It wasn’t short of advocates.

However, a series of tragedies left the business in the hands of Moseley’s daughter, Dana, by the early ’90s. It continued to operate on a smaller scale, though its website went offline in 2020.

Six years later, the firm has been given a new lease of life, and the revived Mosrite brand is celebrating with the launch of the Mosrite Mark II.

The quirky, house-of-mirrors-esque model is made with a choice of either a solid basswood or alder body. That’s then paired with a bolt-on, one-piece maple neck and rosewood fingerboard with 22 narrow vintage frets, and an ever-cool zero fret to keep the original's mojo intact.

Built to the slightly peculiar 24 5/8" scale – a slightly shorter take on 24.75" designs, as seen on various Gretsch models over the years – it also offers SH configured Seymour Duncan pickups, Volume and Tone dials, and a three-way pickup switch.

Its hardware specs are rounded out by a TonePros TOM bridge and tailpiece, along with Grover tuners, delivering oodles of vintage chic.

Right- and left-handed models are available in White, Blue, Red, Gold, and Black colorways, shipping with a hardcase for $2,750.00.

“The Mosrite Mark II reissue represents more than the return of an iconic instrument. It is a continuation of a legacy shaped by an extraordinary luthier and innovator, Semie Moseley,” says General Counsel of Sho-Bud, Fred Waid. “Sho-Bud is committed to honoring Semie's vision.”

“This is a personal project for us,” Sho-Bud’s co-CEO, Dawn Jackson, extends. “Semie Moseley wasn't just a legendary builder. Sho-Bud and Mosrite had a close connection through our father, David Jackson, who collaborated on projects with Semie. This fusion is a way of reconnecting those roots and carrying them forward with respect and intention.”

The guitars are shipping with an estimated six-month turnaround as production gets underway, with Mark I and Gospel models also promised to follow.

See Sho-Bud for more.

Jim Irsay’s guitar haul is widely regarded to be the finest publicized collection in existence, featuring a sizeable chunk of the most famous instruments of the 20th century, including Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Strat and Eric Clapton ‘The Fool’ SG, alongside a host of Beatles kit.

Following Irsay’s passing last year, it was confirmed that the collection would be sold via Christie’s in London and the first 50 lots – including the aforementioned Mustang, Black Strat and The Fool SG – are going under the hammer this March.

Now our UK sister publication Guitarist has been granted an exclusive look at three of Jim Irsay’s most treasured electric guitars from this historic collection, before they are potentially split up following the sale.

“Jim Irsay was so proud of having acquired this guitar. It was like the jewel in the crown of his collection,” Christie's Amelia Walker explains in the clip above.

“It was the most expensive guitar ever when it sold in 2019, and it was something that he loved for everything it represented about music, David Gilmour's creativity, and what he produced.”

Like most of his guitars, Irsay didn’t want them to be locked away in class cases like ancient relics. He regularly loaned them out for performances. For instance, Kenny Wayne Shepherd performed Comfortably Numb on the Black Strat and told Guitar World that he had to adapt to the instrument because it remained set up to Gilmour’s liking. Irsay wouldn't have it altered.

Three years after buying the Black Strat, Irsay broke his own record when Cobain's Mustang went under the hammer in New York.

“It was used to record much of Nevermind, and In Utero, and by all accounts, it was one of his most prized possessions,” says Walker.

“It’s unusual, because he [Cobain] couldn’t find many left-handed vintage guitars and [it was used to record] a generational anthem. Jim Irsay loved it; he recognized its importance in the canon of American music.”

The Fool SG, meanwhile, is a guitar slightly less known in the wider public consciousness, but no less historic. It was built in 1964 and given its kaleidoscopic paint job by the Dutch design collective The Fool, which gave it its name.

After that, Clapton wielded it at the height of Cream's monumental success, making it a totem of the Summer of Love in 1967 and the guitar on which he mastered his iconic ‘woman’ tone, before ending up in the hands of producer/guitarist Todd Rundgren.

“It's the embodiment of psychedelia; it’s mad, beautiful, and colorful,” Walker continues. “It’s a moment in time, and it’s where that whole inimitable Eric Clapton [image] was created.”

Indeed, Clapton/Cream classics, like Crossroads and Sunshine of Your Love, were born from this guitar's dizzying color palette – both tonally and aesthetically – meaning its comparatively humble $1.27M sale in 2023 could very well be usurped in March.

Irsay reportedly once turned down an offer of $1 billion for the collection, deemed by many the world’s finest of its kind, but turned it down. They meant more to him than their weighted price tags alone.

Indeed, of the world’s most expensive guitars, Irsay had won two of the top three – Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang ($4.55M) and David Gilmour’s Black Strat ($3.975M) – and famously said that the chart-topping guitar, Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Marted D-18, wasn’t worth the $6 million figure it sold for.

Irsay's favorite guitar? Well it remains unconfirmed, but it’s thought to be the one he purchased for £1M in 2013 after it was discovered in a woman's attic.

Christie's has just announced the details of the historic sale of the Jim Irsay Collection. Widely regarded as the greatest guitar collection on Earth, it will be auctioned off in a series of sales in 2026.

Compiled over decades by the late billionaire businessman and owner/CEO of the Indianapolis Colts, the Jim Irsay Collection has achieved a mythical status, as it includes some of the most famous acoustic and electric guitars to ever exist.

“Jim Irsay was an incredible collector with an eye for rare treasures tied to the most important moments in our collective history,” explains Christie's Americas President, Julien Pradels.

“It is a privilege to offer this renowned collection at Christie's, giving collectors and visitors a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view, be inspired by, and bid on these objects.”

The first live sale is set to feature around 50 lots, comprising some of the most sought-after treasures in the collection

Highlights include David Gilmour's “Black Strat,” Kurt Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit 1966 Fender Mustang, Jerry Garcia's “Tiger” guitar, John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120, George Harrison's stage-played Gibson SG, and Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged 1939 Martin 000-42.

The once-in-a-generation auction will kick off with almost 400 items, tracing pivotal moments in music, film, sports, pop culture, and, of course, guitar, history, over four auctions from March 3 to March 18 – alongside a free, public exhibition at Christie's New York from March 6 to March 12.

For more information, head to Christie's.

Kurt Cobain’s legendary MTV Unplugged Martin – “one of the most significant artefacts in rock music history”– has been donated to the Royal College of Music (RCM), London, for public display.

The world’s most expensive guitar, bought by RØDE Microphones founder Peter Freedman for a staggering $6,010,000 in 2020, was immortalized by Nirvana’s unplugged performance.

Freedman has donated the guitar in memory of his father, Henry, who died in 1987, some years before the iconic live performance was filmed in Sony Music Studios in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, in 1993.

The guitar arrives in London in good company; the college's museum also hosts the oldest surviving guitar in existence, which was made in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1581. That’s 412 years before Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged show.

An international touring exhibition, featuring the Martin, is slated for 2026. It follows the success of the RCM Museum’s show, Kurt Cobain: Unplugged. It welcomed more than 15,000 visitors, with the D-18E its big pull.

During the show, a guitar pick used by Kurt Cobain on that fateful night, which had previously sold for over $14k (crazy, right?), was raffled off for much less.

Freedman says he hopes “the guitar’s value and profile will benefit young musicians at the RCM and reach people around the world.”

“This gift is dedicated to my father Henry, who loved music and London, and it’s an honour for me to support the next generation of musicians,” he adds.

“The Royal College of Music is deeply grateful to Peter Freedman for his incredible generosity,” says Director of the Royal College of Music, James Williams.

“This asset opens future opportunities to share the Kurt Cobain: Unplugged exhibition with an international audience; it is also emblematic of Peter’s unstinting support for the performing arts and his steadfast belief in the power of education to transform lives.”

The electro-acoustic guitar was modified to cater to Cobain’s southpaw playing. His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, inherited the guitar and stored it in a Seattle vault.

In 2018, it was transferred to Isaiah Silva, who claimed ownership of the acoustic during a divorce settlement when splitting with Frances Bean, leading to its record-breaking sale two years later.

The greatest guitar collection on Earth is set to be sold next spring when artefacts from the late Jim Irsay – widely considered to be one of the most renowned gear collectors of his time – go up for auction.

For guitar fans, Irsay’s collection needs no introduction. It’s not a stretch to say it’s perhaps the most culturally significant and historically important assortment of guitars to ever be curated. The list of guitars included in the collection reads like the stock inventory of a museum.

It includes many of rock and pop’s most famous electric guitars, many of which Irsay purchased himself at auction for multi-million dollar deals over the years. Highlights include (but certainly are not limited to) Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger and the Strat Bob Dylan used to ‘go electric’ at the Newport Folk Festival.

That’s before we mention The Fool SG, which once belonged to Eric Clapton and Todd Rundgren, and John Lennon’s Gretsch 6120 Country Gentleman. Oh, and Irsay’s collection also features instruments and guitars once played and owned by Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and more.

Such is the cultural significance of Irsay’s collection that he was once offered $1,000,000,000 (yes, one billion dollars) by a “middle east element” as part of a deal that would see it be relocated to Dubai.

Irsay held on to it, though, and in August this year he put his world-famous guitar collection on public display. In a bid to keep the legacy of each guitar alive, he was also prone to lending a few of his prized possessions to big-name players for live performances.

Now, in light of Irsay’s passing – and in a move that answers everybody’s queries as to what will happen to his collection – the entire thing will be offered at Christie’s New York in a series of auctions beginning in March 2026.

“Christie’s is honored to offer this magnificent collection, so lovingly compiled, maintained, and shared by legendary collector Jim Irsay over decades,” says Julien Pradels, president of the Christie’s Americans region.

“These extraordinary objects will be made available to passionate collectors around the globe, who have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of history, and provide this exquisite collection its next chapter.”

Given that a handful of the Irsay-owned guitars are already auction record-breakers in their own right, it feels very safe to say that this particular auction will set a new world record for guitar auction sales that will most likely never be beaten.

Gilmour’s Black Strat, for example, was picked up for $3,975,000. Irsay forked out $4,550,000 for the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang. The Fool SG set him back $1,270,000.

These are all now going to make their way to new collectors, and given the caliber of guitars included in the auction, expect individuals with very deep pockets to spend big when the event rolls around next year.

Simply, it promises to be the biggest guitar auction event of all time.

Head over to Christie's to find out more in the meantime.

Irsay passed away in May this year, and was honored by his football team Indianpolis Colts with a memorial Stratocaster.

Producer Andy Wallace says he got the gig working on Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind because of his work with Slayer – which had found a fan in Kurt Cobain.

Wallace had worked on three records with the thrash metal heavyweights – Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons in the Abyss – before Cobain, who apparently felt Nevermind needed a more aggressive mix, came calling.

“It's interesting how that came about,” Wallace tells Rick Beato about how his collaboration with Nirvana came about. “I don't know the whole background on it, but I had heard that Butch Vig had mixed the album, and I've heard the mixes; they're good. Butch is very talented, but I guess Kurt wanted to have somebody else do a shot.”

Vig had produced the record but Cobain, it seems, wanted a little heavy metal panache to lacquer the record, and so turned to Wallace for his mixing expertise.

“I presume,” Wallace then theorizes, “it was because he wanted something a little more aggressive. I had heard that he said, ‘I want that guy that did the Slayer album.’ I never discussed it with Kurt, but I’ll bet that’s true.

“There were a couple of things that I knew I wanted in general,” Wallace explains of his approach to the mix. “I knew I wanted to have the big parts be really big and really aggressive, just in your face. Thankfully, the performers were there to do that, I mean, Dave [Grohl] played like a madman.

“The other thing was I wanted it, unlike a lot of the Slayer things, to really take advantage of the dynamics. The intro [to Smells Like Teen Spirit] works in steps: first, you get slapped in the face, then you get shoved, then you get punched.”

It's believed that, with the band looking for a fresh mix, they were offered several high-profile figures. Included in that list were R.E.M. regular Scott Litt and Ed Stasium, best known for projects with the Ramones and the Smithereens.

The fact that Cobain and co looked to heavier climes for their man shows an intentionality that belies the commercial success the album enjoyed. But it encapsulated the anger and angst of the band, without sacrificing the polish that empowered its broad appeal.

Discussing his surprising admiration for Slayer, Cobain told Guitar World during his last interview with the magazine in 1992: “I'm not into a lot of metal, but I respect the fact that [Slayer] can be so extreme and still be so successful.

“They just go for it,” he had said, “and that’s why they're so great. They don't care about anything else but their music.”

Today, two of Kurt Cobain's guitars are the two most expensive guitars sold at auction.

A Jim Dunlop guitar pick used by Kurt Cobain during Nirvana’s iconic MTV Unplugged show is being raffled off for charity.

The orange .60mm pick shows clear wear from where Cobain’s thumb started to rub off a little of the ink. At £5 (approx. $6.74) a pop for a raffle entry, this is perhaps the cheapest way fans can potentially come to own a fragment of the grunge icon’s history.

“Ever dreamed of owning a piece of Nirvana’s legacy?” a post on the Royal College of Music (RCM) Instagram asks. “Now’s your chance.” All proceeds from the prize draw directly support students and the Future Music Fund at the RCM.

Some readers may look at the pick nestling in its black-rimmed frame as a fairly unremarkable museum piece. But perspective can change things.

After all, a guitar pick that Cobain is believed to have used to track Nevermind demos sold for a staggering $14,678 in 2023. It too an orange Dunlop pick, that plectrum features his joke 'Kurdt Kobain' signature on one side – which he also scrawled on a Boss DS-1 pedal that ultimately sold for $75,000 – and his attempt at drawing the Dunlop tortoise on the other.

The truth of the matter is that Cobain-owned gear carries a staggering mystique at auction. Indeed, the two most expensive guitars to ever sold at auction were his. There are notable other entries in the top 10, with David Gilmour's Black Strat and Eddie Van Halen's Hot For Teacher Kramer among them.

But even the $4 million the Gilmour Strat fetched at auction is dwarfed by the eye-watering $6 million that Cobain's Martin D-18E acoustic guitar – another star of the MTV Unplugged set – eventually sold for.

Interestingly, the RCM’s raffle prize pick was found inside the guitar case that housed the D-18E. It is currently on display at the Royal College of Music Museum, London, but won’t be much longer.

For the curious, Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang claims second spot in the list. It sold for $4,550,000 in 2022.

Suddenly, £5 feels like a drop of the ocean. We crunched the numbers, and it amounts to just 0.035% of that whopping $14,000 outlay.

There is one Cobain-played guitar, however, that is not for sale. The 1953 Martin D-18 acoustic he affectionately named "Grandpa” was gifted to him by singer/songwriter Mary Lou Lord. That six-string now calls the Martin Museum in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, its home.

Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt and Fredrik Åkesson recently played the guitar as their tour bus rolled through the state, and Åkerfeldt revealed another interesting tidbit about the acoustic.

“Someone told us that guitar was haunted, like people who had that guitar had accidents,” he said. No wonder it has no recognizable owner these days.

Guitar World believes the MTV Unplugged pick is not haunted, but some sage could always be bought with some of the leftover $13,995. Just to be sure.

The Royal College of Music Kurt Cobain Plectrum Prize Draw prize competition draw will be conducted on 18 November 2025.

Tickets can be bought from RCM.

A pink Daisy Rock acoustic guitar signed by Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus at the 51st Grammy Awards has sold for $104,000 at auction.

Estimated to fetch a high of $96,000, Julien’s Auctions perhaps slightly underestimated the size of the Swiftie fanbase, as it smashed that target and went comfortably into a six-figure sum.

The two artists left their mark on the guitar on February 7, 2009, the day before the pair’s duet take of Swift’s Fifteen at the Grammys.

The high sales figure was achieved despite the fact that Swift played a different guitar – a Taylor K65ce Koa 12-String – on the night.

It was an evening that also saw Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl join forces on I Saw Her Standing There, and John Mayer, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, and Keith Urban unite for a tribute to Bo Diddley, who had died the previous June.

Swift was just 19 at the time of the performance and would claim her first Grammy wins the following year, including Album of the Year for Fearless.

A total of 22 bids came in for the guitar, which saw its tentative estimate of $6,000–$8,000 surpassed by bid nine during the auction on May 31.

