A reverse-mounted Seymour Duncan Quarter Pound pickup, slab rosewood board and a pack of Burrito Breath fruit stickers make up the blink-182 bassist’s latest Jaguar.
Mark Hoppus has been playing a Guava Green Jaguar Bass covered in grinning cartoon fruit since blink-182’s 2023 world tour, and Fender is now building it for anyone who orders one in the next 182 hours. The length of the window is about as subtle as the paint job.
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The fruit belongs to Burrito Breath, the Ohio-based artist Phil Guy, whose work Hoppus came across on Instagram during the pandemic. He bought a few pieces, later brought him in to design blink-182 posters and eventually had the stoned fruit painted onto his prototype bass and sealed under clear coat. On the production model the artwork comes as a sticker pack instead, so the bass arrives plain green and the owner decides how much fruit it ends up wearing. Hoppus traces the idea back to skate and punk culture, where stickers have always done the decorating, and to something a little more childlike.
“You can pretend you’re a little kid in the back of your parents’ car putting stickers on the windows as they drive down the freeway and you can pretty much make it however you want,” he says.
Underneath the stickers is a solid alder body and a bolt-on maple neck with a Custom C profile, topped with a slab rosewood fingerboard. Hoppus prefers rosewood because it stays clean and smooth where maple gets grubby with wear. The pickup is a Seymour Duncan SPB-3 Quarter Pound split-coil P Bass, mounted in reverse so the D and G strings hold their own against the E and A, something he’d spent years trying to fix with EQ. The tone circuit is wired straight through, since Hoppus has no interest in rolling off any of his top end, and a HiMass Vintage bridge, lightweight vintage-style tuners and a neck plate engraved with his octopus logo finish it off. A deluxe gig bag comes in the box.
Hoppus wanted players to be able to buy the same bass he takes on tour, and Fender isn’t capping the run, so every order placed in the window gets built. The Limited Edition Mark Hoppus Stoned Fruit Jaguar Bass is available exclusively through Fender’s website until around 30 October.
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