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Lot Essay
JERRY GARCIA'S DOUG IRWIN 'TIGER', HIS MAIN GUITAR FROM 1979–1989 AND NOTABLY USED FOR HIS LAST PERFORMANCE WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD AT CHICAGO’S SOLDIER FIELD ON 9 JULY 1995
Jerry Garcia commissioned the custom-built “Tiger” in 1973, urging luthier Doug Irwin to craft the most extravagant instrument he was capable of. The finished guitar – composed of dazzling exotic woods sandwiched together with ornate brass bindings – took Irwin around 2000 hours to complete over six years. Named for the tiger inlay just below the tailpiece, Tiger was first unleashed on stage on 4 August 1979 at the Oakland Civic Auditorium, after which Garcia would play this guitar almost exclusively until mid-1989. Notably, Tiger was the last guitar Garcia played publicly with the Grateful Dead at Chicago’s Soldier Field on 9 July 1995.
From the early 1970s, Garcia was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of the mass-produced electric guitar models marketed by the likes of Fender and Gibson and began to seek a more bespoke instrument that could better fulfil his diverse tonal and technical requirements over an entire set, without the need to chop and change guitars for different sounds during extended performances. I’m the kind of player who generally plays one guitar at a time so I can learn its idiosyncrasies, Garcia told Jon Sievert for Guitar Player in 1978. I really seek a kind of universal guitar, something that will sound like anything I want it to at any given moment. Garcia was at that time playing a modified Stratocaster known as “Alligator” when he stumbled across young luthier Doug Irwin during a visit to Alembic’s San Francisco workshop in 1972. Irwin had been training under Alembic’s Rick Turner and Frank Fuller for two years and was then working on the first of his own designs, which would become known as “Eagle”. While working at Alembic, I had the chance to work on my own projects after hours, wrote Irwin in 2002. Obviously through my experiences there I had learned the various construction styles, and the pluses and minuses of each, and I considered all of this when I began the design for my first "D. Irwin Guitar" in 1971. My first guitar was not quite finished, but while I was working in the back of the shop on some pickups, I had left it out front in the store. A couple of the guys came back to the workshop to tell me that Jerry Garcia was out front and wanted to buy my guitar… He told me that he liked the way the neck felt and bought the guitar right there on the spot for $850. Garcia was so impressed with Irwin’s work that that he immediately commissioned him to build another guitar with electronics designed to his custom specifications.
Thus began a long association between guitarist and luthier that would see Garcia play Irwin’s instruments almost exclusively for the next twenty years. There's something in the way they feel with my touch – they’re married to each other, Garcia told Sievert in 1988. The reason I went with his guitars in the first place was they just fell into my hand perfectly. I can’t even explain why. It wasn’t just a matter of action, it just felt right. Irwin completed Garcia’s first custom order, a neck-through-body design of maple and amaranth with Stratocaster pickups, at a cost of $1500 in May 1973. Garcia was so blown away with the guitar – later named “Wolf” for the cartoon wolf sticker he would apply below the bridge – that he placed yet another custom order there and then, instructing Irwin to make the most extravagant guitar he was capable of. He said "I want you to make me another one, but I don't want you to hold back, I just want you to go for it. I’m not going to tell you what I want, you can just make it the way you want,” recounted Irwin in a 2004 interview for Grateful Dead fan site dozin.com. I just thought to myself, "jeez, how many times does anybody in their life get a chance to do this, where somebody says yeah, go for it. Don't hold back, do it the way you want to." I really made an effort to make it my best effort. It's a guitar unlike any one I've ever built since then.
Whilst Wolf was immediately established as Garcia’s go-to guitar, Irwin dedicated more than 2000 hours over the next six years to meticulously crafting his most exquisite instrument yet with the finest materials he could source from all over the world. The finished guitar was a work of art, with contrasting layers of cocobolo, maple and padauk in the Alembic “hippie sandwich” tradition, ornate brass bindings, a mother-of-pearl tiger motif inlaid on a solid ebony plate under the bridge, giving the guitar its name “Tiger”, and a floral mother-of-pearl and abalone inlay to the back. Garcia would play Wolf until July 1979, when Irwin finally delivered the completed Tiger at a cost of $5,800, and it immediately supplanted the former instrument as his favorite guitar. Speaking to Guitar Player’s Jon Sievert some nine years later, Garcia attempted to explain what he had loved about this guitar when he first played it: I’m not analytical about guitars, but I know what I like. And when I picked up that guitar, I’d never felt anything before, or since, that my hand likes better. It’s more like a Strat than anything else. The simplest way to think about it is as a Strat with a Les Paul neck. But really the neck is not a Paul, because it doesn’t have an arched fingerboard. Its flat, like a banjo neck. I’ve had that guitar all this time, and I’ve set the bridge once and never had the neck straightened. That sucker is still as flat as an aircraft carrier. Not only that, but the frets haven’t worn down, and I’ve been playing it all this time.