The lot became the second most valuable of Julien’s latest Music Icons collection, missing out on the top spot thanks to a Steven Tyler’s Dream On grand piano racking up a $130,000 sale.

Elsewhere, a score of notable six-strings also went under the hammer. A Charvel Art Series electric guitar, played on stage by Eddie Van Halen, doubled its estimate as it went for $78,000. Another Eddie axe, a Fender custom Frankenstein Stratocaster, sold for $45,500.

Several items related to Kurt Cobain were also listed – including, bizarrely, a portion of a Melvins tour van that featured a mural done by Cobain. It sold for $26,000. Considering the two most expensive guitars ever sold at auction belonged to Cobain, it is no surprise.

Notably, however, Cobain’s 1989 Takamine acoustic remains unsold after its reserve wasn't reached. It was used during a recording session in November 1991 in Hilversum, Netherlands in the build-up to Nirvana's show at the Paradiso later that night.

The guitar was estimated to reach $300,000–$500,000, with a starting bid of $75,000.

In recent auction news, groundbreaking filmmaker David Lynch's guitars are currently up for auction – and if you're in the market for an off-kilter guitar, there's also a custom-built five-necked guitar up for grabs.

Renowned gear collector Jim Irsay, who spent millions assembling and exhibiting quite possibly the greatest collection of historically and culturally significant electric guitars, has died aged 65.

The entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist became the CEO of NFL club Indianapolis Colts in 1997, and it was the club that broke the news of Irsay's passing, confirming he passed in his sleep while at home.

He became the youngest owner of an NFL team at 37 when he inherited the club following his father's passing, and while he's celebrated for his longtime custodianship of the Colts, his legacy and the mark he has left in the guitar world is just as notable.

Indeed, the legendary collection of world-changing instruments he collected over his lifetime is one of the most famous assortments of guitar gear ever curated – and in terms of cultural and financial value, it has no equal.

In July 2023, he was offered $1 billion for the collection, which would have seen it be relocated to Dubai – but Irsay stood fast and continued to exhibit the instruments to the public instead.

When you appraise just some of the instruments in The Jim Irsay Collection, it’s no surprise that such a lofty figure was proposed. It features David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger, the ‘Bob Dylan goes electric’ Strat from his iconic Newport Folk Festival appearance, Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, and many, many others.

Another of his distinguished buys was Eric Clapton’s psychedelic ‘The Fool’ SG, which Slowhand used religiously through his Cream days, particularly on Disraeli Gears. It’s also the guitar that Clapton cultivated his famous ‘woman’ tone on and was later owned and restored by Todd Rundgren. He bought the guitar at auction for over $1 million.

The Black Strat and Cobain’s Mustang are currently number two and three on the list of the most expensive guitars sold at auction, with only Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E – which went for an eye-watering $6.1 million in 2020 – topping the two legendary Fenders.

Vitally, Irsay didn’t buy the guitars to simply store in a vault. Oftentimes, he’d loan the guitars out for big-name stars to play and add to their legacy. Blues great Kenny Wayne Shepherd was one such recipient, and played Comfortably Numb on Gilmour’s Black Strat for a special showcase to kick off the Colts’ season in 2022.

The world-famous collection is currently on display at an exhibition hosted by Indiana University in Bloomington, which runs until September. Irsay wanted to exhibition to “highlight the history of the modern guitar.”

Later in his career, Irsay also formed the Jim Irsay band, billed as “a traveling museum of rock music.” It featured incredible talents including Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, who played the historically significant electrics on stage.

Reacting to the news on Instagram, Kenny Wayne Shepherd said: “I really just don’t have the words right now to express the loss of such a special man. A social media tribute post won’t do him justice. Truly one of a kind. Love you, Jim. RIP.”

Irsay had struggled with health issues in his later years and consequently made fewer public appearances. But the collection of instruments and memorabilia he’s amassed – which also includes the $6.18 million acquisition of Muhammed Ali's Rumble in the Jungle championship belt – is quite the legacy to leave behind.

Julien's Auctions has recently announced the return of its Music Icons sale – and this year's two-day sale includes over 700 collectible items from some of the world's biggest music icons.

The sale includes several guitars that were stage- or studio-played by the likes of Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Brian May, Melissa Etheridge, and Bob Dylan, to name a mere few.

“This incredible collection brings together the instruments, fashion, and personal items that shaped the soundtrack of our lives – from the guitars that changed music history to the unforgettable looks worn by the world’s biggest stars,” comments Martin Nolan, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Julien’s Auctions. “It’s a celebration of artistry, legacy, and the timeless power and endless enjoyment of music.”

Among the gems, guitar aficionados can find Cobain's 1989 Takamine FP360SC left-handed electro-acoustic guitar, played during Nirvana’s 1991 Hilversum Sessions recorded in North Holland, which is expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000.

Elsewhere, Eddie Van Halen's stage-played circa 2007 Charvel EVH Art Series – black with red and white stripes – which the virtuoso played (and signed) on October 5th, 2007 in Uncasville, Connecticut is estimated to fetch $20,000 to $40,000.

Another Nirvana link-up comes by way of a 1989 Warwick Dolphin Pro I bass, which Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic played during a session in Hilversum, also in 1991, just before the band’s performance at Amsterdam’s Paradiso. It’s estimated at $100,000 to $200,000.

Eric Clapton's 1980 Santa Cruz FTC-15 is also part of the auction. This acoustic guitar – owned and played by Clapton – was crafted by Santa Cruz luthier Richard Hoover, who in 1980 received a handwritten letter from an “E. Clapton.” Upon opening it, Hoover discovered it was indeed from Eric Clapton, who had seen the FTC in a magazine and wanted to know how he could “lay my hands on this particular model.” The guitar is expected to fetch upwards of $40,000.

Also featured is a Gibson Les Paul Special DC Tribute in cherry red, signed and stage-played by Joe Perry during Aerosmith’s 50th-anniversary concert in 2022 in Boston, which is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000. David Bowie's name also makes an appearance with a signed 1998 Seagull S6 Mahogany Spruce acoustic, played during his final Australian performance.

Other notable guitars include a Noel Gallagher-autographed Suzuki Hummingbird in cherry burst, and a 2012 ESP Ronnie Wood signature Telecaster, signed by the Rolling Stones guitarist and accompanied by a handwritten lyric: “Have you heard about the midnight rambler?”

An exhibition of the Music Icons highlights will be on display at the Hard Rock Cafe Piccadilly Circus in London from May 9 to May 13, before heading across the pond to the Hard Rock Cafe New York from May 21 to May 31. The collectibles will then hit the auction block on May 30 and 31. For more information, visit Julien’s Auctions.

Late last year, the original Mary Kaye Strat – one of the most iconic Fender electric guitars of all time – sold for $227,500 at an auction hosted by Julien's.

Kurt Cobain’s iconic Martin D-18E acoustic, which featured during Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged show, is to be put on display in the UK.

Cobain’s D-18E became the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction when it went under the hammer in 2020, fetching a whopping $6,010,000.

Now, the guitar will go on show at the Royal College of Music Museum in London, starring as part of what's been described as “a landmark exhibition exploring Nirvana’s groundbreaking MTV Unplugged performance”.

Interestingly, Cobain's Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang ($4.55 million) takes the second spot in the most expensive guitars list, with the pair out-selling infamous axes including David Gilmour's Black Stratocaster ($3,975,000) and Eddie Van Halen's Hot For Teacher Kramer ($3,932,000).

That shows just how revered Cobain’s legacy is (even if the deep-pocketed guitar collector Jim Irsay reckons the acoustic in question isn’t worth such a sizable figure). Rode Microphones owner, Peter Freedman, however, didn’t think twice as he placed the winning bid five years ago.

As a founding supporter of the Royal College of Music’s Australia Commonwealth Scholarship, Freedman has now happily loaned the guitar for the exhibition. He hasn’t spent millions of dollars on the guitar to decorate his living room, after all.

“When I purchased this guitar, my intention was to have it begin a worldwide tour of exhibitions, to support performing artists,” he says. “I am delighted that this intent will be premiered at the Royal College of Music, London, with the first exhibition of its kind and will support talented musicians worldwide.”

Renowned music journalist and Guitar World contributor Alan Di Perna has been tasked with curating the exhibition, which includes a series of events from family-friendly workshops and concerts to performances from RCM students inspired by the guitar.

He’s “delighted” to bring the college’s first-ever rock music exhibition to light, and has championed the legacy of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged set, saying it was “a stand-out performance by a group that changed the course of rock history in the 1990s”.

RCM's Professor Gabriele Rossi Rognoni hopes the guitar will “open cross dialogues with students of different backgrounds and create bridges between historical and contemporary music”.

The college is already home to the world's oldest guitar – a build that dates from 1581 – and so Cobain's iconic Martin will be a worthy stablemate.

The green sweater Cobain wore that night will be displayed alongside the guitar for the first time. Other points of interest include a selection of Nirvana posters, collectible vinyl records still in their original shrink wrap, and the top portion of a soundboard of another guitar from the same series as Cobain’s fabled Martin.

Taking palace June 3-August 17, tickets to the exhibition will cost £5 and will go on sale on April 30 at 10 am GMT.

Visit the Royal College of Music Museum to learn more.

Nearly 15 years have passed since the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind on September 24, 1991. As of this writing, the record has sold tens of millions of copies, and continues to sell some 2,500 copies per week – proof that Kurt Cobain’s music and his world-weary lyrics still resonate deeply.

But consider this: those teens whose lives were changed by Nevermind are now parents themselves. 10-year-olds who bought the album when it first came out are now deep in the throes of adulthood. And twenty-somethings who picked up on Nevermind have either just passed the Big Four-O or are rapidly approaching it.

Which is to say, Nevermind has attained classic status. It is one of those rare albums that will accompany its original fans on their journey through life, while continuing to attract new generations of listeners.

If Nevermind doesn’t seem like an old record, it’s partly because over the past 15 years, the rock scene has been entirely remade in its image. But the world into which Nevermind was born is one that a present-day rock teen would hardly recognize. Alternative rock and heavy metal were still very distinct, mutually hostile genres. Nirvana invaded both camps, converting troops from both sides to the army of flannel-shirt-wearing grunge rockers.

The trio from the rugged Northwest altered the world of mainstream pop as well, knocking Michael Jackson from his perch atop the charts. In doing so, they paved the way for “alternative mainstream” success stories like Pearl Jam, Alanis Morissette, Bush, Stone Temple Pilots, and Rage Against the Machine.

Like Frampton Comes Alive or Meet the Beatles, Nevermind is one of those records that gets incredibly successful in a way no one could have predicted or can ever quite explain. Its explosion into the mass culture firmament surprised Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic, and Dave Grohl just as much as it did anyone else.

“You want to know why we’ve taken off?” Grohl told Circus magazine in 1991. “We have no idea. We had no idea it would ever get this insane.”

“I’m constantly feeling guilty in ways,” Cobain told journalist Michael Deeds shortly after Nevermind’s release. “Our music, especially on this album, is so slick-sounding. A few years ago, I would have hated our band, to tell you the truth.”

Nevermind represented a quantum leap for Nirvana, both musically and career-wise. Their previous album, Bleach, was recorded in three days and cost $606.17 to make. Their initial budget for Nevermind was $65,000 – 100 times larger than the budget for Bleach. They ended up spending twice that amount. And while Bleach, which was Nirvana’s debut album, came out on the then-little-known indie label Sub Pop, Nevermind had the major-label clout of Geffen Records behind it.

The two-year period that separates Bleach from Nevermind was a time of tremendous growth and upheaval for the band. They went on their first national and international tours. Cobain started up and broke off a relationship with Tobi Vail of the band Bikini Kill. What’s more, Nirvana went through several personnel shifts.

Guitarist Jason Everman, who joined shortly after Bleach, exited the band nearly as quickly as he’d come aboard, once it became clear that his tastes were more hard rock/metal than his bandmates’. He later joined Soundgarden.

Chad Channing, who played drums on Bleach, left the band. Nirvana’s original drummer, Dale Crover, filled in for a seven-date West Coast tour. Dan Peters of Mudhoney played drums on a Nirvana single called Sliver and did one gig with them before Dave Grohl finally settled into place as the group’s permanent drummer.

The frequent personnel shifts and extensive touring seemed to have honed the band’s songwriting, as such experiences often do.

The process also seems to have sharpened the band’s pop sensibilities, which are in far greater evidence on Nevermind than on the sludge-guitar heavy Bleach. But Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad suggests that those same pop sensibilities existed all along, and that Cobain deliberately suppressed them on Bleach in an effort to conform with Sub Pop’s retro Seventies metal agenda of that time.

“Half of the songs on Nevermind were written at the time of Bleach, but didn’t make it onto the album,” Cobain told journalist Roy Trakin. “So there really isn’t an obvious change. We’ve always been fans of pop music.”

A major milestone along the road to Nevermind came in April of 1990, when Nirvana began recording with producer Butch Vig at Smart Studios, his recording facility in Madison, Wisconsin.

Now perhaps best known as the leader of the band Garbage, Vig was then an up-and-coming indie producer whose credits included well-regarded records by the Laughing Hyenas, Smashing Pumpkins, Firetown, Tad, and Killdozer, among others.

In the week Nirvana spent at Smart, they recorded six songs that would later turn up on Nevermind: In Bloom, Dive, Lithium, Breed (originally titled Imodium), Stay Away (originally titled Pay to Play), and Polly. They also made an unsuccessful stab at another tune, Sappy, which they’d attempted to record at an earlier date, also with unsatisfactory results.

The Smart sessions were originally intended for release as Nirvana’s second album on Sub Pop. But a series of events led the band to change their plans. First, Chad Channing left Nirvana in May 1990. And then the prospect of major-label interest started to become more than an idle rumor.

“We lost Chad and there was uncertainty with that,” Novoselic told a radio interviewer in Australia.

“We didn’t want to release [the Smart sessions]. If we did anything, we wanted it to be with a new drummer. [Also] Sub Pop was doing some wheeling and dealing. They were going to sign a licensing deal with a big label, and that kinda scared us. There were so many variables to consider; it wasn’t wise to put out a record at all.”

Polly is the only song on Nevermind that was recorded at Smart; all the other tracks were re-recorded (although the final versions are said to be very similar to those laid down at Smart).

As for Polly, the band and producer realized there was something special in Cobain’s solo acoustic performance of this disquieting rape scenario, which was based on an actual newspaper account he’d read. The dramatic twist was that the very anti-violence, pro-woman Cobain sang the song from the attacker’s point of view.

“Just because I say ‘I’ in a song doesn’t necessarily mean it’s me,” Cobain later commented. “A lot of people have a problem with that. It’s just the way I write, usually – taking on someone else’s personality or character. I’d rather just use someone else’s example, because, I dunno, my life is kinda boring. So I take stories from television, and things I’ve read and heard.”

“Polly was done with a really cheap acoustic five-string guitar that Kurt had,” recalls Vig. “It had this plunky sound. The original strings were still on it. He never changed them, and he never tuned the guitar either. It was down about a step and a half from E.”

Earlier on, Nirvana had attempted to record a full-band electric version of Polly for their Blew EP. The acoustic performance on Nevermind is no doubt closer in spirit to the song as it sounded when Cobain first wrote it. It also sheds light on the dynamic between Cobain as a songwriter and the rest of the group as interpreters of his material.

“It [songwriting] is usually done on an acoustic guitar, sitting around in my underwear, just picking out riffs, pieces of songs,” Cobain said on Australian radio.

“Krist and Dave have a big part in deciding on how long a song should be and how many parts it should have. So I don’t like to be considered as the whole songwriter. But I do come up with the basics of it. I come up with the singing style and I write the lyrics, usually minutes before we record.”

Grohl became a member of Nirvana in September of 1990, joining them from the Washington D.C. hardcore band Scream. His muscular yet agile drumming took Nirvana’s power trio sound to a new plateau.

Grohl’s arrival also sparked a fresh burst of group songwriting. In a Tacoma, Washington rehearsal space that they shared with a local bar band, Nirvana embarked on a regimen of daily, 15-hour band practices for a period of four or five months.

