Nirvana rocker Kurt Cobain’s reassembled but unplayable Fender Stratocaster that he gifted to Mark Lanegan sold for $596,000 at auction over the weekend.
A Fender Stratocaster guitar smashed by Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain has sold for nearly $600,000 at auction — more than 10 times what it was expected to go for.
The reconstructed left-handed guitar — covered in chips, scratches and the original three bandmembers’ inscriptions — garnered 31 bids and fetched $596,000 at auction Saturday, according to Julien’s Auctions. The iconic instrument, a headlining piece of a three-day music icons auction, was originally valued at $60,000 to $80,000.
A spokesperson for the auction house on Monday told The Times that the buyer wishes to remain anonymous “but he is a Nirvana fan in the U.S. and works in finance.”
Cobain, who fatally shot himself in 1994, was embraced by much of his generation with an almost John Lennon-ish fervor, writing about hypocrisy and apathy “with an anxious urgency that was widely dismissed by older rock fans,” The Times’ former music critic Robert Hilburn wrote in 2007.