The guitar’s innovative electronics included a single-coil DiMarzio SDS-1 Strat-style in the neck position, and two DiMarzio Dual Sound humbuckers at the bridge and middle positions (which would be replaced by DiMarzio Super IIs in 1982), a five-position pickup selector switch and two three-way toggles for coil selection on the humbuckers (hum-canceling/hum-canceling dual/single-coil), a master volume control, neck/bridge and middle pickup tone controls, a unity-gain buffer, and a mini toggle switch for the effect loop. As with Wolf before it, there were two output jacks – one running in mono directly to Garcia’s Fender Twin, the other to the effects rack and back. It allows me to have all my effects pedals wired to the guitar and bypass them all with a switch, Garcia told Sievert. I use a stereo cord, and the signal goes from the pickups to the tone controls and pickup switch. The signal then goes through the effects, back into a network box, and up the ‘B’ side of the stereo cord, back into the instrument before the volume pot, and then out to the amp. The effects always see the guitar as if it had full output voltage. The remainder of Garcia’s stage setup at this time comprised two Fender Twin preamps into Garcia’s preferred McIntosh 2300 power amp “Budman” (see lot 28) out to a Hard Truckers 3x12 cabinet with JBL120 speakers.
With Tiger, Garcia finally had the universal guitar that he had been seeking, the one instrument that could produce any sound he might want to summon on stage at any moment. In conversation with Sievert for Guitar Player in 1988, Garcia explained in some depth how he achieved such a variety of sounds with this guitar: I have basically the clean sound and the fuzzed-out sound. Those are my two basic colors. The rest of it has to do with the way I have my knobs set and my effects. My guitar’s treble cuts are not normal. They have capacitors in them so that when I roll the volume back, the tone stays the same. I have a unity-gain amplifier in my guitars, and that’s the only reason I have it – so I can change volume without changing the tone. The capacitors also serve as resonance boosters, so when I roll the knob all the way back, I get kind of a hollow horn-like quality with plenty of cut left to play a solo. It doesn’t really filter the way a wah-wah pedal does – it’s not that narrow. It’s more of a resonance boost. It does cut the top some, but it also does this other thing to the midrange. So I only choose the pots and capacitor combination that produces that kind of effect, so that gives me an all-the-way-on, all-the-way-off on each pickup, which provides six basic tone voices. Then, when I put those through the fuzz, it invents a new high-end because of the way the fuzz hears low-end or midrange resonance. You no longer have the bright, screaming high end where you can pick out harmonics, although the fuzz adds a high end that brings out the fulness of the interior sound. Sometimes when I play a blues chorus or something where I use the distorted sound, I change the tone by whipping the tone knob all the way down. Most of the time the tone knob is totally useless, but in this case, it really does change the tone. I also have a 5-position Stratocaster-type pickup selector so I can use the half positions, in- and out-of-phase, and with the humbucking and single-coil switch on each pickup. So right there, that’s like 12 discrete possible voices that are all pretty different. And the whole thing with guitar and effects is getting something where you can hear the difference, that gives me a lot of vocabulary of basically different tones. And that’s just the electronics. The rest of it is touch. I mostly work off the middle pickup in the single-coil setting and I can get almost any sound I want out of that.
