Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain smashed guitar has been sold for nearly ₹5 crores at an auction. The busted lefty black Fender Stratocaster electric guitar was sold for $600,000, several times its original estimate, at an auction in New York.
The smashed guitar was signed by all three members of the Seattle grunge outfit Nirvana as they rocketed to global fame. The names of Cobain and his former band, Nirvana, are misspelled. And the guitar itself, which was once smashed and put back together, is no longer playable.
But on Saturday, the broken Fender Strat was sold at Julien’s Auctions for nearly 10 times more than the opening price — showing that the adoration for the rock icon is alive and well nearly 30 years after he died.
The auction house said it had expected the instrument to sell for $60,000 at the event in front of a live audience at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York City.
Instead, it went for a whopping $595,900 — Julien’s said in a statement, calling the total “astounding.“
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“Items from Kurt Cobain or Nirvana are becoming more difficult to obtain and they are one of the highest in terms of collectability of all rock bands,” Darren Julien, the CEO of Julien’s Auctions, told NPR.
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“Kurt, when he was on stage, when he played, he was a machine. The man was angry, and you could feel that on stage. And you would feel that by the way he would treat his instruments, continued Kody Frederick of Julien’s Auctions.
“This broken element, in a strange way, from this broken musician, that really defined this rough and tumble era of music.”
“Come As You Are,” “Lithium,” “Something in the Way” and “Heart Shaped Box,” were among Nirvana’s songs, many of which were written by Cobain.
Furthermore, the 1991 breakthrough, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became the anthem for a generation of alienated youngsters.
Cobain’s marriage to Courtney Love was tumultuous. He was also dealing with depression and substance abuse. Kurt Cobain committed suicide in April 1994.
You can see here the break that took place as he slammed down the guitar, where the neck here kind of connects, as well as down here on the bottom where he slammed the guitar down,” Frederick told AFP earlier in May.
Additionally, there were artefacts from the careers of Eddie Van Halen, Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, Bill Wyman, and Janet Jackson in the three-day auction, which ended on Sunday.
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An entity of flesh and bones in pursuit of becoming a higher being. A connoisseur of the mystic arts and everything musical. His origins are unknown, and so are his true motives.
