Does anyone remember how hard it was to buy an offset before the 'offset boom'?

[Marc]

Wow some great posts here! Thanks for all of them - keep them coming!

[Jaguar018]

It took me about ten years of playing before I started to pay attention to offsets. I simply did not really pay that much attention to the details of guitars, so I didn't know what made Jazzmasters and Jaguars 'different' from Strats and Teles aside from the pickups looking different. Technically, my first offset was a Musicmaster that I got for like $500 or $600 at a mostly acoustic shop in Madison, Wisconsin in 1994 or so. I didn't know it was an offset really. I liked the way it sounded, but it had that smaller 22 inch neck (or whatever it is) and it wasn't all that fun to play.

I am from the Washington DC area, and there are, or were, a few well-known guitar stores that all the vintage junkies knew about. I went to Southworth Guitars in its original DC location and its later Maryland location a lot when I moved back from uni. Southworth had SUCH AN AMAZING COLLECTION back then. The offsets were always cheaper than the Strats, Teles, and Gibsons. Ugh there were so many cool guitars. I also remember talking to the guys there who told me about how the 70s Fender necks with blocks and binding weren't as strong as the older necks... which is some of that classic guitar store bullshit talk most of us have experiences at one time or another.

By the time I really started paying attention in the 2000s, the AVRI line was starting up. My first 'real' offset that I purchased was an AVRI Inca Silver Jazzmaster. I have never been a savvy enough buyer to get vintage originals in good condition. It was all about refins and project guitars. I've always gravitated more to those anyways as 100% vintage originals require too much effort and care.

[cestlamort]

I remember trying to find one for my first real guitar in the mid 90s, but they were really pretty hard to come by, and I can only remember seeing a few reissues in stores, maybe one or two vintage ones. The MIJ reissues were out there new, but that seemed like a lot of money to pay for a new import guitar, especially when shopping used/vintage. Hmmm. New jazzmaster with underwhelming pickups or beat up 70s SG for around the same price? I do remember trying a (competition) mustang, but that's as close as I got, as it was my first attempt to haggle with a seller. (He balked, I walked).

Later, a bandmate's husband had a vintage (stripped) jaguar and sold it on ebay for what we thought was crazy money ($800, essentially 2-3 months rent). It's worth keeping inflation in mind here, as even $500 was a chunk of money in the 90s (especially if you were working at a record label for around $5.50/hr --minimum wage didn't even hit $5 until the late 90s).

I don't remember offsets really popping up much at guitar stores until the 2000s and then only infrequently and almost all reissues or new models.

[Mechanical Birds]

Australia was a captive audience for vintage stuff because it was so hard to source it from outside of the country before ebay came along.

Here's what happened to Jackson's. Selling guitars that weren't theirs to sell.

http://www.juliusmedia.com/jacksons-rar ... questions/

aha that makes much more sense- thought Jacksons was in America! haha

That was one of the hardest to read things I’ve ever seen. Is it a blog or what? Horrible and sadly not very informative sounds like an interesting story

[OSGTemp]

I always thought it odd that Fender made it so difficult to get Mustangs, Jaguars and Jazzmasters worldwide during the whole decade of the 1990's.

We now know that Fender Japan was making Jaguars and Jazzmasters since 1986, and Mustangs certainly by 1987, but predominately for the Japan-only market to protect the US market.

By around 1998 I was able to get a MIJ Sonic Blue mustang to be shipped out of the US, but I recall at least until 2002 it was still difficult to get the wacky stuff from Fender Japan to be shipped outside of Japan. I think it was around 2003 that ishibashi started to make their website more English friendly. Certainly by late 2004 they had caught on and you could get whatever you wanted.

[Marc]

I always thought it odd that Fender made it so difficult to get Mustangs, Jaguars and Jazzmasters worldwide during the whole decade of the 1990's.

Yes I always thought that as well - I remember the main flagship Fender dealer in the UK (Soho Soundhouse who I think became Turnkey and eventually went bust) advertised them in '86 and was blown away as it was something I was hoping for. In the end I got my first offset - a '66 Jag that needed restoration a year later for only £170 or £270 (I forget but it was less than a new MIJ). I had the wiring fixed, a refret and an outstanding sonic blue refin done. The work cost £250 for everything.

We now know that Fender Japan was making Jaguars and Jazzmasters since 1986, and Mustangs certainly by 1987, but predominately for the Japan-only market to protect the US market.

Yes I agree - it was likely to protect the worldwide market. Kind of odd considering they had discontinued all those instruments.

By around 1998 I was able to get a MIJ Sonic Blue mustang to be shipped out of the US, but I recall at least until 2002 it was still difficult to get the wacky stuff from Fender Japan to be shipped outside of Japan. I think it was around 2003 that ishibashi started to make their website more English friendly. Certainly by late 2004 they had caught on and you could get whatever you wanted.

