Come as you are guitar.

Fender Kurt Cobain Jaguar

With the distortion-level coverage of the Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage of Heck drops on May 5th on HBO, we thought we’d look at one of Fender’s signature Cobain guitars. In all, we counted 6 on fender.com

The Kurt Cobain Jaguar is a cleaned up version of his 1965 Jaguar. It has all the knobs and toggles that helped make the Jaguar what it is and the DP100 Super Distortion bridge pickup, which helped make Nirvana what it was.

It seems that every time we talk about the history of a guitar model it has the same storyline. The Jaguar/Explorer/Firebird was released, struggled through disappointing sales for a few years and was eventually dropped. Then some punk/indie/metal artist picks up an old  vintage model for originality/economic reasons and the guitar is embraced by the next generation of musicians.

Kurt Cobain’s adoption of the Jaguar had to do with economics and simply not wanting to look and sound like everybody else. The same can probably applied to his choice in barbers. Necessity breads the best art.

Now Kurt wasn’t the only artist to look to the Jaguar’s unique bridge configuration to help create a new sound. But  Nirvana certainly left the biggest sonic mark. The Kurt Cobain Jaguar comes with an exclusive Fender Kurt Cobain book which includes an interview with Nirvana guitar tech Earnie Bailey.

Check it out at Fender.com