14 DAY TRIAL // While only few guitars that Kurt Cobain smashed while on stage with Nirvana, especially in the early days of the band, have survived, not to mention reach us, this one guitar that checks on both counts was just sold to a private collector for $100,000. This way, the Fender Mustang guitar becomes the second best sold piece of memorabilia branded Kurt Cobain.
The guitar was for a long time in the possession of Sluggo, a punk guitarist of whom the media says he’s a friend of the late Nirvana frontman. He got it after Kurt smashed it onstage in New Jersey, during the band’s first US tour. Out of nostalgia, or perhaps anticipating the heights of fame Kurt would reach, Sluggo held onto the broken guitar until a few years ago when, without giving it up, he allowed for it to be displayed at Seattle’s Experience Music Project museum.
Sluggo claims he was in a position to sell the guitar because it was rightfully his, Kurt having traded it for a new one from him, in order to be able to perform the next day. The name of the purchaser has not been revealed to the media, and nothing is known of his identity, other than the fact that he’s supposedly a collector.
The sale was confirmed the other day by Jacob Murray, curator at the Music Project museum, who spoke to Yahoo! News about what it meant having such an important piece on display. “It’s a really cool looking guitar because it’s smashed and held together with duct tape and Kurt Cobain wrote on it. There’s not a huge amount of broken Nirvana guitars out there,” Murray is quoted as saying.
Several media outlets inform that the Fender Mustang guitar now ranks second in the top of all Cobain memorabilia, the first position being occupied by the Mosrite Gospel Mark IV guitar, which sold for $131,000 at a 2006 auction.