KURT COBAIN’S JAG-STANG
THE AXE
Grunge’s prodigal son was never one to beat around the bush, so he didn’t leave much to the imagination in naming his prized six-string: it’s half Jaguar, half Mustang. Maybe it’s because Strats and Teles were too “mainstream” for the king of the outcasts, but Kurt Cobain found plenty to love in these two underdog Fenders – for the ‘Jag’ part, the wing-shape body and pickup configuration; and for the ‘Stang’, a Dynamic Vibrato bridge and 24-inch short scale neck. It was always a particularly unusual setup, even for the well-experienced modifiers and DIY luthiers of the era. Such made it perfect for Cobain; in an interview with Fender Frontline, he declared, “I like the idea of having a quality instrument on the market with no preconceived notions attached. In a way, it’s perfect for me to attach my name to the Jag-Stang, in that I’m the anti-guitar hero – I can barely play the things myself.”
THE LEGEND
According to an early ’94 interview Cobain did with Nardwuar the Human Serviette, the
Jag-Stang crafJag-Jag-Stangdesigncamefromanarts-and-crafts design came from an arts-and-crafts sesh where Cobain took Polaroid photos of both the Mustang and Jaguar, lopped them in half and glued them together. He sent the idea off to Fender, who gladly whipped him up a couple prototypes. He would unfortunately pass before getting his hands on a Fiesta Red version made by Custom Shop Master Builder Larry Brooks, but his original Sonic Blue prototype was an instant hit on Nirvana’s In Utero tour; Cobain would play it for the entirety of the trio’s last proper headline show in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Upon its debut, fans would note the Jag-Stang’s distinctly peculiar design – it spoke to the off-kilter quirkiness of Cobain himself, and would quickly come to be an icon of his enduring legacy.
THE REPLICA
Fender wasted no time in racing those blueprints off to the factory line once Brooks mastered the Jag-Stang design. First hitting shelves in 1995, the production model axe features a vintage-style single-coil pickup and a customised humbucker, each rocking a toggle switch for ‘on’, ‘off’ and ‘out-of-phase’ settings. The Mustang-style maple neck and Dynamic Vibrato bridge are both essential to the fold, but there have been bodies produced in both basswood and alder options. Fender have produced short runs of the Jag-Stang on-and-off over the last few years, though it’s not too hard to find used models from its heyday in the early ‘00s, when Fender were churning them out like hotcakes.