Garcia made his first appearance with Tiger at the Oakland Civic Auditorium, California, on 4 August 1979, and it would remain his primary guitar for the next eleven years – the longest period that any of his axes would enjoy such status for a continuous run. The Oakland shows on 4 and 5 August were also notable as the first time the Grateful Dead performed the songs ‘Althea’ and ‘Lost Sailor’, both of which would be recorded for their next studio album. Recorded at the Dead’s private studio Le Club Front in San Rafael from July 1979 to January 1980, the Dead’s eleventh studio album Go To Heaven was released in April 1980. Considering its extensive use on stage throughout the 1980s, it’s probable that Tiger was also Garcia’s go-to guitar for studio recordings during this period, however there is little photo evidence available to confirm. A Saturday Night Live appearance on 5 April 1980 – for which Garcia played Tiger – and extensive radio play helped make the album’s lead single ‘Alabama Getaway’ a minor hit for the group. The Dead celebrated their 15th anniversary that fall with a 15-night run of shows at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, followed by two shows in New Orleans, and an eight-night run at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, culminating in a closed-circuit telecast to East Coast theatres for Halloween. Garcia’s performances on Tiger can be heard on the live album from these shows, Dead Set. The shows at Radio City Music Hall on 30 and 31 October were recorded for the concert video Grateful Dead: Dead Ahead, first released in 1981.
Although Garcia’s severe drug addiction meant that he wrote and recorded very little through the early to mid 1980s, the Dead were still regularly packing arenas around the country and playing more destination venues on tour like Berkeley’s Greek Theater and Red Rocks in Colorado. For the group’s 20th anniversary in April 1985, they spent three days recording their performances to the empty Marin Veterans' Auditorium in San Rafael for a planned video project. In summer 1986, Garcia almost died when he unexpectedly fell into a diabetic coma. Months of shows were cancelled as he slowly recuperated and found that he had to re-learn to play the guitar. Grateful to be alive and drug-free for the first time in years, he was back to form when the band returned to the stage at the Oakland Coliseum that December.
They returned to Marin Veterans' Auditorium in the new year to record their twelfth studio album In The Dark. Released in July 1987, the album was an unprecedented success for the Dead, selling two million copies and soaring to No. 6 on the charts, while lead single ‘Touch of Gray’ became their first top ten hit. Garcia plays Tiger in the group’s first ever music video for ‘Touch of Gray’, which saw a band of skeleton marionettes morph into the Dead performing on stage as themselves. The music documentary video Grateful Dead: So Far was also released this year, featuring the 1985 Marin Vets footage, together with the group’s 31 December 1985 concert at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum – Garcia plays Tiger throughout. The Dead embarked on a short tour with Bob Dylan in July 1987, during which they played their own set and then backed Dylan for a 90-minute set. The Dead’s New Year’s Eve show at the Oakland Coliseum in 1987 was recorded for the concert video Ticket to New Year's. Originally released on VHS in 1996, the concert has since been released as part of the Dead’s 2012 DVD box set All the Years Combine: The DVD Collection, along with the aforementioned Dead Ahead and So Far videos, as well as Truckin' Up to Buffalo and Downhill From Here, the concert videos of the Dead’s shows at Rich Stadium in Orchard Park, NY, and Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Wisconsin, on 4 and 17 July 1989, all of which feature Garcia playing Tiger.
Tiger was evidently a much-loved guitar throughout this period, treated with kid gloves by Garcia’s crew. In a 1988 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Garcia’s longtime equipment manager Steve Parish said of Tiger: That guitar really is like an art piece. I love taking care of it because it’s such a one-of-a-kind thing. I literally keep it with me all the time when jerry doesn’t have it. It’s like a good friend. Years later, he would tell the San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music editor Joel Selvin: We slept with these instruments. You could lose amps. You could break things, and sometimes we did. But I could never look Jerry in the eye and say, “I don't have your guitar.”
Tiger continued to serve as Garcia’s main guitar throughout 1988 and most of 1989, until he became interested in building MIDI synthesizers into his guitar, which would allow him a full assortment of guitar tones and other instrumental sounds, such as woodwind and strings. Following successful MIDI experiments on his black Strat, which Garcia trialed on stage during the free-improvisational jam section of the Dead’s concerts, known as ‘Space’, in spring 1989, it was decided to retrofit Wolf as a MIDI guitar. For a period during July 1989, Garcia would play Tiger during a show, switch to the MIDI’d Wolf for ‘Space’, then return to Tiger. However, it wasn’t long before Garcia wanted to introduce MIDI effects into the rest of the set and so Wolf became his everyday guitar once more from around September 1989. However, it would only be a few months until Garcia debuted a new Doug Irwin masterpiece on 31 December 1989, which would supplant the MIDI’d Wolf as his favored instrument. Already pre-wired with MIDI and synth control, the new Irwin was of a similar design to Tiger but was considerably lighter and featured a dancing skeleton inlay holding a rose, which earned it the nickname “Rosebud”.
