The most expensive acoustic guitars in the world have helped shape the history of modern pop and rock music.
For those able to afford them, the price pales into insignificance compared to the value of owning an instrument that channeled some of the most iconic songs ever known.
While the most expensive classical guitars have attracted a few hundred thousand dollars, these acoustic guitars have sold for millions.
Kurt Cobain’s vintage Martin D-18E: $6 million (2020)
While the buyers of most high-priced instruments choose to remain anonymous, Australian entrepreneur Peter Freedman bought Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E for the precise opposite reaction: to gain attention.
“I want to use it to shed light on what is happening with musicians, entertainers, artists,” he told the Australian Financial Review in October 2020, after the coronavirus pandemic had shuttered the arts industry. “I’m on the other side of the mic, I’m lucky, I’m making dough.”
Freedman paid $6 million for Cobain’s vintage Martin D-18E, which he played on MTV Unplugged in November 1993, just five months before his death. Cobain had customized both the guitar and its case prior to his MTV appearance.
The case also contained three Dunlop Tortex 60mm guitar picks and a partial set of medium gauge Martin & Co. Phospher Bronze guitar strings, as well as a small black velvet pouch containing silvertone knife, fork, and spoon lapel pins. (You can read a 40-page publication produced before the auction with detailed photos here.)
Incredibly, Freedman turned up for his interview with the AFR at a restaurant in Sydney carrying the guitar in the same case (he owned the restaurant, which was specially opened for him on a usually closed day). I had the chance to look at the guitar when it was later put on exhibit – you can see photos here.
The guitar was expected to sell for about $1.5 million. However, when the bidding reached an astronomical $5 million (well above the previous record guitar sale), Freedman upped his bid by $1 million to win the auction.
- Tone and feel of Tortex
- Speed and precision of Jazz III
- Available in standard Tortex gauges
Freedman runs Røde Microphones, which is reportedly worth more than $A1 billion. He is also a philanthropist, supporting multiple causes, donating a minimum of $A5 million to the Sydney Festival to support artists in January 2021.
He plans to tour Cobain’s 1959 Martin D-18E guitar around the world to raise awareness about the plight of struggling artists and lobby governments to provide more funding.
“One in many million [musicians] makes a little bit of money but they don’t make real money,” Freedman told the SMH newspaper in January 2021.
“Most of them, if they are doing well, we know them, they are making an average good living. The majority are making hamburgers. But they are doing it because it’s their love, they are an artist, they can’t do anything else. I get it.”
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John Lennon’s Gibson J-160E Acoustic-Electric: $2.4 Million (2015)
John Lennon owned his Gibson J-160E for only two years in the early -1960s before it was stolen, but he used it to write and record some of the most famous Beatles songs of the era.
An anonymous buyer paid $2.4 million for it in 2015, well above the expected reserve below $1 million (half of the auction proceeds were donated to the Spirit Foundation – a charity set up by John and Yoko Ono).
Lennon and George Harrison both ordered identical Gibson J-160Es in 1962 – which they referred to as “the jumbo” – for about £161 each. It was big money at the time – the equivalent in 2015 would have been about $4600.
Lennon used it to record Beatles tracks such as Love Me Do and to co-write I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please, Please Me with Paul McCartney. Unfortunately the guitar was stolen after a London performance in late-1963. The video of This Boy above is one of the last times it was played by Lennon.
“George and I often took a jumbo home with us, so nobody noticed until the end of the season that one was missing,” Lennon told The Beatles Monthly Book a few years after the guitar was stolen. “A week or two afterwards I asked Mal [Mal Evans, the group’s roadie] where he’d put my jumbo. It was only then that we realised the guitar had been pinched, at Finsbury Park. No, I never got it back.”
The guitar then reappeared in a San Diego music store in 1967 with no record of its famous provenance.
It was identified as Lennon’s guitar in 2008 by Beatles expert Andy Babiuk (the author of Beatles Gear: All the Fab Four’s Instruments from Stage to Studio) who traced the serial number to the original hire-purchase receipt still in Gibson’s archives and compared its wood grain.
Many people consider The Beatles to be the most important group in pop music history, which is likely to underpin demand for Beatles paraphernalia for years to come.
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David Gilmour’s 1969 C.F. Martin D-35: $1,095,000 (2019)
Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour bought this Martin D-35 from a musician on a street outside New York’s Manny’s Music store in the early-1970s.
It would become a mainstay throughout his career and sold for more than $1 million to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay in 2019 (who also bought his Black Strat for almost $4 million). The acoustic guitar was expected to sell for just $10,000-20,000.
It was part of a massive collection of 126 guitars, including 37 acoustic guitars, Gilmour auctioned through Christie’s. They netted a record $21.5 million, with Gilmour donated the proceeds to environmental charity ClientEarth.
