Doomscrolling isn’t very good for one’s mental health, but every now and then it can come up trumps – like when it helped reunite Misha Mansoor with his long-lost Jackson Juggernaut.
Talking to Guitar Center about the release of Periphery's latest riff-rich album, A Pale White Dot, the guitarist explains that his very special Jackson USA Juggernaut HT7, his original signature guitar with the firm, was one he thought he'd lost forever.
“I parted with this guitar originally because I had the newer version coming out and I had too many guitars at home,” he details. That's perfectly understandable. We can't all have a vault of 300 guitars like Eagles' Don Felder.
“This is a very special guitar,” Mansoor develops. “Because, aside from being a rare combination of Silverburst, which we had to stop doing, and the very expensive [Periphery logo] inlay done by Ron Thorn [of the Fender Custom Shop], this guitar also had a lot of mojo.”
Early on, it got a love in the studio and on stage, and it was also the guitar he took to Bare Knuckle pickups ahead of crafting his second signature humbucker set, the Ragnarok.
That means the very first Ragnaroks ever made are housed in this guitar. “This is what determined the architecture of the pickups,” he says.
So, despite being “pretty bummed out” by its sale and the thought of never seeing it again, mindlessly perusing social media came to his rescue.
“I was on tour, doom scrolling on my bunk [on the tour bus],” Mansoor recalls. “I got a targeted ad from Guitar Center, and it showed a picture of this guitar. There's only one guitar that looks like this. Obviously, I clicked on it, saw that it was in a Guitar Center in Florida.”
Mansoor reached out to a friend who worked at the Hollywood branch, and soon his seller's remorse was traded for the joy of getting the guitar back in his hands.
“I immediately reached out to my buddy who works in the Guitar Center in Hollywood, and I was like, ‘Hey, that’s my guitar. I’ve been looking for that. Can we arrange something?’” he continues. “And Guitar Center very, very kindly reunited me with this guitar, which I never thought I would ever see.”
While Jackson Juggernauts remain a vital part of Mansoor’s arsenal, earlier this year he finally launched his jaw-dropping custom 30” baritone Surfacaster, which arrived in a limited batch.
