| Kurt Cobain's 1965/66' Fender JaguarProbably the Most Famous guitar of the 1990's |
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It was the spring of 1994 and I was laying in bed asleep at 3 a.m., Rock 103 had started playing creepy "Alien Music" that had somehow invaded my dreams...around that time, at some point, after maybe 15 minutes, now somewhat in between sleeping and wakefulness....the music stops....dead air....and then I heard that opening riff.....
C'mon...how the hell else was I supposed to tell you the riff to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"....I don't think HTML has a tag for "make guitar music" without a WAV/OGG/MP3 file! And suddenly, that creepy kid with the bowl cut who had been in the news for attempting suicide and inciting the wrath of stand-up comics everywhere (ie "Why'd you want to kill yourself if you're in a hot-tub full of women in your Ivory Tower?" - look, I saw that on Comedy Central at tha time) was kinda' cool.....I just did not know HOW cool. Classic rockers won't understand it, and Grunge Rockers won't understand my "classic rock" side either.....and so rose the fucked up duality of "CreepingNet" - a 80's-themed rocker with grunge/punk principles.
Kurt Cobain's Jaguar was my first hand education in how the Guitar Market, Guitar Fads, and Guitar prices, actually work. It did not help I found a 1992 Guitar World Magazine at Crossroads music with a nice, full picture of Kurt's Jaguar on one page...... the one below.... GW: Speaking of guitars, you seem to favor low-end models Cobain: I don�t favor them - I can afford them. [laughs] I�m left-handed, and it�s not very easy to find reasonably priced, high-quality left-handed guitars. But out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. I�ve only owned two of them. GW: What is it about them that works for you? Cobain: They�re cheap and totally inefficient, they sound like crap and are very small. They also don�t stay in tune, and when you want to raise the string action on the fretboard, you have to loosen all the strings and completely remove the bridge. You have to turn these little screws with your fingers and hope that you�ve estimated it right. If you screw up, you have to repeat the process over and over until you get right. Whoever invented that guitar was a dork. GW: It was Leo Fender. Cobain: I guess I�m calling Leo Fender, the dead guy, a dork. Now I�ll never get an endorsement. [laughs] We�ve been offered a Gibson endorsement, but I can�t find a Gibson I like. GW: Is the Mustang your only guitar. Cobain: No, I own a �66 Jaguar. That�s the guitar I polish and baby - I refuse to let anyone touch it when I jump into the crowd. [laughs] Lately, I�ve been using a Strat live, because I don�t want to ruin my Mustang yet. I like to Japanese Strats because they�re a bit cheaper, and the frets are smaller than the American version�s. GW: The acoustic guitar you play on "Polly" sound flat. Cobain: That�s a 20-dollar junk shop Stella - I didn�t bother changing the strings. [laughs] It barely stays in tune. In fact I have to use duct tape to hold the tuning keys in place. GW: Considering how violently you play the guitar, I have to assume that you use pretty heavy-duty strings. Cobain: Yeah. And I keep blowing up amplifiers, so I use whatever I can find at junk shops - junk is always best. GW: What was the last amp you blew up? Cobain: A Crown power amp that was intended for use as a PA, but which I used for a guitar head because I can never find an amp that�s powerful enough - and because I don�t want to have to deal with hauling 10 Marshall heads. I�m lazy - I like to have it all in one package. For a preamp I have a Mesa/Boogie, and I turn all the mid-range up. And I use Radio Shack speakers. GW: How reliable is this set-up? It doesn�t seem like it would be that durable, especially in view of all the touring you do. Cobain: It works out okay. The sound changes with every club we play in, but I�m never satisfied. I think the sound I get is mainly a result of the Roland EF-1 distortion box I use. I go through about five a tour. GW: Ever get the urge to use a twang bar. Cobain: No. Anybody who plays guitar knows that only Jimi Hendrix was able to use the standard tremolo and still keep it in tune. Those things are totally worthless. I do have one on a Japanese Strat, but I don�t use it. So how does this translate to "How I Learned the Guitar Market because of Kurt Cobain"....well, I was under this crazy impression I needed to find a Electric Guitar my mom would like, something with a Rosewood neck, because I had a Yamaha G245S-II classical at the time, and everyone was making a huge deal out of the Brazilian rosewood back, sides, bridge, and whatever else o that guitar. SO I figured, if I cound a nice, woodgrained, rosewood