“We came up with so much stuff where we’d go, ‘God, this is the best thing we’ve ever done!’ Then we’d forget how to play it,” Grohl told Circus magazine. “So many songs got thrown away, until we finally said, ‘Maybe we should start recording them on a cassette.’ So we’d record them, then lose the cassette.”

Two songs that didn’t get away were Smells Like Teen Spirit and Come As You Are, tunes that would prove to be cornerstone tracks of Nevermind. The attention-grabbing title of Teen Spirit was born on a typically relaxed evening at the Cobain residence, as Kurt explained to Australian radio listeners.

“A friend of mine and I were goofing around my house one night. We were kinda drunk, and we were writing graffiti all over the walls of my house. And she wrote, ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.’

“Earlier on, we’d been having this discussion about teen revolution and stuff like that. And I took [what she wrote] as a compliment. I thought she was saying that I was a person who could inspire. I just thought it was a nice little title. And it turns out she just meant that I smelled like that deodorant [called Teen Spirit]. I didn’t even know that deodorant existed until after the song was written.”

Geffen Records had been taking an active interest in Nirvana since April 1990, when Gary Gersh – then an A&R man for Geffen and currently head of Capitol Records – saw the band play at the Pyramid club in New York.

Gersh had been brought to the show by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. This set in motion a chain of events that would lead to Nirvana’s signing with Geffen. The deal was formally consummated on April 30, 1991. In May, the band arrived in Los Angeles to begin recording what would become Nevermind.

According to Come As You Are, Michael Azerrad’s 1994 Nirvana bio, it was at the suggestion of Gary Gersh’s that the band re-recorded their six Smart session tracks for Nevermind. But it was Nirvana’s own call to use Vig as a producer. They chose him over several bigger name producers, including Scott Litt, Don Dixon, and David Briggs. Apparently, Vig’s work on the Smart sessions had impressed the band.

“Butch was just easy to work with,” Novoselic told Australian radio. “Laid back and really attentive to what’s going on. He works hard but he doesn’t work the band hard.”

Butch Vig says that the band, glad to be in sunny Los Angeles, were generally in good spirits for the Nevermind sessions.

“Kurt was enjoying himself when we made that record. That was before they got really big, and they had kind of a casual attitude toward making the record. There wasn’t a lot of pressure – I felt more pressure making that record than they did, because it was really the first major-label record I had made.”

With an initial budget of $65,000, the band could certainly take a more leisurely approach than they’d taken with Bleach. They began with three days of preproduction, running down the tunes with Vig in a North Hollywood rehearsal hall. One of the first things Vig noticed was the huge impact Grohl’s arrival had made on the band’s sound.

“Kurt had called me up and said, ‘I’ve got the best drummer in the world!’ I thought, ‘Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one before.’ But the first time we went in that rehearsal space and started running through the songs, it was just amazing. Dave was incredibly powerful and dead on the groove. I could tell from the way Kurt and Krist were playing with him that they had definitely kicked their music up another notch, in terms of intensity.”

The preproduction chores were fairly light work: Nirvana had already recorded half the material with Vig once before, and they were well rehearsed on most of the newer tunes.

“Frankly, I didn’t want to beat the songs into the ground,” says Vig. “I just wanted to hear the arrangements and maybe tighten things up a little bit.”

Vig had already heard a rough rehearsal cassette of Teen Spirit but he was knocked out the first time he heard Nirvana play it live in the rehearsal room. “I kept having them play it over and over again, because it was so fucking good! I was literally pacing around the room, saying to myself, ‘This is amazing!’

“There wasn’t much that needed to be done with the song. I think we did a little arranging. At the end of each chorus, there’s a little ad lib thing Kurt did with the guitar. Originally that only happened at the end of the song; he did it a whole bunch of times. I suggested moving that up in to each chorus and cutting the choruses down a little bit. Just some minor tweaking of the arrangements.”

From there, the band moved over to Sound City Studios in nearby Van Nuys. A funky old place in a poor, largely Hispanic part of the San Fernando Valley, Sound City has a good classic rock and metal track record (Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, Petty, Dio, Crazy Horse, Ratt). Most importantly, the studio has what Vig and the band felt they needed in order to get the primal rock sound they were after: a large recording room and a vintage Neve console.

“At that point, I’d never done any work in Los Angeles,” says Vig. “But I knew that was where the band wanted to work, and I knew of Sound City’s reputation. I worked out a deal so it was cost-effective for us to go there. It was sight unseen. We just booked it and went in.”

On a typical day, says Vig, “we’d be in the studio by around noon or one and we’d leave around midnight or one in the morning.” The band set up in Sound City’s large room, Studio A, to record basic tracks.

“When we cut basics, it went pretty fast,” Vig recalls. “I think it took five or six days in all. Dave was set up in the middle of the room. We built a big drum tunnel on the front of his bass drum, so we could mike it from a distance and still isolate it from all the bleed in the rest of the room. Chris had his SVT bass rig off to the side, but he could play in the room. His headphones were set up next to the drums.

“Kurt’s amps were in a little isolation area, but he was also in the room and he could sing into a mic. We’d start running a song down and they’d usually get the basic track in two or three takes. If there was a missed chord or a bad bass note, we’d go back and punch in [the correct notes] right away.

“Territorial Pissings was basically a first take. Lithium was a little harder. That was the only track we used a click track on at the start of the song, because, for whatever reason, the band kept speeding up really fast. We decided that we wanted to keep it at a real even tempo. Dave had never played with a click track before, but it was not a problem for him at all. After three or four takes with the click, we nailed it.

“After the first couple of takes of Territorial Pissings, that’s when they did that song, Endless Nameless [the surprise noise track that kicks in 13 minutes and 51 seconds after the end of the album’s ostensible final song, Something in the Way].

“Kurt got really frustrated because the song kept speeding up and they were just not playing particularly tight. And he launched into that bonus track on the CD and just totally went off. In the middle of the song, he smashed his guitar to bits. So we spent the better part of the rest of that day driving around Los Angeles trying to find a left-handed replacement guitar.”

Another problematic track was Something in the Way.

“They originally wanted to cut it as a full-on band,” Vig explains. “But that proved difficult to record. It just was not happening. Kurt was not very happy. Finally he came over to me and said, ‘It needs to sound like this…’ And he picked up his old five-string acoustic guitar [the same one used on Polly]. He sat on the couch in the control room and started to sing and play.”

Realizing he was on to what could be a master take, Vig quickly set up some microphones.

“I turned off the air conditioner and everything else and had the phones shut off. He was playing and singing so quietly. But we got it down on tape. Later on, we overdubbed drums and Kurt added some harmonies. But it was all built around the acoustic track.”

Vig remembers Cobain as someone who was generally willing to let others share in his creative processes.

“He was pretty open to all sorts of ideas. He had different lyrics he would bring in and show me. And he’d say, ‘I got a couple of melodies here. Which one do you like better?’ And he’d sing the song in a couple of different versions and I’d give him some feedback on it.”

After basic tracks were completed, Nirvana moved over to Sound City’s other, smaller room, Studio B, for overdubs.

“We started adding the second rhythm guitar to songs,” says Vig, “and Kurt started working some more on his vocals. Dave did some harmonies.”

Lead vocal sessions were generally done in a one-on-one setting, with just Cobain and the producer present. The vocal mic was set up in the main studio area, “but it was basically like a lounge area,” says Vig.

“There were candles in there, and a big rug on the floor. A pretty cool vibe. Dave and Krist were around, but they’d be off playing pool or watching TV. They’d pop in to the control room and listen every now and then, but Kurt kind of wanted to be left alone when he was doing his vocals. He also didn’t really like to use headphones when he sang, so we set up a fairly elaborate system where he could use speakers.”

Cobain’s legendary impatience with multiple takes came to the fore at this time.

“He really wanted to do everything on the first or second take,” says Vig. “He’d do a couple of takes and say, ‘That’s it. I’m not gonna do it anymore.’ The tricky part was trying to figure out how to motivate him to give really good performances. Sometimes his first or second takes were brilliant, but sometimes they needed work. They needed to be more focused.

“What I ended up doing was recording everything he sang, even the warm-ups. A lot of times, I’d actually be going for a first take, but he would think it was just a warm-up. Then I’d have the engineer flip to a new track and I’d tell Kurt, ‘Okay, you’re ready for your first take.’ If I was lucky, I could get as many as four takes out of him. Then I’d take the best pieces of each one and make a master out of it.”

Cobain’s painful, undiagnosable stomach condition would sometimes bring sessions to a halt, Vig remembers.

“He was very sensitive to certain foods. Sometimes we’d eat dinner and he’d get sick half an hour later and end up spending 45 minutes in the bathroom. He was constantly taking Pepto Bismol and things to relieve some of his pain.”

But for all that, the mood in the studio was generally upbeat.

“Kurt and Krist were really happy that Dave had joined the band,” says Vig. “They were in L.A., they’d just signed a record deal with Geffen, they had a bit of cash, so they’d go out and do a little partying. I know they used to go down to Venice and stay up all night.

“After we’d finish working in the studio at midnight or one, they’d go and stay out 'till the sun came up. So sometimes I’d get to the studio at one and they wouldn’t show up till three because they’d slept in. But basically, they showed up when they needed to show up. There wasn’t any real serious partying going on in the studio. They were there to work.”

While in L.A., the band stayed at the Oakwood Apartments in nearby Universal City.

“A couple of times I went to pick them up there and they had definitely turned their place into a bachelor pad. There were cans of food lying open everywhere and clothes thrown all over the place and acoustic guitars lying around the room.

“I know they were getting a big kick out of staying there because the band Europe was staying next to them. That was the band that had a big hit in the Eighties with The Final Countdown. The guys in Europe would all go sit out with their girlfriends by the pool everyday. And I remember Krist and Dave and Kurt making fun of them. They were not big Europe fans.”

Working at Sound City at the same time as Nirvana were the Sidewinders, an Arizona band Vig had recorded that was now working with David Briggs (whom, embarrassingly enough, Nirvana had rejected as a producer for Nevermind).

Vig recalls that the guys in the Sidewinders “kept coming by and asking, ‘Wow, can you play us some stuff that Nirvana’s doing?’ That was the first sense I got that there were people out there who were really totally obsessed with Nirvana.”

The band reached the end of the 16 days booked at Sound City before they had finished overdubbing. Vig booked an additional four or five days at Devonshire Studios in nearby Burbank, where Nirvana completed their overdubs and did some preliminary mixing.

One of the very last overdubs to be completed was the cello part on Something in the Way, the track that had given them difficulties all along. The cello part was played by Kirk Panning.

“That song really wasn’t even written until a week before we went into the studio,” Cobain told Australian radio. “I knew I wanted cello on it, but after all the music was recorded for it, we’d kinda forgotten about putting a cello on. We had one more day in the studio and we decided, ‘Oh geez, we should hire a cellist, you know, and put something in.’

“We were at a party and were asking some of our friends if they knew anyone who could play cello, and it just happened that one of our best friends in L.A. is a cellist. So we took him into the studio on the last day and said, ‘Here, play something.’ And he came up with a part right away. It just fell in like dominos.”

From a technical standpoint, however, it wasn’t all that easy.

“Kirk is a good cello player,” says Vig, “but we had a hard time getting his instrument in tune with Kurt’s guitar. That old five-string acoustic of Kurt’s was tuned down a few steps and wasn’t really tuned to any standard pitch. I remember I fretted over the whole track. It was tricky getting Krist's bass in tune with the guitar, too. You couldn’t use any kind of a standard tuner.”

While at Devonshire, Vig and the band also took a first stab at mixing the record.

“I mixed three or four tracks with the band,” says the producer, “but none of us were very happy with how they came out. To me, they sounded too rough. Kurt would say, ‘Take all the high end off the guitars.’ And I would say, ‘I don’t want them to sound muddy.’ There was also a tendency to bury the vocals more. The mixes sounded more punk rock that way, but the songs didn’t sound as focused to me.”

Ultimately, they decided to call in someone else to mix the album. Geffen’s Gary Gersh sent over a list of possible names.

“Scott Litt was on top of the list,” Vig recalls, “but Kurt said, ‘No, I don’t want to sound like R.E.M.’ Ed Stasium was also on the list. To which Kurt said, ‘No, I don’t want to sound like the Smithereens.’ He went all the way to the bottom of the list and Andy Wallace was there. It said ‘Slayer’ next to his name. And Kurt said, ‘Get this guy.’”

The mixes were done at Scream, another San Fernando Valley studio.

“Basically, I’d let Andy go over the tracks by himself for a few hours,” Vig recalls. “When he got everything up, he’d call me in, and I’d bring in the band and we would nit-pick stuff. Basically, we mixed a song or two a day. The whole record took nine or 10 days to mix.”

Despite the fact that Wallace was Cobain’s own choice and that the band participated in the mixing process, Cobain would later complain to the press that Wallace’s mixes made Nevermind sound too slick, and that it was “closer to Mötley Crüe than a punk rock record.”

“But I think part of that was just Kurt’s reaction to having Nevermind be so successful,” Vig speculates. “If it had only sold 50,000 copies, he probably wouldn’t have had any comments on whether it was too slick or not slick enough.”

By the time the finished masters were handed to the label, the band had spent $130,000, which, despite being twice their initial budget, is still a relatively small amount for a multi-Platinum album. With the music out of the way, attention turned to the cover art.

“One day Dave and I were sitting around watching a documentary on babies being born under water,” said Cobain in his Australian radio interview. “I thought that was a really neat image, so we decided, ‘Let’s put that on the album cover.’ Then when we got back a picture of a baby underwater, I thought it would look nice [to add] a fish hook with a dollar bill on it. And so an image was born.”

The back cover of Nevermind features a photograph by Cobain taken some years earlier, with a background comprised of a collage he made from photos of raw meat, vaginas (according to some accounts), and figures from a painting of Dante’s Inferno. In the foreground is Chim Chim, his toy monkey who’d appeared in earlier Nirvana artwork.

“I was in a bohemian photography stage, you know?,” Cobain later said. “If you look real close, there’s also a picture of Kiss, in the back, standing on a slab of beef.”

Nevermind was released on September 24, 1991. Like all rock albums, it documents the artists’ world at the time the record was made. This momentous recording happened to catch Nirvana at a high point: in the midst of a creative groundswell, somewhere between obscurity and superstardom.

“We’re experiencing the typical independent-band-going-onto-a- major-label punk rock crisis,” Cobain said in 1991, shortly after Nevermind was released. But he also acknowledged the existence of something more important than passing musical fashions and fickle perceptions of “credibility” and “authenticity.” On a level beyond all that, he appeared to realize that the songs on Nevermind could stand the test of time.

“People have opened up to an appreciation of hard rock in punk, and it’s great that they’ve fused together,” Cobain told Monday Morning Replay in December 1991. “Now it’s time to appreciate the pop side. Attitude is one thing. But a good song is the most important thing. It’s the only way to really touch someone.”

This feature was originally published in Guitar World in 2005.

Guitars used by Kurt Cobain have been deemed by the vintage guitar market to be quite the commodity.

The two most expensive guitars ever sold at auction both belonged to the late Nirvana frontman – the Mustang he used in the Smells Like Teen Spirit video sold for $4.55 million in 2022, and the Martin D-18E he used for Nirvana's legendary MTV Unplugged performance sold for $6 million in 2020.

One Cobain guitar that's not for sale, however, is the 1953 D-18 acoustic he affectionately referred to as “Grandpa.” Given to Cobain by singer/songwriter Mary Lou Lord, the D-18 now sits in the Martin Museum in Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

A few months ago, Mikael Åkerfeldt and Fredrik Åkesson, guitarists for Swedish metal perennials Opeth, stopped by the Martin Museum, and were given, much to their delight (the former called it “the Holy Land”) free rein to take even the museum's most valuable acoustic guitars for test drives.

Though Åkerfeldt was left in awe by a 19th century acoustic he got to play – “I got scared,” he told Revolver in a recent interview – he was decidedly less moved by Cobain's D-18.

“It was very beat up,” Åkerfeldt told Revolver. “It didn’t feel that good. There was nothing special about it, other than it had belonged to Kurt.”

