You can now follow the latest news for free through our Instagram account
Click here to subscribe
A guitar smashed by Kurt Cobain, the hero of the famous American rock band Nirvana, on stage, was sold at auction for about $ 600,000.
The broken black guitar, dubbed the Fender Stratocaster, was expected to sell for a tenth of that amount at auction on Saturday at New York’s Hard Rock Café.
Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994, is best known for his violent performances.
The guitar was smashed while Nirvana was working on their album Nevermind in the early 1990s.
The guitar has been reassembled, but is no longer usable.
The broken guitar was signed by all three members of the band with a silver marker. It also contains an emotional cameo by Cobain of his friend and musical collaborator Mark Lanegan, who passed away last year.
Cobain, whose name was often misspelled, signed the instrument “Cobain’s Chord”.
Cobain is known to have smashed a number of Fender Stratocaster guitars during his career.
“The guy was angry and you could feel that on stage. You could feel it by the way he handled his instruments,” Cody Frederick, of Julien’s Auctions, told AFP.
The Fender Stratocaster has been listed for sale at an estimated price of $60,000 to $80,000. Julien described the closing bid of $596,900 as “amazing”.
According to the auction house, Cobain gave the guitar to Lanegan during the North American tour of the Nirvana Nevermind album in 1992.
The identity of the buyer was not revealed. The auctioneers name the previous owner as Tony Palmer.
Details of the fall of American guitarist Carlos Santana on stage. Will Arab music become the new international “trend”?
Two years earlier, the guitar Cobain used in his legendary performance on “MTV Unplugged,” an American television series about musicians, sold in late 1993 for $6 million.
Julien’s three-day auction includes memorabilia from other music legends, including Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury, Janet Jackson and Dolly Parton.
