Excuse me while I kiss this price! Jimi Hendrix guitar goes up for sale with $1.25m

A piece of rock n’ roll music history is now up for grabs as a classic guitar used by a young Jimi Hendrix has hit the market for $1.25 million.

The legendary performer’s 1961 Epiphone Wilshire guitar has been put up for sale over six decades after Hendrix first picked it up. 

Long before he whipped crowds into a frenzy at Woodstock or wowed with an electric rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner, the Wilshire was one of the first guitars Hendrix performed with. 

While he was able to negotiate a price tag of just $65 for the guitar, it’ll take a very wealthy music lover to snap up the expensive antique. 

Hendrix (left) used the guitar during the early days of his band ‘The King Kasuals’

The Epiphone Wilshire was bought by Hendrix for just $65 in 1962

Hendrix owned a fleet of iconic guitars until his untimely death in 1970, aged just 27. 

He was best known for shredding on a 1968 Olympic White Fender Stratocaster, which he most famously used at his generational performance at Woodstock in 1969.

However, according to Farout Magazine, his favorite guitar of all time was another Stratocaster in an all-black finish, which he affectionately called ‘Black Beauty’. 

But in the years before he found mainstream success, Hendrix picked out the Wilshire currently up for auction in 1962 shortly after he was discharged from the army. 

Desperate to snap up the Wilshire to help his budding career, Hendrix traded his Danelectro guitar and $65 for the instrument.

He went on to use the guitar before he went solo, playing it while he was a member of his early band ‘The King Kasuals’. 

The guitar was previously on the market back in 2008, and a private collector is now selling it via the proprietor Moments in Time. 

The instrument comes with a photocopied letter of authenticity, and a collection of images showing Hendrix playing the guitar. 

It isn’t the first time one of Hendrix’s cheap guitars has fetched a fortune. 

In 2016, a second-hand guitar Hendrix bought for just $25 was snapped up for over $200,000 at auction, according to Yahoo News. 

And four years later, a rare Japanese sunburst electric guitar used by Hendrix in the 1960s was bought for more than $171,000, over four times its pre-auction estimate.