A Tale of Two Jacksons (and how I couldn’t love them)

I sent these back to Musician’s Friend. It would have been easy to keep them. They were beautiful instruments yet I had no particular feeling about either one of them. Pardon the outrageous mess in the background — we were doing an addition/remodel and the house was in disarray.

I’ve been a Strat person since 1990 or so, when I bought a MIJ flower power Strat from a little music store in Akron that later burned down. I used that guitar for the next 20 years. It has great feel and low action but also (took me a while to realize this) the most passive pickups on earth. Over the years I’ve done stupid stuff like bust the whammy bar off in it and probably let way too many…