Jerry Garcia’s Wolf Guitar Becomes The 3rd Most Expensive Ever Sold At Auction
Last night, as the Associated Press reports, someone paid $1.9 million for the late Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia’s Wolf, a famous guitar that Garcia regularly played from 1973 until his 1995 death. The guitar’s former owner was philanthropist Daniel Pritzker, who paid $790,000 for it in 2002. Pritzker sold it at a Brooklyn Bowl auction, raising money for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
According to this Guitar Player list, that $1.9 million makes Wolf the third-most expensive guitar ever sold. In fact, it cost about twice as much as the previous #3, the Fender Stratocaster that Bob Dylan famously and controversially played at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The only guitars that have sold for more money are John Lennon’s 1962 Gibson Acoustic-Electric and a Fender Stratocaster signed by a laundry list of guitar heroes.