The D-35 guitar can be heard on Wish You Were Here, the ballad inspired by Pink Floyd founder member Syd Barrett, who left the band in 1968. The opening riff was actually composed on a 12-string acoustic, a Martin D12-28 that Gilmour bought in 1974. (This guitar sold for more than half a million dollars at the same auction – see entry below.)
However, it was the D-35 that Gilmour relied on to write most of Pink Floyd’s songs over the years, he told Guitar Player magazine in 2003.
Christie’s produced an article solely focused on Gilmour’s love of acoustic guitars for the 2019 auction, which is well worth a read.
“I pick one up and play one every day, mostly acoustics, because they make a nicer noise in the room,” he said.
Eric Clapton’s 1939 Martin OOO-42: $791,500
The main guitar Eric Clapton played on during his 1992 MTV Unplugged appearance was sold for $791,500 in 2004. The album – which featured Clapton with this Martin guitar on the cover – went on to win six Grammy Awards and sell 26 million copies worldwide.
It can be heard on the acoustic versions of: Layla, Before You Accuse Me and Old Love, as well as early versions of My Father’s Eyes and Lonely Stranger.
Clapton liked his pre-war Martin 000-42 so much that it served as the basis for his own model built by Martin: the Eric Clapton signature model 000-42EC.
“This is an incredible guitar,” Clapton said in an interview to promote the auction. “I would never be able to part with it if I didn’t have one as good which I’ve kept, an OM…This was the ‘Unplugged’ guitar and got played throughout that whole period…on stage.”
Just 113 pre–World War II Martin 000-42 guitars were built. They were designed with a short-scale, giving better access to the 14-fret neck.
Paul McCartney’s first guitar, a 1950s Rex acoustic: $615,203
John Lennon is not the only member of the Beatles to make this list of most valuable acoustic guitars. The Rex guitar that Paul McCartney first learnt to play sold at auction for £330,000 in 2015 – more than three times its estimate.
The guitar was sold by McCartney’s school-friend Ian James, who initially lent the guitar and helped teach McCartney how to play.
McCartney brought the guitar to a fete where he met Lennon, then playing with The Quarrymen, and impressed him with a few chords, sparking one of the most famous musical partnerships in history. (The guitar Lennon was playing that day was sold at auction for £155,500 in 1999.)
Two photographs were included with the sale: McCartney playing the guitar today and a photo (taken by McCartney) almost 50 years ago of a young Ian James with the instrument.
A note written by McCartney said: “The above guitar, belonging to my old school pal Ian James, was the first guitar I ever held. It was also the guitar on which I learned my first chords in his house at 43 Elswich Street, Liverpool 8.”
Roy Rogers’ 1930 Martin OM-45 Deluxe: $554,500
Roy Rogers’ famous 1930 OM-45 Deluxe Martin guitar was auctioned for $460,000 in 2009 by The Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum.
It was the first OM-45 Deluxe model Martin ever built – only 15 were made – although incredibly Roy Rogers (then an unknown musician named Leonard Franklin Slyever) paid just $30 for it at a California pawn shop in 1933.
Martin honoured Roy Rogers with a replica signature edition of his famous guitar in 2006.
David Gilmour’s 1971 C.F. Martin D12-28: $531,000
David Gilmour’s 12-string Martin D-12-28 sold at auction for $531,000 in 2019 as part of a larger collection which brought in $21.5 million. It was expected to sell for just $5000-$10,000.
It was the guitar Gilmour used to write Wish You Were Here, and can also be heard underneath the main riff played on his Martin D-35 (see entry above). The 12-string was recorded to sound like it was being played on a radio, with the fuller sounding D-35 played by a kid at home joining in.
Rolling Stone magazine has ranked the song among the greatest of all time.
“Every time I listen to the actual original recording, I think, ‘God, I should have really done that a little bit better’,” Gilmour told Paul Rappaport in September 2011. “It wasn’t supposed to be too slick… and it wasn’t.”
The guitar can also be heard on the Wish You Were Here album’s second track, Welcome To The Machine, before appearing again four years later on the 1979 concept album The Wall, and on the song Paranoid Eyes for the 1983 anti-war concept album The Final Cut.
Elvis Presley’s 1969 Gibson Dove acoustic: $334,000
Elvis performed with this custom guitar regularly between 1971 and 1973, most famously during his televised Aloha From Hawaii concert. It sold at auction in 2016 for well above its $200,000 – $300,000 reserve.
The finish on the guitar is ebony, apparently representing Elvis’ black belt in karate, and the fingerboard has an acanthus “Elvis Presley” inlay. There’s also a Kenpo Karate decal on the body of the guitar.
In 1975, Presley gave the guitar to a 21-year-old audience member, Mike Harris, at a concert in Asheville, North Carolina. He sat with the guitar for the rest of the concert and received a police escort out of the building.
