Prince guitar sells for nearly a million bucks at auction, sets record

Prince‘s yellow “Cloud 3” guitar — one of four such instruments the late artist played onstage in the ’80s and ’90s — sold for $910,000 at the Music Icons sale held by Julien’s Auctions on Thursday. That’s a new record for the most expensive Prince guitar ever sold at auction.

The guitar was originally built for Prince in 1985 for the Purple Rain tour and started out white. It was redone in peach for the Sign O’ The Times tour and then, finally, was repainted yellow. When Prince inked a then-historic $100 million contract with Warner Brothers in 1992, the Cloud 3 guitar was photographed with him at the signing.

Prince played the guitar on the Purple Rain, Parade, Sign O’ The Times, Lovesexy, Nude and Diamonds & Pearls tours.

Prince donated or gave away three of his four Cloud guitars; one of them, Cloud 1, is in the Smithsonian Institution. Cloud 3 was given away in a radio station contest in 1993 and was rediscovered after nearly 20 years.