“Own a piece of grunge history”: Could your next amp be Kurt Cobain’s stage-played Fender Twin? Nirvana’s Bleach-era touring backline goes up for sale

Nirvana’s Bleach-era touring backline is being sold off, offering Kurt Cobain obsessives a rare opportunity to nail the Promethean electric guitar tones that would become the bedrock of the Seattle sound as the rising tide of the grunge revolution swept all before it.

The collection is being sold from tomorrow (10 April) at 5pm UK time via London’s Denmark Street Guitars, based out of Hanks Guitars, which is a place packed with grail-worthy items.

This is where Peter Capaldi found Doctor Who’s “junk shop” Yamaha electric. A few weeks back they had Eric Clapton’s 1939 000-42 acoustic guitar – no, not the MTV Unplugged 000-42 that sold for $4,101,000 as part of the record-breaking Jim Irsay auction, but a “twin” that Slowhand got just for recording.

Indeed, the last time we walked by – en route to speak to Zakk Wylde – there was one of those stunning (and über-rare) Jimmy Page Les Paul Custom Shop replicas calling out from the window. It's that kind of place.

Anyway, back to the Nirvana amps. Given their live-in-a-dive history, might well be quarantined behind some plexiglass – they look like the kind of tube amps that would get a restaurant shut down on a health code violation.

The collection includes Cobain’s black and silver-panelled Fender Twin Reverb combos, all loaded with JBL speakers, plus a Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet, and bass guitar players aren’t left out either, with Krist Novoselic’s Ampeg SVT head also included.

Cobain’s Bleach tones are one of the gnarliest sounds every committed to tape. Raw, barely tamed yet unusually eminently listenable – certainly when compared with the totally hostile noise-rock engineering of In Utero, when they went all in clang and feedback, and used every bit of Steve Albini’s nous to get a sound to unsettle the mainstream.

Bleach? According to producer Jack Endino, that was his ’67 Fender Twin that had been loaded with a pair of Utah speakers – until Endino fried them. At the time, Cobain had preferred a solid-state Randall, using it on the 1988 recordings with Dale Crover playing drums.

Endino remembers this as a febrile time for the band. Nirvana did not mess about in the studio.

“The first demo I did for Nirvana took five hours and they did 10 songs, and it was recorded and mixed in one afternoon, and then they went and played a show that night,” recalled Endino, speaking to Guitar World in 2022. “That was the one and only show of that era that they played with Dale Crover on the drums, January, 1988. The songs were one take. If a band is really good then all you have to do is get out of their way and make sure the sounds are good, hit ‘record’ and let them do their thing.”

When Cobain’s Randall went in for repair he used Endino’s Twin through a 2x12 cab loaded with a pair of Celestions. This particular guitar amp would assume a certain notoriety.

“In fact, I still have it,” said Endino. “It’s called ‘The Bleach Twin’ because Kurt used it on Bleach. I can tell you Kurt, using my amp on Bleach, was using a Boss DS-1, the orange [distortion] pedal with three knobs. That was his sound in 1989.”

Cobain tracked Bleach with the Mosrite-esque Univox Hi-Flyers, then embarked on Nirvana’s US tour with an Epiphone ET270, using his Randall head through a Bullfrog 4x12. That was in his Bleach-era touring rig for the US. The Boss pedal made it out unscathed, the guitars, not so much.

In Europe, the touring for Bleach was supplied by Protone backline rental in Holland, and comprised the complement of amps being sold via Denmark Street Guitars.

You can register your interest at sales (at) londonvntageguitars.com.