1964 Fender Jaguar

Fender introduced the Jaguar in 1962 and while it wasn’t exactly a disappointment for the company, it wasn’t a huge success either. At first it gained a certain amount of popularity with surf guitarists, but not many other players took to the Jaguar. As the decade wore on players began to stop buying them altogether in favor of the tried and true Teles and Strats and in 1975 Fender dropped it from the line. Part of the problem with the Jag was that it just had too many features, including a couple that no one really wanted. Fender added a mechanical mute that damped the strings and approximated the sound of a guitarist using his palm to mute the strings. The problem was the rubber on the mute began to decompose and turn into a gummy mess. The Jag also had a circuit that allowed the player to switch back and forth between a bright, open sounding lead tone and a muffled rhythm tone. Players called this feature the Strangle Switch, which really did describe its effect on the sound.

Then in the early 1980s the Jag underwent a strange revival. Because the model was considered a flop, used Jags sold for very little. Guitarists like Thurston Moore and Kurt Cobain who couldn’t afford Strats and Teles began to buy them out of necessity and quickly found that Jags, along with Fender’s other neglected classic the Jazzmaster, sounded great when cranked up. Some of the features that led to the guitar’s demise, such at the propensity of the strings to resonate behind the bridge, became absolute virtues and contributed a great deal to the sound of bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana. Pretty much overnight Jags went from being junk to undiscovered classics with a corresponding jump in price. Which brings us to today’s Catch. This 1964 is triply rare. One, it’s sporting a Sea Foam Green paint job, one of Fender’s scarcer custom colors. Two, it has some gold plated hardware, a very rare custom feature. Oh and it used to belong to Marc Bolan, the legendary glam rocker who died in a car wreck at the age of 29 in 1977. This Fender Jaguar is priced at $24,000 and it’s currently living at Fretted Americana.

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