boarded electric, maybe my electric-guitar hating mother would accept the fact her son wanted one. And the Jaguar seemed like a nice compromise, because I have always had a thing for knobs and switches - it just made sense. So I went out into the guitar shops and started looking around an inquiring about Fender Jaguars once I foudn the name in "The Fender Book" and saw what looked like the one John Frushante had in the "Under the Bridge" video. Even without Humbuckers, I was totally fine with that. And of course, not a single store in Opelika or Auburn had one in stock. Now, later I'd get to play a nice run of Jazzmasters - mostly because of This Guy - but Jaguars were a royal pain in the ass for me to find even ONE to try out. To make matters worse, it seemed most of the guys at the shops had some kind of disdain for them, ranging from "they won't stay in tune" "They're delicate" "they sound thin and "ice picky"" "there's too many controls for me to know what the hell they all do" to "Jaguars are crap!". But yet rebuttals about Humbuckers and Tune-O-Matics resulted in "how dare you cut up a vintage musical instrument" - it seemed weird to me such a hated guitar model would get so much protection from the guys who ran music shops. What seemed even weirder, was the one Jaguar that DID turn up during this time, was a hacked up 1963 with the FULL Cobain livery - painted black, with a tort guard, DiMarzio Humbuckers, a bound neck with dot inlays - it was literally a right-handed and blacked out clone of Kurt's guitar right down to the humbuckers. And they wanted $340 for it - so you see, I kind of DID have aspirations to mess with guitars since day one. But mom was having NOTHING of me purchasing a hacked up vintage Jaguar - even if it was EXACTLY what I wanted at the time. After some attempts on some Jazzmasters, I settled on a Kramer Focus 3000. Eventually that shop rebuilt that Jaguar and sold it for $700. Well out of my reach. I used to go to the Auburn Draughton Library and hang out on G-base Guitar Mall for hours looking at Vintage Jaguars - these things were in the $1500 range already! And today, people think "that's cheap" - haha, no, $1500 in 1995 was like $3000 today. The Japanese examples cost the same price as a current day Squier VM Model. I learned, I'd come to the party too late - Nirvana-mania had driven the prices on Jaguars (and MustangS) up to stupid prices. But surprisingly, not THAT stupid, you still could get a Vintage Mustang for around $500, as one blue 1965 that was AWESOME showed me, which was roughly the same as a Japanese Mustang at the time, which also were made of Fairie blood. But what's more intriguing than my boring stories, is the story of Kurt's Jaguar. Obviously, he got it for cheap, but how cheap? Who did he get it from, who was modding Jaguars like this in the super-strat-locking-tremolo 1980's where Kramer was King, whatzit look like under all that gaffer's tape, why does every Jaguar I see that's left handed have a right handed Vibrato but Kurt's has TWO holes? All this and more will be explained, speculated, and mentioned below - kinda' sorta chronologically.THE HISTORY COBBLED TOGETHER The history of this guitar is one of the most interesting histories of famous guitars, right up there with Ed's Frankenstrat and SRV's "Number One/First WifE" guitar. However, it's origins are deeply more mysterious. It could have had as few as two owners (Jenner and Cobain), and it could have had as many as four or more (including those two). I've done my best piecing things together - gathering information if you will - from all the various places on the internet (OSG, YouTube/NirvanaGuitars, various magazines, etc...).  
The guitar was a 1965 or 1966 Fender Jaguar originally, Serial# 95747 per the Kurt's Equipment website that used to be the definitive gear pages for Nirvana back in the 90's. While initially, many people thought it was a 65' due to the binding and dot inlay neck, many of us over the years have noticed the strangeness with the Jaguar's neck - small strat headstock, bad reproduction logo - but you have to remember, this guitar started as a pretty normal Fender Jaguar back when it was new in the mid 1960's. Basically, alder body, maple neck, rosewood board - 2 single coils, regular specs all around - and as we would later come to find, a Blocks and Binding neck with a large headstock originally - as it would start out in the early 1980's. I posted TWO pictures so that you could get an idea what it may have looked like new. Notice that the vibrato on the original 1966 Lefty below, has a RIGHT HANDED Vibrato. This was normal for all left-handed Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters at the time (not sure if any southpaw VI's left the factory but that'd be the same too). 
