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Lot Essay
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.
It's generally believed to be around this time that Cobain purchased this left-handed Fender Competition Mustang from Lloyd Chiate of Voltage Guitars, North Hollywood – most likely either in late April when the band first arrived in LA for rehearsals ahead of the recording sessions, or out of necessity following the theft of several guitars from their truck at the Oakwood Apartments complex on 29 May. 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.
There is an argument that Cobain could have picked up the Competition Mustang after the recording sessions. Whilst album producer Butch Vig has corroborated the prevailing narrative that Kurt brought a Mustang to the studio for the album recording, we would be remiss not to mention a somewhat incongruous entry in Cobain’s journals, written after recording wrapped, which outlines Things that have been taken from me within the past 2 months, and lists three guitars (including the moserite), before Cobain acknowledges that the setback was tempered by his acquisition of a really neato left handed 67 fender Jaguar, which is in my opinion, almost as cool as a mustang. So I consider it a fair trade for the moserite. Some have posited that the absence here of any reference to the recent acquisition of a Mustang could indicate that the present guitar had not yet come into Cobain’s possession. Without more concrete evidence, it is difficult to be certain either way. In any event, we know that Cobain was certainly in possession of the guitar before the music video was filmed on 17 August, which allows for another possible acquisition date of 15 August, when the band were briefly back in West Hollywood for a label showcase at The Roxy.
Cobain repeatedly stated his preference for the Mustang model in 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 storage 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 dating 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 me 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.
THE STUDIO
Producer Butch Vig first heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in person during the band’s rehearsals before they entered the studio. We had set them up in a pretty big room to practice, Vig recalls, 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 got up and I was pacing around listening to them. I kept thinking, “How am I gonna harness this energy in the studio?” They finished the song and Krist said, “Wha’dya think, Butch?” I said, “Man, this sounds great. Play it again. Play it again.” Then I settled in a little bit, calmed down, and was able to focus. I watched Dave’s drumming to see how they were interacting. We did a few things to the arrangement, but they were very subtle. We just tightened up a couple sections. At the end there’s a little break when they come out of the chorus. There’s a musical part and then Kurt goes, “Yeah,” and they go back into the rest of the riff. They did that over and over and over again — sometimes four or eight times. I said, “That’s cool, but just do it two times as a little transition. Get out of the chorus and get right back into the verse.” That was one of the final arrangements we did that day. 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.
After three days of pre-production, the band launched into recording sessions at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, from 2-28 May 1991. While Vig kept meticulous tracking sheets detailing the amps, pedals, microphones and other equipment used for the recordings, there were no notes as to which guitars were used for each track in the studio. Vig recalls that Kurt had his Stella acoustic, a Mustang, his Mosrite and several guitars that Vig had rented for the band’s use, noting that the latter would probably have been Telecasters rather than Strats. Unless it was rented, any Mustang that Cobain had in the studio at this time could only be this Competition Mustang. Kurt had a Mesa/Boogie, but we also used a Fender Bassman a lot and a Vox AC30 on Nevermind. Vig told Guitar World’s Chris Gill. I prefer getting the amp to sound distorted instead of using special effects or pedals, which lose body and the fullness of the bottom end, even though you can get nice distortion with some of them. If you get a good-sounding amp, that’s 90 percent of it. Vig recalls that Cobain used the Small Clone effects pedal liberally, telling Gill: That’s making the watery guitar sound you hear on the pre-chorus build-up of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and also ‘Come as You Are’.
We knew it was great, Vig admitted to Mojo in 1998. 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
Filmed on 17 August 1991 on a Culver City soundstage, the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video was heavily shaped by Cobain’s treatment - part subversion of the American pep‑rally trope, part controlled chaos. Cobain proposed elements which amplified the anti‑pageant atmosphere (non‑traditional cheerleaders, staged disorder, and bonfire imagery). While not all concepts survived production and edit decisions, the set ultimately descended into cathartic anarchy as the audience left the bleachers to mosh. The resultant aesthetic - flannel‑shirted crowds, scuffed hardwood, fog, and the band centre‑stage - conveyed a documentary‑like immediacy that matched the song’s dynamic contrasts. It 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 then and entering the specialty rotation on 120 Minutes, before moving rapidly to heavy rotation and becoming one of the channel’s signature “Buzz Bin” clips. The single reached the Top 10 in the US and UK; Nevermind ascended to No. 1 in the US and charted internationally. The video won two MTV Video Music Awards (Best New Artist in a Video; Best Alternative Video) and has been widely recognized in critical rankings. By December 2019, official YouTube views surpassed 1 billion, later exceeding 2.1 billion.
