Greeny: When Provenance Works
The Exception That Proves the Rule
December 11, 2025
Most "famous" guitars trade on mythology and a single murky photograph. The burden of proof sits somewhere between hearsay and hope. Greeny is different.
This 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard—named for Peter Green, passed to Gary Moore, now owned by Kirk Hammett—is one of the few celebrity instruments where the story is actually verifiable. Decades of photographs, recordings, expert consensus, and continuous public visibility across three careers. No blurry polaroid. No "trust me." Just receipts.
That matters. Because in a market where provenance drives value, Greeny is a case study in what documentation looks like when it works.
And yet, even Greeny has gaps—years of opaque dealer-level trading, a sale price that remains folklore rather than fact. If this is the gold standard, imagine what we're losing everywhere else.
The Chain
Peter Green (c. 1965–early 1970s)
Green bought the used Burst in mid-60s London, shortly before his stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers in 1966–67. It became his main guitar with early Fleetwood Mac, appearing on "Black Magic Woman," "Albatross," and "The Green Manalishi."
Somewhere along the way, the neck pickup ended up with an atypical magnet orientation and wiring—widely believed to be a manufacturing or repair mistake rather than a deliberate mod. The result: the now-famous out-of-phase middle-position tone that became part of Green's sonic identity and, later, a target for pickup makers trying to reverse-engineer the accident.
Gary Moore (early–mid 1970s–2006)
As Green's mental health deteriorated and he withdrew from public life, he passed Greeny to his friend Gary Moore—reportedly insisting on roughly what he'd paid for it himself, around £100. Even before the Burst boom, that was an absurdly low number. It wasn't a market transaction. It was a handoff between friends, a "passing of the torch."
Moore made the guitar his primary Les Paul for over three decades. He used it with Thin Lizzy, on signature tracks like "Parisienne Walkways," and eventually on Blues for Greeny—a tribute album that cemented both the instrument's name and its association with vocal, lyrical blues phrasing. The play wear accumulated. The mythology compounded.
The Black Box (2006–2014)
Multiple accounts indicate that Moore sold Greeny in 2006 due to financial difficulties. The first buyer was UK dealer Phil Winfield, with an initial price bracketed roughly between $750K and $1.2M. From there, the guitar passed through collector Melvyn Franks and an unknown number of intermediate owners before surfacing again in 2014.
This is the opaque interval—dealer- and collector-level trading with no publicly verifiable chain of custody. We know the named nodes (Winfield, Franks). We don't know the full sequence.
Kirk Hammett (2014–present)
In 2014, Metallica's Kirk Hammett acquired Greeny. Most articles report the price as "around two million dollars," but Hammett himself has publicly denied paying that much—calling it "the rumor" in a Howard Stern interview. He's described the deal as opportunistic, a quick negotiation with a financially pressured seller, and has said only that the price was "very realistic."
The actual number remains undisclosed. "Two million" has become market lore—a useful indicator of the guitar's perceived tier rather than a documented transaction. Hammett benefits from the mythology while actively distancing himself from the specific figure. Even in trophy-guitar land, pricing is negotiated, opportunistic, and deliberately opaque.
Unlike many collectors, Hammett continues to tour and record with Greeny rather than keeping it locked away—extending the provenance into a third stylistically distinct but globally visible career.
Monetizing the Myth
Gibson has since built multiple Greeny-branded product lines: a limited Murphy Lab Collector's Edition of 50 guitars at around $50,000 each, plus a regular production Standard. The wear patterns, the out-of-phase wiring, the mythology itself—all have become features, productized and sold.
As part of the process, Gibson engineers conducted what amounts to a forensic inspection of Hammett's guitar—measuring neck dimensions, carve, finish wear, pickups, and wiring. The full technical documentation remains internal, but the examination itself functions as another layer of institutional verification. The story gets checked. The details get recorded. The artifact persists.
What This Teaches Us
Greeny's story shows how value compounds when an instrument's chain of ownership is unbroken, well-documented, and tied to specific recordings, tours, and cultural moments. Each handoff—Green to Moore to Hammett—added new repertoire, new audiences, new visual and media exposure. The guitar became a narrative object as much as a tool.
That layered provenance underpins both its extraordinary monetary value (from a ~£100 used guitar to a multi-million-dollar asset) and its status as a reference point for reissues, tributes, and replicas. Stories and documentation transformed a single physical instrument into a long-lived cultural symbol.
And yet: even here, we have gaps. Eight years of dealer trading without public records. A sale price that remains folklore. A pickup anomaly whose precise origin story is reconstructed from inference rather than documentation.
If this is what provenance looks like when it works, imagine what's being lost—right now, everywhere else—when no one's paying attention.
Takeaways
No one knows when they're making history. Peter Green didn't document the pickup anomaly. Gary Moore didn't notarize the handoff. The stories survived anyway—but barely, and only because the guitar stayed visible. Most instruments aren't that lucky.
Visibility is not the same as verification. Greeny's provenance is unusually strong because of continuous public exposure. But even public exposure didn't capture the 2006–2014 trading chain or the actual sale prices. Documentation requires intention.
The market runs on blurry polaroids. Until a canonical system of trust is established, most instruments will continue to trade on testimony, rumor, and hope. Greeny shows what's possible. The rest of the market shows what we're settling for.