So somewhere between 1966 and most likely 1979 and 1980, the Jaguar wound up in the hands of Martin "Mart" or "Marty" Jenner (depending what you read about him). Mart Jenner was a session guitarist who was active between 1971 and 1989. He played an SG, various Telecasters, at least one Strat, and of course, this 1966 Fender Jaguar - at least, that's what's understood - because....lets divert a little bit before we focus on Martin Jenner and his mods.... Why I am so Sure this is Kurt's Guitar 
Being a fan of 80's rock and 90's rock gives me some ability a lot of people generally don't have - the ability to know WHY this is very likely, if not almost certain, this is Kurt's guitar. See above, this is the 1970's guitarist culture bits here (I know Ed is CONSIDERED 80's - but). So prior to the 1970's, modifying your guitar was generally frowned upon by most people if you did not run a guitar company or make guitars professionally. Pioneers in that time included players like Jeff Beck, who hired Seymour Duncan to mod a Les Paul and Esquire, Eric Clapton who bought 3 Stratocasters for cheap and took the best bits to build Blackie, Kiss, Ace Frehley used DiMarzio pickups and had Les Pauls that could smoke and catch fire from a "dummy pickup" for a stage show, and of course, probably the man who did the most for DIY guitar antics - Edward Van-Halen. Once Eddie came around, EVERYONE it seems looking back at anecdotes from all over the internet started to tinker with their guitars whether it was ripping up Teiscos for their punk bands, or more often, souping up vintage Stratocasters to make them all freaked out like Eddie's Frankenstrat. For every original, there's hundreds of thousands of neophytes at least. BUT, there's a catch to this, the Fender JAGUAR part of the equation. See, the Fender Jaguar was marketed mostly as a "Surf Guitar" aimed at "Surf Musicians" after the Jazzmaster failed to establish itself in the JAZZ market and becae the de-facto Surf Guitar after countless surf bands, such as The Ventures - started using them. The Jaguar had a nice streak for about 2-3 years as the top of the line guitar, before Rickenbacker 12-strings were the rage, then the Acid Rock boom and Heavy Metal pretty much killed off anything Fender (for the most part) for a decade in the rock genre (Gibson ruled the 70's). Hendrix pretty much killed the Jaguar in 1969, but it did not know it until it was discontinued in 1975. Despite a lot of New Wave/East Coast guys (Elvis Costello, Ric Ocasek, Tom Verlaine, Sonic Youth, Danny Elfman, etc..) using offsets as they were cheap and flashy in appearance at the time (Ric Ocasek got his Jaguar for $80 in a hock shop in 1980 - and he could afford a total custom build by that point I'm sure) - the Jaguar was pretty much a "washed up has-been" guitar, a cheap exponent of the 60's now banished to the bargain racks for bargain basement prices. And that fact is what make's Jenner choosing a Jaguar as a touring guitar VERY interesting, because nobody in 1980 or before would be modding a Fender Jaguar as a touring guitar. The beliefs about the Jaguar at the time - remembered from those years visiting music shops myself - were that it was thin sounding, ice picky, unstable bridge, unstable tuning, and the controls were too complicated - at least that's how most musicians who were not tech types saw it. Even moreso, the mods are so specific, it has to be the same guitar. Now, back to Jenner....
The whole first round of the mods included 2 Humbuckers (DiMarzio PAF in the neck, and Super Distortion in the bridge), Gibson-like Wiring on the lead circuit (3-way switch in lieu of the original slide switches on a custom milled plate, 2 500K Aud Volumes (one per pickup), and a single 500K global lead circuit tone control), tailpiece milled to relocate the vibrato bar to the correct side of the tailpiece for left-handed-ness (one very often missed modification). At this point, the guitar still had the third slide switch - what this was used for is anyone's guess, could have been a global coil split or the original STrangle Switch still if Jenner's use of the Jaguar is any indication. Could have been something entirely custom, even a preamp (another common 70's modification). We'll never know. It looks like it still has original tuners, though a common mod at the time was Grover Rotomatics, so the verdict is out on whether those were changed or not. 
The shows of which the Jaguar is seen in this condition most easily are the Cliff Richard Songs from some 1980 tour, I think for the album "Wired for Sound" IIRC (which Jenner played on). I've carefully curated this row of videos to allow you to see the guitar in action and hear it's various versitile tones, and tell my take of them. I know most people into Nirvana generally have a distaste for this kind of music, but honestly, for me, if I ignore certain things, it's really not all that bad.