LIVE USE AND NOTABLE PERFORMANCES, 1991–1993
The Competition Mustang’s first public, documented appearance occurred at Nirvana’s Nevermind release event at Beehive Records, Seattle, 16 September 1991, where amateur video shows Cobain using it on “Breed” and “Floyd the Barber.” It appears in tour photography shortly thereafter, including:
First Avenue, Minneapolis — 14 October 1991
Trees Club, Dallas — 19 October 1991 (the Dallas incident that sidelined the guitar for the remainder of the Nevermind tour)
The Crocodile Café, Seattle — 4 October 1992
Estadio José Amalfitani, Buenos Aires — 30 October 1992
Hollywood Rock, Rio de Janeiro — 23 January 1993
Cow Palace, San Francisco — 9 April 1993
While photographic documentation is incomplete for many dates in this period, Cobain owned one Competition Mustang; consequently, any period photograph of him with a Competition Burgundy Mustang refers to this instrument.
THE TREES CLUB, DALLAS, 1991
The October 1991 Trees Club appearance would be of particular consequence for this guitar. As documented by 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 illness and the effects of prescribed medication. Mid‑performance, he struck the venue’s monitor board with the guitar, damaging both the equipment and his favored Mustang. The incident escalated when a confrontation arose between Cobain and a venue security staff member, leading to a physical altercation during the song “Love Buzz.” I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show, Kurt said. So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. He got a big gash on his forehead. Guitar tech Earnie Bailey confirmed that Cobain usually “babied” this guitar, it is a testament to how angry he was that night that, he was livid enough to break his favorite guitar. That night is quite a story. The rest of the band jumped in to stop the fight and the show ultimately continued, but the Mustang was rendered unplayable for the remainder of the tour. The Dallas performance has since become one of the most closely chronicled episodes of Nirvana’s early mainstream ascent, further underscoring this instrument’s central place in the band’s Nevermind‑era narrative.
For an extended version of this essay, please see Christies.com.
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.
It's generally believed to be around this time that Cobain purchased this left-handed Fender Competition Mustang from Lloyd Chiate of Voltage Guitars, North Hollywood – most likely either in late April when the band first arrived in LA for rehearsals ahead of the recording sessions, or out of necessity following the theft of several guitars from their truck at the Oakwood Apartments complex on 29 May. 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.
There is an argument that Cobain could have picked up the Competition Mustang after the recording sessions. Whilst album producer Butch Vig has corroborated the prevailing narrative that Kurt brought a Mustang to the studio for the album recording, we would be remiss not to mention a somewhat incongruous entry in Cobain’s journals, written after recording wrapped, which outlines Things that have been taken from me within the past 2 months, and lists three guitars (including the moserite), before Cobain acknowledges that the setback was tempered by his acquisition of a really neato left handed 67 fender Jaguar, which is in my opinion, almost as cool as a mustang. So I consider it a fair trade for the moserite. Some have posited that the absence here of any reference to the recent acquisition of a Mustang could indicate that the present guitar had not yet come into Cobain’s possession. Without more concrete evidence, it is difficult to be certain either way. In any event, we know that Cobain was certainly in possession of the guitar before the music video was filmed on 17 August, which allows for another possible acquisition date of 15 August, when the band were briefly back in West Hollywood for a label showcase at The Roxy.
Cobain repeatedly stated his preference for the Mustang model in 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 storage 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 dating 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 me 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.
THE STUDIO
Producer Butch Vig first heard ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in person during the band’s rehearsals before they entered the studio. We had set them up in a pretty big room to practice, Vig recalls, 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 got up and I was pacing around listening to them. I kept thinking, “How am I gonna harness this energy in the studio?” They finished the song and Krist said, “Wha’dya think, Butch?” I said, “Man, this sounds great. Play it again. Play it again.” Then I settled in a little bit, calmed down, and was able to focus. I watched Dave’s drumming to see how they were interacting. We did a few things to the arrangement, but they were very subtle. We just tightened up a couple sections. At the end there’s a little break when they come out of the chorus. There’s a musical part and then Kurt goes, “Yeah,” and they go back into the rest of the riff. They did that over and over and over again — sometimes four or eight times. I said, “That’s cool, but just do it two times as a little transition. Get out of the chorus and get right back into the verse.” That was one of the final arrangements we did that day. 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.