Åkerfeldt also shrugged off the spooky lore that apparently comes with the instrument.

“Someone told us that guitar was haunted, like people who had that guitar had accidents,” he said. “I’m a Nirvana fan, but it was just a regular guitar to me.”

According to Martin, Cobain received the “Grandpa” D-18 shortly before the release of Nirvana's history-making Nevermind album.

It would be another two years before he purchased the oddball, already-rare Martin D-18E that would later become the most expensive guitar ever sold.

According to Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey, Cobain was largely nonchalant about the value, age, and such of guitars, viewing them primarily as tools.

“I don’t believe he had any idea how rare it was before he bought [the D-18E],” Bailey told Guitar World in 1995.

“Kurt was neither a collector nor a connoisseur of rare guitars. I think he saw it as an oddity, hoping it would sound as good as it looked.”

In 2020, the guitar universe was left slack-jawed by the blockbuster sale of the Martin D-18E Kurt Cobain used for Nirvana's seminal MTV Unplugged set. Headlining a Julien's Auctions lot, the guitar fetched an incredible $6,010,000, making it by far the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction.

One of just over 300 of its kind produced, the Martin D-18E in question was a rare guitar in anyone's hands, but its association with the haunting apex of Nirvana's final chapter gave it legendary status in guitar lore, even before its record-shattering sale.

Cobain, though, wasn't precious about the D-18E – a model that Martin discontinued in 1959, only a year after its unveiling – during his lifetime. According to Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey, Cobain was far from a vintage guitar fiend, and was likely more drawn to the eccentricities of the short-lived model than its potential value.

He even, inspired by one of his guitar heroes and with the assistance of his tech, modded the six-string to better fit his tonal needs.

Reflecting on the D-18E, which Cobain purchased at Voltage Guitar in Los Angeles in 1993, Bailey told Guitar World in 1995, “I don’t believe he had any idea how rare it was before he bought it.

“Kurt was neither a collector nor a connoisseur of rare guitars,” he explained. “I think he saw [the D-18E] as an oddity, hoping it would sound as good as it looked.”

Cobain was a great admirer of alt-rock trailblazers-turned arena conquerers R.E.M., and, struggling with the D-18E's tone, he turned to the band's guitar hero, Peter Buck.

“Unfortunately, the [D-18E's] DeArmond pickups were designed with nickel strings in mind, so hearing it with bronze-wound strings was pretty disappointing,” Bailey recalled. “Our solution was to attach yet another pickup – a Bartolini model 3AV – to the top of the Martin.

“Kurt first became interested in [the Bartolini pickup] when he saw Peter Buck using one and really liked the sound.”

From there, Cobain was insistent on running the vintage acoustic through his Fender Twin Reverb amp and his usual effects.

Not thrilled with how that particular setup would look on camera, Unplugged producer Alex Coletti came up with a deceptive cover.

“I built a fake box out in front of the amp to make it look like a monitor wedge,” Coletti told Guitar World in 1995. “It was Kurt’s security blanket. He was used to hearing this guitar through his Fender. He wanted those effects. You can hear it on The Man Who Sold the World [the David Bowie song covered by Nirvana on Unplugged].

“It’s an acoustic guitar, but obviously he’s going through an amp. There’s no trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. I actually fought pretty hard to leave that song out. Because I felt it wasn’t as genuine as the rest of the songs. But I’m a huge Bowie fan, so I couldn’t fight too hard against the song.”

To this day, Cobain's MTV Unplugged D-18 remains, by far, the most expensive guitar ever sold publicly. Incidentally, #2 on that list happens to be another one of Cobain's guitars, the Fender Mustang he used in the era-defining Smells Like Teen Spirit video.

On September 25, 1993, Nirvana appeared as a quartet on Saturday Night Live. As the story goes, the band’s new guitarist, Pat Smear, had received a call from Kurt Cobain inviting him to join the group as a second guitarist for an upcoming tour. The SNL performance served as an opportunity for the public to witness the updated lineup and experience select songs from Nevermind's follow-up, In Utero.

However, before joining Nirvana, Smear had been playing with German singer-songwriter and actress Nina Hagen, and had been coaxed into acquiring a 1982 Charvel for that particular gig.

When it came to playing with Cobain and co, though, the Charvel – which Smear considered to be his “good guitar” – raised a few eyebrows.

“She had a musical director, and they were snobs, and they hated that there was a fucking punk rocker in their band. They hated it so much,” Smear recalls in a conversation with Dave Grohl and Chris Shiflett for Premier Guitar. “I mean, she didn’t, but the band did, and they’re like, ‘You need to get a good guitar.’ So I end up buying this Charvel.

“It was gorgeous,” he goes on. “I mean, this thing was so pretty. I thought, ‘Okay, now I have a good guitar.’ So we’re doing my first-ever gig with Nirvana [on] Saturday Night Live. And I’m like, ‘Well, better play my good guitar. I’m gonna play my Charvel.’

While he had considered playing his Hagstrom instead, Smear thought his newly acquired Charvel would make more sense for such a highly anticipated appearance with, as he referred to Nirvana, “professional musicians”.

“And what I didn’t know at the time – I don't even know if you [referring to Dave Grohl] were involved – but there was a discussion about me and that guitar like, ‘No, no, no, we can’t let him on stage.’”

“Kurt ended up giving me this rad fucking guitar [referring to the Mosrite Mark V in blue he ended up playing], which is not a Charvel.”

During his (albeit brief) tenure with Nirvana, Smear played several models, primarily Fender Strats purchased for him by Cobain.

According to Nirvana’s longtime guitar tech, Earnest Bailey, three of the main ones were an American Strat in Midnight Blue with a maple fretboard, another American Strat nicknamed ‘Glossy’ – featuring a black DiMarzio pickup and a locked-down Floyd Rose bridge – and ‘Flopsy’, a Mexican Strat in black that Smear further modified throughout the tour by adding nail polish in different colors.

He also played a Hagstrom III in black, a blue Hagstrom I, and a black Hagstrom XII, plus the colorful Harmony Buck Owens American acoustic, which actually belonged to Krist Novoselic, and that stood out during Nirvana’s iconic MTV Unplugged concert.

However, his relationship with that Charvel guitar didn’t end there. Fast forward to 2023, and a serendipitous, full-circle moment occurred during a Foo Fighters SNL appearance with H.E.R “I noticed she was playing a Charvel,” Smear says. “She goes, ‘Yeah!’ [and I said] ‘I have a perfect guitar for you,’ and I sent her that guitar.”

Think of the quintessential Seattle band and you might, understandably, reach for the grunge icon of your choice, but from Hendrix to Heart, the city is steeped in guitar playing history.

Now KEXP DJ and frontwoman of the Black Tones, Eva Walker, alongside her music journalist husband, Jake Uitti, have penned a love letter to the music history of the Seattle-area, The Sound of Seattle.

From Thunderpussy to Ayron Jones, Kurt Cobain to Ben Gibbard and The Sonics to Sleater-Kinney, the book, which is out on August 20, chronicles some 80 years of songs and innovations in the Emerald City.

Included are also a number of interviews with Seattle luminaries, from Jack Endino to Sir Mix a Lot, alongside a healthy chunk of guitarist talent.

Below the authors have shared an excerpt from one of the city’s most iconic players – and a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer – Nancy Wilson, of Heart.

For the guitarist who co-wrote songs like Barracuda and Magic Man, her hometown of Seattle – and its place as one of rock ’n’ roll’s foundational cities – is reflected in another bastion of music, the UK...

The Liverpool of the States

For Nancy Wilson, the guitar dynamo for the Pacific Northwest–born rock band Heart, Seattle has often reminded her of another cloudy port town that helped spawn a musical movement.

Wilson, who rose to fame co-writing and performing songs like Barracuda and Crazy On You, believes Seattle is a lot like the birthplace of the Beatles, Liverpool. But Seattle, notes Wilson, also has its own Fab Four: grunge icons Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. Coincidence? Likely not.

“I always called Seattle the Liverpool of the States,” says Wilson. “They are sister cities. Seattle is such a rich and storied seaport town with ferries crossing the Sound under gray rainy skies.”

Heart, in which Wilson starred along with her big-voiced sister, lead singer Ann, released its seminal debut album, Dreamboat Annie, in 1975. With it, the band helped bolster the 1970s rock landscape, along with groups like Led Zeppelin and the Who.

Of course, Heart was also different from these groups. They were American and were led by women. In this way, Heart inspired a generation (and beyond) of rockers, from Kathleen Hanna to Brandi Carlile.

But, says Wilson, while rock thrived in the 1970s and later in the 1990s, the genre may have been searching for itself a bit in the 1980s. Indeed, she says, the ’70s and the ’90s were high points in the guitar-based music – thanks in large part to Seattle.

Northwest rock pioneers

“The musical story of Seattle was never more fashionable than in the ’90s,” says Wilson. “The music was a much-needed break from the corporate ’80s sound and literally put electric guitar rock back on the map. Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden became the pillars of the new sound that took over the world like a cultural flash mob.”

While Wilson celebrates the grunge movement of the ’90s, she knows it would not have happened without those who came before, including her skeleton-shaking rock group and the many others who preceded her, locally and beyond.

“Jimi Hendrix hailed from Seattle as well as great Northwest rock pioneers like the Wailers, Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, the Kingsmen, the Sonics, to name a few,” says Wilson. “And then there was Ray Charles.”

In Seattle, the question often arises, as it must also in pubs and music clubs in Liverpool today: Why here? What makes this place special and conducive to so much music?

For Wilson, who has lived in the city for decades, including with her former husband of nearly 25 years, movie director Cameron Crowe, it has to do with location and weather as much as talent and drive.

“I think the moody weather of the great Northwest – like Liverpool – plus the infusion of sailors and travelers from around the world help bring forth a creative haven for players sheltering indoors out of the elements and banging away in garage bands,” offers Wilson.

“To me, all of these players through the eras are what makes ‘The Seattle Sound.’ The ’50s bands informed the bands of the ’60s and so forth.”

The Seattle sound

Specifically, Wilson says, the ’70s were a time of experimentation and achievement on the West Coast, thanks to open-minded cities like those in the Bay Area, as well as the Emerald City, and to musicians from Hendrix and Santana at Woodstock in 1969 to Heart and the second wave of the British Invasion a handful of years later.

“In the ’70s, Heart became part of the Seattle Sound although so much was also still being born out of the Bay Area, too,” Wilson says. “The mind-expanded sounds of the ’60s folded easily into the’70s where you’d hear more epic and longer songs like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.

“Also, the genius of Led Zeppelin entered the story like the ultimate rock muses they were, and it was at a small venue called the Green Lake Aqua Theater where we witnessed their opening set for a youth festival. It was as mind-bending and life-altering as having seen the Beatles live at the Seattle Coliseum in 1966.”

And what effect, exactly, did all of this have on her in real time? “Being in Heart in the mid-’70s was pure adrenaline and excitement,” says Wilson.

“We had the intuition that music was a wide-open playing field for a band as unique as we were and that it was going to work. Apparently, our instincts were right when the first Heart album went big region by region in 1975.”

What about the region itself? “All around the whole Northwest [in the ’70s], that was a magical time for the Seattle Sound, even if you were from Vancouver or Portland or Olympia. Bands were thriving and creating greatness in their own right and in their own style. Later, the ’80s decade was almost like rock had to get over its corporate tantrum to return to the real deal.”

• The Sound of Seattle is published on August 20 and available to preorder now.

Nirvana fans attending the FooVana gig last week were treated to a special guest appearance from Krist Novoselic, who joined the Foo Fighters/Nirvana tribute act to play a handful of the band’s songs.

FooVana were performing at Georgie's Garage & Grill in Vancouver, Washington, on Thursday, July 18. Novoselic’s presence was teased ahead of the gig, as the band posted an image of the bass player on their Facebook with the caption: “Show’s about to start! Oh yeah that’s right… Somebody else is here!”

The Nirvana legend accompanied the band for three of the Seattle icon’s hits – Blew, Lithium, and Smells Like Teen Spirit – as the tribute band suddenly got that much closer to the real deal.

Notably, it was the first time Novoselic had played Blew live for three decades, with the Nirvana co-founder telling the audience: “The last time I played that song was 30 years ago”.

FooVana’s guitarists were armed with a Dave Grohl Epiphone DG-335 and a Fender Jaguar, respectively, as they looked to nail the vibes and tones of both bands. Novoselic, meanwhile, opted for his signature Gibson RD bass.

Novoselic recently said he loves Gibson basses “because they're so dense”, as he unveiled his new band The Bona Fide Band with a rendition of Nirvana’s first-ever single.

Between that band and 3rd Secret – his project with Soundgarden's Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron – he's keeping himself plenty busy, but not too busy so that he didn't have time for this surprise celebration of Nirvana's everlasting legacy.

Nirvana tone obsessive Aaron Rash has spent the last few years tumbling down the rabbit hole of Kurt Cobain’s feral In Utero electric guitar sound. Now, he's produced a painstakingly put-together pack of Impulse Responses that lets guitarists harness the iconic In Utero tone "without touching a single physical amp".

Nirvana’s Nevermind follow-up (which Steve Albini offered to produce for free, so long as they beat him at a game of pool) was released in 1993 to great acclaim. It saw Cobain take his guitar tones in a wiry new direction – a sound Rash has been determined to recreate.

As such, the Utero Sessions IR Pack follows years of investment into research and gear-chasing to nail the record’s distinctive sound. Even if at times he felt it was a fruitless endeavor.

“I have bought and sold probably seven different [Fender] Quad Reverbs to find the perfect sounding one, because – news flash – they don’t all sound the same, even with the same speakers,” he says of the process. “They really vary all over the place.”

“Every amp is different and it's going to affect the tone,” Rash said of his tone hunt to MusicRadar earlier this year. “I found speakers make the most difference, especially for distortion tones – it’s night and day.

“I’ve always thought about it like this: if you take white noise and you run it through a speaker, every speaker is going to have its own profile. Distortion is just like white noise, really – if you hear it without going through a speaker, it just sounds like trash. The speaker is really important.”

The problem Rash faced was that the speaker he longed for – one made by legacy speaker brand, Utah, specifically for the Quad Reverb – is extremely rare. Only a few were made.

But he couldn’t cut corners, saying: “With its undersized magnets, and 16 ohm voice coil, nothing else sounds quite like it.”

Away from the speaker intricacies, Rash endeavored to use the same 1940s ribbon mics Nirvana used, despite them coming at an “astronomical” cost.

Says Rash: “I sourced all the original microphones that were used on the record, preamps, literally everything. I honestly don’t want to know how much I’ve spent to do this, but it’s done! And I am so happy to share it with you guys.”

Rash also points out that the room in which the IRs were created was crucial, adding that Steve Albini and Cobain’s guitar tech, Earnie Bailey, helped guide him on his mammoth journey.

The software is compatible with amp guitar plugins, with Rash personally recommending the Softube Vintage Amp Room. However, he says any kind of Fender Twin Reverb-emulating plugin will do the trick.

“The amp’s not really important,” he confesses. “What’s important is the IR pack.”

The Utero Sessions IR Pack is available now for $49.99.

Head to Aaron Rash to learn more.

Bassist Joe Preston may be best known for playing with the Melvins and Earth. However, he is also one of the most prolific bassists to come out of the early-’90s grunge and the Washington underground scenes, before hitting his stride with Sunn O))), High On Fire, and Thrones. 

In a new interview with MusicRadar, he reveals how a message from Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl served as the catalyst that led him to join the Melvins. 

“There was no audition, and I already knew them. And I’d gone on tour with Nirvana [with Earth] and stuff. I’d also interviewed them for a magazine I was writing for, so I’d known them for several years by then,” says Preston. 

“But I had just moved to Olympia, and I heard some ruckus outside my house outside in the street, and then on my porch, and it was Kurt and Dave from Nirvana, who had a note for me with a message from Buzz, saying, ‘This is not a joke, call Buzz about playing with the Melvins.’”

The Nirvana connection doesn't stop there. Elsewhere in the same interview, Preston talks about touring with pre-fame Nirvana while he was a member of Earth. 