Cliff Richard Live in London - "Carrie"
Cliff Richard Live in London - "Everyman"
Cliff Richard Live Chichester 1980 - "Everyman" By the end of 1980, it seems Jenner was using a Stratocaster in Cliff's band a bit more. I really think (and might do someday when I'm bored) we should do a further look around at some of the other performances by other artists than just Cliff Richard. Martin Jenner was a session guitarist and honestly, I can't think for hte life of me, that Jag was only used with Cliff Richard. Especially since I found a PDF that pretty much told a good bit about how Jenner would tour and perform and work - his workflow if you will. Per this PDF article I read, Martin goes on to descrive that session guys typically have at least 2 "setups" (guitar, amp, effects, etc.) that they would have a courier company move one setup to the next location while they used the other setup - allowing them to do as much as multiple sessions a day for all kinds of artists. Mart, unfortunatley, did not have this advantage because he was a lefty, and had to carry his gear around himself. So it could be, through the 80's, the Jag made the rounds on all sorts of stuff - commercials, production backing music, pop artists, funk artists, blues artists, country artists, Christian Rock artists, touring backing bands (like Cliff Richard's) - we could have been hearing that guitar all over the place in the 80's, and not even known about it. 
The neck is not a replacement, but rather, the original 1965/66 neck I surmise. One of the things shared by this guy's post is that the headstock was reshaped due to damage. It's not unusual for a guitar to get damaged while out on tour. It also sounds like, with the money he made, Mart decided to have the neck customized to be more like his Telecasters and his Stratocasters, the former being his model of choice per the PDF I mentioned. This would explain that rumor has it the original Fender pencil markings are on the neck heel despite the neck looking and feeling NOTHING like a regular Fender Jaguar neck. Mart goes on to describe that the neck is a shallow "V" shape with "no cheeks" on it - leading me to believe the curvature of the neck was heavily modified for Jenner's smaller hands - somethign that likely also really appealed to Kurt Cobain. Another thing mentioned in this is the guitar had a Compound Radius - high tech stuff for the 1980's - so I'm willing to bet that compound radius REALLY made that Jaguar VERY easy to play, easier than any of Kurt's other guitars TBH. A Compound radius is when the fretboard starts with a portion of a circle that would be one size if it was full - always smaller, and then flattens out as you go to progressively higher frets. In the case of this neck, the neck starts with a 9 or 10" radius, and progressively moves to a 12" radius - ending around 16" at the bridge. The headstock logo was replaced with a low-end reproduction Fender logo with the wrong fonts, and the fretboard was 100% replaced, with new binding, and new frets. The only pictures I've been able to find are stills from a Cliff Richard documentary where we can hardly see the guitar because something is in it's way, which means who knows if it already had the Tune-O-Matic or removed the Strangle switch yet. So Jenner was strill using it for awhile. Jenner to Cobain, or someone Else
So Jenner - let's assume - is in California, it's past 1989 when Kurt got the guitar (1991 to be exact). So Cobain was looking for another guitar and found out about this Jaguar in the L.A. Recycler classifieds - I don't know what the actual ad was and I highly doubt it looks like the mockup someone made to the left, but I do know that they bought it, and I recall for something around $345 with a Anvil-type Roadcase used by touring musicians - making it very likely. Krist Novoselic gave some hints as well via Twitter a handful of years ago as of this writing confirming they bought a guitar like athat in the San Fernando Valley from a "Professional Musician" To me, that all checks out to make sense. Cobain Buys the Guitar 
So sometime in 1991, Kurt Cobain buys the Jaguar from Jenner or whoever had it, and it slowly ramps up to being his most seen guitar. You could say Kurt's use of the Jaguar follows Nirvana's rise to fame in 1991. However, it's hard to tell a few things.