After three days of pre-production, the band launched into recording sessions at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, California, from 2-28 May 1991. While Vig kept meticulous tracking sheets detailing the amps, pedals, microphones and other equipment used for the recordings, there were no notes as to which guitars were used for each track in the studio. Vig recalls that Kurt had his Stella acoustic, a Mustang, his Mosrite and several guitars that Vig had rented for the band’s use, noting that the latter would probably have been Telecasters rather than Strats. Unless it was rented, any Mustang that Cobain had in the studio at this time could only be this Competition Mustang. Kurt had a Mesa/Boogie, but we also used a Fender Bassman a lot and a Vox AC30 on Nevermind. Vig told Guitar World’s Chris Gill. I prefer getting the amp to sound distorted instead of using special effects or pedals, which lose body and the fullness of the bottom end, even though you can get nice distortion with some of them. If you get a good-sounding amp, that’s 90 percent of it. Vig recalls that Cobain used the Small Clone effects pedal liberally, telling Gill: That’s making the watery guitar sound you hear on the pre-chorus build-up of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and also ‘Come as You Are’.
We knew it was great, Vig admitted to Mojo in 1998. 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
Filmed on 17 August 1991 on a Culver City soundstage, the 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' video was heavily shaped by Cobain’s treatment - part subversion of the American pep‑rally trope, part controlled chaos. Cobain proposed elements which amplified the anti‑pageant atmosphere (non‑traditional cheerleaders, staged disorder, and bonfire imagery). While not all concepts survived production and edit decisions, the set ultimately descended into cathartic anarchy as the audience left the bleachers to mosh. The resultant aesthetic - flannel‑shirted crowds, scuffed hardwood, fog, and the band centre‑stage - conveyed a documentary‑like immediacy that matched the song’s dynamic contrasts. It 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 then and entering the specialty rotation on 120 Minutes, before moving rapidly to heavy rotation and becoming one of the channel’s signature “Buzz Bin” clips. The single reached the Top 10 in the US and UK; Nevermind ascended to No. 1 in the US and charted internationally. The video won two MTV Video Music Awards (Best New Artist in a Video; Best Alternative Video) and has been widely recognized in critical rankings. By December 2019, official YouTube views surpassed 1 billion, later exceeding 2.1 billion.
LIVE USE AND NOTABLE PERFORMANCES, 1991–1993
The Competition Mustang’s first public, documented appearance occurred at Nirvana’s Nevermind release event at Beehive Records, Seattle, 16 September 1991, where amateur video shows Cobain using it on “Breed” and “Floyd the Barber.” It appears in tour photography shortly thereafter, including:
First Avenue, Minneapolis — 14 October 1991
Trees Club, Dallas — 19 October 1991 (the Dallas incident that sidelined the guitar for the remainder of the Nevermind tour)
The Crocodile Café, Seattle — 4 October 1992
Estadio José Amalfitani, Buenos Aires — 30 October 1992
Hollywood Rock, Rio de Janeiro — 23 January 1993
Cow Palace, San Francisco — 9 April 1993
While photographic documentation is incomplete for many dates in this period, Cobain owned one Competition Mustang; consequently, any period photograph of him with a Competition Burgundy Mustang refers to this instrument.
THE TREES CLUB, DALLAS, 1991
The October 1991 Trees Club appearance would be of particular consequence for this guitar. As documented by 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 illness and the effects of prescribed medication. Mid‑performance, he struck the venue’s monitor board with the guitar, damaging both the equipment and his favored Mustang. The incident escalated when a confrontation arose between Cobain and a venue security staff member, leading to a physical altercation during the song “Love Buzz.” I decided to get one good blow in before he beat me up after the show, Kurt said. So I smacked him in the face with my guitar. He got a big gash on his forehead. Guitar tech Earnie Bailey confirmed that Cobain usually “babied” this guitar, it is a testament to how angry he was that night that, he was livid enough to break his favorite guitar. That night is quite a story. The rest of the band jumped in to stop the fight and the show ultimately continued, but the Mustang was rendered unplayable for the remainder of the tour. The Dallas performance has since become one of the most closely chronicled episodes of Nirvana’s early mainstream ascent, further underscoring this instrument’s central place in the band’s Nevermind‑era narrative.
For an extended version of this essay, please see Christies.com.