John Lennon's 'Love Me Do' Guitar Sells for Record $2.4 Million
John Lennon's long-lost acoustic Gibson J-160E, used in the recording of the Beatles' Please Please Me and With the Beatles LPs, shattered all estimates Saturday on the Julien's Live auction block, as the instrument sold for $2.41 million, a record for a guitar with music history significance. Lennon purchased the Gibson at Rushworth’s Music House in Liverpool in September 1962 for £161. The guitar, which was lost for over 40 years, sold for three times its $800,000 estimate to an unspecified buyer who asked to remain anonymous.
t's unclear how Lennon was separated from the instrument, which was also used on the Beatles' first single "Love Me Do" / "P.S. I Love You," but it resurfaced in a San Diego music shop in the summer of 1967; however, the purchaser had no idea the guitar once belonged to Lennon. It wasn't until 2008 that the guitar's provenance was discovered. "Its importance in Beatles history cannot be overstated; this guitar is intimately bound to the early career of The Beatles," Julien's Live said of the guitar. "This is the earliest and most significant John Lennon guitar to be auctioned."
By comparison, Lennon's Gretsch guitar, used on the Beatles' 1966 single "Paperback Writer," sold for $530,000 to Indianapolis Colts owner and guitar collector Jim Irsay in November 2014. Irsay also spent $965,000 for Bob Dylan's Fender Stratocaster used at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the infamous "Dylan goes electric" guitar. A white Fender Stratocaster signed by an army of guitar gods – Keith Richards, David Gilmour, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and others – sold for $2.7 million at a charity auction for tsunami victims in 2007.
By: Daniel Kreps
Source: Rolling Stone
