So what we establish here is Kurt really liked his Jaguar, but itt probably was so modified a stock one could never cut it for him live. On the other hand, he loved Mustangs, a lot! All of the major guitars in his collecton had ties to California Surf, so there was some of that late 70's/early 80's irony-based retro-Americana Kitsch to his taste - ala new wave bands like The CArs, The Go Gos, or The Clash.

Anyway, in 1993, Fender approached Kurt about designing his own custom guitar. Kurt already had an idea apparently, as his journals suggested being full of sketches of Jag-Stang like guitars of his own design going back as far as 1991 or 1992. To get the ball rolling, Kurt took polaroids of his two main guitars - the 65' Jaguar and 69' Competition Mustang, and then cut the electronics and 1/4th of the body of the Mustang out of the picture, and put that on the Jaguar's body. Later it was colored in in the color he wanted ("Aqua Blue, Like old Mustangs"). This early incarnation looks more balanced aesthetically, but apparently there were needs for refinement for the rest of his time on earth.

How Fender did this was they would ship out the prototype to Kurt, who at the time was touring with Nirvana in support of In Utero. When the guitar arrived, ideally - Kurt would let them know of changes to the guitar required, and ship it baack for Fender to make the changes, I think they did this, according to what I read, 3 times. But the actuality was a little different. I think how it was done was, the guitar was shipped in, Ernie would switch the bridge for a Tune-O-Matic, and the bridge pickup from the DiMarzio unit Fender used (as they had a business partnership with DiMarzio at the time), with a Seymour Duncan JB in white - I have read this somewhere as well. Then the guitar was converted back when it was sent back to Fender. This original guitar used in the prototype process was a Sonic Blue one, with an alder body, Fender Texas Special in the Neck, SD JB in the bridge (swapped from a DiMarzio H8 or so I'm told), and a 7 screw whiite pickguard (versus the normal Mustang-derived 9 screw version we see on production Jag-Stangs). The Jag-Stang was used on the southeastern United States leg, appearing at Georga and possibly Alabama shows in 1993, before going over to Europe for the final part of the 1994 tour before coming back for Unplugged.

On April 4th 1994, Kurt was found dead in his Seattle home in the green room with a self inflicted gunshot wound. At the same time, Fender was just about to send Kurt the second prototype, a Fiesta red one with a pearloid pickguard. That guitar was kept at Fender until it was accidentialy lost/sold/stolen, and replaced with another Jag-Stang sometime later (probably Japanese) or so it's rumored. Kurt Cobain's original blue Jag-Stang was given, by his widow, Courtney Love, to Michael Stipe of REM, who Kurt was about to work with at the time,

Unfortunatley, due to it's tight connections with Kurt Cobain, the Jag-Stang had a hard time, despite Kurt saying he wanted to release a guitar with "no preconcieved notions attached to it", getting anywhere further than mostly Nirvana fans who wanted to be like Kurt, and the occasional use in someone's band. Also, it seems Fender's execution was not "up to par" to most people. That said, there were a few artists early on who picked up the Jag-Stang, such as Anett Mook of the band Cay. Billy Joe Armstrong is rumored to have used one as well. But overall, the instrument always had this pall cast over it of being a somewhat crass cash-grab. Outside of myself, I have never heard of anyone using a Jag-Stang as their "main guitar".

The critiques from buyers on the early internet included "the bridge is wrong/stupid/does not stay in tune" "the bridge pickup is weak/enemic" "the body wood is wrong" "the color is too "green" "the body shape looks stupid". And this spread like wildfire over the guitar community giving the Jag-Stang it's bizzarely sought after but crappy reputation.

It did not do too bad though, Fender sold a lot of them, enough to keep making the original Japanese runs of the Jag-Stang from 1995-2001, and then bringing it back for a second run from 2001-2005. The changes in the second run were an alder body and they re-branded or redesigned the bridge pickup to be a "Fender Santa Ana Humbucker" - probably just the old DiMarzio design built in-house and renamed.