“It was exciting and weird, because when things started getting going for them, it all happened quickly, from being broke punk rock guys to being able to buy stupid stuff or whatever,” he recalls.

“In the spring or summer of '91, we went down there, and they were recording Nevermind. It was just really weird to see them get to that level. 

“I got to be with them when the A&R guys would take them out, and it was really weird, because they went from being a band they’d never heard of to wanting to talk to them. It was a weird time because it was the beginning of all this brown-nosing from labels.”

Back in 2023, Buzz Osborne also recalled the post-grunge A&R era that saw The Melvins themselves courted by major label executives. 

“We thought Atlantic would take one album from us, hate it and be done,” Osborne told Guitar World. “But they did three, which is still surprising to us. People told us they were surprised, but trust me, no-one was more surprised than us...”

To read the full interview with Joe Preston, head to MusicRadar.

Nirvana bassist and co-founder Krist Novoselic's new group, The Bona Fide Band, have just played their first few shows in the Washington area, including Kurt Cobain's hometown Aberdeen. As fitting for the occasion, they paid tribute to Cobain with their own rendition of Love Buzz, a song that launched Nirvana's career.

The Bona Fide Band, which, aside from Novoselic on bass, consists of vocalists Jillian Raye and Jennifer Johnson from the grunge supergroup 3rd Secret, former Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel, guitarist Kathy More from The Kathy Moore Super Power Trio, debuted at Easy Street Records in Seattle on June 20. The band performed at the Make Music Day celebrations in Aberdeen, Washington a day later.

While their set heavily skewed towards tracks from the 3rd Secret's repertoire and Novoselic's former band Giants in the Trees, the band covered psych-rock band Shocking Blue's Love Buzz.

This performance served as a nod to Nirvana, who famously released a cover of Love Buzz as their debut Sub Pop single in 1988. A slightly different mix later appeared on Nirvana's debut album Bleach.

Speaking of his new band and this performance to Seattle's KOMO News, Novoselic said he formed The Bona Fide Band partly to raise awareness of his new political party, the Cascade Party.

“It's moving. I'm really looking forward to playing in Aberdeen, and that's on June 21st on World Music Day. We're just going to make music and try to make people happy and entertain people.”

“If it brings back memories and feelings for people, that's the magic of music,” he asserted. “We're not going to contaminate that with politics. We're not going to make these political speeches.”

For the occasion, Novoselic brandished an Alpine White Gibson Thunderbird bass. In a 2011 interview with Bass Player, he commented on his career-long affinity for Gibson basses, particularly the Gibson Ripper he used during his Nirvana days.

“I’m six foot seven,” he commented, “which is lucky, because it’s a big bass. Check one out when you go to a music store. Try it on, because it’s big and heavy, it’s a big gun, but it’s got that sustain that I really like. You just let the note ring. That’s probably why I stuck with Gibson basses the whole way through, because they’re so dense.”

Sitting at the very top of the list of the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction is Kurt Cobain’s iconic MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E, which sold in 2020 for a whopping $6,010,000.

However, according to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay – the renowned guitar collector, whose own catalog comprises a huge array of high-profile electric guitars – that figure “doesn’t make any sense,” and the D-18E isn’t actually worth that much.

The acoustic guitar was bought by Rode Microphones owner Peter Freedman, whom Irsay says had his own personal valuation of an instrument that clearly meant so much to him as a fan of Cobain.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he says of the sale figure in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It was not worth that, but it was to him.”

That much is true. As per Rolling Stone, Freedman particularly wanted the acoustic as Nirvana's music had helped him through difficult times during the '90s.

Funnily enough, the second most expensive guitar to have sold at auction is another Kurt Cobain guitar – his Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang, which was bought in 2022 for $4,550,000 by – you guessed it – Irsay himself.

Despite his Cobain guitar costing just $1.5 million less than Freedman’s, Irsay says his purchase is easier to justify owing to its greater cultural and musical significance.

“That being Kurt’s main guitar, and the electric guitar that survived the stage and survived many a jump – versus a one-night show – I felt [the electric guitar] was worth more,” Irsay says.

However, Freedman, who was also interviewed for the Rolling Stone piece, was given the opportunity to rebut Irsay’s comments, and was quick to dismiss the NFL team owner’s observations that Cobain only used the Martin D-18E for the MTV performance.

“It was not a one-off guitar that Kurt bought and put away,” Freedman fires back.

Irsay’s comments are worth hearing out, though, especially since he has emerged as one of the most high-profile guitar collectors of our time.

His roster includes an ultra-rare 1964 Fender Jazzmaster owned by Jimi Hendrix, David Gilmour’s famed Black Strat, and Bob Dylan’s Newport Folk Festival Strat, which he says is his favorite guitar of the lot.

In fact, Irsay’s guitar collection is so revered that he apparently was once offered over $1 billion to sell the entire catalog and relocate it to Dubai.

We’ve all been there. The string break. The dreaded string break. That dawning realisation that you’ll have to nip down to Guitar Center or, most likely, order a whole new set of strings from Amazon. The pain. The upheaval. The admin. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? 

No, this is not an article about unbreakable strings – but instead about the world of guitarists who play with missing strings on purpose. These luminaries from the worlds of grunge, reggae, metal, new wave and beyond show us that the odd snapped string need not be an obstacle, but an opportunity.

1. Keith Richards

Keith Richards is by far the most notable guitarist to use a restricted string setup. His distinctive five-string chime can be heard on some of The Rolling Stones’ best tracks, including Brown Sugar and Start Me Up.

In the late 1960s, after realising he “was not going to get any better on the sixth string,” Keef started experimenting with open tunings in order to allow him access to new resonances, frequencies and chords that weren’t always possible on the traditional six-string standard tuning configuration. It’s proof that The Human Riff was always keeping his ears open to new sonic possibilities.

2. Bill Orcutt 

Bill Orcutt is a giant in the experimental world. After forming then disbanding influential noise rockers Harry Pussy in the 1990s, he went on to cultivate a knotty and uncompromising solo catalogue, as well as many fruitful collaborations.

The defining characteristic of albums such as Odds Against Tomorrow and – fittingly – Why Four Strings? is the four-string guitars he plays. He removes the second and third strings, and the space between the low E and the G gives his tone a distinctive roaring, yowling sound.

The albums he’s made with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet – Music For Four Guitars and ​​Four Guitars Live – show the primal power of what four four-strings can do in unison.

3. Ricky Wilson

Easily one of the most inventive guitarists in new wave, Ricky Wilson of The B-52’s lent his chops to legendary cuts including Rock Lobster, Mesopotamia and Private Idaho. The key to his urgent, snappy, wound-tight style was heavy-gauge strings, Mosrite guitars, bonkers tunings (BADXG#C#, anyone?) and the four and five-string set-ups he favoured.

His tragic death from AIDS in 1985 cut short what should have been a longer and more illustrious career. Indeed, many believe the real sound of The B-52’s died with Wilson. 

4. Seasick Steve

With his bushy white beard, baseball cap and beat-up red hollowbody of unidentifiable origin, Seasick Steve is immediately recognisable. Nicknamed ‘The Three-String Trance Wonder,’ the instrument provides the perfect gutbucket backing for his tales of getting booked “for vagrancy” and “sleeping under a bridge.” Add a brass slide and a touch of Tube Screamer overdrive, and Steve really makes the guitar sing.

Whether you believe his backstory or not, Steve posits that this set-up came about through pure expediency, saying: “If you broke a couple of strings and were a baby about it, and said you weren’t going to play, then you didn’t eat.”

5. Kurt Cobain

A devotee of lo-fi music and Leadbelly, Kurt Cobain channeled this appreciation into Nevermind, Nirvana’s breakthrough album. Listen to any of the acoustic guitars and you’ll hear the slack, muted rattle of his dilapidated Harmony Stella.

The guitar frequently went out of tune, had its tuning pegs held in place with duct tape, and had five nylon strings despite being designed for 12 steel strings. You can hear its unique tone most prominently on the moody banger Something In The Way, as well as Polly.

It’s rather endearing that Cobain – who could have owned any high-end acoustic – so often plumped for a $20 model. The moral is simple: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

6. Brushy One String

Brushy One String takes the philosophy of the restricted set-up to the next level. After giving up the guitar as a child, he was reportedly inspired by a dream to play using just a single string.

His Chicken In The Corn video has 64 million views on YouTube. It best demonstrates his unique style, which involves beating out percussion parts on a truly battered acoustic guitar, and thumping his string like a bass.

Brandon Rodriguez, who works for NASA, says in an excellent TED Talk that “constraints aren’t the boundaries of creativity, but the foundation of it” – and Brushy One String is a testament to that.

7. Max Cavalera

Co-founder of metal legends Sepultura and leader of Soulfly, Max Cavelera has been wielding a four-string configuration since two broke off on an early tour, and he never bothered to replace them.

He explained in 2008: “I just do rhythm,” hence the reason he had no need for the other strings. The configuration allows him to emphasise his unfussy power chord-based style, best heard on Sepultura ragers like Roots Bloody Roots and Refuse/Resist.

8. Henri Cash

Henri Cash, guitarist of LA-based rockers Starcrawler, was first inspired to use his three-string configuration after learning guitar via open tunings.

In 2023 he said: “It’s something I’ve done since I was a kid… My dad played guitar, and he used a lot of open tunings. I kind of narrowed that down to the bare essentials and found that three strings were all I needed.”

You can hear the sound of his gorgeous custom-made ‘White Bat’ triple-string on Starcrawler albums such as Devour You and She Said, where it adds a Stonesy swagger to the glam rock backing. 

9. The Presidents of the United States of America

Ever heard of a ‘basitar’ or a ‘guitbass’? Enter The Presidents of the United States of America and their Frankenstein’s monster-esque instruments.

Singer and bassist Chris Ballew told Bass Player Magazine in 1997: “I've always been of a disposition to take off strings and find my own way to do things.” He played a guitar strung with two bass strings, while Dave Dederer used a guitar strung with three guitar strings tuned to drop D.

Much like Max Cavalera’s instrument, the guitbass and basitar are machine-tooled for pure impact – an adaptation that suits the raucous energy of albums such as PUSA’s self-titled debut and Love Everybody.

10. Leo Kottke

In a case of the tail wagging the dog, Leo Kottke once sawed off his Martin D-12’s top two machine heads so “it’d fit into a normal case.”

Listening to Kottke’s immaculate fretwork – all sparkling, liquid runs and muscular fingerpicking – you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the output of a different, more pristine instrument. But no: it was a battered 10-string that was taped up like a rugby union prop, with battle scars and an amputation to boot.

That this old war horse is responsible for some of the most thrilling American primitive guitar is yet more evidence that when it comes to strings, less is often more.

When it comes to guitar auctions, artist connections rule. The world’s most expensive electric guitars and acoustic guitars have been refinished, refretted, and beaten up, but thanks to their rock star provenance they’re worth more than any mint condition 1959 Gibson Les Paul.

The list that follows, containing the most expensive guitars ever sold at auction, is all the evidence you need to prove such a theory. The list itself looked very different, up until March 2026, when the greatest guitar auction in history took place in New York.

The Jim Irsay Collection auction – hosted by Christie's and comprising some of the late collector's storied possessions – shattered records, smashed estimates, and obliterated expectations, completely flipping the list of the most expensive guitars of all time on its head.

Private sale prices are notoriously hard to confirm. As a result, we’ve left out Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock Stratocaster (reportedly sold for $1.3m in 1993 to Microsoft’s Paul Allen) and the infamous Peter Green/Gary Moore Les Paul, for which Kirk Hammett allegedly paid $2 million in 2014.

Everything else goes, though, so read on to find out which instruments make it into the list of the most expensive guitars to go under the hammer.

22. Eric Clapton's "Blackie" Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2004
Price: $959,000

"Blackie" set a world record auction price at the time of sale, but now barely scrapes into the top 11.

When Clapton fancied a Fender Stratocaster in 1970, he bought the entire stock from Nashville’s Sho-Bud. He gave three to his friends George Harrison, Pete Townshend, and Steve Winwood, and assembled his ideal Strat from the rest: a ’56 body, ’57 neck, and a third guitar’s pickups (two '50s models and one 1970 grey bottom).

Clapton played it almost exclusively from 1974 to 1985. By the end, the neck was so worn that the low E string hung off the edge, which must be why it didn’t quite reach the one-million mark.

21. Bob Dylan's 1964 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2013
Price: $965,000

At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan went electric, toting this 1964 Stratocaster, which he subsequently left on a private plane. Pilot Vic Quinto picked it up, and it stayed with his family for nearly 50 years.

Auction catalog photos show it in excellent condition for a gigged guitar, with the Three-Tone Sunburst largely free of dings or fading. As an example of a pre-CBS Stratocaster, this was a fine specimen even before you consider the history.

With original strap and case included, it was expected to fetch up to $500k. In the event, it stole "Blackie"’s crown.

20. Rory Gallagher's 1961 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: London, 2024
Price: $1,160,000

The announcement that Rory Gallagher's family would be selling his legendary 1961 Fender Stratocaster – along with a load of his other gear – quite literally sparked international interest. Members of the Irish government endorsed a grassroots fundraising effort to keep the guitar in the late blues rock great's native country of Ireland. Joe Bonamassa endorsed the idea.

Owing to the significance of this particular Strat (legend has it it was actually the first to ever reach Irish soil), no one will be surprised to see it make this list. Gallagher wielded this heavily aged guitar throughout the course of his career, and used it to cement himself as one of the all-time greats of guitar music.

When the auction rolled around in October 2024, the hammer eventually went down at £700,000 (£889,400 with the added buyer's premium), which equates to $1.26 million. Fortunately for those who wished to see the Strat stay in Ireland, the successful bidder donated it to a national museum.

19. Duane Allman's 1957 Gibson Les Paul

Sold: Dallas, 2019
Price: $1,250,000

Guitar nerds may be surprised that the most expensive Les Paul is not in fact a Burst, but this 1957 Goldtop. It was used on first two Allman Brothers albums, as well as Derek & the Dominos’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, before Duane traded it for a sunburst model. Allman insisted on keeping the pickups, so this guitar now has the humbuckers from the Burst.

A subsequent owner refinished it badly, before Tom Murphy restored it to glory. Former owner Scot Lamar frequently loaned it out, so you’ve seen it on stage with the likes of Billy Gibbons, Kirk Hammett, and Derek Trucks.

18. John Lennon's 1963 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $1,270,000

One of three John Lennon guitars on this list, his Gretsch 6120 Chat Atkins was used during the recording sessions of Paperback Writer and Rain. The 1963 model also sold for $1,270,000 – a figure justified by the influence it had during one of the Beatles’ most innovative and creative periods in the lead up to Revolver.

It stayed in Lennon’s home studio until late 1967, when he gifted it to his younger cousin. By then, it had already been etched into Beatles lore.

17. John Lennon's 1964 Rickenbacker Model 1996

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $1,270,000

A few John Lennon guitars went under the hammer for the Jim Irsay Collection auction in March 2026, and while none pipped the Framus or the J160E, his stage-played Rickenbacker– used during the Beatles Christmas shows in 1964 and 1965 – crept into the top 20 when it sold for $1,270,000.

Lennon and Ricks go hand in hand, hence the price of this one. Notably, this one has traditional f-holes instead of the usual Rickenbacker ‘slash’ soundholes. In 1968, it was gifted to Ringo Starr. So, a double-whammy for Beatles fans.

16. Kurt Cobain’s 1993 Fender Mustang “Sky Stang I”

Sold: Nashville
Price: $1,587,500

March 1, 1994 marked the date of Nirvana’s final show with Kurt Cobain – and the Sky Stang I featured heavily in that performance, having become the frontman’s go-to guitar for the majority of the band’s In Utero tour dates.

The instrument was one of 10 ordered by Cobain in July 1993. It was built in Japan at the iconic Fujigen factory by custom luthier Scott Zimmerman.

Why Japan? Well, at that point, Fender’s US custom shop did not produce left-handed models, so the task fell to Zimmerman – the man behind the necks on Cobain’s first Jagstang builds.

