Tiger: The Story of Jerry Garcia's Most Legendary Guitar

The Commission

In 1973, Jerry Garcia walked away from luthier Doug Irwin with a guitar called Wolf in hand. He didn't wait long to come back. Garcia handed Irwin a new commission on the spot: build something even more extravagant. No budget ceiling, no design limits. Just make the most ambitious instrument you're capable of.

That instruction turned into Tiger.

Six Years, Two Thousand Hours

Irwin didn't rush it. Tiger took roughly two thousand hours of work spread across six years, from 1973 to 1979. This wasn't a guitar built off a template. Irwin was laminating exotic hardwoods into a single, neck-through-body instrument, then wrapping the whole thing in brass binding and inlay work that took as long as the woodworking itself.

The build, by the numbers:

• Body: Cocobolo top and back, sandwiched around a maple and padauk core
• Back detail: Quilted maple with a brass-bound circular inlay of mother-of-pearl vegetal (floral) marquetry
• Neck: Three-piece flame maple and padauk, neck-through-body construction, bound in brass
• Fingerboard: Ebony, 25" scale, 16" radius, with pearl inlay and brass binding
• Frets: .105" x .045"
• Bridge: Brass Schaller Tune-o-matic style
• Pickups: One DiMarzio SDS-1 single coil in the neck position, two DiMarzio Super II humbuckers in the middle and bridge
• Electronics: Onboard preamp with an effects loop, controlled by a five-way selector, master volume, two tone controls, and three mini toggle switches
• Signature inlay: A tiger set against black at the base of the top, doubling as the preamp cover. The back carries an inlaid "050" surrounded by the same floral motif

Garcia set his action high, 7/64" at the twelfth fret with .030" of neck relief, and kept the strings sitting about .030" above the first fret at the nut. It was a heavy guitar, but players who've handled it describe it as perfectly balanced despite the weight.

The Delivery

Tiger was finished and delivered to Garcia in the summer of 1979, closing out six years of work. It came in a custom hardshell case with a Tiger sticker on the outside, matching the instrument's name before anyone had heard a note out of it.

August 4, 1979: The Debut

Garcia first plugged Tiger in on stage at the Oakland Auditorium on August 4, 1979. From that night forward, Tiger became his main guitar almost exclusively through 1989, and it stayed in rotation well beyond that. It's the guitar in the "Touch of Grey" video that introduced the Grateful Dead to MTV audiences. It was on stage for the massive stadium shows at Giants Stadium. It carried the band's sound for the better part of two decades.

Tiger's run ended where the band's did. On July 9, 1995, at Soldier Field in Chicago, Garcia played it on "Box of Rain" during what turned out to be the Grateful Dead's final show.

Where Tiger Went

When Garcia passed in 1995, his will directed that his Irwin-built guitars go back to Doug Irwin. After a legal dispute with the surviving band members, the parties settled: Irwin took Wolf and Tiger, while GD Productions kept Rosebud and Wolf Jr. As part of that agreement, Irwin auctioned Tiger and Wolf.

Tiger sold in 2002 for $850,000 to Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay, at the time the highest price ever paid for a guitar at auction. It stayed in the Irsay collection, including a stretch on public display in the "Amped at IU" exhibition at Indiana University. Following Irsay's passing, Tiger went back to auction in 2026 and sold for $11.56 million to the Family Guitars collection, where Derek Trucks was the first to play it in its new home.

More than fifty years after Irwin first started bending wood for it, Tiger remains the high-water mark of what a guitar can be when a luthier is told to hold nothing back.

Wear the Story

Can't own the guitar. Can own the graphic.

The Tiger Guitar tee runs the design in gold ink on black, with a silver ink on navy version too. Same artwork carries over to long sleeves for cooler nights at the show, and a heavyweight hoodie for when it really gets cold, also available in a silver on blue colorway. Officially licensed, 100% cotton where it counts, sizes running up to 6X on tees and 3X on hoodies.