First off, the missing strangle switch and Tune-O-Matic, were these done post-repair. Nobody's talked about this or speculated. It seems odd to me that Jenner could have found a Tune-O-Matic in the mid 1980's, and that's a very Sonic-Youth inspired setup, so it could be it had the original bridge until Kurt Got it, we'll never really know now will we? The Strangle switch may have still been there or removed at some point due to damage from Cobain's playing. We don't know that for sure either. Another thing is whether the guitar was on Nevermind or not. A lot of people say he got it AFTER Nevermind just before the European tour, but the above video with Butch Vig and Rick Beato really makes me question - because per Butch Vig, he said Kurt Had a Mustang, Strat(s), a Univox, and a JAZZMASTER in the studio - and Jazzmasters, very often, are confused with Jaguars (and vice versa) due to the similar body shape. So that tells me the Jaguar WAS indeed on Nevermind. And if you consider the specs of Kurt's guitars, and some of the thicker guitar parts on there, and overdubs, I think the Jaguar was indeed on Nevermind, but just in a limited capacity - ie Overdubs. It's not the main guitar on SLTS (that's a Strat) - to narrow down, based o live use, I think the Jaguar was on - if it even was on that album and Vig is remembering right - overdubs for the dirty parts on LIthium, overdubs on Drain You (likely the Bassman part), On A Plain in it's entirety, and MAYBE overdubs or the main rhythms on In Bloom. We don't know, we were not there, but that's what my ears are hearing. Listening to those tracks, I'm listening for a buzzy, but super-duper bassy, 13.5K Ohm, ceramic Humbucker - ie a DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker.The univoxes are usually clunky and milky sounding, the Strats sound like...well...Strats, the Mustang has more of a pencil-like salty Jangle - like a cross between a Strat and a Jazzmaster, while the Jaguar has this gruff, raspy clean with that characteristic 24" scale "rubbery" attack, and a very very very thick and buzzy distortion the way Kurt used it. I know for a fact that it was around at least the end of Nevermind, since the Beehive Music show was somewhere around the same time as the record release party for Nevermind.
Nirvana Beehive Records Show In September 1991, Nevermind came out, with the leading Single "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and seemingly overnight, every teenaged kid aspiriting to be a guitarist wanted a Fender Jaguar. Prices on vintage Jaguars and mustangs shot up over night. The Jaguar went from the "why the hell do I have this" guitar to the "I GOTTA' Have This" guitar. While B.C. Riches, Charvels, Jacksons, and most especially Kramers - all the pointy metal guitars, were banished to the once Offset laiden bargain racks for prices Jaguars and Mustangs had only up until recently been priced at. The Jaguar continued to tour getting increased usage from 1991 through 1992, right before the In Utero album would start production. The Jaguar Post Nevermind
I mean for a guitar he "polished and babied" it really got it's workout that night doing everything from a job on the DJ tables all the way to cleanup in the produce dept! But hey, it also took out a bouncer at the Tree's Show in 1991 as well. As for being used on the In Utero album and tour. The Jaguar possibly did not tour thoguh some say it was seen at ONE 1993 show and either briefly played or not played at all (need to do more digging on that one). I supposed on In Utero the Jaguar tracks would have been "Scentless Apprentice", "Francis Farmer", and maybe All Apologies (Though I'm thinking more Univox on that one ala Heart Shaped Box). Maybe that's what's up with the neck pickup on "Very Ape" even....hmmm. Anyway, as the In Utero Tour went on, Skystang's 1 through 3, the Roseland Mustang, and the Jag-Stang prototype #1 were the guitars that were used on that tour, Cementing the Jaguar's association with Nevermind. Then on April 4th, 1994, Kurt Cobain was found dead in the green room above the garage of his Lake Washintgon home dead at 27. But we still yet had not seen the last of this axe.... Eric Erlandson & Kurt's Jaguar - My Take on that
Just Because He's Playing it Doesn't Mean It's His
