GUITARS
Kurt Cobain was left-handed, which as any
lefty guitar player knows, severely limits
one's choices when it comes to instruments.
Combine this left-handedness with a life lived
mostly in abject poverty, and you have a
recipe for a weird-ass guitar collection. Kurt
found that there were certain instruments
that suited his purposes well enough
musically, and were also frequently available
left-handed for relatively small amounts of
cash. His selections did vary quite a bit over
the years, and he often smashed them to bits
on stage shortly after buying them, but among
the regulars in his collection were Univox HiFlyers, Japanese Stratocasters, and Fender's
unloved and undervalued (in the pre-Nirvana
era, at least) offset models, a category which
included Cobain stalwarts such as the Jaguar
and the Mustang.
Over the years, it has been the Fender
Mustang which has become the guitar most
closely associated with Kurt Cobain and the
Nirvana guitar sound. Introduced in 1965,
the Mustang was a developed as a shorter,
24-inch-scale, student model electric. It was
produced through 1982, and by the time
Nirvana became an active band, these guitars
had long been overlooked pawn shop relics.
They were relatively reliable though, easy
enough to upgrade, and could be obtained
very inexpensively. Or, as Kurt famously
quipped in a 1992 Guitar World interview,
when asked why he preferred the Mustang,
"They’re cheap and totally inefficient, and they
sound like crap and are very small. They also
don’t stay in tune, and when you want to raise
the string action on the fretboard, you have
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TONE TALK //
Smells Like Tone Spirit: Sound Like Kurt Cobain, Now