Following Cobain’s death, the Sky Stang I passed to his brother Chad Cobain before eventually going to auction in late 2023. The guitar was purchased by Japan-based businessman Mitsuru Sato, so after 30 years abroad, it seems the instrument headed home.

15. David Gilmour's 1954 Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2019
Price: $1,815,000

Here’s a guitar that would have been collectible even without the Pink Floyd provenance. Its serial number, #0001, makes it confusingly not the very first Strat (that was #0100) but nevertheless among the first pre-production Strats given to Fender endorsees.

The first owner was country star Rex Gallion, and en route to Gilmour it was owned by Seymour Duncan. The fact that it was also used to record the Nile Rodgers-esque rhythm parts on Another Brick in the Wall was just a bonus. Auctioneer Christie’s guide price of $100-150k proved unnecessarily pessimistic.

14. Jerry Garcia's "Wolf"

Sold: New York, 2017
Price: $1,900,000

The only guitar here not built by a major manufacturer, the "Wolf" was luthier Doug Irwin’s bespoke creation for the Grateful Dead guitarist. Using laminated maple and purpleheart – an incredibly stiff South American wood – Irwin invented an instrument with a new shape, hardware, and controls.

An ingenious plate system allowed pickup systems to be dropped in and out, while two outputs let Garcia run his effects loop separately and switch it from the guitar. Iconic to Deadheads, the "Wolf" was the flagship of a Grateful Dead auction that raised $3.2 million for civil rights charity, the Southern Poverty Law Center.

13. George Harrison's Gibson SG Standard

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $2,271,000

A new entry into the list as of March 2026, George Harrison joined John Lennon in the annals of expensive guitar history when his 1964 SG Standard sold for $2,271,000 as part of the Jim Irsay Collection auction.

It’s a lot of money for an SG Standard, of course, but the Fab Four connection here is the key. It was used extensively by the Beatle both on stage and in the studio between 1966 and 1968, making it one of Harrison’s longest-serving instruments. It was played during the sessions of both the White Album and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and was also used by Lennon during the making of Hey Bulldog in 1968.

Christie’s said “it’s impossibly rare for such a well-documented and extensively used Beatles guitar to come to auction”.

12. David Gilmour's Martin D-35

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $2,393,000

Another Gilmour record-breaker, the Martin D-35 that he used to record Wish You Were Here was sold for $2,393,000 – a sizable increase from the mere $1,095,000 it sold for in 2019.

In 2003, David Gilmour told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs his Martin D-35 was the one luxury item he’d want if he were stranded at sea. “It’s the best guitar I own,” he said. “It’s the guitar that’s always by my side. I’ve written just about every piece of music using that guitar. My ideas come through that guitar.”

Most prominently heard on Wish You Were Here, it was used on every Pink Floyd album from Dark Side of the Moon (1973) to The Final Cut (1983). The 1969 D-35 proved not to be entirely indispensable, however, as Gilmour auctioned it to benefit the charity ClimateEarth.

11. John Lennon's Gibson J160E

Sold: Los Angeles, 2015
Price: $2,410,000

Whacking a pickup in a standard acoustic guitar was a Gibson masterstroke, giving rock ’n’ rollers exactly what they needed to be heard. John Lennon used this particular guitar to write hits like I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and to record most acoustic moments on Beatles songs from 1962-1963.

The acoustic was even on the Beatles’ first US number one, Love Me Do, but was stolen at a Christmas concert in 1963. Lennon replaced it and carried on using J-160Es for the rest of the Beatles’ career. Given its significance to rock history, it’s hardly surprising that it fetched a record price when it re-emerged in 2015.

10. Reach Out to Asia Fender Stratocaster

Sold: Qatar, 2005
Price: $2,700,000

Unique here in that it was never owned by a superstar, the Reach Out to Asia Strat was auctioned for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

It was a humble Mexican Standard Stratocaster bearing the signatures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend, Mark Knopfler, Ray Davies, Liam Gallagher, Ronnie Wood, Tony Iommi, Angus and Malcolm Young, Paul McCartney, Sting, Ritchie Blackmore, Def Leppard and Bryan Adams.

New made-in-Mexico Strats sold for around $350 in 2005, making this objectively the most overpriced axe of all time.

9. Eddie Van Halen's ‘Kramer Ad’ guitar

Sold: New York, 2025
Price: $2,734,000

Built in the early 1980s, this was one of the very first Kramer guitars that Eddie Van Halen built and used, and was famously featured in Van Halen’s “It’s very simply the best guitar you can buy today” Kramer ad.

The Kramer was also one of the first builds the brand and Van Halen collaborated on together, and was modeled after Van Halen’s iconic Frankenstein, carrying over the black/red/white striped colorway from the OG six-string.

It was used on stage during a number of occasions across 1982 and 1983, in locations such as Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela.

8. John Lennon's Help! 12-string Framus Hootenanny

Sold: New York, 2024
Price: $2,857,500

In April 2024, at a special preview event shrouded in mystery, Julien’s announced its discovery of John Lennon’s 12-string Framus Hootenanny – a hugely influential Beatles instrument that was used extensively during the Help! recording sessions in the ‘60s.

Used to record the film of the same name – and seen during a performance of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away – the guitar was found in the back of an attic, having been missing for 50 years. Its saviors were under no assumption: the Framus would be making headlines the world over, and could even set a new world record for guitar auctions.

While that didn’t quite happen, it did comfortably make it onto this list, smashing its absurdly conservative estimate of $800,000 and selling for $2,857,500 in May 2024. It also set a record for the most expensive Beatles guitar to sell at auction, beating out Lennon’s $2.4 million Gibson J-160E.

7. Eric Clapton’s 1964 ‘The Fool’ Gibson SG

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $3,003,000

Three years after it sold for just over $1,000,000 in 2023, Clapton’s ‘The Fool’ SG entered the top 10 in March 2026 when it re-sold at auction for $3,003,000. It ticks a lot of boxes as far as historical, musical and cultural significance is concerned.

The Fool became Slowhand’s go-to guitar in his post-Bluesbreaker days while he and his Cream bandmates were piecing together the riff-orientated Disraeli Gears. It became the face of the psychedelic era, thanks to its wild artwork, and helped concoct Clapton’s heralded ‘woman tone’, which underpinned hits such as Sunshine of Your Love.

Another headline-stealer from the Jim Irsay Collection auction, it broke the record for the most expensive Gibson guitar of all time.

6. Eddie Van Halen's Hot For Teacher Kramer

Sold: New York, 2023
Price: $3,932,000

There’s been no shortage of Eddie Van Halen guitar auctions over the past few years, but when news broke that the late guitar legend’s Hot For Teacher Kramer was going under the hammer… well, it was apparent that this case was different from all the others, and that the striped Kramer in question would be rubbing shoulders with some of the six-strings on this prestigious list.

Exceeding its auction estimate by nearly $1,000,000, the Paul Unkert-built beauty was reportedly one of Van Halen’s primary instruments in 1983 and 1984, and most notably starred in the iconic Hot For Teacher music video. Owing to this history, it sold for just shy of the four million dollar mark in early 2023.

Few guitars of this caliber from the Van Halen camp are currently out in the wild, and we doubt those of greater significance will ever hit the auction block. As such, this might just be the most expensive Van Halen guitar that will ever sell at auction.

5. Eric Clapton's MTV Unplugged Martin 000-42

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $4,101,000

For a long time, Cobain’s D-18E was the only acoustic in the top 10 of this list. Now, thanks to Clapton’s record-breaking Martin 000-42, it’s got company. The 1939 acoustic famously featured on that iconic MTV Unplugged performance, and when it sold for $4,101,000 in 2026, it became the most expensive Slowhand guitar to ever go under the hammer.

It was expected to sell for up to $1,200,000 but, of course, it smashed that ceiling. This Martin can be seen on the MTV Unplugged cover, and was one of four guitars used for that concert. With this, Clapton played eight of the 17 songs, including Layla, Before You Accuse Me, and Old Love.

4. Kurt Cobain's Martin D-18E

Sold: Los Angeles, 2020
Price: $6,010,000

In summer 2020, there wasn’t much to do apart from play guitar and bid on online auctions, which might be why Kurt’s guitar so comprehensively smashed all records.

The D-18E was used for Nirvana’s immortal MTV Unplugged set, including the goosebump-raising cover of Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World. Because that gig was televised and universally lauded, this iconic instrument is indelibly associated with Kurt Cobain.

Rode Microphones owner Peter Freedman was the man with the dented wallet after the auction. He has promised to exhibit the guitar on a world tour, although Covid-19 has thus far scuppered that plan.

3. Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $6,907,000

It wasn’t that long ago that Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang went under the hammer for $4,550,000. At the time, it was a big deal. It was the second most expensive guitar to be sold at auction in 2022.

Amazingly, it’s been demoted a spot despite the fact it’s actually gone up in value, with the Mustang in question – which helped catapult Nirvana into the stratosphere and cement Smells Like Teen Spirit as a grunge anthem – selling for $6,907,000. And, yes, it was another Jim Irsay Collection auction sale.

Known for its starring role in the Smells Like Teen Spirit music video – which in turn played a vital part in launching Nirvana’s popularity straight into the stratosphere – the Mustang’s near-mythical appearance has now been viewed on YouTube almost 1.5 billion times, after it made its debut on MTV’s 120 Minutes on September 29, 1991.

2. Jerry Garcia Tiger

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $11,560,000

Somewhere further down this list, you’ll see Jerry Garcia’s Wolf guitar, which sold in 2017 for just shy of $2,000,000. Well, step aside, dear Wolf, because there’s another Garcia guitar in town now – the equally iconic Tiger, which fetched $11,560,000 at the Jim Irsay Collection auction in 2026.

It’s now one of two guitars not made by a major manufacturer on this list (something that no doubt heightens its appeal and prestige) and we’re not surprised to see yet another Garcia guitar get so much love. It was expected to sell for $2,000,000. It sold for a lot more.

1. David Gilmour's Black Fender Stratocaster

Sold: New York, 2026
Price: $14,550,000

When it sold in 2019 for nearly $4,000,000, David Gilmour’s legendary Black Strat became the fourth most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. When the Jim Irsay Collection auction swung around in March 2026, though, it was launched all the way to the top spot – selling for a staggering, record-shattering $14,550,000.

That’s a value increase of more than $10,000,000. Understandably, it holds a fair few records now. It’s the most expensive guitar ever. It’s the most expensive Fender Stratocaster ever. It’s the most expensive David Gilmour guitar ever. It is, quite frankly, an assortment of records that will probably never be broken.

Gilmour himself said he couldn’t tell the difference between the Black Strat and his signature model. But hey, you’re not paying $14,550,000 for just any ol’ Strat. It’s the Gilmour Strat, the one that played the Comfortably Numb solo. Its upper pre-auction estimate of $4,000,000 looks very silly now.

Kurt Cobain’s 1993 Fender Mustang electric guitar – known as the Sky Stang I – sold at auction on Saturday (18 November) for more than $1.5 million. 

The Nirvana frontman’s name has previously been associated with several of the highest-value guitar sales of all time and the price fetched by the Mustang comfortably places it among those ranks.

Indeed, the latest sale means that Kurt Cobain’s instruments now occupy three of the top 10 spots in the list of the most expensive guitars sold at auction. Previously, he and David Gilmour had two apiece on the list.

Cobain’s sales also eclipse that of Gilmour when it comes to value, with Gilmour’s sales worth a total of $5,790,000 – a figure that is more than doubled by the $12,147,500 raised for Cobain’s three guitars.

When we first reported on the Sky Stang I auction, we mentioned it could be a prime candidate for Jim Irsay’s billion-dollar guitar collection, but in the end the auction was won by Japan-based businessman Mitsuru Sato – who paid a final price of $1,587,500.

Irsay won’t feel too hard done by, however. A portion of the sale price has gone towards his Kicking the Stigma non-profit (which campaigns to raise awareness of mental health conditions). In addition, Irsay also scooped up Eric Clapton’s iconic 1964 Gibson SG ‘The Fool’ for $1,270,000.

The Sky Stang I is one of 10 Fender Mustangs that were ordered by Cobain in the summer of 1993. The guitars were built in Japan, by Scott Zimmerman, a luthier based at the Fujigen factory. At that point, the brand did not have the capability to produce left-handed models at their US custom shop facilities.

The instrument then became Cobain’s go-to guitar for much of the In Utero tour, seeing use in 53 of the tour’s 63 shows, including the band’s MTV Live and Loud appearance and, most poignantly, Cobain’s last Nirvana show on March 1, 1994 at Terminal 1 in Munich, Germany.

Its provenance is also unquestionable, with the distinctive V-shape mark on the scratchplate being clearly visible in numerous images and video footage from the period. 

Following Cobain’s death, the Sky Stang I passed to his brother Chad Cobain, who held onto the guitar until putting it up for auction last month.

The final price fetched in this latest auction also vastly exceeds that of its sibling, the Sky Stang III, which went up for auction in 2019 and sold for $340,000. That instrument also saw use on the In Utero tour and was later gifted to a fan by Courtney Love.

However, even the Sky Stang I remains a relative minnow when you compare it to $4.5 million price fetched by the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, or the astonishing $6 million fetched by Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin.

We’re not sure what the Nirvana frontman would have made of the extreme prices commanded by his instruments nearly 30 years on from his death, but we do know that when it comes to guitar auctions, Cobain remains the undisputed king.

For more information on the Sky Stang I, head to Julien’s Auctions.

Just when we think we’ve seen the last of the Kurt Cobain mega auctions, something else comes along that blows our minds. Now Julien’s Auctions has announced that a made-in-Japan Fender Mustang electric guitar used by Kurt Cobain at his final public performance with Nirvana is going under the hammer.

Known as the The Sky Stang I, Cobain reportedly used the guitar extensively throughout his final tour dates with Nirvana, following the release of In Utero.

“Former Nirvana guitar technician Earnie Bailey refers to this Electric Blue Mustang as the Nirvana front man’s ‘workhorse,’” reads the Julien’s Auctions listing. 

“From its In Utero stage debut on October 18th, 1993 at the Arizona State Fair Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum, to the band’s final performance on March 1, 1994 at Terminal 1 in Munich, this storied guitar was used during 53 of the 63 In Utero tour performances and the band’s final chapter.”

The Sky Stang I was one of 10 left-handed Mustang models reportedly bought by the guitarist ahead of the tour, but clearly became one of his go-tos as the shows progressed.

It is distinguished by the combination of its Electric Blue finish, a unique yellow ‘V’ shape on the tortoiseshell-style pickguard and a white humbucker in the bridge position. There is also a sizeable crack on the rear of the instrument, running from the neck heel to about half way down the body.

Of course, provenance is everything in celebrity gear auctions and the Sky Stang I has that in spades.

There is official footage of Cobain playing the Sky Stang I at the Munich show for a tongue-in-cheek cover of The Cars’ My Best Friend's Girl. 

It was also used for nearly all of the band’s MTV Live and Loud show in December, 1993 and has previously been on display in Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. 

And, if all that’s not good enough for you, it is currently owned by one Chad Cobain –the late frontman’s brother.

In Kurt Cobain’s final interview with Guitar World, back in 1993, the Nirvana man discussed his reasons for playing the Mustang.

"I don’t favor them – I can afford them,” Cobain joked to Guitar World, at the time. 

“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 favorite.”

At that point (February 1992), Cobain only owned two of them. The aforementioned order of 10 lefties came in July 1993.

The current estimate on the Sky Stang I is $1,000,000 – $2,000,000, but other notable Cobain instruments have far exceeded that. Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang fetched $4.5 million and his MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E went for over $6 million – placing it at the top of the pile when it comes to the most expensive guitars sold at auction.

This, along with Eric Clapton’s iconic Gibson SG ‘Fool’, which is also going up for auction, would seem to be prime candidates for Jim Irsay’s billion-dollar guitar collection. 

Regardless, let’s hope they both go somewhere we can see them… To register to bid, head to Julien’s Auctions.

A Teisco Del Ray EV-2T electric guitar engraved by Kurt Cobain has sold at auction for $153,000.

The electric guitar was never actually owned by Cobain, but had an interesting provenance, given the Nirvana man reportedly played it and inscribed the word ‘sick’ on the body when he stayed with previous owner, Johnny Cooper.

