Just hours after someone raided their piggy bank to buy Jerry Garcia’s fabled ‘Tiger’ guitar for just shy of £12 million, Derek Trucks has taken the iconic instrument to the stage.
It was auctioned off along with a raft of seven-figure electric guitars from the late Jim Irsay’s monumental collection last week. The eye-watering $11.56 million sale price makes it the second most expensive guitar in history, with the winner also crowned during a record-shattering auction.
The guitar, crafted by Alembic Guitars for Garcia in the late ’70s, weighs 13.5 pounds, and the chiropractor's nightmare is lavishly kitted out. Garcia is said to have told Alembic not to hold back on its creation, and the ornate axe was the result.
It, along with Alembic’s Wolf build for Garcia, is the only guitar on the most expensive list (now expanded to 22) that is not produced by a major manufacturer.
For its body layers of cocobolo, maple, and padauk are laminated together for a 'hippie sandwich' approach to tonewood, and the six-string, which cost Garcia a comparatively measly $5,800, became his main guitar for the next decade.
Not much longer after the gavel went down in New York, Trucks was taking the instrument 24 blocks away, to the Beacon Theatre. There, the guitar featured Tedeschi Trucks Band's latest residency show.
“There are instruments where you look at it and go, ‘Holy shit, what has this thing seen?’” Trucks tells Rolling Stone. “Just imagining Garcia in his dressing room, fucking playing the thing. Instruments carry a spirit.”
But Trucks isn’t the guitar’s owner; he was merely loaned it. Bobby Tseitlin, 44, from Family Guitars – a Chicago family of historic-instrument collectors – is the man who broke the bank on this one-of-a-kind guitar.
The Tiger is his third purchase linked to Garcia's legacy, after the Travis Bean TB500 and Modulus Blackknife.
But like Matt's Guitar Shop has done with Jeff Beck's Yardburst and Steve Jones’ Les Paul, the family wants them to “live and breathe” rather than become museum pieces. So expect to be seeing a lot more of the Tiger in the hands of guitar greats in the future.
“We knew that if Tiger went somewhere else, it was most likely going to be left behind glass,” Tseitlin explains. “They deserve to be out there, and people want to hear them. Those guitars bring out something in players.”
