A guitar played by Beatles legend John Lennon is to be sold for at least $1milllion (£783,000) after a man found it after it was lost in his dad’s attic.
The acoustic guitar spent more than 50 years in the attic in rural England before it was rediscovered and sent to auction. The Framus 12-string Hootenanny guitar was once played by Beatles stars John Lennon and George Harrison on some of the Fab Four’s most popular tracks.
The instrument was used by the legendary musicians on the making of the Beatles’ fifth album Help! and their sixth Rubber Soul . The guitar can be heard on tracks like You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away, It’s Only Love, I’ve Just Seen a Face, Norwegian Wood and Girl.
John Lennon reportedly gifted the guitar to musician Gordon Waller, of the pop duo Peter and Gordon. Waller then passed it on to a friend who stashed it in his attic and promptly forgot about it for 50 years.
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Darren Julien, Executive Director and co-founder of Julien’s auctions said: “We got a call from a gentleman who said ‘my parents are just moving and we didn’t know that we had this guitar, or where it was. But when we were moving out of the house we pulled it out of the attic, a guitar that my father says was a John Lennon guitar and that Gordon, of Peter and Gordon, had gifted to my father in the late 60s’.”
Speaking in a video, Martin J. Nolan, Executive Director and co-founder of Julien’s auctions, added: “The son told us that he’d always heard his dad talk about this guitar but he’d always believed that it was lost.”
The auctioneers went to an expert in Beatles history who confirmed that this particular guitar had been missing for decades. Matching unique wood grain on the guitar body and patterning on the pickguard led to the confirmation that this was indeed the guitar used by the band.
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The guitar which was also used in stage performances and features prominently in the Beatles’ Help! movie. Julien’s is currently selling the guitar in a two-day auction at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York on May 29 and 30 in a sale of music memorabilia including a setlist handwritten by Kurt Kobain, a Tupac Shakur lyric book and a Versace outfit from Tina Turner.
Bidding started at $150,000 (£117,000) while it was estimated to fetch between $600,000 (£470,000) to $800,000 (£627,000), however, bidding has already reached a staggering $1million (£783,000). The most expensive Beatles guitar ever sold was Lennon’s Gibson J160E, which sold for $2.4 million in 2015.