This week’s post is a little different, but hopefully something you’ll find really cool!
Not only am I a massive music fan, I’m also a massive musical instrument fan. My love of guitars goes as far back as I can remember, when I first saw my guitar teacher’s red Stratocaster at age 7 and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just play that guitar instead of the beginner acoustic I was learning on.
What started as a fascination with playing electric guitars soon grew into a fascination with modifying them - replacing components soon morphed into modifying the electronics, meddling with the innards of every guitar I could find to understand how they worked. Those skills, as you’ll soon see, came in very handy when I came across a super rare guitar that was in desperate need of a rebuild.
This is a really cool story, and I hope you’ll enjoy it. And as an added bonus, I’m not talking about a Stratocaster or Les Paul, the darlings of the popular guitar rock world - I’m talking about a cool guitar model many people might not have heard of: The Fender Jaguar.
To start us off, though, I thought it would be fun to get into the Jaguar spirit with a playlist of songs featuring the guitar and its signature sound.
Jaguar Jams
Arguably the most famous user of the Jaguar was Kurt Cobain. But there have been others - John Frusciante, Johnny Marr, and a whole list of more recent artists who have embraced the Jaguar’s unusual sound. I’ve rounded up a few of the songs here to give you a taste. When you listen, take note of the fairly “twangy” or “beachy” tone on the guitar. It’s kind of thin and stringy to me; that’s a hallmark of the Jaguar and a reason many artists loved and hated it.
About the Fender Jaguar
I won’t try to rewrite the history of the Fender Jaguar; this link (and this one) sum it up so well that I don’t think I’ll attempt it. But I recommend you check out the history of the Jaguar. It’s a cool story - the Jag was intended as a flagship guitar, but around the time it came out, the rock and roll sound we know today was developing, which was all about sustain - as in how long the notes could sound after being plucked. This is what led to the massive guitar hero solos of popular classic rock, and this sound was just something the Jaguar wasn’t very good at.
As far as popular rock guitar models go, most people know about the Stratocaster and the Les Paul, the Flying V and the SG, and even the Telecaster for folks who enjoy the twangier side. There’s also the Jazzmaster, which is frequently confused with the Jaguar due to its greater popularity and similar shape. But the Jaguar was a bit unique, not really fitting into the Gibson and Fender dominated guitar scene
The Jazzmaster is simpler, without all the chrome pieces, and had already gained popularity by the time the Jaguar came out. It’s probably the more popular of the two guitars for many reasons, but as you’ll soon see, I didn’t much care about the popularity of the Jag when starting this rebuild.
The Story Of My 1962 Jaguar
The story of this guitar starts with my guitar instructor. He was a great family friend who sadly passed away several years ago. All through my childhood he would come to my parents’ house every Sunday for a guitar lesson and a plate or three of my mom’s spaghetti. He was an awesome and entertaining guy, played in several local bands, and taught me to pluck out the tune of Rocky Top as a funny prank on my family (Rocky Top is the fight song for the University of Tennessee, and my family was largely supporters of a rival school who couldn’t stand the song for that reason).
When he passed away, he left me his music equipment. I can’t tell you how touching that was for me - he had plenty of other guitar students and family members, but thanks to his friendship with my family he thought of me when passing along his guitar collection. Maybe I’ll go into that more later, but for now, let’s stick with the story of the Jag.
A few years after his passing, my dad and I got a request to look through his house before it went for sale - specifically, to go through his old shed in the backyard that had never been cleaned out. So we got our boots and gloves on and dove into the mess.
Halfway through the cleanup, we discovered the body of a guitar. It was just the wooden part - no electronics, chrome covers, or neck, and it had been spray painted blue (poorly). There was a little splinter of the neck still attached where it had seemingly been broken off - but most importantly, the next plate was still attached.
We didn’t think much of it, but we took it home, thinking it might be a fun project to put it back together. But after some research, we identified something pretty cool - this was the body of a Fender Jaguar, and based on the way the electronics holes were drilled, it seemed to be a very early model. (There was an additional hole drilled in the first models of the Jaguar that was redesigned in later years). And the big kicker - the serial number on the neck plate confirmed our suspicions - this was one of the first Jaguars ever made, serial number 78503, which indicated it was from 1962, the first year Jaguars were produced.
The next day we went back to the shed, ready to search for the other missing pieces of the Jaguar. Sure enough, we found most of them - the tremolo/bridge, along with some tuning pegs, pickups, and 2 of the 3 metal plates that adorn the front of the Jaguar.
And thus, the Great Jaguar Rebuild Project was born. Because of course we had to rebuild this thing.
I thought a lot about why we found this guitar in this condition, and we eventually landed on a theory.
The Jaguar, by many accounts, was actually considered a crappy guitar in its early years. It had complicated electronics that failed a lot, and it didn’t sound different enough from its big brother the Jazzmaster that people cared about it - it actually had poor sustain and was prone to go out of tune from its unique bridge design. I think that’s why we found this guitar in this condition - one theory is that my instructor took his least favorite guitar and spray painted it Red, White and Blue for a 4th of July concert, or something like that. You can barely see it in the pictures, but the neck splinter we found was painted bright red. Hell, he might even have smashed the guitar onstage for some reason. Rocking too hard, perhaps. We’ll never know.
You might have noticed the engraved text on the back plate - for some bizarre reason, the owner’s address and social security number are scribed into the metal. I have no explanation, but I find it strangely hilarious in today’s age of information security.
In a couple weeks I’ll post Part 2, where we try to figure out what this guitar originally looked like, and start to restore it to its former glory.
Related: I also write about playing guitars, not just rebuilding them — check out my guitar arrangements and tabs.