Garcia continued to use Tiger occasionally, most notably during his November 1991 run with the Jerry Garcia Band. As the guitar’s hardware had been ravaged by years of sweat on stage, Irwin personally refurbished Tiger in around 1992, installing new brass hardware, fresh electronics and refinishing the cover plate, while preserving the instrument’s original character. Rosebud was eventually succeeded by a replica of Tiger that arrived in 1993, its body carved from an old Chinese opium bed by a then unknown Florida woodworker called Stephen Cripe, which Garcia named “Lightning Bolt”. However, as fate would have it, Lightning Bolt was in the shop for repairs when the Grateful Dead performed what would turn out to be their final show at Soldier Field in Chicago on 9 July 1995, and in its place, Garcia would play Rosebud. When Rosebud began to experience technical problems during the set, Garcia turned to his old friend Tiger to finish the show and played his final encore with the cherished instrument that had served him on stage longer than any other guitar he had owned. Garcia passed away some four weeks later after suffering a heart attack on 9 August 1995.
Garcia's only bequest to someone outside his immediate family was to Doug Irwin, intending for all four of his custom-built Irwin guitars to be returned to their maker. The Grateful Dead partnership sued to fight the codicil, maintaining that the band members collectively owned all instruments purchased with Dead funds. Ultimately, a settlement was agreed whereby Irwin would inherit two guitars – Wolf and Tiger – and the Dead would keep Rosebud and Headless, an unusual Irwin design with no tuning pegs that Garcia had never played. Irwin auctioned both Wolf and Tiger in 2002, when the present guitar was acquired by Jim Irsay. Irsay has since allowed select musicians including Warren Haynes and Kenny Wayne Shepherd to play the legendary guitar for Grateful Dead fans at occasional tribute events including the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration for his 74th birthday in 2016 and Garcia’s 75th Birthday Celebration in 2017. Because [Garcia’s] music lives on, there’s a need to preserve the instruments that created the sound, Irsay told Rolling Stone in a 2016 statement. Tiger needs to be available for future generations to see and hear. I know this instrument, in the right hands, can produce sound capable of moving the human spirit to dance, to tears, and every emotion in between.
Jerry Garcia commissioned the custom-built “Tiger” in 1973, urging luthier Doug Irwin to craft the most extravagant instrument he was capable of. The finished guitar – composed of dazzling exotic woods sandwiched together with ornate brass bindings – took Irwin around 2000 hours to complete over six years. Named for the tiger inlay just below the tailpiece, Tiger was first unleashed on stage on 4 August 1979 at the Oakland Civic Auditorium, after which Garcia would play this guitar almost exclusively until mid-1989. Notably, Tiger was the last guitar Garcia played publicly with the Grateful Dead at Chicago’s Soldier Field on 9 July 1995.
From the early 1970s, Garcia was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of the mass-produced electric guitar models marketed by the likes of Fender and Gibson and began to seek a more bespoke instrument that could better fulfil his diverse tonal and technical requirements over an entire set, without the need to chop and change guitars for different sounds during extended performances. I’m the kind of player who generally plays one guitar at a time so I can learn its idiosyncrasies, Garcia told Jon Sievert for Guitar Player in 1978. I really seek a kind of universal guitar, something that will sound like anything I want it to at any given moment. Garcia was at that time playing a modified Stratocaster known as “Alligator” when he stumbled across young luthier Doug Irwin during a visit to Alembic’s San Francisco workshop in 1972. Irwin had been training under Alembic’s Rick Turner and Frank Fuller for two years and was then working on the first of his own designs, which would become known as “Eagle”. While working at Alembic, I had the chance to work on my own projects after hours, wrote Irwin in 2002. Obviously through my experiences there I had learned the various construction styles, and the pluses and minuses of each, and I considered all of this when I began the design for my first "D. Irwin Guitar" in 1971. My first guitar was not quite finished, but while I was working in the back of the shop on some pickups, I had left it out front in the store. A couple of the guys came back to the workshop to tell me that Jerry Garcia was out front and wanted to buy my guitar… He told me that he liked the way the neck felt and bought the guitar right there on the spot for $850. Garcia was so impressed with Irwin’s work that that he immediately commissioned him to build another guitar with electronics designed to his custom specifications.
