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Smells like a bargain.
Kurt Cobain guitar from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video will be sold an a Midtown auction next spring — and it’s expected to fetch millions, The Post has learned.
The Nirvana frontman’s 1969 Fender Mustang will be put up as part of massive sale of the late Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay’s music memorabilia by Christie’s in March, with an estimated sale price of between $2.5 million and $5 million. according to the company’s global president Alexander Rotter.
“He made the greatest music on this guitar and defined a generation,” Rotter told The Post of the Mustang, which is rumored to have been one of Cobain’s favorite axes.
“This is a piece of American history, so I [predict] a lot of people coming in for it … I am convinced it will get competitive.”
The sale is set to bring a record number of music fans into the free-to-enter Rockefeller Plaza galleries, which previously peddled guitars that once belonged to rockers Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, among others, the auction veteran said.
“I expect this building to be crowded when we’re selling this collection — excitingly crowded, it’s going to feel like a concert,” Rotter said. “When we open up and go into popular culture at the highest level, because that’s what we do, it gets exciting.”
Irsay purchased the iconic instrument for $4.6 million in 2022, making it the highest-priced electric guitar in the world at the time.
Despite significant paint scratches and other damage on the instrument’s body, Rotter noted the guitar hasn’t quite met the fate of other Cobain-owned instruments — some which were smashed onstage or otherwise battered.
Cobain’s pummeled Fender Stratocaster guitar sold at auction in 2023 for a whopping $595,000, despite being unplayable.
“He didn’t go crazy with it, [like] with some other guitars that we’ve seen in videos or live concerts,” Rotter said of the Fender Mustang, “so he took care of it and it survived.”
“Out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite,” Cobain told Guitar World in a 1991 interview, going on to call the models as “cheap and totally inefficient, and they sound like crap and are very small.”
Cobain went on to proclaim his love for his left-handed Mustang: “Out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I’ve only owned two of them … Lately, I’ve been using a Strat live, because I don’t want to ruin my Mustang yet.”
For Nirvana fans who can’t wait until next spring, Christie’s will be auctioning an Elizabeth Peyton portrait of Kurt Cobain on Wednesday, which is estimated to sell for between $2 to $3 million.
“It’s almost a love letter in portraiture form of Kurt by one of the greatest portrait artists of her generation,” Rotter said, noting the artwork was completed a year after Cobain’s 1994 death by suicide. He was 27 years old.
The guitar, which was used in studio sessions for both Nirvana’s seminal 1991 grunge album “Nevermind” and its 1993 follow-up “In Utero,” was owned by the Cobain family and displayed at The Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle from 2010 until Irsay’s auction buy.
The electric model was later showcased it as part of the traveling Jim Irsay Collection — which also includes Elton John’s longtime Steinway & Sons touring piano, handwritten Bob Dylan lyrics, a Ringo Starr drum kit and various guitars used by Elvis Presley, Prince and John Lennon.
The former business mogul was reportedly offered more than $1 billion for his music lovers’ treasure trove, according to ESPN.
Irsay’s daughters revealed in an October announcement that they would be selling off swaths of the collection, with a portion of the proceeds to be donated to charity.
“Our dad was a passionate collector, driven not by possession, but by a profound appreciation for the beauty, history and cultural resonance of the items he curated,” the family said in a statement.
“From iconic instruments to handwritten lyrics by legends to rare historical artifacts and documents, each piece in the collection tells a story — and he was always so excited to share those stories with the world.”
Christie’s is already choreographing the stage at the Midtown auction house for next spring’s rockstar sale, where its galleries will be “transformed” with some of music history’s greatest ephemera.
“Right now, we’re thinking about how to display [Irsay’s] guitars, because they need to look the part,” Rotter said, pointing, to the acclaimed Fender Mustang:
“It will be an amazing sale of memorabilia that spans, and this will be one of the trophies.”
English (US)