That would be the last the public would see of the guitar pretty much from then.....and thensome.... After Hole? Where Is It Now? My thoughts/speculations. Everyone seems highly interested in WHO owns the Jaguar now. I understand this, I support it from a curiosity standpoint, but not as a privacy standpoint. See, the Jaguar is probably the MOST iconic guitar next to Edward Van-Halen's Frankenstrat, and while yes, we know that Wolfgang Van-Halen owns that guitar now, we also know that Wolfgang Van-Halen is out there making music on the mainstream music scene on the same kind of level of fame as his father, but standing on his own. So here's my theory. I think Courtney still had the guitar AFTER Eric borrowed it. Likely she kept it somewhere safe and undisclosed, to prevent people from harassing her about it endlessly. Which I'm sure has happened over the years. See, Nirvana fans were among some of the first music fans to hit the internet, and I remember when some long-standing "institutions" (if you can call it that) of Nirvana fandom such as the Internet Nirvana Fan Club and whatnot first started. So of course, you have all these younger Gen X and Millennials pestering everyone about Kurt's gear, especially the 65' Jaguar. I think through the celebrity, people forget that famous people are people too and when one guy on YouTube said "courtney replied back with an e-mail saying "Fuck You"" - well, I'm honestly not surprised. She (plus the other guys) probably get e-mails all day long on this damn thing. As for the Francis thing, maybe she has it, maybe not. Honestly the "Special Guitar" of his I think that was mentioned was the Martin D-18E that was ripped off and auctioned. And after that happening, if she DID have it, do you think she'd want to share that it exists in her collection of gear? Probably not I'd say. It's fun to sepeculate but really, at this point, since the Jaguar has not turned up growling out anymore tunes on an album since then, is there really anything more to learn about it or it's history? I mean, I think with Jenner's history, we've got it nailed down! I think the too-long-did'nt read is that it started like any other lefty 66' Jaguar, was modified initially with the DiMarzio Pickups, selector switch change, extra volume knob, and proper-lefty-setup vibrato. Sometime in the 80's the guitar got it's original neck refurbished by Knight Guitars as a dots and binding neck with a reshaped headstock and new decal to fix some damage. Possibly somewhere between here or there, the bridge was swapped too - I'm almost thinking Kurt did that given the fact black-chrome was not really a thing in the late 80's. Sometime later, the strangle switch was removed, and then the bridge pickup swapped with a Seymour Duncan SH4 Jeff Beck humbucker in black. Then Eric borrowed it, Courtney remained soul custodian, and then probably Francis has it now, and Fender got access to it to make a version we all can buy already built.How Kurt's Jaguar Influenced Me as a Guitar Designer, Builder, and PLayer That Fender Jaguar was basically my DREAM guitar whe I was starting out. Being out of touch with the guitar market and just starting out when I learned of it, I wanted one! Bad! I went to every guitar shop asking about them, as if they even had a bad torn up one in back I could tinker with. One shop, Crossroads Music, had one, and I toyed with the idea of putting it back together, only just barely aware of aftermarket modifications. That Jaguar was a 65' that would have been a close approximation of Kurt's - it had a Tune-O-Matic, was routed by Humbuckers. The shop was willing to sell it to me for $350 in 1995 - the shop eventually had it on the rack, restored, and looking oddly like Eric Erlandson's Jag, for $745 about a year or two later. Would'nt that be nuts if Eric Erlandson bought the Jaguar I almost bought in Auburn in 1995. My mom refused to let me save up for it because it was not a working instrument. Shops that I'd talk to would often bash the Jaguar, saying it sounded "thin" "Brittle" "ice picky" "did not take high gain well" "had no sustain" "had no tone" "does not stay in tune"....but the hilarious part of all this is talking about modding a Jaguar to get rid of these traits, using Cobain's guitar as a guide, resulted in equally as stern comments like "why destroy history" "Why would you MUTILATE a vintage Jag?" - like one minute before, they talked like the Jaguar was a piece of shit, the next minute, they talked like it was some kind of prized golden goose that needed protected - so which was it? So taking in input from other guitars I'd played at guitar shops, I started to design my own guitars for fun, knowing full well it's very unlikely that I could build them. To do so in the mid 1990's, I'd need to start off with premade necks and bodies - which did not exist back then. Warmoth only made Strat, Telee, Les Paul, Flying V, and Explorer bodies at the time. Warmoth did not make such bodies until 1998 or so. My first creation was called "Lana" and was combining the Cobain Jaguar with an 80's Superstrat - left-handed Jaguar neck with blocks and binding, Sea Foam Green, Matching Headstock, I would change