The guitar came with a letter of provenance from Cooper and carried a minimum bid of $10,000. 

That figure was comfortably exceeded by the close of the sale, with a winning bid of $120,000 (which was then subject to a 25% sales premium and other fees, making for the final $153,000 price tag).

As we have previously reported, guitars associated with the Nirvana frontman repeatedly rank among the highest-value instruments in the world. 

A Martin D-18E played by Cobain during his iconic MTV Unplugged performance is currently the most expensive guitar sold at auction, having gone for $6 million. 

Meanwhile, the Fender Mustang used by Cobain the Smells Like Teen Spirit video occupies second place, with a price tag of $4.5 million.

It seems that some of that stardust has rubbed off on the Teisco. However, the same cannot be said for the Franciscan acoustic guitar that featured in the same sale and appears to have gone unsold. 

That instrument hailed from the 1996 Kurt Cobain estate sale and, while we hate to be that guy, GW’s initial observation that the auctioneer’s minimum price of $50,000 was optimistic appears to have rung true. 

Indeed, it proves that merely being a Cobain-associated acoustic is not enough to command the big bucks, if there’s no evidence of particular usage or interaction. Rather, if there’s one clear trend, it’s that personality counts when it comes to Cobain auctions. 

In comparison, the MTV Unplugged Martin has distinctive control knob mods, was used extensively in arguably the most iconic acoustic performance of the last 30 years – and has the advantage of being a vintage Martin build, to boot.

The Teisco certainly has character and a good story, too. In addition, as GW reader Teja pointed out to us following our previous story on the Teisco, Cobain’s ‘sick’ engraving also appears to have contained the frontman’s initials – note the small ‘C’ that appears to follow the K on the close-up.

On that point, some of the songwriter’s otherwise indistinct gear has also fetched huge prices thanks to his graffiti adornments. Not least, Cobain’s ‘Nirwahna’ Boss DS-1, which fetched $75,000 at auction last year.

2023 marks 30 years of Nirvana’s In Utero, and ever since it was released guitarists have obsessed over how to best replicate Kurt Cobain’s incendiary, unsanitary electric guitar tones. But the secret behind Cobain’s tone might finally have been revealed by a YouTuber with a serious In Utero obsession.

Aaron Rash has made a series of videos about Nirvana but in this latest video, in which he concludes that the secret behind Cobain’s In Utero tone is not just in finding a vintage Fender Quad Reverb – in itself quite a feat, for the company only made them for four years or so – but finding a Quad loaded with what he describes as one of the rarest speakers in the world.

Rash admits that it might be “a little weird” that every video he makes is about Nirvana or Kurt Cobain but he promises he is not obsessed. He is not going to grow his hair out, dye it blond and wear oval-framed Christian Roth sunglasses. It is In Utero that fascinates him. Savage, untamed, wild and electric and yet somehow organic, as though Cobain exhumed those tones from the dirt.

While it would seem as though we already have everything we need to understand Cobain’s In Utero tone, and thus everything required to replicate it, it’s always out of reach. It is remarkable we have got this far, with In Utero long since immortalized in the pop-cultural firmament, that the album still holds such mystery. It’s like the Zodiac Killer of guitar tones. Rash, for his part, is our Robert Graysmith.

We know, thanks to Cobain’s guitar tech, Ernie Bailey, in conversation with Reverb in 2014, that Cobain favored his Competition Blue Mustang, a Jaguar and producer Steve Albini’s aluminum Veleno for the sessions. 

Rash is aware of this, and even built a replica of the Veleno in search of the Holy Grail. We know there was a Quad Reverb. What Rash has discovered, however, from A/Bing different Quads, is that the speakers don’t just matter – the speaker is everything.

“Fender was on this speaker train way before anybody else was,” he says. “They understood. They knew that, ‘Hey, different speaker, different tone.’ You can use the same amp head and still get a lot of different tones with different speakers.”

Which is why just getting any old Quad Reverb won’t necessarily get you the exact same tone – even accounting for the usual caveats that tone is in the fingers, a consequence of how we as individuals touch the guitar, the pressure we exert on the strings, and so forth.

As Rash tells it, Bailey turned Cobain on to the Quad Reverb and they picked one up from a listing in Tacoma, Washington. Up to ’74, Quad Reverbs packed Oxford speakers, with blue stickers on the back. Rash says there was the one year where things changed for the Quad; Fender reverted to Utah speakers, with the orange stickers on the back. And this, 30 years on, is the secret sauce.

“That’s really the missing ingredient to the sound of In Utero, this Utah speaker,” says Rash. 

To prove just how critical these speakers are on the tone – not the tone stack, not the tubes, not the guitar amp per se – Rash runs the signal from his Randall combo out through the Utah speakers, and it is uncannily accurate.

“What is really crazy about this speaker, like, I thought it was the Filter Matrix [from the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress], and it actually wasn’t,” says Rash. “It’s just these speakers. They have like a natural Filter Matrix sound built-in. They just sound like that.”

So there you have it. Forget the amp. After all, the schematics for the Quad Reverb and the Twin are the same. It’s the speakers. Maybe someone should make an IR of these Utah speakers. 

Oh, Rash is already on it, and through a Tech 21 SansAmp pedal and a home captured impulse response, it already sounds pretty good. His next step is to take the Quad to a studio, mic it like In Utero, and make “an exact digital copy” of the tone. Will it work?

Technically, yes. But as Bailey said to Reverb in 2014, in the grand scheme of things, the gear didn’t matter much to Nirvana.

“They were a rock band that used both good and bad equipment, but in the end, it was the songwriting that made them important,” he said.

You can follow Aaron Rash on YouTube, and check out his In Utero Quad Reverb speaker conclusions above.

GWS Auctions has announced that its forthcoming Artifacts of Hollywood and Music sale will feature a Teisco Del Ray EV-2T electric guitar that was played and signed by Kurt Cobain, as well as a Franciscan acoustic guitar from the Nirvana man’s collection.

Kurt Cobain gear auctions have become increasingly regular fixtures in recent years, and it’s not surprising given the premium prices fetched by guitars associated with the Nirvana frontman.

Having never been owned directly by Cobain, the Teisco has a more tenuous association with the songwriter than the likes of the Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, so we don’t think it will bring in the mega-bucks.

However, as mentioned previously, frankly, any instrument with a Cobain attachment commands a serious price tag and this one certainly has a few endearing features.

Firstly, Cobain altered it, carving the word ‘SICK’ on the guitar’s body and signing the rear. It’s not the same level of doodling found on Cobain’s characterful Boss DS-1, but the personalization element has gone down well in previous sales – including the world’s most expensive guitar pick – and offers a direct connection to the guitarist.

Secondly, there’s a nice tale of provenance from the original owner, Johnny Cooper.

“[I] did a lot of jamming with Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana,” writes Cooper. “We spent a big part of the younger years on the road up and down the West Coast doing what we loved, playing music. This Teisco Del Ray EV-2T in Lake Placid blue was used and played and signed by Kurt Cobain.

“In 1985 while Kurt stayed at my apartment here in Olympia WA. Kurt took the guitar and carved the word 'SICK' at the bottom of it and then after that I had Kurt sign it on the back. There are some nicks on the guitar and one string missing.”

At that point, Cobain had formed a band called Fecal Matter, which at various points featured future Melvins members Dale Crover, Buzz Osborne and Mike Dillard. A demo of that band would later persuade Krist Novoselic to collaborate with Cobain in what become Nirvana.

Finally, it’s a novel design. A $50 catalog guitar that was produced in the late-’60s and inspired by the look of the Vox Phantom, the Teisco Del Ray EV-2T, like many of its peers, has been reappraised by players in recent years.

As such, it’s now increasingly sought-after, particularly by indie players seeking out the guitar industry’s 1960s freaks and geeks and, like many Teisco/Silvertone designs, the quirks in playability are compensated for by its chiming single-coil pickups.

The Teisco carries a minimum bid of $10,000.

Elsewhere in the same sale is a Kurt Cobain-owned Franciscan CS-19 acoustic guitar, complete with case that was purchased from the 1996 Cobain estate sale, which features a Dean Markley sticker on the lower body – the brand of strings Cobain was known to use.

That one is a Japanese-made model that did not go under Cobain’s carving knife, but does come with the original auction invoice.

The auctioneers seem more excited by the acoustic, giving it a minimum bid of $50,000 – no doubt with one eye on the $6 million price tag of Cobain’s MTV Unplugged Martin D-18E.

We’re not convinced that the fact it is an acoustic lot is enough to justify such an increased minimum bid – we’d be more tempted by the Teisco, frankly. However, if we’ve learned one thing from Cobain gear auctions, it’s that someone is always willing to pay more than you’d expect…

Bidding for the Kurt Cobain Teisco and Franciscan acoustic opens on August 26 at 10am PT, so we’ll have to wait to find out final sale prices.

We wonder if these, like the Mustang, will wind up in Jim Irsay’s billion dollar guitar collection.

For now, you can head over to GWS Auctions to see the Cobain guitar lots.

Jim Irsay has revealed that he has received an offer from a “middle east element” to purchase his renowned pop culture and guitar collection in its entirety. 

The businessman and Indianapolis Colts owner has steadily acquired the world’s finest collection of iconic guitars, music and sports memorabilia.

It includes some of rock music’s most famous electric guitars, among them David Gilmour’s Black Fender Stratocaster, Jerry Garcia’s Tiger, the Strat Bob Dylan used to ‘go electric’ at the Newport Folk Festival and the Fender Mustang that Kurt Cobain used in the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit. 

And that’s before we get on to the world’s only complete Beatles drum kit, the original single-scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and even Muhammed Ali’s Championship belt from his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle victory over George Foreman.

Now, in a new conversation with Eddie Trunk, Irsay says the offer from an unnamed middle eastern contingent mirrors some of the recent big money moves made from the region into sports like golf and soccer. 

The purchase offer, which it seems Irsay has turned down, would have reportedly seen the collection moved in its entirety to Dubai.

“I was offered by a middle east element – kind of like what’s been going on in golf a little bit – 1.150 billion dollars for the collection,” Irsay tells Trunk [around 58 mins]. “They wanted to move it to Dubai and they wanted it in totality.”

While Irsay does not go into further detail about the origin of the bid, it would likely have meant the loss of a significant chunk of the US’s cultural heritage.

Currently, Irsay periodically displays the collection and arranges free tours and performances featuring celebrity names – for instance, Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s performance of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb on Gilmour’s Black Strat last year.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Irsay explains his attachment to the collection and discusses some of the most valuable items – revealing that the most expensive purchase was not a guitar. 

“I’ve put this together for 25 years, with blood, sweat and tears,” says Irsay. “The collective of this ‘collection’ is so incredible, because there’s nothing like it. And you can’t get certain things anymore. You can’t get [Jerry Garcia’s guitar] Tiger anymore. You can’t get David Gilmour’s Strat or the Beatles drum kit. It’s just not out there. 

“The highest [value] thing that was bought at auction was actually Ali’s belt,” continues Irsay. “That went for almost seven million dollars. 

“[Then] the guitars keep breaking records. Gilmour’s Strat went for four million and 67 nations tuned in to that auction… Everything keeps going really up in value, because they’ve been owned for more than 20 years.”

In the same conversation, Irsay also names his favorite guitar from his $1 billion collection. If you want to hear the whole chat, head to The Eddie Trunk podcast. 

For more on some of the instrument’s from Irsay’s incredible haul, read about the 12 most expensive guitars sold at auction.

Nirvana and Aerosmith are two bands that would not necessarily be seen as natural bedfellows. Indeed, the grunge rockers are often positioned as the force that obliterated the ’80s rock and hair metal scene.

Now, in a recent interview with Classic Rock magazine (via Louder), Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry has discussed the time he met Cobain backstage after a show in Seattle in the early ’90s.

“He was pretty quiet. He just wanted to hang out,” recalls Perry. “He came in the dressing room with Courtney [Love] and kind of just sat around with us. He was a normal guy.

“When he went off to the bathroom, Courtney – who was very verbal – said: ‘He loves you guys. He doesn’t like anybody, but he loves you guys.‘ I had nothing but respect for the guy. He was an amazing songwriter and performer, and to hear that was great.”

Love’s reported comment tallies with what we know of the Nirvana man’s musical tastes. Cobain included the band’s 1976 album Rocks in his top 50 albums of all time – a list that was documented and reproduced in the Kurt Cobain Journals book. 

He also named an early Nirvana demo Aero Zeppelin, noting – again, in his journals  – that the song was not about the groups themselves, but was named in homage to “a couple of our favorite masturbatory ’70s rock acts”.

However, Cobain’s feelings towards both of those bands were more complex than Love – perhaps being a little diplomatic – appears to have let on in her conversation with Perry.

In 1993, in a candid interview with legendary UK music journalist Jon Savage, Cobain revealed he’d later grown annoyed with the classic rockers’ lyrical content.

“I listened to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, and I really did enjoy some of the melodies they'd written,” Cobain told Savage. 

“It took me so many years to realize that a lot of it had to do with sexism. The way that they just wrote about their dicks and having sex. I was just starting to understand what really was pissing me off so much, those last couple of years of high school. 

“And then punk rock was exposed and then it all came together. It just fit together like a puzzle. It expressed the way I felt socially and politically. Just everything, you know? It was the anger that I felt. The alienation.”

So there it is – it may not always have been a straight case of hero worship, but Aerosmith (and ’Zeppelin) ultimately shaped the Nirvana sound in more ways than one.

Speaking of hero worship, Perry took on one of his own icon’s tracks when he performed Jeff Beck signature tune Beck’s Bolero in New York, recently.

Heritage Auctions has unveiled the latest crop of electric guitars and acoustic guitars it’s set to place under the hammer, with the bumper collection including a handful of attention-grabbing instruments.

Chief among those awaiting auction is a 1966 Fender Jaguar signed by Kurt Cobain, as well as a 1968 Fender Rosewood Telecaster prototype that was built for Elvis Presley.

It’s the second time the latter model has cropped up on the sales circuit, having been listed on Reverb last November with an asking price of $295,000.

As was reported back then, Elvis’s Tele is said to be one of six prototypes, and a sister model to George Harrison’s well-known example, and had been used by the King of Rock and Roll intermittently for a period of few months.

However, Elvis supposedly sent the Tele back to Eddie Miller – Fender’s Nashville rep of the time – because the guitar was too heavy for him.

The guitar itself is all original, said to be in excellent condition, and arrives accompanied by a handful of letters written by Hal Blaine, Harold Bradley (former president of the Nashville Association of Musicians), and Miller himself, confirming the guitar’s authenticity – the same certificates that came with the original listing.

It’s joined at the top of the auction pile by a Cobain-signed ‘66 Jag. Cobain’s guitars are veterans of the auction circuit, and currently occupy the two top spots of the most expensive guitars sold at auction list.

At number one is the $6,010,000 Martin D-18E Cobain used for Nirvana’s immortal MTV Unplugged set, while second spot is reserved for his Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang, which sold for $4,550,000 last year.

Given the lack of historical importance this particular Jag has, we don’t see it getting anywhere near those kinds of numbers. Still, whenever a Cobain-related guitar emerges on the market, a sizable price tag usually follows suit.

Carrying the inscription “To the Guitar Hall O Fame,” as well as Cobain’s signature, the Jaguar is said to be one of the many instruments the Nirvana frontman crossed paths with while he shopped around to replace his stage-smashed guitars.

It arrives with certificates of authenticity composed by authenticator Roger Epperson and PSA Authentication Services.

Heritage Auctions' catalog also has room for other instruments bearing the signatures of multiple guitar heroes: a 1989 Fender Stratocaster signed by both Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan can be found, as can a Gibson Sonex sporting the signatures of numerous players.

Few details are supplied for the Sonex, which carries the scrawls of Steve Vai, Adrian Belew, Al Di Meola, Eric Johnson, Vivian Campbell, Warren Haynes, and many others. 

The auction – which also boasts a range of vintage Gibson Les Pauls –  is set to go live on July 24, and will close August 11.

For more information on the sale, head over to Heritage Auctions. 