Agreed - very few dealers had JMs or Jags in stock. Partly I think because they were concerned with being stuck with a guitar they couldn't sell - by and large I found most dealers were indifferent about offsets right up until the turn of the millennium. Someone mentioned in this thread waiting months for a JM on order and eventually gave up - I also recall someone I knew waiting the best part of a year for their order to turn up although that was the late 80s. It always seemed super strange to me that dealers and Fender seemed quite ignorant to how many offsets they could have sold had they hung them on the walls in greater quantities. As I've mentioned, I do think that dealers were very snotty about offsets in general - typically they thought they just plain weird with "all those switches, low output and terrible tuning". They are of course no more complicated than a lot of Gretsches and, as for the setup... well I just think luthiers didn't know how to adjust them and pre-internet there was no way of circulating how it should be done. I'm grateful the world is a smaller place now.

[B]

Oh holy hell, I absolutely remember. I actually look back at the pre internet days and miss them. Shit seemed more "real". I liked the earlier comment about how nobody thought the original bridges were "unplayable" until the internet told them so. It's sad how much the internet has taken even the slightest grain of truth of something (or complete outright bullshit) and magnified into "absolute fact".

First off, I'm 46 years old and have played a Jazzmaster since I was in high school in the 80s. My Dad was the biggest Ventures fan of all time and had a 61 Jazzmaster, and my idol at the time was Robert Smith because I was a geeky new wave kid, so I felt like a Jazzmaster was predestined to be what I was meant to play. Plus nobody played them, guitar shops didn't have them, so that was all the more reason to be proud to play my Dads, which I pretty much commandeered and never gave back. Me and my friends never called them "offsets"... That name became primarily associated with them much later. They were called "Gumby guitars" because we thought they looked kind of like Gumby's head.

I remember seeing a video my Dad had of either the Ventures or some other surf band and I noticed the Jaguar. It was basically like what I was playing already, but flashier, so I set out to find one of those... This was about 1988-89. I went to a local pawn shop my Dad said had one hanging up forever and found a 1962-ish sunburst Jaguar. The guy wanted $600-something bucks for it (everything there was grossly overpriced), which was WAY out of my price range, so I just made it my mission to find one more "reasonably priced" when I was checking out other pawn shops in Portland or Seattle.

I found my first Jaguar at a woodworker's shop in Hermiston Oregon. I was driving through town and drove past a 7-11 and decided I wanted to flip around and grab a drink before I continued on up to Spokane, so I pulled into a parking lot to make a quick u-turn. The business there was a shitty looking building that belonged to a woodworker and custom cabinet/furniture maker. BUT, hanging in the window of this cabinet shop was a old body of a Danelectro that had the words painted on it "We Do Guitar Repairs Too!". I figured what the hell, and I went in and asked if he happened to sell any guitars.

There were about 6 or 7 guitars hanging on the wall. No name acoustics, some beat up Kay archtop... basically nothing. The guy asked "What kind of guitar you looking for, I could make you a good one." And I told him "Oh, I'm really looking for Fender Jaguar someday". He shot back "Oh good God, why those?... Today is your lucky day". He took me in the back of his shop and started pulling parts out of a box. After about 5 minutes he had found the entire guitar... An original sonic blue 64 Jaguar. "I meant to someday get it wired up... You want a project to work on?" I blurted out "Oh heck yeah, I'll give you $250!" Funny thing is, I could tell from the look on his face after I said $250 that he thought he hit the gold mine... He was probably going to say $50, but I blurted out a number so he said "You got yourself a project". HAHAHA... He even gave me some sandpaper because "It's baby blue but you can sand that off and I bet it would look sharp!"

So $250 and I walked out with an original sonic blue Jaguar in a box. My friend Trevor repaired electronic keyboards and stuff at a local music shop so I traded him a couple of boxes of 9mm bullets and he wired it all back up. (Now that's fuckin' GRUNGE BABY!)

I played the Jag for a year or so and then sold it for $800 and thought I had hit the lotto. Plus I could always just play my dad's Jazzmaster. My band needed PA gear so I thought it was basically a killer trade off. This was right before it seemed every Northwest band wanted those... They were starting to get popular here even before Nirvana was known outside of the Northwest. It was all because they had this aesthetic of being "your Dad's surf guitar from back when he was cool and wanted to be in The Ventures", haha. As soon as I started seeing them get popular around here I started regretting selling it and went on the hunt for another one. And sure enough, I found one... An original 60s Burgandy Mist hanging up at The Trading Musician in Seattle. BUT BUT BUT, now the prices of them started going through the roof. "$1200?!?!?!... Seriously?!?!?! These guys are out of their fucking minds! Screw this place!!!!". And I walked out.

Then "it" happened... And every Jaguar, Jazzmaster, Mustang, Mosrite and "kind-of-surfy" guitar in a 500 mile radius disappeared overnight.

[cestlamort]

They were starting to get popular here even before Nirvana was known outside of the Northwest. It was all because they had this aesthetic of being "your Dad's surf guitar from back when he was cool and wanted to be in The Ventures", haha. As soon as I started seeing them get popular around here I started regretting selling it and went on the hunt for another one. And sure enough, I found one... An original 60s Burgandy Mist hanging up at The Trading Musician in Seattle. BUT BUT BUT, now the prices of them started going through the roof. "$1200?!?!?!... Seriously?!?!?! These guys are out of their fucking minds! Screw this place!!!!". And I walked out.

