The guitar offered for sale by Julien’s Auctions is a left-handed 1969 Fender Mustang with a blue finish.

Cobain can be seen playing it in the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The video, first broadcast on Sept 29, 1991, on the MTV cable music channel, helped get Nirvana on the radar outside the grunge scene. Overnight, the band became a global sensation.

This is the first time this guitar has appeared on the market. It has been on display for 12 years at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, along with other guitars that belonged to Woody Guthrie, Gene Simmons of KISS and Eric Clapton. For Julien’s Auctions, this 1969 Fender Mustang is “the electric guitar that changed music.”

And it was just as important to Cobain. The Nirvana frontman talked about it at length in his last interview with Guitar World magazine in the fall of 1991. “I’m left-handed, and it’s not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favourite. I’ve only owned two of them,” he said at the time.