A guitar pick that previously belonged to Kurt Cobain sold at auction last month for a final price of $14,678.

The sale concluded on June 10 and the price fetched by the orange Dunlop Tortex pick represents – as far as we can verify –  the highest ever paid for a guitar pick. So what makes it worth the money? 

Well, the pick has a few unique features. Firstly, it’s signed by Cobain using his joke ‘Kurdt Kobain’ misspelling (similar to the 'Kurdt' signature found on the Cobain-used Boss DS-1 that sold at auction last year). It’s also been heavily worn and, in the place of the original Tortex tortoise logo, features a recreated tortoise doodle drawn by Cobain.

More important, though, is the context within which the Nirvana man used it. The pick was acquired on Friday April 6, 1990. This marked the end of the week that Nirvana spent demoing Nevermind material at Butch Vig’s Smart Studios – including the version of Polly that would make the final album – and it very likely saw use on those sessions.

The auction was won by Shaun Ertischek – a longtime Nirvana fan who describes himself as “an eclectic collector” and “product of the 1990’s alternative and grunge rock scene.”

“I knew this piece was special when I saw it come up at auction,” Eritschek tells Guitar World. “Guitars and other equipment used by Kurt Cobain have gone for exorbitant prices. 

“I often try to get my hands on guitar picks during live concerts, but there is usually no way to authenticate them because they are so generic. How can anyone prove that a particular pick was used by a musician?

“This pick, however, was signed by Kurt on one side and he drew on the other side. His personality comes through in this little doodle.”

It’s not the first Cobain pick to come to auction. Another orange Tortex pick, used during Nirvana’s 1991 John Peel session, sold last year for $5,760. At the time, we remarked it was a huge amount for a pick. At three times the value, this latest sale comfortably eclipses that. 

However, in this case, the context, the personality and the provenance – with multiple experts authenticating the signature – all persuaded Ertischek to stay the course in the auction. So how did it feel to win? 

“It feels surreal to own this piece of music history,” responds Ertischek. “I haven’t seen anything like it before and it is truly one-of-a-kind. Kurt was obviously an incredible singer, songwriter and guitarist. It is beyond rare and special to have something played by his hand and subsequently signed.”

Ertischek says he hasn’t yet decided “if or how” it will be displayed, but for now there will be “occasional excursions to show off to friends that share my love and passion of rock music [and] I look forward to sharing its story with others.”

As Ertischek rightly asserts, Kurt Cobain is by some margin the most valuable celebrity name when it comes to record-breaking guitar gear auctions. 

The Nirvana icon’s Fender Mustang (as used in the iconic Smells Like Teen Spirit video) sold last year for $4.5 million, making it the world’s most expensive electric guitar. 

A few years prior, in 2020, Cobain’s Martin D-18e sold for $6 million, making it the most expensive guitar (and, by the same token, the most expensive acoustic guitar) ever sold. 

The aforementioned Boss DS-1 pedal used by Cobain in a John Peel BBC radio session went for $75,000 – making it very likely the most valuable guitar pedal ever sold at auction. Meanwhile, a Cobain-owned, stage-smashed Stratocaster fetched almost $600,000 earlier this year – likely, the most expensive smashed guitar ever sold. 

Now, it seems, the world’s priciest pick can also be attributed to Cobain’s legend. Just go easy on the pick slides, eh, Shaun?

A stage-smashed Fender Stratocaster played by Kurt Cobain has fetched almost $600,000 at auction, which could well make it the most valuable smashed guitar ever sold. 

We are, by now, used to seeing Kurt Cobain-associated guitars fetch a premium at auctions, but even regular observers and participants will have been shocked at the $595,000 price tag fetched by a broken Strat that once belong to the Nirvana frontman.

The 1990 Japanese Fender Stratocaster was signed by all three members of the band and features a notable inscription to the late Mark Lanegan, then frontman for The Screaming Trees. 

“Hell-o Mark!” reads the message. “Love, your pal, Kurdt Kobain [sic]/Washed up rockstar.”

The guitar was reportedly played onstage and met its end during the band’s 1992 Nevermind tour, before being gifted to Lanegan. As such, the instrument is missing half its headstock and a slice of the neck down to the third fret, where it splintered off during its onstage reckoning. 

Clearly, the context of the Strat’s use, the signatures and its previous owner(s) all seem to have contributed to the final price. 

The instrument carried an initial estimate of $60,000 - $80,000, but that always seemed a little low, particularly given two Kurt-smashed Strats sold for $150,000 in 2020 and, just last year, a stage-smashed 1973 Fender Mustang owned by Kurt Cobain sold at auction for $486,000. By our calculations, that Mustang now has the honor of being the second most expensive stage-smashed guitar sold at auction. 

Other contenders include Noel Gallagher’s 1960 Gibson ES-355 (famously smashed by his brother Liam Gallagher during the argument that led to Oasis splitting up in 2009), which sold for $403,000.

If you were to broaden the criteria to ‘stage damaged’, then you can mention Jimi Hendrix’s 1965 Stratocaster, which was the instrument he set fire to onstage in London in 1967. That one fetched around $497,557 at auction in 2008 – though the recent Cobain sale still comfortably exceeds that sum.

Regardless, there is certainly a premium associated with the Nirvana man’s gear. This is likely down to the ever-growing legend around the late Cobain, alongside (we suspect) demographic forces at play – as Gen X’ers hit the wealthiest stage of their lives. 

Indeed, the most expensive guitars sold at auction both belonged to the Nirvana frontman. Kurt Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Fender Mustang (as featured in the song’s promo clip) fetched over $4.5 million last year, while his Martin D-18E (aka the MTV Unplugged acoustic guitar) was sold in 2020 and still holds the top spot, raising over $6 million.

As a founding member of Nirvana, bassist Krist Novoselic helped create some of the most beloved and endearing guitar music of all time. While Kurt Cobain was the band’s primary songwriter and drummer Dave Grohl added huge drive and dynamics to the sound, Novoselic made the most of the melodic opportunities presented to him by virtue of being in a power trio, always a bassist’s dream.

However, he never hogged the limelight or indeed the full frequency range; his basslines were definitely an important part of each song’s melodic content and often an actual hook, but the songwriting remained the trio’s main focus rather than each members playing skills. Or as Krist once told BP, “I’ve approached bass playing as a bridge between the rhythm section and the guitar/vocal melody.”

Today, we’re looking back at the five basslines that made Krist Novoselic so essential to Nirvana. 

1. About A Girl (Bleach, 1989)

Novoselic delivers a warm, almost metallic bassline on this early classic, when Kurt Cobain was still referring to himself as ‘Kurdt Kobain’ and which was released at a time when people thought that Extreme and Warrant were like, totally cool dude. For 1989's Bleach, Novoselic deployed a variety of basses, including a Fender Jazz, an Ibanez Black Eagle and even a borrowed Hohner.

2. Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)

An anthem for a generation of slackers it may be, but Smells Like Teen Spirit is usually underestimated as a performed piece of music. It devolves during its verses to Novoselic’s simple four-note bassline. It’s the simplest pattern of eighths possible, and Novoselic performs it with total skill, playing microscopically behind the beat to lend it extra weight. The solidity of this classic bass guitar part is still gobsmacking to this day.

3. Lithium (Nevermind, 1991)

“I’m so happy,” lied Kurt Cobain over Novoselic’s snappy, almost cheeky bass part – one of those little licks that you tend to hum to yourself without ever really realising that it actually exists. His choice of notes is generally economical; you won't hear any extended runs despite Kurt dropping out before the song’s final verse, at which point Novoselic carries the entire arrangement.

4. On a Plain (Nevermind, 1991)

Perhaps more than any other song recorded by Nirvana, On a Plain sounds like big-hair arena rock, from it’s full-fat opening chords to the fists-aloft chorus. Novoselic's tone here is crunchy and warm, with sufficient top to give it definition, but a world away from the traditional, scooped metal bass sound that stood for everything that Nirvana were against. Keep an ear out for that nifty three-second bass solo after each chorus.

5. Serve The Servants (In Utero, 1993)

After the happy-clappy stadium sounds of Nevermind, Nirvana sought a darker place from which to operate, and found one with In Utero, one of the most lyrically miserable albums ever recorded. Sonically, it was a heavier, subtler experience than its predecessor, with Novoselic laying down a bass part that coupled perfectly with Cobain’s riffage on this opening cut.

Nirvana - The Bass Guitar Collection is available on amazon.

A Fender Stratocaster that was played onstage (and subsequently smashed) by late Nirvana frontman and electric guitar player Kurt Cobain is headed to the auction block.

Put up for sale as part of the latest Julien's Music Icons auction, the guitar is autographed by all three members of Nirvana and, notably, bears an inscription – written by Cobain – addressed to Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan. 

"Hell-o Mark!" the inscription reads. "Love, your pal, Kurdt Kobain [sic]/Washed up rockstar."

A Japanese-made model built around 1990, this particular Strat features a white pickguard, Gotoh tuners, and a Hot Rails pickup in the bridge position. Another inscription on the instrument's neck plate, "Boddah Lives," references Cobain's childhood imaginary friend.

Of course, the guitar is a little, well, banged-up. Its rosewood fingerboard is broken from the third fret to what would have been the fourth tuner. Three tension springs, however, are still attached to the tremolo block and three Gotoh tuners are still affixed to what remains of the headstock. The Strat's pickups and electronics, Julien's says, still work.

According to Julien's, Cobain gifted the guitar to Lanegan in the fall of 1992, during the North American leg of Nirvana's Nevermind tour. 

The guitar's value is estimated at $60,000 - $80,000, with a starting bid of $15,000. Given, however, that a 1973 Fender Mustang that Cobain smashed to smithereens in 1989 sold at auction for an incredible $486,400 last November (not to mention the fact that the two most expensive guitars ever sold at auction both belonged to Cobain) we wouldn't be surprised if its final sale price ends up being significantly higher. 

Accompanied by a signed letter of provenance from its previous owner, Tony Palmer, a stage-used white Ernie Ball guitar strap, and a black Fender hard case with the inscription "Abort Christ," the Strat is currently set to go under the hammer on May 19. 

For more info on the guitar, visit Julien's.

Nile Rodgers, Nirvana and Heart’s Nancy and Ann Wilson are all set to be honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 2023 Grammys. 

The ceremony is scheduled for February 4 and is due to take place in person for the first time since 2020. The list includes a diverse array of artists, including The Supremes (meaning Diana Ross joins a rare list of two-time inductees), Slick Rick, blues icon Ma Rainey and Bobby McFerrin. 

Chic guitarist and serial hit-making producer Nile Rodgers already has multiple Grammy awards, alongside inductions to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame to his name, so his inclusion is arguably overdue. 

Elsewhere, Nirvana will be honored for their role in sparking a “seismic shift in global youth culture” in the early '90s and returning “rock 'n' roll integrity and passion to the top of the charts.”

Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson, meanwhile, are no poor relations – celebrated here for their mammoth rock anthems like Alone and These Dreams, both of which were Billboard number ones – though, shockingly, their galloping riff-fest Barracuda only got to number 14 upon its initial release. They also had a run of 10 top 10 albums in the ’80s, which remains the longest by a female-fronted band. 

All the honorees will join a list of previous Lifetime Achievement Award winners that includes some of guitar music’s most iconic names – among them Jimi Hendrix, The Allman Brothers, Chet Atkins, Cream, Buddy Guy, George Harrison, Lightnin' Hopkins and the Rolling Stones.

In addition to the performers, the Recording Academy also issue Trustee and Technical Awards to individuals and organisations of particular merit. In 2023, this will include photography Henry Diltz, who shot Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and The Eagles, as well as landing the plum job of official photographer for the 1969 Woodstock Festival. 

Stax Records founder Jim Stewart is also honored for his role in bringing us Booker T. And The MGs, Albert King and many more, while Dr. Andy Hildebrand is celebrated for developing Antares’ groundbreaking auto-tune technology.

“The Academy is proud to celebrate this diverse slate of influential music people spanning numerous genres and crafts as our 2023 Special Merit Awards honorees,” says Harvey Mason Jr., the Recording Academy CEO. 

“Each creator on this list has made an impact on our industry – from technical to creative achievements – representing the breadth of music’s diverse community. We’re excited to celebrate this group of legends next month that continues to inspire and shape the music world.”

The full Grammys ceremony takes place on February 4, 2023, at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. Head to the official Grammys site for more information.

For those of you not familiar with Aaron Rash, he’s a producer and musician who runs a channel on YouTube that is largely dedicated to Nirvana’s guitar tone. 

In his latest video, Rash explains that there had been a sound that had long eluded his tonal investigations, something he heard on Kurt Cobain’s home demos but was unable to replicate using the usual distortion pedals associated with the Nirvana icon.

A resourceful, hands-on type, Rash took to his soldering iron in an effort to build a box that captured the sound. The result is a pedal he calls The Engine, because “to me it sounds like an engine, revving to the max, about to explode into a million pieces… it’s a really weird sound.”

Rash admits the design and the sound are both unorthodox, but that’s largely the point. 

“If some smart, super-awesome designer guy came in here and saw this pedal, he would slap me in the face,” explains the guitarist. “Everything from a technical standpoint is wrong. I biased it wrong. I wired things up really strange. It’s all super old stuff, wired point-to-point, ‘70s-style.”

The controls are limited to Volume and Roar, and when cranked up it has an appealingly growly, serrated tone, but back it off and the effect comes very close to the static-y asymmetrical clipping sound of Cobain’s gnarly Heart-Shaped Box tone – captured using a Fender Quad Reverb guitar amp with only a single power tube.

In the clip, Rash explains that he believes he recently found the source of his pedal mystery – pointing to Univox Super Fuzz from the ‘70s that Cobain once owned. However, the prohibitive price point ($1,000) will put many fans off that particular purchase.

Instead, Rash says he’s now considering producing The Engine for sale and perhaps even tweaking it to better incorporate the Ring Modulation-like tone of the Quad Reverb rig, too. 

Nirvana tone hounds will also be interested in another pedal that Rash teases at the close of the clip – a Red-X Ring Modulator built and hardwired by Mr. Bill. It is a direct clone of the one used by Cobain on Nirvana's In Utero.  

Rash claims (and Mr. Bill’s markings on the pedal innards would seem to confirm) that this makes it the “second one that exists in the world… the first one belongs to Steve Albini.”

In other Nirvana-based distortion news, Kurt Cobain’s Boss DS-1 pedal recently sold at auction for $75,000, which makes that Univox Super Fuzz price tag seem almost reasonable…

Earlier this week, we learned that Cobain’s stage-smashed Mustang fetched nearly $500,000 at a November 13 auction. Now it has emerged that in the same sale a battered Boss DS-1 stompbox belonging to the Nirvana frontman fetched an eye-watering sum of $75,000.

The remarkable figure is higher than that of Jimi Hendrix’s Roger Mayer-built Octavia, which was used on his iconic Band of Gypsys album and sold for $70,400 in December 2020. Cobain’s stompbox could well have set a new record for a guitar pedal sold at auction.

The 1980s distortion pedal, one of history’s best-selling effects units, was clearly heavily used by the guitarist, but we suspect the price may largely be down to the characterful decoration.

On the bottom of the pedal is a sticker reading, “It's only right and natural/ The Frogs”, while Cobain scrawled marker pen on the surfaces: the side reads “Kurdt was here”, while the top panel foot pedal is inscribed with the word “Nirwahna”.

This adds great value, as does the fact that it comes with a letter of authenticity confirming its use in a session for legendary BBC DJ John Peel on September 3, 1991 – approximately three weeks before Nevermind landed and changed the band’s fortunes forever.

Elsewhere in the same auction, an orange Dunlop Tortex pick belonging to Cobain and used in the same Peel session fetched a huge $5,760.

Another of Cobain’s DS-1 pedals sold for $9,000 just two years ago. This recent sale marks yet another major rise in the value of the Nirvana leader’s gear, which for all its workaday charm, seems to obtain record-breaking prices at auction – and with increasing regularity.

In May, Cobain’s Smells Like Teen Spirit Mustang fetched $4.5 million, while the Martin D-18E used in Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance was sold for $6,010,00 in 2020 – making it the world’s most expensive guitar.