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拍品专文
For those who grew up watching MTV in the 90s, Kurt Cobain’s distinctive teal blue Fender Competition Mustang with its contrasting diagonal racing stripes remains instantly recognizable for its use in the landmark music video for Nirvana’s generational anthem ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. A seminal moment in music history, the release of the music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ sparked a cultural sea change that saw grunge break through to the mainstream and let to the widespread popularization of alternative rock. While the single was already generating buzz following its release on 10 September 1991, the video sent Nirvana’s success stratospheric and catapulted frontman Kurt Cobain to global stardom as the reluctant voice of a generation. Beyond the music video, Cobain made a number of notable live appearances with the Mustang and later used the guitar during the recording of Nirvana’s critically acclaimed third and final studio album In Utero.
THE FENDER MUSTANG
Out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite.
Kurt Cobain, Guitar World, 1991.
A short-scale student model produced by Fender from 1964-1982, the relative affordability of the Mustang on the vintage guitar market made it popular with punk and grunge players in the 1980s and 90s looking for cheaper Fender quality guitars that they could modify for a punchier sound. Along with the reasonably low asking prices, the availability of factory-made left-handed models was particularly appealing to the left-handed Cobain, who also found that the smaller scale of the Mustang better suited his more diminutive frame and shorter reach. When asked about his preference for low-end guitar models in a 1992 interview for Guitar World, Cobain insisted that it was a matter of necessity: I don’t favor them, I can afford them. I’m left-handed and it’s not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all of the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I’ve only owned two of them. Cobain first appeared with a Mustang during Nirvana’s Bleach era in late 1988. Believed to be the first left-handed guitar he ever owned, it was originally a factory red model that Cobain stripped down, modified, and repainted several times until it was ultimately destroyed in February 1990. Around the same time, Cobain and bandmate Krist Novoselic built a number of homemade hybrid ‘Mustangs,’ all of which met the same fate in early 1990.
Cobain acquired his second Mustang at a pivotal moment for the band. In between touring in support of their debut album Bleach, Nirvana had begun working on a second album with producer Butch Vig, ultimately recording eight songs in April 1990 for their indie label Sub Pop. The project stalled when drummer Chad Channing left the group at the end of the band’s North American Tour and relations were souring with Sub Pop. After signing up new drummer Dave Grohl, the band began circulating their April recordings as demo tapes to attract a major label that could buy them out of their Sub Pop contract. Nirvana pressed up 100 cassettes and ostensibly bootlegged themselves, Vig told Jon Wiederhorn in 2016. They sent them out to all their friends, who made more copies and sent them to their friends… enough people at the big record labels heard it and that led to a bidding war. The feeding frenzy peaked when A&R reps from the likes of Columbia, Capitol, Slash, RCA, and several other labels were bumping into one another to see Nirvana’s one-off show at Seattle’s tiny Off Ramp Café on 25 November 1990. Based on recommendations from Sonic Youth, Nirvana decided to sign with Geffen Records’ imprint DGC Records and negotiated a $287,000 advance for their next album, allowing the band to purchase some new equipment. Nirvana formally signed with Geffen on 30 April 1991 when they arrived in Los Angeles to begin recording their major label debut at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, from 2-28 May 1991.
While the prevailing narrative has been that Cobain purchased this left-handed Fender Competition Mustang from Lloyd Chiate of Voltage Guitars, North Hollywood, prior to the album recording at Sound City Studios, our research indicates that the guitar was more likely acquired after the recording of Nevermind. While album producer Butch Vig recalls Cobain bringing a Mustang to the studio, other sources have stated that Cobain used only two Fender Stratocasters during the Sound City sessions, purchased for Kurt by Geffen Records prior to the recording. An unsent letter to ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail, written after the band had wrapped recording on Nevermind and later published in Cobain’s Journals, supports the likelihood of a later acquisition date. Following the theft of several guitars from the band’s truck at the Oakwood Apartments complex on 29 May and his eviction from his Olympia apartment in late July, Cobain’s letter outlines Things that have been taken from me within the past 2 months, and lists three guitars (including the moserite), before acknowledging that his acquisition of a really neato left handed 67 fender Jaguar, which is in my opinion, almost as cool as a mustang had somewhat tempered his bitterness over the theft and was considered a fair trade for the moserite. The absence here of any reference to the recent acquisition of a Mustang implies that the present guitar had not yet come into Cobain’s possession. As Cobain was certainly in possession of the Competition Mustang before the “Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video was filmed on 17 August, the guitar was likely acquired the week of 11 August, when the band were back in West Hollywood for a label showcase at The Roxy ahead of the shoot. The 1960s Zen-On bass that Novoselic would use for the music video was most likely also acquired around this time.
Inspired by the striped Shelby Mustang cars of the late 1960s, Fender had introduced the “Competition” Mustang in 1969, featuring body and forearm contours and diagonal racing stripes to the body in three finishes – Competition Red, Competition Orange and Competition Burgundy – with matching headstocks. Although it seems a misnomer, Cobain’s Mustang was finished in Competition Burgundy, referring to a purplish bursting that remains more visible on some examples than others. While Cobain’s has faded over the years, evidence of the purple tint is still apparent on the headstock and back of the body. Cobain repeatedly stated his preference for the Mustang model in a several interviews. My favorite guitar in the world is the Fender Mustang, he told Guitar Player magazine in 1992, before detailing their many faults. They're really small and almost impossible to keep in tune. They're designed terribly. If you want to raise the action, you have to detune all the strings, pull the bridge out, turn these little screws under the bridge, and hope that you've raised them the right amount. Then you put the bridge back and tune all the strings. If you screwed up, you have to do the whole process over again. But I like it, Cobain adds, identifying the potential creative benefits, as he saw them, that were borne out of the Mustang’s limitations. That way things sound fucked-up, and I stumble onto stuff accidentally. I guess I don't like to be that familiar with my guitar. To overcome these tuning problems, Cobain would eventually have his Competition Mustang fitted with a Gotoh Tune-O-Matic bridge, a modification that would be routinely performed on the various Mustangs he subsequently acquired.
