Some guitars were built to be played. A handful were played to change everything.

On May 29 and 30, Hard Rock Cafe Times Square will host what may be the most significant gathering of rock and roll artifacts in recent memory with Music Icons 2026, a landmark two-day live auction featuring over 650 lots spanning five decades of rock and roll, heavy metal, punk, blues, and beyond. This year, the collection hits different.

From the instrument Johnny Cash carried to his Grand Ole Opry debut to the guitar Kirk Hammett inscribed as "The very first Ouija guitar — 0001," this collection represents the most significant assembly of music memorabilia to come to market in years.

Bid live in New York, online from anywhere in the world, or by phone — the auction is open to all.

Guitars, stage wear, handwritten lyrics, and deeply personal relics from the artists who defined the sound of the last half-century will change hands across those two days. But before the gavels fall, a curated exhibition of highlights is making its final stop on a three-leg worldwide tour from London and Tokyo to Hard Rock Cafe New York, where it opens to the public on May 13. Consider it a museum visit with unusually high stakes.

The Centerpiece Nobody Will Stop Talking About

If there's a single object that anchors this entire affair, it's the 1975 Gibson Les Paul that Ace Frehley relied on more than any other guitar in his career. Not one of his Les Pauls. The Les Paul. The one he brought to stages and studios with KISS more than any other instrument in his arsenal, and the one that cemented his place on virtually every "Top 10 Les Paul Players of All Time" list ever published. It's been estimated between $400,000 and $600,000, which sounds like an enormous sum until you consider what it represents: the actual physical object responsible for some of the most indelible guitar moments in hard rock history.

The auction also marks the 50th anniversary of KISS's London debut — fitting, given the breadth of KISS-related material on offer. Stage-worn costumes, personal effects, and items spanning the full arc of the band's career fill out what amounts to the most comprehensive KISS collection to appear in one place outside of a dedicated exhibition.

The Guitars That Played the Songs

Frehley's Les Paul isn't alone in commanding the room's attention.

Stevie Ray Vaughan's 1969 Guild F-412 twelve-string — the guitar he played during his January 30, 1990 performance on MTV Unplugged, one of his final major television appearances before his death that August — is expected to draw somewhere in the $300,000 to $500,000 range. It is, by any measure, a profound artifact.

Kirk Hammett’s Stage and Studio-Played, Signed, First “Ouija” ESP Custom guitar, inscribed in his own hand — "The very first Ouija guitar – 0001! This was one of my main touring + recording guitars throughout the '90s" — connects directly to one of the most fertile and consequential decades in Metallica's recording history. It's estimated between $250,000 and $350,000.

A 1954 Martin D-18 acoustic that Johnny Cash played at his 1956 Grand Ole Opry debut — potentially the earliest professional guitar of his career, used during the period he recorded "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk the Line" — arrives with an $80,000 to $100,000 estimate and the weight of American music history behind it.

Eddie Van Halen personally striped and stage-played a Charvel Art Series guitar that carries its own sober distinction: it was used during his final performance with Sammy Hagar. An Izzy Stradlin Gibson HR Fusion, given to the Guns N' Roses guitarist by Gibson in 1987 during the recording of Appetite for Destruction and prominently featured in the "Welcome to the Jungle" video, makes the case that it is among the most important instruments from that album's orbit. Adam Clayton's Fender Jazz Bass — studio and stage-used during the Unforgettable Fire era and played at Live Aid in 1985 — rounds out the upper tier.

Beyond the Fretboard

The collection refuses to limit itself to strings and pickups. A Beatles band-signed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band sleeve, estimated between $20,000 and $40,000, is the kind of piece that makes lifelong fans briefly consider their retirement accounts. Joni Mitchell's handwritten "Woodstock" lyrics — a fair copy in her own hand of perhaps the defining song of a generation — carry a $20,000 to $30,000 estimate and a cultural weight that can't really be priced.

John Bonham's 1976 velvet suit, tailored for the Led Zeppelin drummer and photographed on him that same year, represents the glamour and excess of an era that produced some of the greatest rock records ever made. A Paul Cook stage-worn Sex Pistols "Anarchy in the U.K." sleeveless shirt from 1977 puts punk in the same room as classic rock, which feels exactly right.

Where to Be and When

The exhibition opens at Hard Rock Cafe New York on May 13 and is open to the public daily in the lead-up to the sale. The auction itself runs May 29 and 30, live from Hard Rock Cafe Times Square. For those unable to make the trip, bidding across the full collection of more than 650 items is currently open online at juliensauctions.com.

The guitars, the clothing, the signed sleeves — they've all been patient. They've waited in cases and vaults and private collections for the right moment to pass into new hands.

That moment is almost here.