A few days ago, the guitar that Phoebe Bridgers famously smashed on Saturday Night Live went up for auction to benefit GLAAD. When Uproxx reported the story on April 9, the leading bid was up to $6,000. In the days since, that number climbed drastically, and now the auction has ended with an astonishing winning bid of $101,500.
Anthony Ramos — the supervising producer of the GLAAD Media Awards, to which the auction was connected — told Variety of the auction:
“I know she has a loyal fan base. Saturday night when I went to bed, it was around $18,000, and I was like, ‘That’s a great number!’ I was kind of hoping we would get to 25. Then I woke up and it was 40, then 50, then 80, and finally over 100. Obviously we were very pleasantly surprised. I’m so thankful someone wanted to support our work and wanted that guitar so badly. […] Obviously [the buyer is] someone who’s either a huge Phoebe Bridgers fan or someone who is really into broken guitars or someone who really wants to help us accelerate our work for the LGBTQ community, and hopefully it’s someone who checks all three of those boxes. The other side of it is that we’re so grateful to Phoebe for donating the guitar but also for being someone who’s a visible and out part of the community in rock music. She made a great album, and we love all she’s doing and love working with her.”
Bridgers also seemed pretty blown away by the money her guitar raised, as she shared a link to the auction yesterday and added simply, “uh.”
— traitor joe (@phoebe_bridgers) April 11, 2021
Now we wait to see how much her smashed ukulele will go for.