Dating this guitar presented something of a dilemma. It's commonly accepted that dating Fender instruments based on their neck plate serial numbers alone can be fraught with contradiction, as Fender did not adhere to a strict chronological order when assigning serial numbered neck plates to a specific guitar, leading to overlapping consecutive numbers from year to year. Historians have therefore relied on the neck, body and potentiometer date codes found internally to date Fender guitars. The serial number stamped on the F-series neck plate of this guitar is 279651. Taking this into account, together with the fact that the Competition finishes were introduced for the Mustang in 1969, would lead us to embrace that date. Contrary to this, however, the neck is dated DEC 66 and the neck pocket is stamped SPECIAL. Fender historian Terry Foster illuminates this contradiction when explaining that all left-handed Fender instruments were by nature “special order” instruments but not made bespoke. A number of left-hand necks and bodies would be made in advance and remain in storge until a specific order for a “lefty” needed to be filled. At this time the components would be completed and married up to finalize the instrument. It’s therefore safe to assume that the present Mustang was made from compiled parts that date from 1966 and were assembled by Fender in 1969.
THE SONG
The origins of the song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ are well documented. The previous year, Cobain had been Tobi Vail of the band Bikini Kill, while Grohl was dating her band mate Kathleen Hanna, and the four would often hang out together. We were having a really fun time talking about all kinds of revolutionary things, and we ended up destroying my bedroom, Cobain told Patrick McDonald of The Seattle Times, who evidently was one of the first to interview Kurt on the day of Nevermind’s release, before a wave of similar interviews would harden him to repetitive questioning about the origins and meanings of the song. We ended up throwing my art supplies all over, and paint, and breaking the mirror, and tearing my bed up. It was a lot of fun. And so we were writing all over the wall with paint and my friend [Hanna] wrote, ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit,’ and I took that as a compliment. What she actually meant by it was that I smelled like this deodorant that is for teenagers called Teen Spirit. She’d seen it on television and I guess I stunk that night. When asked by McDonald about the meaning of “Teen Spirit”, Cobain responds: It’s basically just about friends. The friends that we have now, in a way. We still feel as if we’re teenagers because we don’t follow the guidelines of what’s expected of us to be adults. We still screw around and have a good time. It also has kind of a teen revolutionary theme to it.
Biographer Charles R. Cross has suggested that many of the lyrics were influenced by Cobain’s break-up with Vail, stating: “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” could not have been about anyone else, with the lyrics “She’s over-bored and self-assured.” ‘Teen Spirit’ was a song influenced by many things – his anger at his parents, his boredom, his eternal cynicism – yet several individual lines resonate with Tobi’s presence. He wrote the song soon after their split, and the first draft included a line edited from the final version: “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?” The answer, at one point in his imagination, had been Kurt Cobain and Tobi Vail.
Cross goes on to document the development of the song once Cobain shared it with the other band members: Kurt brought a new riff into rehearsal. ‘It’s called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ Kurt announced to his bandmates, stealing the Kathleen Hanna graffiti. At the time, no one in the band knew of the deodorant, and it wasn’t until the song was recorded and mastered that anyone pointed out it had the name of a product in it. When Kurt first brought the song into the studio, it had a faster beat and less focus on the bridge. “Kurt was playing just the chorus,” Krist [Novoselic] remembered. It was Krist’s idea to slow the tune down, and Grohl instinctively added a powerful beat. Kurt just hummed a couple of the verses. He was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and ‘Teen Spirit’ had about a dozen drafts. One of the first drafts featured the chorus: “A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we’re so famous / We’re so stupid and from Vegas.” Another began with: “Come out and play, make up the rules / Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose.”
Whatever the origins of the individual lyrics, the overall sense of a call to arms meant more to a generation of disaffected youth than the sum of the song’s parts, perhaps even for the band. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a song I really can’t describe, Cobain told Lorraine Ali of the Phoenix New Times in a rare moment of unironic openness, cause there are so many contradictions. I’m not only just saying that I’m disgusted with my generation’s apathy, but I’m also making fun of being anally, politically correct at the same time. There's so many different connotations to the song that it doesn’t have a direct message or one meaning. Producer Butch Vig understood what Cobain couldn’t quite articulate, observing to NPR’s David Greene: Even though we’re not really sure exactly what Kurt is singing about, there’s something in there that you understand – a sense of frustration and alienation. And to me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ reminds a little bit of how Bob Dylan’s songs affected people in the ’60s. In a way, I think, that was a song that affected a generation of kids in the ’90s. They could relate to it.
Vig first heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in person during the band’s rehearsals before they entered the studio. Speaking to Jon Wiederhorn for Yahoo Entertainment in 2016, Vig recalled: We had set them up in a pretty big room to practice, and Kurt said, “We’re gonna play that new song ‘Teen Spirit.’” It was the first song on the cassette they had sent me, so I said, “Cool, man. I dig the song. Let’s hear it.” And they kicked into the song and it was so f—ing loud and intense it completely floored me… I said, “Man, this sounds great. Play it again. Play it again… There were a couple options for how Kurt was going to sing the melody for the verse of “Teen Spirit.” He tried them all for me and I told him I liked the one he wound up using, which moved around more and I thought it was more like a Paul McCartney melody, which fit the song well.