my mind on pickguards constantly between pearloid, w/b/w, and b/w/b - usually b/w/b because I never saw that on a Jaguar. It had a tune-o-matic of unspecified version, 3 EMG 81 pickups (today I'd use a 60 in the neck, an H in the middle, and 81 in the bridge, making it like a souped up Ferrington pickup config), same wiring as a Stock Jaguar but with a Stratocaster volume/tone/tone layout with tone on the neck and middle pickups. Later on I revisited this idea with a 2 Humbucker 60/81 Floyd Rose version in Lithium that I also never built. In 1996 EVH's Peavey Wolfgang came out, and I was influenced to drag the Jag into more "Big Rock" territory. So the next idea had a pair of Blade/Pole humbuckers, high output, a FLoyd Rose locking tremolo like my Kramer, stock Jaguar wiring with a 5-way switch in place of the slide switches and no Starngle, and a 22 fret blocks and binding neck with the headstock right handed because now that I had an electric (Kramer Focus 3000), I preferred the tuners on top of the headstock, not on the bottom. In 1997, I saw a guy on the "Sounds of the 70's" infomercial playing some kind of Fender with 2 humbuckers in it, I think it was a Jazzmaster with PAFs, and thought "What if we did that with a Jaguar" - this is maybe the closest I came to the Cobain guitar in design. Except I wanted gold hardware, a 490R in the neck, and a 490T Gibson humbucker in the bridge, and a Basswood body with a Foto Flame Finish. At this point, my idea was to create a Jaguar that looked classy and upscale like a Gibson. I still was sticking with the Tune-O-Matic after some "meh" experiences with the Jazzmaster vibrato at that point....oh how wrong I was. The following year, I shifted to 80's AOR rock - Night Ranger, Journey, and Loverboy, and I started learning of Paul Dean's home built axes a bit pretty soon therein. So now I had an idea. The new guitar, still using Girls names instead of a brand - chrisented "Jana" - was to be a Paul Dean Kramer crossed with a Jaguar. Mahogany Body, Mahogany neck, Rosewood Board, maybe a Flame Maple Veneer top. I kept moving around, I knew I wanted it to be dark teal. Eventually a prototype made out of a destroyed Teisco bass body and neck was started, but never finished. It was to be a teal green transparent or Ford Cayman Green Metallic body, with a white or black pearloid pickguard, black trim rings, Jaguar middle pickup, and Seymour Duncan SH8 Invaders in the neck and bridge positions. All black plated hardware - including the control plates. Maurauder style switches for each pickup with phase on the middle, and coil split on the neck and bridge - lifted from my own Kramer. The vibrato was to be a Kahler 2300, and it would be the first Jaguar based design to use a 24 Fret 24" Scale neck! The neck would have 10 degree headstock tilt, and the Paul Dean-inspired resonance slots in it, so no string trees and resonance. The last of these souped up "Super Jags" was named after another chick at school I liked who I was flirting with on lunch break just before I left high school. This time it was a dark Transparent red "Jag-berger" design with a flame or curly maple top, diamondplate pickguard inspired by James Hetfield's ESP Explorers (I was getting into Metallica at the time), a Trans Trem, but with a peghead (funny si today I know EXACTLY how to pull this off and have it work), EMG pickups, and one of the first Freeway selector switches. This design did not get shown off as much....because...well... In 2003, I got my first chance to play a REAL Fender Jaguar, a 1963. Matt at the Auburn GUitar Shoppe - same guy who sold me my Jag-Stang - mentioned they had something in back I'd really like to see. He brings out this battered tweed hardshell and out comes a nicely loved 1963 Fender Jaguar, supposedly with some pretty hot stock pickups in it from 1963. I almost wonder if they were "Abigail Ybarra" pickups (incredibly funny, that's my wife's first name). So I plugged the Jaguar into a Mesa Boogie Heartbreaker 2x12 combo, on the bold channel, gain jacked, treble tastefully backed off, and started riffin' Chugga Chugga - playing Metallica on it, and this thing showed everyone in the past who made all these weird jusdgements on Jaguars LIED! The Jaguar is a perfect guitar. It stays in tune, the whammy kicks ass, it has sustain, it has tone, it sounds fat WITH Single coils....I mean, even the metalhead tech at the shop was headbanging and did a double take when he saw the Flying V was still o nthe wall and he said "You're getting THAT tone out of a JAGUAR!?!?" - yep. So that's truly I think where the whole "Jag-shredder/Offset-Shredder" thing started with me. I did not need a hyper modified Jaguar. The stock ones were good enough. 