Anette Mook from the punk/grunge group Cay played a Jag-Stang for awhile when the Nature Creates Freaks CD came out. There was also another guy on YouTube who played a Jag-Stang on a song called "Break Free" which for some reason I can't find at the moment (will need to dig into my back catalog of videos for that one). Joan Jett's guitarist used one for awhile, as did Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day. But mostly, you just never really saw Jag-Stangs get a lot of appreciation or use outside the Nirvana tribute band or some 13 year old at a big-city Guitar Center banging away the opening chords to Smells Like Teen Spirit ad nauseum.....

After that, the Jag-Stang was thought done and over forever. Honestly, to give you perspective about the Jag-Stang, I'm a nothing, a nobody, I'm a LOCAL musician, and I could probably almost rate in the top 5 of Jag-Stang players because there are so few. I got on YouTube in 2006 initially to start a computer channel and ended up instead making a guitar channel that inadvertantly stirred up some shit so I kind of went on a low-grade-crusade to point out these guitars indeed CAN handle heavy rock and actually do amazingly well at it, stock or modified. Honestly, most of what I heard about the Jag-Stang in that period, was myself. The rest of the time it was "I wanna put a JB in mine to be like "teh kurdtz"" - usually raising as many groans as me talking about playing "Eruption" by Van-Halen on that guitar would on guitar forums back then. Yeah, this period is so boring and low-activity, except maybe Ryan Jarman doing his own variation on the Jag-Stang, that it's almost not even worth mntioning.

In the 2010's Fender opened up thier Hollywood offices and started showing us pictures of the guitars there. One of them was, you guessed it, a Jag-Stang. Which kicked off a bunch of speculation a reissue or even a Squier version was going on the market, sinice the guitar question looked like a VM production test run instrument from China. However, we would have to wait even longer, till 2021, before we would see the Jag-Stang come back.

In it's stock form, all iterations of the Jag-Stang have a roughly 7.5K Ceramic humbucker in the bridge - marketed as a DiMarzio, Santa Ana, or "Custom Design" pickup, and the neck pickup is either a Fender 62' Reissue strat pickup at 6.4K ohms, or a Fender special design single coil around 5.something K, likely out of one of the newer Mustang designs. The pickups are wired into each switch 2 wire style with phase change. Some people have claimed coil-split was availible on the original releases, but I'm not 100% sure. 1 Volume, 1 Tone, output jack, that's it for electronics.

These electronics are often maligned. We all know Kurt Cobain used DiMarzio Super Distortions, Hot Rails, and Seymour Duncan J.B. (Jeff Beck) pickups in either full sized or hot rail form. In Kurt's original designs, he called for a "double coil hot rail" meaning it originally was supposed to have a hot rail pickup. All of these pickups are in the high-output range of 12K-16K ohms. He also used the pickups in the Univox Hi Fliers as well in his mustangs and those are rumored to also be quite hot in wiring. So the original electronics aare not quite "accurate" to what Kurt was using. I suppose what happened was this, when planning the guitar for production, some scientific eggheads at Fender thought a few things....first that they needed to properly "balance" the pickups, with little thought about how people since the 70's were using 6.4K Strat pickups against 14K ohm humbuckers, let alone Kurt jamming the same kind of high powered pickups in his own guitars. So, to "match", they put 6.4K strat pickup in the neck, and then put a 7.4K humbucker in the back and said "that's properly balanced". Then the next thing they did was maybe "warm it up" with 250K Ohm pots possibly. What results is an underwhelmpingly under-powered guitar for what is expected. This is why - besides the Cobain association - most people with Jag-Stangs put a hotter pickup in the bridge.