When it came time to record the song at Sound City, Vig made some further suggestions to tighten the arrangement. I think we changed the chorus to six progressions instead of eight, Vig told Berkenstadt and Cross, I wanted the song to keep building to this explosive release. It was pretty subtle arranging that I did. I just paced around the room thinking, “This is just an incredibly powerful song”. Cobain recorded two takes of his guitar part through a Fender Bassman amp, both of which were used in the mix. Vig recalls that Cobain used the Small Clone effects pedal liberally, telling Chris Gill: That’s making the watery guitar sound you hear on the pre-chorus build-up of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The best parts of three vocal takes were combined to create a composite vocal master and overdubbed with the “hello” bridge. Reflecting on the recording session for Mojo in 1998, Vig acknowledged: We knew it was great. It's like an anti-anthem – and a week after recording it I suggested that it should be the lead off track, that it should set the tone for this record.
THE VIDEO
Cobain’s Fender Competition Mustang made its first public appearance in the music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, which was slated to be released as the lead single from the band’s major label debut Nevermind. Cobain worked up a treatment for the video, loosely inspired by the cult 1979 teen rebellion film Over The Edge. I saw this movie Over The Edge, Cobain told Melody Maker in 1993. I remember leaving that theatre and almost everyone who was in there came running out screaming their heads off and breaking windows and vandalising and wanting to get high. No doubt Cobain hoped to provoke a similar sense of teen rebellion with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Filmed on 17 August 1991 on a Culver City soundstage, the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video was heavily shaped by Cobain’s initial treatment – part subversion of the American pep‑rally trope, part controlled chaos. The basic concept would see the band perform in front of an anarchic pep assembly, made up of extras recruited two days earlier at their show at the Roxy in Los Angeles. Cobain proposed elements which amplified the anti‑pageant atmosphere (non‑traditional cheerleaders, staged disorder, and bonfire imagery). The resultant aesthetic - flannel‑shirted crowds, scuffed hardwood, fog, and the band center‑stage - conveyed a documentary‑like immediacy that matched the song’s dynamic contrasts.
While not all of Cobain’s ideas survived the production and edit decisions of first-time director Sam Bayer, the set did ultimately descend into cathartic anarchy as the assembled extras left the bleachers to mosh. By the first chorus the place was just a riot, recalled Grohl for the documentary Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind in 2005. I remember [the director] screaming into the megaphone, like “Stop! Cut! Stop! Cut!” and the place was just being torn to shreds you know, it was hilarious. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2010, Bayer recounted: The band was egging them on because they didn't like making the video either. I was exhausted at the end of the day. I'm like, “Okay, you guys want to destroy the set? Go, destroy the set”. And the kids come down off the bleachers, and it's under my lighting, and I'm like, Oh my God, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen! …And that riot became the last minute of the video. Notably, when the riotous climax of the shoot called for an anarchic guitar smash, it was Novoselic’s cheap 1960s Zen-On bass that Cobain would smash rather than has own Mustang. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a music video for a new generation, at once rejecting the pop culture status quo but profoundly resonating with its intended audience, cementing itself as an instant classic.
The video quickly caused a buzz at MTV, initially winning fans among the staff before premiering on the channel’s flagship ‘alternative’ show 120 Minutes on 30 September 1991, then moving rapidly to heavy rotation to become one of the channel’s signature “Buzz Bin” clips. The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit, admits Grohl to biographer Paul Brannigan. People heard the song on the radio and they thought “This is great”, but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, “This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they're tearing up their fucking high school”.
Due to constant airplay of the music video on MTV, Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week by the end of the year and had knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the number one spot on the Billboard 200 by January 1992. The video won Nirvana the Best New Artist and Best Alternative Video awards at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards and was ranked at number three on Rolling Stone’s 1999 list of the 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made. When ranking the video at number one on a reader’s poll of the Greatest Music Videos of the 1990s, Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene declared that it was the most iconic piece of film of the entire decade. At last count, official YouTube views of the video surpassed 2.1 billion. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has continued to garner critical acclaim over the 30+ years since Cobain’s suicide and the breakup of Nirvana and is often listed as one of the greatest songs of all time – Rolling Stone ranked the song fifth on its 2021 list. As of February 2026, it’s the fourth most streamed song of the 20th Century on Spotify with over 2.7 billion streams.
LIVE USE AND NOTABLE APPEARANCES, 1991–1993
Following the video shoot, the first documented appearance of the Competition Mustang for a live performance occurred at the band’s album release event at Beehive Records, Seattle, on 16 September 1991, a week before the release of Nevermind. Although initially billed as a “listening party”, the band performed a full set including many of the songs on their new album. Amateur video footage from the event shows Cobain playing his Competition Mustang for ‘Breed’ and ‘Floyd The Barber’. Photographer Charles Peterson, who captured several fantastic shots of Cobain playing the Mustang that day, refers to this in-store appearance as a watershed moment for Nirvana. This was the last time I saw them play on a floor, he told grammy.com in 2024, which to me makes for great photos because you’re right there at the same level as them… What was totally surprising was the subsequent mosh pit in the store, with people being hoisted on shoulders. There were also signs of how things were about to change for the band. Kurt was besieged by autograph seekers outside the store. It was the first time I think that really happened to him.
The band kicked off the Nevermind North American Tour four days later in Toronto. Nick Close, Cobain’s tour guitar tech from September 1991 until March 1992, told Guitar World’s Chris Gill that initially only a handful of guitars were taken along on tour – the 1965 Jaguar, the 1969 Competition Mustang and a left-handed Japanese Strat. Cobain’s stage rig was essentially the same as that used to record Nevermind – the Mesa/Boogie Studio preamp, a Crown power amp, a Boss DS-1 and the Small Clone. Cobain was first photographed using the Mustang almost a month into the tour at the First Avenue in Minneapolis on 14 October and at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis on 16 October 1991.
