Musical equipment
Garcia played many guitars during his career, which ranged from student and budget models to custom-made instruments. During his thirty-five-year career as a professional musician, Garcia used about 25 guitars.
In 1965, when Garcia was playing with the Warlocks, he used a Guild Starfire, which he also used on the début album of the Grateful Dead. Beginning in late 1967 and ending in 1968, Garcia played black or gold mid-1950s Gibson Les Paul guitars with P-90 pickups. In 1969, he picked up the Gibson SG and used it for most of that year and 1970, except for a small period in between where he used a sunburst Fender Stratocaster.
During Garcia's "pedal steel flirtation period" (as Bob Weir referred to it in Anthem to Beauty), from approximately 1969 to 1972, he initially played a Fender instrument before upgrading to the ZB Custom D-10, especially in his earlier public performances. Although this was a double neck guitar, Garcia used the "E9 neck and the three pedals to raise the tone and two levers to lower it." He employed an Emmons D-10 at the Grateful Dead's and New Riders of the Purple Sage's final appearances at the Fillmore East in April 1971.
In 1969, Garcia played pedal steel on three notable outside recordings: the track "The Farm" on the Jefferson Airplane album Volunteers, the track "Oh Mommy" by Brewer and Shipley and the hit single "Teach Your Children" by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young from their album Déjà Vu, released in 1970. Garcia played on the latter album in exchange for harmony lessons for the Grateful Dead, who were at the time recording Workingman's Dead.
In 1971, Garcia began playing a sunburst Les Paul. In March and April 1971 – the time period during which the Grateful Dead recorded its second live album, Grateful Dead – Garcia played the "Peanut", a guitar he had received from Rick Turner, who had custom built the guitar's body and incorporated the neck, pickups, and hardware from an early '60s Les Paul.
In May, Garcia began using a 1955 natural finish Stratocaster that had been given to him by Graham Nash in 1969. Garcia added an alligator sticker to the pickguard in the fall of 1971, and the thusly-named "Alligator" would remain Garcia's principal electric guitar until August 1973.
In the summer of 1971, Garcia also played a double-cutaway Les Paul TV Junior.
While Alligator was in the shop in the summer of 1972, he briefly reverted to the sunburst Stratocaster; this can be seen in Sunshine Daydream.
In late 1972, Garcia purchased the first guitar ("Eagle") made by Alembic luthier Doug Irwin for $850 (equivalent to $6,500 in 2025). Enamored of Irwin's talents, he immediately commissioned his own custom instrument. This guitar, nicknamed "Wolf" for a sticker Garcia added below the tailpiece, was delivered in May 1973 and replaced Alligator on stage in September. It cost $1,500 (equivalent to $10,900 in 2025), an extremely high price for the era.
Wolf was made with an ebony fingerboard and featured numerous embellishments like alternating grain designs in the headstock, ivory inlays, and fret marker dots made of sterling silver. The body was composed of western maple wood which had a core of purpleheart. Garcia later had Irwin (who ultimately left Alembic to start his own business) replace the electronics inside the guitar, at which point he added his own logo to the headstock alongside the Alembic logo. The system included two interchangeable plates for configuring pickups: one was made for strictly single coils, while the other accommodated humbuckers. Shortly after receiving the modified instrument, Garcia commissioned another custom guitar from Irwin with one caveat: "Don't hold back."
During the Grateful Dead's 1974 European tour, Wolf was dropped on several occasions, one of which caused a minor crack in the headstock. Following filming of The Grateful Dead Movie (in which the guitar is prominently visible) a month later, Garcia returned it to Irwin for repairs. Throughout its absence, Garcia predominantly played several Travis Bean guitars, including the TB1000A (1975) and the TB500 (1976-1977). On September 28, 1977, Irwin delivered the refurbished Wolf back to Garcia. The wolf sticker which gave the guitar its name had now been inlaid into the instrument; it also featured an effects loop between the pick-ups and controls (so inline effects would "see" the same signal at all times) which was bypassable. Irwin also put a new face on the headstock with only his logo (he later claimed to have built the guitar himself, though pictures through time clearly show the progression of logos, from Alembic, to Alembic & Irwin, to only Irwin).
The Grateful Dead began using McIntosh Labs amplifiers in the mid-1960s at the insistence and funding of sound technician and prolific LSD chemist Owsley Stanley. Garcia began using a specific McIntosh MC 2300 in 1973, eventually christened with a Budweiser Budman sticker placed on the front in 1974 and making it a unique way of identifying Garcia's specific MC 2300 out of the many that powered the Wall of Sound. "Budman" was one of the only components from the Wall to continue traveling with Garcia until 1993 when it was replaced with a cab simulation system.
The Budman amp is the longest continuously used piece of gear in Grateful Dead history. On 14 October 2021 during a Sotheby's auction titled "From the Vault: Property from the Grateful Dead and Friends". Garcia's last stage rack containing a MC2300 sold for $226,800 USD. The MC2300 Budman sold for $378,000 USD.
Nearly seven years after he commissioned it, Garcia received his second custom guitar ("Tiger") from Irwin in the summer of 1979.
