Cobain D-18 sells for £4.8m
The sale of Kurt’s MTV Unplugged Martin will help artists in need
David Gilmour’s Black Strat seemed unassailable when it sold at auction last year for £3.13 million, but it’s now been eclipsed by the Martin D-18E Kurt Cobain used throughout Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged In New York set. The guitar sold for $6 million (£4.8 million) at auction in California on 20 June.
The buyer was Australian businessman Peter Freedman, owner of Rode Microphones, who won out in a fierce bidding frenzy at Julien’s Auctions’ Music Icons sale last month. But rather than keep it under private lock and key, he’s got big plans for the guitar.
“It’s a big deal,” he told the Press Association. “I didn’t even buy it for me. I paid for it, but I’m going to use it to highlight the plight of artists worldwide by touring it around, and then I’m going to sell it and use the dough for that as well, later.”
The guitar is rare even without the Cobain connection. It’s the seventh of only 302 D-18Es built by Martin, and as Nirvana tech, Earnie Bailey, told our sister magazine Total Guitar in 2014, it was then heavily modified for Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged performance in New York. “The D-18E’s spruce top was weighed down by a trio of volume and tone potentiometers, a toggle switch and a Bartolini soundhole pickup mounted between a pair of hefty [stock] 1950s DeArmond Dynasonic pickups [these ended up being bypassed in favour of the retrofit Bartolini],” said Bailey.
The guitar was recently a focus of the divorce settlement between Cobain’s daughter Frances Bean Cobain and her ex-husband Isaiah Silva, with the latter becoming its legal owner.
The famous Martin D-18E was sold with its original hardshell case, and came complete with a half-used pack of Martin guitar strings, three picks and Cobain’s suede bag, which is decorated with a miniature silver spoon, fork and knife.