The infamous show at the Trees Club in Dallas that would put this guitar out of action for the remainder of the tour occurred just a few days later on 19 October. Looking towards the unruly mosh from the side of the stage, photographer and future film director Spike Jonze captured several sublime shots of Cobain on the Mustang before chaos ensued. As documented by biographer Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain had grown increasingly frustrated by what he deemed inadequate on‑stage sound during the tour, exacerbated that specific evening by bronchitis and the effects of prescribed medication. I started drinking and I just felt insane, Cobain told Azerrad, like I did a whole bunch of speed or something. I just wasn’t very rational at all. Amateur footage of the gig shows Cobain opening the set on his Jaguar before swapping to the Mustang for ‘School’, ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘About a Girl’, and ‘Polly’, while struggling with the sound throughout. Almost immediately on playing the final notes of ‘Polly’, the enraged Cobain swung the guitar off his shoulders and bludgeoned the venue’s monitor board with the butt of the Mustang until its neck was hanging off the body, before flinging the battered guitar to the stage floor. The scars from this encounter remain visible on the guitar today. Guitar tech Earnie Bailey remarked that while Cobain usually “babied” this guitar, it’s a testament to how frustrated he was that night that he was livid enough to break his favorite guitar. The Mustang would not be seen on stage again until almost a year later.
After Cobain switched back to the Jaguar, the incident famously escalated further when the club’s burly bouncer took the opportunity to wallop Kurt when he stage-dived into the crowd during ‘Love Buzz’. I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show, Cobain told Azerrad. So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. Although Novoselic and Grohl jumped in to stop the fight, which ultimately allowed the band to finish their set, a speedy exit was required to avoid a larger confrontation after the show. Evidently regretting having lost his temper and taken it out on the cherished Mustang, Cobain reverted to the Jaguar as his principal stage guitar and began switching in Stratocasters in place of the Competition Mustang for the remainder of the tour. Lately, I’ve been using a Strat live, because I don’t want to ruin my Mustang yet, he told Guitar World in January 1992. From that point on, Cobain reserved the Mustang for special one-off appearances, preferring not to take the risk of damaging the guitar on tour.
According to guitar tech Earnie Bailey, the Mustang was used during the band’s first studio recording session post-Nevermind, which took place at producer Barrett Jones’ Laundry Room Studio in Seattle on 7 April 1992. The session yielded the Nirvana deep cuts ‘Oh, the Guilt’, a cover of the Wipers’ ‘Return of the Rat’, and ‘Curmedgeon’, the latter of which was released as a B-side to ‘Lithium’ just three months later.
The Competition Mustang was next seen on stage when Nirvana appeared as the “secret” opening band for Mudhoney at the Crocodile Cafe in their hometown of Seattle on 4 October 1992. Photographer Charles Peterson was on hand to snap numerous color shots of Cobain on the Mustang. The guitar was seen again on 30 October 1992 when Nirvana played a one-off show at the Estadio José Amalfitani in Buenos Aires for their final live engagement that year. Footage recorded for television broadcast in Argentina shows that Cobain played the Competition Mustang for ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’ before switching to a white Strat.
By October 1992, guitar tech Earnie Bailey had performed a number of modifications on the guitar, including replacing the stock bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Humbucker. Bailey then replaced the original Mustang bridge with a Tune-O-Matic style adjustable bridge, flipped the tailpiece so the strings could be inserted without going under the tailpiece, and inserted washers to allow the tailpiece to be tightened down against the plate. Bailey explained: This modification solved several problems. It disabled the tremolo system and, in the process, increased tuning stability. Reversing the tailpiece itself allowed us to now re-string the guitar in a much easier process, stabilizing the tuning while changing the angle in which the string connected to the bridge, which would reduce string breakage. By tightening the tailpiece down against the plate, it also redirects the string resonance from being absorbed by the tremolo spring and to the body. In addition, the neck was shimmed for a better angle with the bridge, increasing downward tension on the bridge itself. These modifications would later be repeated on Cobain’s In Utero era Mustangs. While I performed a handful of modifications to this guitar to stabilize the tuning and optimize its playability, notes Bailey, this one was a rare example in which the modifications performed were discussed in detail with Kurt and not made irreversible as we were each aware of not only how rare this guitar was but also how much he cherished it.
According to Bailey, Cobain used the Mustang for demo sessions at Word of Mouth Productions and Laundry Room Studio in Seattle in late October and November 1992. The sessions were intended to produce demo recordings for In Utero but were abandoned before vocals were tracked. In January 1993, the Competition Mustang was among the select equipment flown to Brazil for Nirvana’s headlining appearance at the Hollywood Rock Festival. While the guitar was not seen at the first of the two concerts in Sao Paolo, numerous photographs and videos show Cobain playing the Mustang for a substantial portion of the show at the Praça da Apoteose in Rio de Janeiro on 23 January 1993. As the entire concert was recorded for broadcast on Brazilian television, Cobain can be seen playing the Mustang for ‘School’, ‘Drain You’, ‘Breed’, ‘Sliver’, ‘In Bloom’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Polly’, ‘About a Girl’, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the latter with a notable cameo from the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea on trumpet. Cobain’s last documented live appearance with the Competition Mustang was during the band’s headlining performance at a benefit concert for Bosnian rape victims at San Francisco’s Cow Palace on 9 April 1993, when he strapped on the Mustang for the recently recorded ‘Dumb’. While photographic documentation for many of the band’s concert dates over this period remains incomplete, it’s important to note that Cobain owned only one Fender Competition Mustang and therefore any period photograph or circulating recordings that show him with a left-handed Competition Mustang must relate to the present guitar.
IN UTERO
While in Rio de Janeiro for the Hollywood Rock Festival, Nirvana booked into BMG Ariola Studios from 19-21 January 1994 to record further demos with producer Craig Montgomery. Of the nine demo tracks recorded during this session, four would ultimately be re-recorded for In Utero, including ‘Heart Shaped Box’. Having used the guitar for the various album demo sessions, Cobain requested the favored Mustang when the band traveled to Pachyderm Recording Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, to record their hotly anticipated follow-up album with producer Steve Albini from 12-26 February 1993. Earnie Bailey confirmed that this Mustang was one of the few guitars he prepped and shipped to Minnesota for the recording.