Thus began a long association between guitarist and luthier that would see Garcia play Irwin’s instruments almost exclusively for the next twenty years. There's something in the way they feel with my touch – they’re married to each other, Garcia told Sievert in 1988. The reason I went with his guitars in the first place was they just fell into my hand perfectly. I can’t even explain why. It wasn’t just a matter of action, it just felt right. Irwin completed Garcia’s first custom order, a neck-through-body design of maple and amaranth with Stratocaster pickups, at a cost of $1500 in May 1973. Garcia was so blown away with the guitar – later named “Wolf” for the cartoon wolf sticker he would apply below the bridge – that he placed yet another custom order there and then, instructing Irwin to make the most extravagant guitar he was capable of. He said "I want you to make me another one, but I don't want you to hold back, I just want you to go for it. I’m not going to tell you what I want, you can just make it the way you want,” recounted Irwin in a 2004 interview for Grateful Dead fan site dozin.com. I just thought to myself, "jeez, how many times does anybody in their life get a chance to do this, where somebody says yeah, go for it. Don't hold back, do it the way you want to." I really made an effort to make it my best effort. It's a guitar unlike any one I've ever built since then.
Whilst Wolf was immediately established as Garcia’s go-to guitar, Irwin dedicated more than 2000 hours over the next six years to meticulously crafting his most exquisite instrument yet with the finest materials he could source from all over the world. The finished guitar was a work of art, with contrasting layers of cocobolo, maple and padauk in the Alembic “hippie sandwich” tradition, ornate brass bindings, a mother-of-pearl tiger motif inlaid on a solid ebony plate under the bridge, giving the guitar its name “Tiger”, and a floral mother-of-pearl and abalone inlay to the back. Garcia would play Wolf until July 1979, when Irwin finally delivered the completed Tiger at a cost of $5,800, and it immediately supplanted the former instrument as his favorite guitar. Speaking to Guitar Player’s Jon Sievert some nine years later, Garcia attempted to explain what he had loved about this guitar when he first played it: I’m not analytical about guitars, but I know what I like. And when I picked up that guitar, I’d never felt anything before, or since, that my hand likes better. It’s more like a Strat than anything else. The simplest way to think about it is as a Strat with a Les Paul neck. But really the neck is not a Paul, because it doesn’t have an arched fingerboard. Its flat, like a banjo neck. I’ve had that guitar all this time, and I’ve set the bridge once and never had the neck straightened. That sucker is still as flat as an aircraft carrier. Not only that, but the frets haven’t worn down, and I’ve been playing it all this time.
The guitar’s innovative electronics included a single-coil DiMarzio SDS-1 Strat-style in the neck position, and two DiMarzio Dual Sound humbuckers at the bridge and middle positions (which would be replaced by DiMarzio Super IIs in 1982), a five-position pickup selector switch and two three-way toggles for coil selection on the humbuckers (hum-canceling/hum-canceling dual/single-coil), a master volume control, neck/bridge and middle pickup tone controls, a unity-gain buffer, and a mini toggle switch for the effect loop. As with Wolf before it, there were two output jacks – one running in mono directly to Garcia’s Fender Twin, the other to the effects rack and back. It allows me to have all my effects pedals wired to the guitar and bypass them all with a switch, Garcia told Sievert. I use a stereo cord, and the signal goes from the pickups to the tone controls and pickup switch. The signal then goes through the effects, back into a network box, and up the ‘B’ side of the stereo cord, back into the instrument before the volume pot, and then out to the amp. The effects always see the guitar as if it had full output voltage. The remainder of Garcia’s stage setup at this time comprised two Fender Twin preamps into Garcia’s preferred McIntosh 2300 power amp “Budman” (see lot 28) out to a Hard Truckers 3x12 cabinet with JBL120 speakers.
