Kurt Cobain’s smashed Guitar sells for $100,000

Seattle, Washington, December 27: 15 years after his death, the appeal of Nirvana frontman, Kurt Cobain, refuses to die. He still has fans and can still make money; a guitar used by the grunge rocker on the band's first United States tour has been sold at auction for $100,000.

According to Helen Hall, a broker in England, it is the second-highest known price for an item of Cobain memorabilia. The most expensive sale was that of his Mosrite Gospel Mark IV guitar, which went for $131,000 at an auction in 2006.

An unidentified private collector bought the smashed Fender Mustang guitar from Sluggo, a punk guitarist and friend of Cobain.

During a gig in New Jersey, Cobain’s instrument was damaged onstage and he went looking for another one for his next concert. Cobain, who was staying at Sluggo's apartment back then, later swapped the broken instrument for a working one with the Grannies and Hullabaloo guitarist.

Sluggo held on to his possession for many years before lending it to Seattle’s Experience Music Project for display.

“It’s a really cool-looking guitar because it’s smashed and held together with duct tape and Kurt Cobain wrote on it,” said Jacob McMurray, senior curator at the Experience Music Project.

"There's not a huge amount of broken Nirvana guitars out there," McMurray said, adding that most amount to "little slivers and fragments."

McMurray said he hoped the buyer would agree to the instrument returning to Seattle for a Cobain exhibit that is being worked on, for 2010.