Jerry Garcia’s Tiger: The Guitar That Saw Everything
Jerry Garcia’s Tiger sold for $11.56 million. Christie’s also corrected its final-show story: this wasn’t the guitar from the Dead’s last night.
Doug Irwin spent six years building the instrument Garcia had given him free rein to create. When Tiger reached the stage in 1979, Brent Mydland had recently joined the Grateful Dead and the band was finding a new sound. The guitar became a fixture of the next decade, through Garcia’s health crisis, his return to the stage and the breakthrough that brought a new audience into the fold.
That history is big enough without a perfect ending. Yet Tiger acquired one: the familiar account placed it in Garcia’s hands at the Grateful Dead’s final show, at Soldier Field on July 9, 1995. Christie’s printed that account in its catalog, then issued a correction. Its updated essay attributes the clarification to Steve Parish and places Tiger’s final appearance with Garcia at the Warfield, with the Jerry Garcia Band, on April 23, 1995.
The sale still reached $11.56 million, including fees. That result does not tell us what bidders would have paid without the correction, but it leaves a more interesting question than the legend did: what makes this particular guitar matter? Part two of our Doug Irwin trilogy follows Tiger through the Dead’s changing world, then separates its documented farewell from the story that grew around it.
Chapters:
0:00 Tiger, $11.56 Million and a Correction
2:30 Doug Irwin Gets an Open Commission
4:39 Tiger Arrives as the Dead Change Sound
6:11 Garcia Wants a Guitar He Can Trust
7:34 Jerry Garcia Falls, Then Comes Back
10:03 Touch of Grey Changes the Dead Forever
14:05 Rosebud Arrives as the Tiger Era Ends
15:06 The Warfield and Tiger’s Last Appearance
16:15 Soldier Field and the Story That Spread
18:29 Christie’s Corrects the Tiger Record
20:37 What Tiger’s Real History Still Means
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