As part of a divorce settlement with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter Frances Bean Cobain, Isaiah Silva got to keep Kurt Cobain’s Martin D-18E, the acoustic guitar with electric pickups he played on MTV Unplugged in what was probably the only episode of MTV Unplugged worth actually watching. The guitar was already a collectible when Cobain used it, as Martin is perhaps the finest manufacturer of mass-produced acoustic guitars in the world and the D-18E, a version of the iconic Martin D-18 Dreadnought with electric pickups, was only produced for one year in 1959.
So the particular guitar Kurt Cobain played in the iconic performance, one of the few guitars of Cobain’s he didn’t smash to pieces at the end of a concert, is a bona fide piece of rock history. Jesse Amoroso from Pawn Stars told TMZ the guitar was priceless, then immediately put a price of a million dollars or more on it.
According to Silva, Frances Bean’s mother Courtney Love put together an Ocean’s Eleven-style group to murder him and steal the guitar. I assume the idea was to make it look like a suicide. Not that Courtney Love has ever killed anyone and made it look like a suicide. Why would Simon Amstell say a thing like that?
Love’s A-Team allegedly includes Sam Lufti, who was Britney Spears’ manager, private dick John Nazarian and the guy who played Reggie Mantle on Riverdale in season one, Ross Butler. Because why wouldn’t you get those guys to murder someone? That’s the sort of thing a crazy person who had murdered their husband and gotten away with it would do, and we know that’s not who Courtney Love is.
According to People, Silva alleges that this group, which has all sort of names on it I’ve never head like Yan Yukhtman “entered into a criminal conspiracy to commit trespass, burglary, home invasion robbery, assault, battery, kidnapping, and murder.” Also that one of them, who is surprisingly not Kevin Spacey, grabbed his penis. Personally, I think it’s nice to have a story on Courtney Love where she isn’t the one who sounds like a crazy person wandering down the street in New York City talking about beams from satellites.