With Tiger, Garcia finally had the universal guitar that he had been seeking, the one instrument that could produce any sound he might want to summon on stage at any moment. In conversation with Sievert for Guitar Player in 1988, Garcia explained in some depth how he achieved such a variety of sounds with this guitar: I have basically the clean sound and the fuzzed-out sound. Those are my two basic colors. The rest of it has to do with the way I have my knobs set and my effects. My guitar’s treble cuts are not normal. They have capacitors in them so that when I roll the volume back, the tone stays the same. I have a unity-gain amplifier in my guitars, and that’s the only reason I have it – so I can change volume without changing the tone. The capacitors also serve as resonance boosters, so when I roll the knob all the way back, I get kind of a hollow horn-like quality with plenty of cut left to play a solo. It doesn’t really filter the way a wah-wah pedal does – it’s not that narrow. It’s more of a resonance boost. It does cut the top some, but it also does this other thing to the midrange. So I only choose the pots and capacitor combination that produces that kind of effect, so that gives me an all-the-way-on, all-the-way-off on each pickup, which provides six basic tone voices. Then, when I put those through the fuzz, it invents a new high-end because of the way the fuzz hears low-end or midrange resonance. You no longer have the bright, screaming high end where you can pick out harmonics, although the fuzz adds a high end that brings out the fulness of the interior sound. Sometimes when I play a blues chorus or something where I use the distorted sound, I change the tone by whipping the tone knob all the way down. Most of the time the tone knob is totally useless, but in this case, it really does change the tone. I also have a 5-position Stratocaster-type pickup selector so I can use the half positions, in- and out-of-phase, and with the humbucking and single-coil switch on each pickup. So right there, that’s like 12 discrete possible voices that are all pretty different. And the whole thing with guitar and effects is getting something where you can hear the difference, that gives me a lot of vocabulary of basically different tones. And that’s just the electronics. The rest of it is touch. I mostly work off the middle pickup in the single-coil setting and I can get almost any sound I want out of that.
Garcia made his first appearance with Tiger at the Oakland Civic Auditorium, California, on 4 August 1979, and it would remain his primary guitar for the next eleven years – the longest period that any of his axes would enjoy such status for a continuous run. The Oakland shows on 4 and 5 August were also notable as the first time the Grateful Dead performed the songs ‘Althea’ and ‘Lost Sailor’, both of which would be recorded for their next studio album. Recorded at the Dead’s private studio Le Club Front in San Rafael from July 1979 to January 1980, the Dead’s eleventh studio album Go To Heaven was released in April 1980. Considering its extensive use on stage throughout the 1980s, it’s probable that Tiger was also Garcia’s go-to guitar for studio recordings during this period, however there is little photo evidence available to confirm. A Saturday Night Live appearance on 5 April 1980 – for which Garcia played Tiger – and extensive radio play helped make the album’s lead single ‘Alabama Getaway’ a minor hit for the group. The Dead celebrated their 15th anniversary that fall with a 15-night run of shows at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, followed by two shows in New Orleans, and an eight-night run at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, culminating in a closed-circuit telecast to East Coast theatres for Halloween. Garcia’s performances on Tiger can be heard on the live album from these shows, Dead Set. The shows at Radio City Music Hall on 30 and 31 October were recorded for the concert video Grateful Dead: Dead Ahead, first released in 1981.
Although Garcia’s severe drug addiction meant that he wrote and recorded very little through the early to mid 1980s, the Dead were still regularly packing arenas around the country and playing more destination venues on tour like Berkeley’s Greek Theater and Red Rocks in Colorado. For the group’s 20th anniversary in April 1985, they spent three days recording their performances to the empty Marin Veterans' Auditorium in San Rafael for a planned video project. In summer 1986, Garcia almost died when he unexpectedly fell into a diabetic coma. Months of shows were cancelled as he slowly recuperated and found that he had to re-learn to play the guitar. Grateful to be alive and drug-free for the first time in years, he was back to form when the band returned to the stage at the Oakland Coliseum that December.
They returned to Marin Veterans' Auditorium in the new year to record their twelfth studio album In The Dark. Released in July 1987, the album was an unprecedented success for the Dead, selling two million copies and soaring to No. 6 on the charts, while lead single ‘Touch of Gray’ became their first top ten hit. Garcia plays Tiger in the group’s first ever music video for ‘Touch of Gray’, which saw a band of skeleton marionettes morph into the Dead performing on stage as themselves. The music documentary video Grateful Dead: So Far was also released this year, featuring the 1985 Marin Vets footage, together with the group’s 31 December 1985 concert at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum – Garcia plays Tiger throughout. The Dead embarked on a short tour with Bob Dylan in July 1987, during which they played their own set and then backed Dylan for a 90-minute set. The Dead’s New Year’s Eve show at the Oakland Coliseum in 1987 was recorded for the concert video Ticket to New Year's. Originally released on VHS in 1996, the concert has since been released as part of the Dead’s 2012 DVD box set All the Years Combine: The DVD Collection, along with the aforementioned Dead Ahead and So Far videos, as well as Truckin' Up to Buffalo and Downhill From Here, the concert videos of the Dead’s shows at Rich Stadium in Orchard Park, NY, and Alpine Valley Music Theatre, Wisconsin, on 4 and 17 July 1989, all of which feature Garcia playing Tiger.