THE FENDER MUSTANG
Out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite.
Kurt Cobain, Guitar World, 1991.
A short-scale student model produced by Fender from 1964-1982, the relative affordability of the Mustang on the vintage guitar market made it popular with punk and grunge players in the 1980s and 90s looking for cheaper Fender quality guitars that they could modify for a punchier sound. Along with the reasonably low asking prices, the availability of factory-made left-handed models was particularly appealing to the left-handed Cobain, who also found that the smaller scale of the Mustang better suited his more diminutive frame and shorter reach. When asked about his preference for low-end guitar models in a 1992 interview for Guitar World, Cobain insisted that it was a matter of necessity: I don’t favor them, I can afford them. I’m left-handed and it’s not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all of the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I’ve only owned two of them. Cobain first appeared with a Mustang during Nirvana’s Bleach era in late 1988. Believed to be the first left-handed guitar he ever owned, it was originally a factory red model that Cobain stripped down, modified, and repainted several times until it was ultimately destroyed in February 1990. Around the same time, Cobain and bandmate Krist Novoselic built a number of homemade hybrid ‘Mustangs,’ all of which met the same fate in early 1990.
Cobain acquired his second Mustang at a pivotal moment for the band. In between touring in support of their debut album Bleach, Nirvana had begun working on a second album with producer Butch Vig, ultimately recording eight songs in April 1990 for their indie label Sub Pop. The project stalled when drummer Chad Channing left the group at the end of the band’s North American Tour and relations were souring with Sub Pop. After signing up new drummer Dave Grohl, the band began circulating their April recordings as demo tapes to attract a major label that could buy them out of their Sub Pop contract. Nirvana pressed up 100 cassettes and ostensibly bootlegged themselves, Vig told Jon Wiederhorn in 2016. They sent them out to all their friends, who made more copies and sent them to their friends… enough people at the big record labels heard it and that led to a bidding war. The feeding frenzy peaked when A&R reps from the likes of Columbia, Capitol, Slash, RCA, and several other labels were bumping into one another to see Nirvana’s one-off show at Seattle’s tiny Off Ramp Café on 25 November 1990. Based on recommendations from Sonic Youth, Nirvana decided to sign with Geffen Records’ imprint DGC Records and negotiated a $287,000 advance for their next album, allowing the band to purchase some new equipment. Nirvana formally signed with Geffen on 30 April 1991 when they arrived in Los Angeles to begin recording their major label debut at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, from 2-28 May 1991.
While the prevailing narrative has been that Cobain purchased this left-handed Fender Competition Mustang from Lloyd Chiate of Voltage Guitars, North Hollywood, prior to the album recording at Sound City Studios, our research indicates that the guitar was more likely acquired after the recording of Nevermind. While album producer Butch Vig recalls Cobain bringing a Mustang to the studio, other sources have stated that Cobain used only two Fender Stratocasters during the Sound City sessions, purchased for Kurt by Geffen Records prior to the recording. An unsent letter to ex-girlfriend Tobi Vail, written after the band had wrapped recording on Nevermind and later published in Cobain’s Journals, supports the likelihood of a later acquisition date. Following the theft of several guitars from the band’s truck at the Oakwood Apartments complex on 29 May and his eviction from his Olympia apartment in late July, Cobain’s letter outlines Things that have been taken from me within the past 2 months, and lists three guitars (including the moserite), before acknowledging that his acquisition of a really neato left handed 67 fender Jaguar, which is in my opinion, almost as cool as a mustang had somewhat tempered his bitterness over the theft and was considered a fair trade for the moserite. The absence here of any reference to the recent acquisition of a Mustang implies that the present guitar had not yet come into Cobain’s possession. As Cobain was certainly in possession of the Competition Mustang before the “Smells Like Teen Spirit’ music video was filmed on 17 August, the guitar was likely acquired the week of 11 August, when the band were back in West Hollywood for a label showcase at The Roxy ahead of the shoot. The 1960s Zen-On bass that Novoselic would use for the music video was most likely also acquired around this time.
Inspired by the striped Shelby Mustang cars of the late 1960s, Fender had introduced the “Competition” Mustang in 1969, featuring body and forearm contours and diagonal racing stripes to the body in three finishes – Competition Red, Competition Orange and Competition Burgundy – with matching headstocks. Although it seems a misnomer, Cobain’s Mustang was finished in Competition Burgundy, referring to a purplish bursting that remains more visible on some examples than others. While Cobain’s has faded over the years, evidence of the purple tint is still apparent on the headstock and back of the body. Cobain repeatedly stated his preference for the Mustang model in a several interviews. My favorite guitar in the world is the Fender Mustang, he told Guitar Player magazine in 1992, before detailing their many faults. They're really small and almost impossible to keep in tune. They're designed terribly. If you want to raise the action, you have to detune all the strings, pull the bridge out, turn these little screws under the bridge, and hope that you've raised them the right amount. Then you put the bridge back and tune all the strings. If you screwed up, you have to do the whole process over again. But I like it, Cobain adds, identifying the potential creative benefits, as he saw them, that were borne out of the Mustang’s limitations. That way things sound fucked-up, and I stumble onto stuff accidentally. I guess I don't like to be that familiar with my guitar. To overcome these tuning problems, Cobain would eventually have his Competition Mustang fitted with a Gotoh Tune-O-Matic bridge, a modification that would be routinely performed on the various Mustangs he subsequently acquired.
