Ask any vintage collector and they will tell you that there’s something special about old guitars, their stories, the songs they’ve made – especially acoustic guitars, which age particularly well, sounding better as the years pass and the wood dries out.
But all that mojo stuff, and the power of legend? It doesn’t work every time and not on every player. In an interview with Revolver, Opeth frontman/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt revealed that he had recently had the chance to play Kurt Cobain’s “haunted” Martin D-18 at the Martin Museum, Nazareth, Pennsylvania, and even as a Nirvana fan it didn’t strike him as anything special.
“It was very beat up,” said Åkerfeldt. “It didn’t feel that good. There was nothing special about it, other than it had belonged to Kurt.”
Åkerfeldt doesn’t mention it by name but it is most definitely “Grandpa” that he is talking about – a 1953 Martin D-18 that Cobain was given before the touring cycle for Nevermind, which is now one of the star attractions at the Martin Museum.
As the story goes, Nirvana were yet to blow up, and money was tight. Cobain needed an acoustic for their upcoming tour and his friend, the Boston-based indie-folk artist Mary Lou Lord, could help him out, giving him her guitar, Grandpa, for the tour.
Cobain took Grandpa out, the rest was history. Nirvana got big. The guitar was returned to Lord and then Elliott Smith played it when Lord went touring with him.
Åkerfeldt is right. This 1953 D-18 is beat up. That it made it through a Nirvana tour unscathed is a minor miracle in and of itself. The wear and tear on both sides of the soundhole is something you don’t see every day but that’s what happens when it has been played hard by a left-handed guitarist in Cobain and by right-handed guitarists Lord and Smith – not to mention the decades of playing before those two got their hands on it.
I’m a Nirvana fan, but it was just a regular guitar to me
That Cobain and Smith died young, some people took on a ghoulish fascination with Grandpa, as though it was cursed. Åkerfeldt was nonplussed by all that.
“Someone told us that guitar was haunted, like people who had that guitar had accidents,” he said. “I’m a Nirvana fan, but it was just a regular guitar to me.”
I’m a Nirvana fan, but it was just a regular guitar to me
Åkerfeldt is no stranger to Martin guitars. He started using them with Opeth around the Damnation era, when the Martin replaced his old Seagull acoustic. He used to work in a Stockholm guitar shop that specialised in Martin guitars, making repairs to them, and because the shop was quiet Åkerfeldt would spend his time practising on acoustics.
“I was playing a lot and writing a lot for our second album [Morningrise] and developing my technique as an acoustic guitar player,” he told MusicRadar in 2010. “That’s something that made a lot of difference to me as a songwriter, guitar player and musician overall. The years in that store helped me to develop our sound.”
He might have been unmoved by Cobain’s Grandpa. But he tells Revolver that visiting the Martin HQ was like “visiting the Holy Land” – and there was one Martin he was so old – so valuable – it gave him the heebie-jeebies.
“I played a guitar from the 1800s,” said Åkerfeldt. “I got scared. They held it up to me and I kept backing away. It’s invaluable, you know? I don’t know what the value in money would be, but it’s an artefact. I get nervous around those kinds of things. But I did play it.”
Grandpa is one of the most famous acoustic guitars in the Martin Museum. But how much it would be worth is hard to say.
Cobain’s most famous Martin is the 1959 Martin D-18E that he played on Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged, which in 2020 became the most valuable guitar ever sold at auction. Australian businessman Peter Freedman, owner of Rode Microphones, paid a $6,010,000 for it.
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