Tiger was evidently a much-loved guitar throughout this period, treated with kid gloves by Garcia’s crew. In a 1988 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Garcia’s longtime equipment manager Steve Parish said of Tiger: That guitar really is like an art piece. I love taking care of it because it’s such a one-of-a-kind thing. I literally keep it with me all the time when jerry doesn’t have it. It’s like a good friend. Years later, he would tell the San Francisco Chronicle’s pop music editor Joel Selvin: We slept with these instruments. You could lose amps. You could break things, and sometimes we did. But I could never look Jerry in the eye and say, “I don't have your guitar.”
Tiger continued to serve as Garcia’s main guitar throughout 1988 and most of 1989, until he became interested in building MIDI synthesizers into his guitar, which would allow him a full assortment of guitar tones and other instrumental sounds, such as woodwind and strings. Following successful MIDI experiments on his black Strat, which Garcia trialed on stage during the free-improvisational jam section of the Dead’s concerts, known as ‘Space’, in spring 1989, it was decided to retrofit Wolf as a MIDI guitar. For a period during July 1989, Garcia would play Tiger during a show, switch to the MIDI’d Wolf for ‘Space’, then return to Tiger. However, it wasn’t long before Garcia wanted to introduce MIDI effects into the rest of the set and so Wolf became his everyday guitar once more from around September 1989. However, it would only be a few months until Garcia debuted a new Doug Irwin masterpiece on 31 December 1989, which would supplant the MIDI’d Wolf as his favored instrument. Already pre-wired with MIDI and synth control, the new Irwin was of a similar design to Tiger but was considerably lighter and featured a dancing skeleton inlay holding a rose, which earned it the nickname “Rosebud”.
Garcia continued to use Tiger occasionally, most notably during his November 1991 run with the Jerry Garcia Band. As the guitar’s hardware had been ravaged by years of sweat on stage, Irwin personally refurbished Tiger in around 1992, installing new brass hardware, fresh electronics and refinishing the cover plate, while preserving the instrument’s original character. Rosebud was eventually succeeded by a replica of Tiger that arrived in 1993, its body carved from an old Chinese opium bed by a then unknown Florida woodworker called Stephen Cripe, which Garcia named “Lightning Bolt”. However, as fate would have it, Lightning Bolt was in the shop for repairs when the Grateful Dead performed what would turn out to be their final show at Soldier Field in Chicago on 9 July 1995, and in its place, Garcia would play Rosebud. When Rosebud began to experience technical problems during the set, Garcia turned to his old friend Tiger to finish the show and played his final encore with the cherished instrument that had served him on stage longer than any other guitar he had owned. Garcia passed away some four weeks later after suffering a heart attack on 9 August 1995.
Garcia's only bequest to someone outside his immediate family was to Doug Irwin, intending for all four of his custom-built Irwin guitars to be returned to their maker. The Grateful Dead partnership sued to fight the codicil, maintaining that the band members collectively owned all instruments purchased with Dead funds. Ultimately, a settlement was agreed whereby Irwin would inherit two guitars – Wolf and Tiger – and the Dead would keep Rosebud and Headless, an unusual Irwin design with no tuning pegs that Garcia had never played. Irwin auctioned both Wolf and Tiger in 2002, when the present guitar was acquired by Jim Irsay. Irsay has since allowed select musicians including Warren Haynes and Kenny Wayne Shepherd to play the legendary guitar for Grateful Dead fans at occasional tribute events including the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration for his 74th birthday in 2016 and Garcia’s 75th Birthday Celebration in 2017. Because [Garcia’s] music lives on, there’s a need to preserve the instruments that created the sound, Irsay told Rolling Stone in a 2016 statement. Tiger needs to be available for future generations to see and hear. I know this instrument, in the right hands, can produce sound capable of moving the human spirit to dance, to tears, and every emotion in between.