Dating this guitar presented something of a dilemma. It's commonly accepted that dating Fender instruments based on their neck plate serial numbers alone can be fraught with contradiction, as Fender did not adhere to a strict chronological order when assigning serial numbered neck plates to a specific guitar, leading to overlapping consecutive numbers from year to year. Historians have therefore relied on the neck, body and potentiometer date codes found internally to date Fender guitars. The serial number stamped on the F-series neck plate of this guitar is 279651. Taking this into account, together with the fact that the Competition finishes were introduced for the Mustang in 1969, would lead us to embrace that date. Contrary to this, however, the neck is dated DEC 66 and the neck pocket is stamped SPECIAL. Fender historian Terry Foster illuminates this contradiction when explaining that all left-handed Fender instruments were by nature “special order” instruments but not made bespoke. A number of left-hand necks and bodies would be made in advance and remain in storge until a specific order for a “lefty” needed to be filled. At this time the components would be completed and married up to finalize the instrument. It’s therefore safe to assume that the present Mustang was made from compiled parts that date from 1966 and were assembled by Fender in 1969.
THE SONG
The origins of the song ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ are well documented. The previous year, Cobain had been Tobi Vail of the band Bikini Kill, while Grohl was dating her band mate Kathleen Hanna, and the four would often hang out together. We were having a really fun time talking about all kinds of revolutionary things, and we ended up destroying my bedroom, Cobain told Patrick McDonald of The Seattle Times, who evidently was one of the first to interview Kurt on the day of Nevermind’s release, before a wave of similar interviews would harden him to repetitive questioning about the origins and meanings of the song. We ended up throwing my art supplies all over, and paint, and breaking the mirror, and tearing my bed up. It was a lot of fun. And so we were writing all over the wall with paint and my friend [Hanna] wrote, ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit,’ and I took that as a compliment. What she actually meant by it was that I smelled like this deodorant that is for teenagers called Teen Spirit. She’d seen it on television and I guess I stunk that night. When asked by McDonald about the meaning of “Teen Spirit”, Cobain responds: It’s basically just about friends. The friends that we have now, in a way. We still feel as if we’re teenagers because we don’t follow the guidelines of what’s expected of us to be adults. We still screw around and have a good time. It also has kind of a teen revolutionary theme to it.
Biographer Charles R. Cross has suggested that many of the lyrics were influenced by Cobain’s break-up with Vail, stating: “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” could not have been about anyone else, with the lyrics “She’s over-bored and self-assured.” ‘Teen Spirit’ was a song influenced by many things – his anger at his parents, his boredom, his eternal cynicism – yet several individual lines resonate with Tobi’s presence. He wrote the song soon after their split, and the first draft included a line edited from the final version: “Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?” The answer, at one point in his imagination, had been Kurt Cobain and Tobi Vail.
Cross goes on to document the development of the song once Cobain shared it with the other band members: Kurt brought a new riff into rehearsal. ‘It’s called ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit,’ Kurt announced to his bandmates, stealing the Kathleen Hanna graffiti. At the time, no one in the band knew of the deodorant, and it wasn’t until the song was recorded and mastered that anyone pointed out it had the name of a product in it. When Kurt first brought the song into the studio, it had a faster beat and less focus on the bridge. “Kurt was playing just the chorus,” Krist [Novoselic] remembered. It was Krist’s idea to slow the tune down, and Grohl instinctively added a powerful beat. Kurt just hummed a couple of the verses. He was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and ‘Teen Spirit’ had about a dozen drafts. One of the first drafts featured the chorus: “A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we’re so famous / We’re so stupid and from Vegas.” Another began with: “Come out and play, make up the rules / Have lots of fun, we know we’ll lose.”
Whatever the origins of the individual lyrics, the overall sense of a call to arms meant more to a generation of disaffected youth than the sum of the song’s parts, perhaps even for the band. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a song I really can’t describe, Cobain told Lorraine Ali of the Phoenix New Times in a rare moment of unironic openness, cause there are so many contradictions. I’m not only just saying that I’m disgusted with my generation’s apathy, but I’m also making fun of being anally, politically correct at the same time. There's so many different connotations to the song that it doesn’t have a direct message or one meaning. Producer Butch Vig understood what Cobain couldn’t quite articulate, observing to NPR’s David Greene: Even though we’re not really sure exactly what Kurt is singing about, there’s something in there that you understand – a sense of frustration and alienation. And to me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ reminds a little bit of how Bob Dylan’s songs affected people in the ’60s. In a way, I think, that was a song that affected a generation of kids in the ’90s. They could relate to it.
Vig first heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in person during the band’s rehearsals before they entered the studio. Speaking to Jon Wiederhorn for Yahoo Entertainment in 2016, Vig recalled: We had set them up in a pretty big room to practice, and Kurt said, “We’re gonna play that new song ‘Teen Spirit.’” It was the first song on the cassette they had sent me, so I said, “Cool, man. I dig the song. Let’s hear it.” And they kicked into the song and it was so f—ing loud and intense it completely floored me… I said, “Man, this sounds great. Play it again. Play it again… There were a couple options for how Kurt was going to sing the melody for the verse of “Teen Spirit.” He tried them all for me and I told him I liked the one he wound up using, which moved around more and I thought it was more like a Paul McCartney melody, which fit the song well.
When it came time to record the song at Sound City, Vig made some further suggestions to tighten the arrangement. I think we changed the chorus to six progressions instead of eight, Vig told Berkenstadt and Cross, I wanted the song to keep building to this explosive release. It was pretty subtle arranging that I did. I just paced around the room thinking, “This is just an incredibly powerful song”. Cobain recorded two takes of his guitar part through a Fender Bassman amp, both of which were used in the mix. Vig recalls that Cobain used the Small Clone effects pedal liberally, telling Chris Gill: That’s making the watery guitar sound you hear on the pre-chorus build-up of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. The best parts of three vocal takes were combined to create a composite vocal master and overdubbed with the “hello” bridge. Reflecting on the recording session for Mojo in 1998, Vig acknowledged: We knew it was great. It's like an anti-anthem – and a week after recording it I suggested that it should be the lead off track, that it should set the tone for this record.