Carried over from the Mustang was the Dynamic Vibrato unit which nobody ever uses because "Cobain locked his down". HOwever, this vibrato unit was kind of falsely given a bad name via the Mandella effect - Kurt never said specifically the Mustang vibrato was bad, he just said - at the end of the same interview where he addresses the mustang in response to a question of "do you ever use the whammy bar" he said "Everyone knows only Jimi Hendridx could keep those things in tune". See, Kurt Cobain never mentioned in ANY interview that the Fender Dynamic was terrible as a vibrato bar, he said the MUSTANG guitar as whole was terrible at stying in tune because he did not know that you could adjust the action with a tiny hex wrench. And we can give him a pass on that, this was, in fact, the early 1990s, which a guy who had been using Mustangs since the 80's, and it was not like every bloody toolkit came with a 2mm hex wrench to adjust the bridge, - heck, I remember finding it a big deal to even SEE A hex wrench somewhere mainstream like Lowes or Home Depot - and for sure none of the $50 Mustangs he was playing had a hex wrench with it when he bought it. Kids today have no idea what it was like in the pre-Nirvana days with offsets, I only ust barely can speculate myself. But the anti-poodle-haired-shredder brigade of "this guitar jock who plays 10,000,000 notes a minute reminds me of that guy from the football team that stuffed me in a toilet for a swilrlie and dated the chick that got me hot - so I'm going to attack any music anywhere remotely like his regardless if it's Reb Beach, Eddie Van-Halen, Kirk Hammett, or Dimebag Darrell". And so they went around talking total s*** about the vibrato system because "that's what Kurt would have done". No, Kurt just said "only Jimi Hendrix can keep one of those in tune". I've had so many stupid and pointless celebrity worship arguements about offsets it's bloody embarassing. It's one of the main reasons I'm very salty and a bit triggered by this subject at this point.

The truth of the matter, is what we have here is a a 24" scale angular Fender Mustang with a underpowered humbucker, a decent enough single coil, wiring that holds more potential than is being utilized, and a pretty awsome and underrated vibrato system....not to mention a VERY fast and comfortable neck. Cobain's choice of neck is an A+, and it's a trade off from the Paul Dean guitars, it's just as skinny, but STAYS that skinny all the way up to the 22nd fret - but the speed is agumented by the 7.16" fretboard radius requiring a higher action to not choke out on bends - but that augmentation is made up for by the skinny "C" profile and .75" shorter scale.

So let's talk about how to improve the Jag-Stang in general.

Most people opt for a Seymour Duncan JB, though a DiMarzio Super Distortion would also be a great pickup to put in there. If you're on a budget, Guitar Maniacs, Fleor, and other budget Chinese pickup makers make some pretty killer 12K-17K Ohm humbuckers that can really make a Jag-Stang a fire breathing beast in the bridge position.

For the neck position on these guitars, almost any single coil sounds nice. With the 81 I have an SA up there, and it balances nicely with the 81. The result is really interesting - the middle position, when in phase, sounds more Les-Paul-Like toward the neck and more Fender-Strat position 4-like near the bridge, this is nice because I esentially have 2 guitars in one position, and of course, I can roll off the volume and mimic a Tele with both pickups on, though there's a little STratty-sparkle coming through with it.

The neck alone can be very acoustic-like, almost like a piezo system, but with a bit of tin-can-ness to it. Actually, it gets pretty close to Kurt's Martin D-18 on my rig. Out of phase with the bridge using a Pi2 Phase Inverter gives almost a tone similar to James "JY" Young's Yoshinerator strat tone - think "Blue Collar Man" - it can do the whole clonky Peter Greene thing (kind of fitting since Kirk Hammett plays Greenie these days), but it really shines that that grindy, weird, 70's overdrive thing.

On Jag-Stangs, you might want to also raise the potentiometer values a bit. I think one reason, especially with higher output humbuckers, these guitars get so wooly is the combination of a lightweght vibrato/tailpiece made of brass, a very thick chunk of alder or basswood where a Les Paul has a lot of wood - hence my Les Paul comments earlier, and a short scale, combined iwth an overall springiness like a Mustang. THis absorbtion of treble frequencies means that you will lose presense and cut when playing solos. With EMG's, how I did this was an extreme code 471 capacitor on the volume pot, and then a "no-load" tone control, where it's out of circuit when it's not in use. This brought back the brightness and Mustangy-springiness lost to the EMG's, basswood, and capacitance of the tone pot. Another possible alteration without opening up the pot would be to use a JAGUAR style wiring cheme for the tone pot (pickup goes in, output goes into the tone control's middle lug, then outputs from the normally empty right lug on the tone pot). Also fitting since this IS a JAG-stang.