He first employed the instrument in concert at a Grateful Dead performance at the Oakland Auditorium Arena on August 4, 1979. Its name was derived from the inlay on the preamp cover.
The body of Tiger was of rich quality: the top layer was cocobolo, with the preceding layers being maple stripe, vermilion, and flame maple, in that order. The neck was made of western maple with an ebony fingerboard. The pickups consisted of a single coil DiMarzio SDS-1 and two humbucker DiMarzio Super IIs; these were easily removable, accommodating Garcia's preference for replacing his pickups every year or two. The electronics were composed of an effects bypass loop (which allowed Garcia to control the sound of his effects through the tone and volume controls on the guitar) and a preamplifier/buffer, which rested behind a plate in the back of the guitar. Fully outfitted, Tiger weighed 13+1⁄2 pounds (6.1 kg). This was Garcia's principal guitar for the next eleven years, and his most played. Due to the ongoing repair and retrofitting of other instruments, Garcia played Tiger during the last song ("Box of Rain") of his final performance with the Grateful Dead at Chicago's Soldier Field on July 9, 1995.
In the late 1980s Garcia, Weir and CSN (along with many others) endorsed Alvarez Yairi acoustic guitars. There are many photographs circulating (mostly promotional) of Garcia playing a DY99 Virtuoso Custom with a Modulus graphite neck. He opted to play with the less decorated model but the promotional photo from the Alvarez Yairi catalog has him holding the "tree of life" model. This hand-built guitar was notable for the collaboration between Japanese luthier Kazuo Yairi and Modulus Graphite of San Rafael. Since Garcia's death, the DY99 model has remained highly valued among collectors.
In 1990, Irwin completed "Rosebud", Garcia's fourth custom guitar. While similar to Tiger in many respects, it featured different inlays and electronics in addition to a slightly lighter weight. Rosebud, unlike Tiger, was configured with three humbuckers; the neck and bridge pickups shared a tone control, while the middle had its own. Atop the guitar was a Roland GK-2 pickup which fed the controller set inside the guitar. The GK2 was used in conjunction with the Roland GR-50 rack mount synthesizer. In turn, the GR-50 synthesizer drove a Korg M1R synthesizer that produced MIDI effects during live performances of this period, as heard on the Grateful Dead's Without a Net (1990) and other contemporaneous recordings. Sections of the guitar were hollowed out to bring the weight down to 11+1⁄2 pounds (5.2 kg). The inlay, a dancing skeleton holding a rose, covers a plate just below the bridge. The final cost of the instrument was $11,000 (equivalent to $27,100 in 2025).
In 1993, carpenter and aspiring luthier Stephen Cripe tried his hand at making a speculative instrument for Garcia. After researching Tiger through pictures and films, Cripe set out on what would soon become known as "Lightning Bolt", again named for its inlay. The guitar used Brazilian rosewood for the fingerboard and East Indian rosewood for the body, which, with admitted irony from Cripe, had been taken from a 19th-century bed used by opium smokers. Built purely from guesswork, Lightning Bolt was gifted by Cripe to Garcia, who began using the guitar exclusively. However, as Cripe had little background in electronics, Garcia hired San Francisco-based repairman Gary Brawer to reconfigure the pickups and make the instrument MIDI-compatible. Additionally, Cripe "hadn't known that the oval-shaped body inlays on Tiger and Rosebud concealed their batteries, so Brawer had to remove his inlay and put it on a cover-plate." A new bridge also was installed during the final Grateful Dead tour.
Soon after, Garcia requested that Cripe build a backup of the guitar. Cripe, who had not measured or photographed the original, was told simply to "wing it." Cripe later delivered the backup, which was known by the name "Top Hat", in April 1995. Garcia bought it from him for $6,500, making it the first guitar that Cripe had ever sold. Still infatuated with Lightning Bolt, Garcia rarely used the backup.
After Garcia's death, the ownership of Wolf and Tiger came into question. According to Garcia's will, his guitars were bequeathed to Doug Irwin, who had constructed them. The remaining Grateful Dead members disagreed – they considered his guitars to be property of the band, leading to a lawsuit between the two parties. In 2001, Irwin won the case. However, nearly having been left destitute from a traffic accident in 1998, he decided to place the guitars up for auction in hopes of being able to start another guitar workshop.
On May 8, 2002, Wolf and Tiger, among other memorabilia, were placed for auction at Studio 54 in New York City. Tiger was sold for $957,500, and Wolf for $789,500. Together, the pair sold for $1.74 million, setting a new world record. Wolf went into in the private collection of Daniel Pritzker who kept it in a secure climate controlled room in a private residence at Utica, New York. Tiger went to the private collection of Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay. In May 2017, Wolf was again auctioned, but this time for charity. Pritzker decided to sell the guitar and donate all proceeds to the Montgomery, Alabama based Southern Poverty Law Center. Brian Halligan placed the winning bid totaling $1.9 million.
For the majority of 2019 Wolf and Tiger were included in the Play it Loud exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. On June 23, 2019 John Mayer played Wolf with Dead & Company at Citi Field.
In March 2026, Tiger was sold at auction for $9,500,000 ($11,560,000 including auction fees).