THE VIDEO
Cobain’s Fender Competition Mustang made its first public appearance in the music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, which was slated to be released as the lead single from the band’s major label debut Nevermind. Cobain worked up a treatment for the video, loosely inspired by the cult 1979 teen rebellion film Over The Edge. I saw this movie Over The Edge, Cobain told Melody Maker in 1993. I remember leaving that theatre and almost everyone who was in there came running out screaming their heads off and breaking windows and vandalising and wanting to get high. No doubt Cobain hoped to provoke a similar sense of teen rebellion with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Filmed on 17 August 1991 on a Culver City soundstage, the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video was heavily shaped by Cobain’s initial treatment – part subversion of the American pep‑rally trope, part controlled chaos. The basic concept would see the band perform in front of an anarchic pep assembly, made up of extras recruited two days earlier at their show at the Roxy in Los Angeles. Cobain proposed elements which amplified the anti‑pageant atmosphere (non‑traditional cheerleaders, staged disorder, and bonfire imagery). The resultant aesthetic - flannel‑shirted crowds, scuffed hardwood, fog, and the band center‑stage - conveyed a documentary‑like immediacy that matched the song’s dynamic contrasts.
While not all of Cobain’s ideas survived the production and edit decisions of first-time director Sam Bayer, the set did ultimately descend into cathartic anarchy as the assembled extras left the bleachers to mosh. By the first chorus the place was just a riot, recalled Grohl for the documentary Classic Albums: Nirvana – Nevermind in 2005. I remember [the director] screaming into the megaphone, like “Stop! Cut! Stop! Cut!” and the place was just being torn to shreds you know, it was hilarious. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2010, Bayer recounted: The band was egging them on because they didn't like making the video either. I was exhausted at the end of the day. I'm like, “Okay, you guys want to destroy the set? Go, destroy the set”. And the kids come down off the bleachers, and it's under my lighting, and I'm like, Oh my God, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen! …And that riot became the last minute of the video. Notably, when the riotous climax of the shoot called for an anarchic guitar smash, it was Novoselic’s cheap 1960s Zen-On bass that Cobain would smash rather than has own Mustang. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a music video for a new generation, at once rejecting the pop culture status quo but profoundly resonating with its intended audience, cementing itself as an instant classic.
The video quickly caused a buzz at MTV, initially winning fans among the staff before premiering on the channel’s flagship ‘alternative’ show 120 Minutes on 30 September 1991, then moving rapidly to heavy rotation to become one of the channel’s signature “Buzz Bin” clips. The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit, admits Grohl to biographer Paul Brannigan. People heard the song on the radio and they thought “This is great”, but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, “This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they're tearing up their fucking high school”.
Due to constant airplay of the music video on MTV, Nevermind was selling 400,000 copies a week by the end of the year and had knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the number one spot on the Billboard 200 by January 1992. The video won Nirvana the Best New Artist and Best Alternative Video awards at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards and was ranked at number three on Rolling Stone’s 1999 list of the 100 Greatest Music Videos Ever Made. When ranking the video at number one on a reader’s poll of the Greatest Music Videos of the 1990s, Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene declared that it was the most iconic piece of film of the entire decade. At last count, official YouTube views of the video surpassed 2.1 billion. ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ has continued to garner critical acclaim over the 30+ years since Cobain’s suicide and the breakup of Nirvana and is often listed as one of the greatest songs of all time – Rolling Stone ranked the song fifth on its 2021 list. As of February 2026, it’s the fourth most streamed song of the 20th Century on Spotify with over 2.7 billion streams.
LIVE USE AND NOTABLE APPEARANCES, 1991–1993
Following the video shoot, the first documented appearance of the Competition Mustang for a live performance occurred at the band’s album release event at Beehive Records, Seattle, on 16 September 1991, a week before the release of Nevermind. Although initially billed as a “listening party”, the band performed a full set including many of the songs on their new album. Amateur video footage from the event shows Cobain playing his Competition Mustang for ‘Breed’ and ‘Floyd The Barber’. Photographer Charles Peterson, who captured several fantastic shots of Cobain playing the Mustang that day, refers to this in-store appearance as a watershed moment for Nirvana. This was the last time I saw them play on a floor, he told grammy.com in 2024, which to me makes for great photos because you’re right there at the same level as them… What was totally surprising was the subsequent mosh pit in the store, with people being hoisted on shoulders. There were also signs of how things were about to change for the band. Kurt was besieged by autograph seekers outside the store. It was the first time I think that really happened to him.
The band kicked off the Nevermind North American Tour four days later in Toronto. Nick Close, Cobain’s tour guitar tech from September 1991 until March 1992, told Guitar World’s Chris Gill that initially only a handful of guitars were taken along on tour – the 1965 Jaguar, the 1969 Competition Mustang and a left-handed Japanese Strat. Cobain’s stage rig was essentially the same as that used to record Nevermind – the Mesa/Boogie Studio preamp, a Crown power amp, a Boss DS-1 and the Small Clone. Cobain was first photographed using the Mustang almost a month into the tour at the First Avenue in Minneapolis on 14 October and at Mississippi Nights in St. Louis on 16 October 1991.
