I recall that Jet actually posted a reply himself and explained the D tuning thing in response to a thread query on this site some years ago.
As mentioned above, he said that although the record was done with dropped tuning to D, it was too much of a hassle to have to retune to concert on stage just for that tune, so he just played it live in E 'concert' tuning on the Jaguar. (Even many top professional folks only usually had ONE guitar on stage back then, with no backup, unlike today! The Fabs had backups, and possibly Hank, but I doubt that many others did)
I suspect the 'dead' guitar sound on the NME Poll Concert would have been the stock flatwounds on the Jaguar...