Then "it" happened... And every Jaguar, Jazzmaster, Mustang, Mosrite and "kind-of-surfy" guitar in a 500 mile radius disappeared overnight.

I can confirm all of this, more or less. I think I also saw a green (sherwood?) JM at Al's Guitarville in 1995 or so, but it was $1500 or thereabouts (remember that minimum wage was $4.50 or so, a 4-bedroom house was $700/mo rent or less). I almost got a 70s SG for $450 at trading musician in that era, for comparison.

[B]

I can confirm all of this, more or less. I think I also saw a green (sherwood?) JM at Al's Guitarville in 1995 or so, but it was $1500 or thereabouts (remember that minimum wage was $4.50 or so, a 4-bedroom house was $700/mo rent or less). I almost got a 70s SG for $450 at trading musician in that era, for comparison.

The original Guitarville up off of N. 145th... God I loved that shop back in the day! I ended up buying another Jaguar from them, a Rivera amp, and God knows how many pedals. Ha, I was actually talked OUT of buying an old Ovation Breadwinner they had. I was obsessed with the looks of them and this metal head looking guy they all seemed to know was buying a bunch of stuff there. He could tell could tell I was irrationally wanting it, making all kinds of excuses to myself to buy it, so he started explaining technically just why the guitar sucked and why I shouldn't even consider it for the music I wanted to play. And he was totally correct, the guitar was far from what I needed, so I ended up buying a bunch of pedals instead. Thanks Jerry Cantrell. Loved that place. Plus I always got a laugh when this one guy there always referred to The Trading Musician as "The Fading Musician". Stupid joke, but the way the guy said it was always with complete disgust on his face in the most hilarious way.

Anyways, Me and my girlfriend at the time liked that area and went to look at an apartment right near that shop. $700 a month. I remember us leaving saying "Damn, Seattle is getting just too expensive... No way we can ever move."

I miss those times.

[B]

And am I the only Washingtonian old enough to remember when you could grab a vintage Fender (usually modded to shit, because nobody cared... And it was The Trading Musician), light up a cigarette, and sit down and play it right in the middle of the shop because they had conveniently placed ceramic ashtrays on top of the amps on the floor? Oh you might get a "be careful, don't put a burn mark on anything" if the guy working was in a particularly bad mood and/or you looked like an idiot.

[Larry Mal]

The only thing I knew about the Jazzmaster was this black and white image from Ralph Denyer's excellent book on learning the guitar, which I totally wore out back in the day:



And nothing about that made me think that Jazzmasters were anything that actually existed or that I would ever see. I didn't like, want one from that description.

Then one day I was working a double and walked down the street to a high-end guitar place. Up until that point I hadn't owned a lot of guitars, a Squier 2 Strat that was garbage, a Norlin SG that had a super narrow nut I couldn't play, and then I decided that a Carvin special order would really "do it all" without my having to "pay for the name".

It was awful.

So, I saw a Jazzmaster, an MIJ, and I was like, shit, those things are around? I didn't know they were still making them. I asked the guitar store clerk and he expressed scorn for the guitar, which was pretty much all I heard about it for years, but then again this was an upscale store that sold guitars that had birds as inlays on the guitar necks. So you can imagine.

I thought, well, hell, let's play it. Ten minutes later I was putting it on layaway. I wasn't a good guitar player or anything but I had never played anything that worked for me as well as that Jazzmaster, nothing had ever played as easily as that.

It blew me away. I told all my friends about it and they all thought that it wasn't cool. Some people would suggest that I put Seymour Duncan pickups in it or some shit. I thought they were nuts.

It had all these sounds in there. I still have it.

[eskmsaul]

I'm a little greener than most of y'all but for years the only offsets I ever saw in person were the HH ones like the black mij hardtail jag or the jagmaster.

[cestlamort]

I can confirm all of this, more or less. I think I also saw a green (sherwood?) JM at Al's Guitarville in 1995 or so, but it was $1500 or thereabouts (remember that minimum wage was $4.50 or so, a 4-bedroom house was $700/mo rent or less). I almost got a 70s SG for $450 at trading musician in that era, for comparison.

The original Guitarville up off of N. 145th... God I loved that shop back in the day!


I miss those times.

Yep. One salesman kept saying how "that guitar looks good on you" (ridiculous selling point) so a friend and I convinced them we were going to pick up the guitorgan they had ($800?) but needed to go to a cash machine. As we drove off we could hear someone declare "pack up the guitorgan!" Funny, but we didn't feel ok going back for a couple of months.

I got my Guild Starfire III there (and still have it and play it). Probably the lowest return on investment for a 60s guitar (but I still have it and play it).

Trading musician was best when still on 65th (by my own Roosevelt High School, espresso express, etc)