The infamous show at the Trees Club in Dallas that would put this guitar out of action for the remainder of the tour occurred just a few days later on 19 October. Looking towards the unruly mosh from the side of the stage, photographer and future film director Spike Jonze captured several sublime shots of Cobain on the Mustang before chaos ensued. As documented by biographer Michael Azerrad in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, Cobain had grown increasingly frustrated by what he deemed inadequate on‑stage sound during the tour, exacerbated that specific evening by bronchitis and the effects of prescribed medication. I started drinking and I just felt insane, Cobain told Azerrad, like I did a whole bunch of speed or something. I just wasn’t very rational at all. Amateur footage of the gig shows Cobain opening the set on his Jaguar before swapping to the Mustang for ‘School’, ‘Floyd the Barber’, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘About a Girl’, and ‘Polly’, while struggling with the sound throughout. Almost immediately on playing the final notes of ‘Polly’, the enraged Cobain swung the guitar off his shoulders and bludgeoned the venue’s monitor board with the butt of the Mustang until its neck was hanging off the body, before flinging the battered guitar to the stage floor. The scars from this encounter remain visible on the guitar today. Guitar tech Earnie Bailey remarked that while Cobain usually “babied” this guitar, it’s a testament to how frustrated he was that night that he was livid enough to break his favorite guitar. The Mustang would not be seen on stage again until almost a year later.
After Cobain switched back to the Jaguar, the incident famously escalated further when the club’s burly bouncer took the opportunity to wallop Kurt when he stage-dived into the crowd during ‘Love Buzz’. I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show, Cobain told Azerrad. So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. Although Novoselic and Grohl jumped in to stop the fight, which ultimately allowed the band to finish their set, a speedy exit was required to avoid a larger confrontation after the show. Evidently regretting having lost his temper and taken it out on the cherished Mustang, Cobain reverted to the Jaguar as his principal stage guitar and began switching in Stratocasters in place of the Competition Mustang for the remainder of the tour. Lately, I’ve been using a Strat live, because I don’t want to ruin my Mustang yet, he told Guitar World in January 1992. From that point on, Cobain reserved the Mustang for special one-off appearances, preferring not to take the risk of damaging the guitar on tour.
According to guitar tech Earnie Bailey, the Mustang was used during the band’s first studio recording session post-Nevermind, which took place at producer Barrett Jones’ Laundry Room Studio in Seattle on 7 April 1992. The session yielded the Nirvana deep cuts ‘Oh, the Guilt’, a cover of the Wipers’ ‘Return of the Rat’, and ‘Curmedgeon’, the latter of which was released as a B-side to ‘Lithium’ just three months later.
The Competition Mustang was next seen on stage when Nirvana appeared as the “secret” opening band for Mudhoney at the Crocodile Cafe in their hometown of Seattle on 4 October 1992. Photographer Charles Peterson was on hand to snap numerous color shots of Cobain on the Mustang. The guitar was seen again on 30 October 1992 when Nirvana played a one-off show at the Estadio José Amalfitani in Buenos Aires for their final live engagement that year. Footage recorded for television broadcast in Argentina shows that Cobain played the Competition Mustang for ‘In Bloom’ and ‘Territorial Pissings’ before switching to a white Strat.
By October 1992, guitar tech Earnie Bailey had performed a number of modifications on the guitar, including replacing the stock bridge pickup with a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails Humbucker. Bailey then replaced the original Mustang bridge with a Tune-O-Matic style adjustable bridge, flipped the tailpiece so the strings could be inserted without going under the tailpiece, and inserted washers to allow the tailpiece to be tightened down against the plate. Bailey explained: This modification solved several problems. It disabled the tremolo system and, in the process, increased tuning stability. Reversing the tailpiece itself allowed us to now re-string the guitar in a much easier process, stabilizing the tuning while changing the angle in which the string connected to the bridge, which would reduce string breakage. By tightening the tailpiece down against the plate, it also redirects the string resonance from being absorbed by the tremolo spring and to the body. In addition, the neck was shimmed for a better angle with the bridge, increasing downward tension on the bridge itself. These modifications would later be repeated on Cobain’s In Utero era Mustangs. While I performed a handful of modifications to this guitar to stabilize the tuning and optimize its playability, notes Bailey, this one was a rare example in which the modifications performed were discussed in detail with Kurt and not made irreversible as we were each aware of not only how rare this guitar was but also how much he cherished it.
According to Bailey, Cobain used the Mustang for demo sessions at Word of Mouth Productions and Laundry Room Studio in Seattle in late October and November 1992. The sessions were intended to produce demo recordings for In Utero but were abandoned before vocals were tracked. In January 1993, the Competition Mustang was among the select equipment flown to Brazil for Nirvana’s headlining appearance at the Hollywood Rock Festival. While the guitar was not seen at the first of the two concerts in Sao Paolo, numerous photographs and videos show Cobain playing the Mustang for a substantial portion of the show at the Praça da Apoteose in Rio de Janeiro on 23 January 1993. As the entire concert was recorded for broadcast on Brazilian television, Cobain can be seen playing the Mustang for ‘School’, ‘Drain You’, ‘Breed’, ‘Sliver’, ‘In Bloom’, ‘Come As You Are’, ‘Polly’, ‘About a Girl’, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, the latter with a notable cameo from the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Flea on trumpet. Cobain’s last documented live appearance with the Competition Mustang was during the band’s headlining performance at a benefit concert for Bosnian rape victims at San Francisco’s Cow Palace on 9 April 1993, when he strapped on the Mustang for the recently recorded ‘Dumb’. While photographic documentation for many of the band’s concert dates over this period remains incomplete, it’s important to note that Cobain owned only one Fender Competition Mustang and therefore any period photograph or circulating recordings that show him with a left-handed Competition Mustang must relate to the present guitar.
IN UTERO
While in Rio de Janeiro for the Hollywood Rock Festival, Nirvana booked into BMG Ariola Studios from 19-21 January 1994 to record further demos with producer Craig Montgomery. Of the nine demo tracks recorded during this session, four would ultimately be re-recorded for In Utero, including ‘Heart Shaped Box’. Having used the guitar for the various album demo sessions, Cobain requested the favored Mustang when the band traveled to Pachyderm Recording Studio in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, to record their hotly anticipated follow-up album with producer Steve Albini from 12-26 February 1993. Earnie Bailey confirmed that this Mustang was one of the few guitars he prepped and shipped to Minnesota for the recording.