It’s been lost for 50 years, but now it’s headed for auction where it could break the all-time record. In the opening video of this article, you can see the guitar with which John Lennon recorded the album Help! in 1965. with hits like Yesterday or Help! and which he also plays in the film of the same name. It was also played by George Harrison from the Beatles band and was also used during the recording of another album, Rubber Soul, from the same year.
And so it is not surprising that, although the American auction house Julien’s Auctions estimated its value at 600 to 800 thousand dollars, it is expected that it could be sold for much more on May 29 – up to ten times. And thus beat the previous record holder from March 2022.
“Keep in mind that we hold the world record for the most expensive guitar, which was Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E from MTV Unplugged in 1993. We sold that for six million and ten thousand dollars. This might be the guitar that can top it because it’s really, really important. Nobody has seen it for 50 years and it’s probably the last Beatles instrument to come on the market,” explains Martin Nolan, director and co-founder of the auction house, about its rarity.
The Beatles guitar was lying on the floor
This is a Hootenanny 12-string model made by the Bavarian company Framus in the early 1960s. But at the end of the decade it changed hands several times and then disappeared. Julien’s Auctions compares its discovery to finding a lost Rembrandt or Picasso. From the United States, experts went to verify its origin elsewhere than in Britain, where it was literally found in the attic, and they just managed to pull its equally valuable case out of the trash.
“The family, you know, had been in the music business for over 60 years and that guitar was given to them by Gordon Weller of the duo Peter and Gordon, who were friends of the Beatles and played their music a lot. And the Beatles also wrote songs for them, after which they gave the guitar to their manager. And when he had her, he probably didn’t think much of her, so she ended up in the attic. Well, when she moved on to the house, she ended up in the attic again, and when the family gradually cut costs and turned the two-story, attic shack into a one-story, attic house, their son found her in a box. “He’d always heard about it growing up, but never seen it,” Nolan describes how the instrument came to be.
Famous and expensive guitars
According to Julien’s Auctions, the wooden body of the guitar is a perfect match for the one John Lennon and George Harrison both played. According to auctioneers, it fulfills the role of a fingerprint. And because it was untouched for about 50 years, it is in the condition in which they left it.
American auctioneers also say it is the biggest such find since the discovery of Paul McCartney’s violin-shaped Höfner bass, which was stolen from him in 1972 and only returned to him in February this year. He bought it for £30 in 1961, but today it could be worth £10 million.
And this is how in 1963 they stole one of John Lennon’s guitars. It was the Gibson model on which he wrote the song I Want to Hold Your Hand. It appeared only in 2014 and just a year later Julien’s Auctions auctioned it for £1.6 million.
