The electric guitar, Prince's main live instrument from 1984 until 1993, went on the block at the June 19-20 event with an estimate of $400,000 - $600,000, and it didn’t disappoint, selling for an impressive $563,500.
The blue angel is the third Cloud guitar auctioned by Julien’s. In 2017 the auction house sold a teal Cloud guitar for $700,000, the world record for the highest price ever paid at the time for a Prince guitar. In 2018, Julien’s auctioned a yellow Cloud for $225,000.
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(Image credit: Julien's Auctions)
(Image credit: Julien's Auctions)
(Image credit: Julien's Auctions)
(Image credit: Julien's Auctions)
The blue angel wasn’t the only big-ticket guitar sale at the Music Icons auction. Kurt Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E acoustic guitar, which he played at Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York concert, went for $6,010,000.
That figure makes the acoustic the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction, eclipsing the previous record-holder, David Gilmour’s 1969 Black Strat, which sold for $3,975,000 last year.
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Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