Now probably the most relevant would be me mentioning that I did play one of the Kurt Cobain Jaguars, and I'm going to say, I was not that impressed with it. It seems to me that the neck was a little too wide given all the descriptions here. If this was indeed a custom neck for Martin Jenner, I would have thought they'd made the neck thinner. Seems they put more of a modern "C" shape on it with a flatter radius like an Ibanez. Jenner's was compound radius starting at about 10" and ending around 16". Outside of that, the sound is there, and it really felt pretty much like any other Jaguar to me otherwise, except I'd prefer a rocker bridge. That said, I still do like to experiment with the design for fun. My Jagmaster cross-pollinates Kurt's Jaguar, with a Jazzmaster, and a Super-Strat, and it sounds vicious. Those early Squier VM Jaguars with the 11K bridge pickup, and the old Classic Player Jaguar Vintage models are a close fight. The benchmarks for me with Jaguars, is my 1962 Reissue CIJ Fender Jaguar and that 1963 I played. That's where I decided, Jaguars are my standard "off-the-rack" guitar. Also, in all the years I've played live, the Jaguar has never failed me - not even once. The reason I have cool rails though, is because they match the original sound, even with 500K pots, just a little thicker, and that's all I need. |
But I digress, being obsessed with the Strat, Tele, and Les Paul for the last year, meant that I HAD to get to know this guy's guitars. So I went to my sister's collegate home, now 11 years old, and got to see what the ruckus was about - I turned on MTV one day in June, a few months after Kurt died (Just my luck, I find a new band to get into and the lead singer/guitarist dies....people, this is MY kind of luck) and Kurt Loder is hosting some kind of "Tribute to Nirvana" thing on MTV, and of course, I'm watching this. One of the videos that comes up is Lithium....and I see that familiar guitar...it's unlike anything I'd seen in any magazine, catalog, or anywhere really. I mean, it's not a STrat, it's not a Tele, It's definatley not a Les Paul, it's weird, it's angular...it looks like Gumby kinda' sorta....and it has a lot of chrome plates, switches, and who knows what else on it. I called it the "Aerocaster" for awhile.....because it looked like some kind of new 1990's model Fender guitar made specifically for grunge musicians.....oh how wrong I was!
Based on what little we can find out from videos, Martin Jenner may or may not be the original owner, given unlike his other guitars, this one kept it's original neck for awhile, and that's not the neck that Kurt Cobain used.
I suspect, based on an OSG Post where a Nirvana guitar tech or someone in touch with one said that the pickup selector was out of a 1970's Ibanez guitar. Actually, that plus the use of 3 500K Pots on the lead circuit (regular Jaguars have a 1MEG Ohm Linear Volume pot and 1MEG Ohm Audio Taper Tone Pot) in a configuration almost identical to a Gibson or Ibanez Lawsuit copy of a Flying V or Explorer - almost has me surmising that the Jaguar may have been "kit-bashed" with an Ibanez product of some kind, maybe a Destroyer. Kind of a cool pedigree.
It seems - and it's hard to pin down - sometime between 1980 and 1985-ish, Martin Jenner had the original neck rebuilt - that's the theory I'm going with, and I'm sticking to it. Based on an OSG Post, where someone did the groundwork to get in touch with the parties who did luthier work for Martin Jenner - I feel it's pretty safe to say this was Kurt's guitar. Basically, Knight Guitars did the work, and a guy with them had a son who was into Nirvana, saw the OP's e-mail, and got him in touch with his father to discuss the neck.
One source I need to find considering the sources on this page I need to "fill in the links for" per-se, is Martin Jenner's life story a bit. I remember reading, somewhere, that he moved to L.A. or somewhere in the right region during Blaze's first discovery of this on TDPRI, which makes it very likely that the guitar came from Jenner. Now, I would not doubt there's a possibility Jenner could have sold it at some point, and then some guy in San Fernando who was playing Guns N' Roses covers on it or something, bought it and did the other two mods I have not talked about much.
Sometime in 1992, the Jaguar got it's bridge pickup damaged...that's the rumor at least. Anyway, something facilitated the replacement of the bridge pickup on it. A lot of people cite the 1992 Rock in Rio show as the cause (Kurt was dribbling canteloupe and spitting seeds everywhere, conflicting with the whole statement in Guitar World about "polishing" and "babying" the Jaguar). It could have been that the Jaguar was a test mule for the later Skystangs bridge position J.B. Humbuckers - we don't know. What we do know is sometime in 1992 or 1993, the Jaguar got a black Seymour Duncan J.B. pickup installed as seen right. We can also see there's a little white plastic thingy in the original trem bar hole, which I think was put there to keep dirt out of the Trem Mechanism by Jenner - further attesting to the metal-work that's been done on this guitar.
So in 1995, Kurt's widow Courtney Love turns up with her band Hole with a music video for "Doll Parts" - and peeking out from the right side of the screen is what we know for sure would be Kurt's old Fender Jaguar, now strung up right handed, and upside down. It's the only time we see Eric Erlandson play it. Since the Internet was just beginning to take off, Nirvana fansites took off like wildfire announcing the new owner of the guitar - I truly, honestly, doubt this. I think Courney LOANED the guitar to Eric for the video shoot, knowing full well anyone into Nirvana would recognize it, at the very least, as the NEVERMIND guitar Kurt used to play. But by the time they were touring, Eric was playing a right handed Black 65 or 66' Fender Jaguar with stock pickups instead.