![The Origins and Legends Surrounding Jerry Garcia's "Tiger" Guitar]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/The-Origins-and-Legends-Surrounding-Jerry-Garcias-Tiger-Guitar-758x406.jpg "The Origins and Legends Surrounding Jerry Garcia's \"Tiger\" Guitar] 1")
“It’s like a work of art,” Amelia Walker – specialist head of the Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s – reflects of Jerry Garcia’s ornate ‘Tiger’ custom electric, which has now sold for $11,560,000 as part of the Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame.
“For a lot of people, that is the guitar in the collection – it’s kind of the ultimate because it was the last guitar he played live before his death and it was his main guitar for about 10 years, from when it was delivered in 1979 up until to 1989. It was one of his most recognisable and favourite guitars.”
Guitar historian Tony Bacon says that ‘Tiger’ was the third such guitar Garcia owned: “Jerry Garcia’s custom guitar known as Tiger was made for him by Doug Irwin, who Jerry met in the early ’70s when Doug worked with Rick Turner at Alembic.
Article continues below
“He bought a couple of guitars that Doug made there, the first known as ‘Eagle’, and then one named ‘Wolf’ for the snarling inlay behind the bridge on its highly figured exotic-wood body. Wolf became Jerry’s stage favourite for a few years,” Tony says.
“Toward the end of the ’70s, Doug delivered another guitar to Jerry – this one, too, with a body inlay that provided its nickname, ‘Tiger’, and this one enjoyed an even longer life as a Jerry fave.
“Cocobolo is an incredibly exotic wood, and the maple on the back of the neck is hand-selected for the most figured timbers,” Amelia Walker observes. “Even on the front, as you’re looking at the horns, he’s carved the wood in such a way as to select the peak of the grain where it curls over the arched top. It’s very, very beautifully done.
“It’s a sort of sandwich laminate construction, but I think it is chambered as well. Otherwise, it would weigh about a ton,” she says, adding that the chambering gave rise to some very ’70s theories about why these cavities had been added.
“There was a lot of mythology around there being ‘secret drugs compartments’,” Amelia says. “I don’t think that’s the case; I don’t think that Doug Irwin specifically put in a ‘weed slot’. I think it’s just chambered and therefore to access the preamp cover, which has got this beautiful inlay, there is another little corner – which could potentially be used for transporting [small items].”
The guitar houses some quite complex electronics to serve Garcia’s broad sonic palette, Tony Bacon says: “Tiger’s DiMarzios are arranged in HHS format.
“The guitar was fitted with three controls (master volume; tone for neck and bridge; tone for middle), a pickup selector, three mini-switches and two output jacks (a mono out and a stereo socket, selected by one of the mini-switches: selecting the stereo looped the signal out to an effects rack and back to the guitar’s controls, then out via the mono jack).
“The other two mini-switches were coil selectors for the humbuckers, and the five-way selector provided Jerry with ‘in-between’ pickup selections when he needed them.
“‘So right there,’ Jerry told Jon Sievert at Guitar Player, ‘that’s like 12 discrete possible voices that are all pretty different.’ The rest of it was touch, he explained. ‘I mostly work off the middle pickup in the single-coil setting and I can get almost any sound I want out of that. And touch is so individualised. It’s something every guitar player has to find for himself.’”
Needless to say, such ornate decoration and complex electronics took a long time to craft; Doug Irwin estimated that it took a total of around two thousand hours of work in order to complete the build.
“Jerry Garcia commissioned it as soon as Doug Irwin completed Wolf in 1973 and it was delivered in 1979 – so it was six years on the bench,” Amelia Walker says. “And in terms of modifications, it was delivered with white pickups and then at some point during the ’80s it changed to these black pickups in an HHS configuration, which is what it has today.”
- Christie’s auctions The Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame starting 12 March. For more information on the four-part sale series, visit Christie’s.
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
