Jerry Garcia debuted it at a 1973 performance in front of the Hell’s Angels, and he played it at so many concerts that his “Wolf” guitar became nearly as recognizable among Dead Heads as the Grateful Dead frontman himself. Now, the legendary instrument is owned by Boston tech executive Brian Halligan.The cofounder and chief executive of Cambridge marketing software company HubSpot paid $1.9 million for Garcia’s guitar on Wednesday at a charity auction in Brooklyn held for the Southern Poverty Law Center.Halligan is a longtime Dead fan who cowrote the 2010 business book, “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn from the Most Iconic Band in History.” He has been to about 100 shows of the Grateful Dead and the band that reformed after Garcia died in 1995.
Halligan credits the band’s signature approach in which it tried to make every concert a little different and welcomed fans to record performances and distribute the tapes for free — a kind of viral marketing strategy that increased their popularity and also profoundly influenced his career and HubSpot’s business strategy.“They were the original social media marketers before there was social media,” he said. “They kind of turned the model of the music business back then on its head.”Owning an authentic Garcia guitar comes with high expectations, but Halligan acknowledged Dead Heads will never confuse his modest guitar chops with those of the master’s. He expects his first Dead song on the guitar is the simple, but popular, “Ripple.”“Now I’m going to have to get my act together,” he said. “Everybody’s going to expect me to be fantastic.”Wolf, created by famed guitar-maker Doug Irwin out of amaranth and curly western maple, bears a signature inlay of a hungry, cartoonish canine just below the bridge. Irwin added that feature during a repair job after Garcia had toured with the instrument for a few years. The guitar had previously been owned by Dan Pritzker, a musician and heir to the family that owned the Hyatt chain, according to Guernsey’s, the New York auction house that sold it. Pritzker bought Wolf in 2002 for nearly $1 million — at the time a record price for a guitar.Guernsey’s said this week’s sale is also a record — if you account for a matching donation that came along with Halligan’s purchase and brought the total to $3,532,500.
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The amount Halligan paid included a $300,000 buyer’s premium.The benefit for the Southern Poverty Law Center was held Wednesday evening at Brooklyn Bowl. Halligan said he was prepared to be outbid, but within minutes unexpectedly found himself the owner. He mainly wanted the instrument because of its connection to Garcia and to show his support for the law center, a civil rights group with an emphasis on calling out racism and hate.Halligan said he will lend Wolf to Garcia’s family whenever they ask, but he’s definitely keeping it.“I’m never going to sell it,” he said. “It’s going to be with me the rest of my life.”Andy Rosen can be reached at. Follow him on Twitter at.
A post shared by (@johnmayer) on Jun 24, 2019 at 12:16am PDTThe guitar was built by California luthier and first used by Garcia at a private party for the Hell’s Angels in NYC in 1973. The instrument was made with a purpleheart and curly maple body, a 24-fret neck and an ebony fingerboard inlaid with African ivory (except for the first fret which is mother-of-pearl).Irwin built the guitar with a plate system for mounting pickups so Garcia could experiment with traditional Fender Stratocaster pickups and humbuckers — the guitar now has humbuckers in the bridge and middle positions and a single-coil in the neck. To control the pickups, the guitar has a five-position selector, tone controls for the front and middle pickups and a master volume control (two mini-toggle switches control pickup coils).
The guitar also has two output jacks: one went directly to the amp and another went to an effects loop (another mini-toggle switch brought the effects loop in or out).Garcia used the instrument throughout the ‘70s and then used it to experiment with MIDI synthesizer technology in ’89. He last played it onstage with the Grateful Dead in Oakland in 1993.In 2017, the guitar sold for over $1.9 million at a benefiting the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Brian Halligan, the Boston-based CEO of HubSpot, placed the winning bid with intentions that the guitar be played. “I think it is best served by being played, so I plan to do so,” he told. “I plan to lend it out to the Garcia family whenever they want it.”The day after Dead & Co.’s Citi Field concert, longtime Grateful Dead photographer shared how the instrument ended up in Mayer’s hands: “In late March, John reached out to me and said, ‘This idea keeps happening to me, to play Wolf.’ And then he asked me, ‘Do you think it would be appreciated by the Deadheads?’, and I immediately said, ‘Absolutely!’ There were some logistical issues involved,” Blakesberg wrote in a. The guitar was slated to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibit and Mayer wanted to try it before leaving for his Australian tour. The guitar’s handler, David Meerman Scott, quickly got it to Mayer for a day in Los Angeles. Since the guitar would be on display in NYC for six months, Mayer decided the best decision was to play it only for the Citi Field show.“It arrived around 3 p.m. At Citifield where John’s expert guitar tech restrung it,” Blakesberg wrote.
“He had a small Fender amp in his dressing room and the minute he plugged in and started to play Garcia licks, the room exploded with sound and color swirling in the air.” According to the photographer, the crew didn’t know if he’d play the guitar for a few songs or for the entire show. But Mayer performed exclusively on the instrument, much to the delight of the audience. “By the time the band got to the end of the second set you could see how the guitar and the player had become one and that last solo in Morning Dew took us all collectively — the band and the fans — to that special place where we all commune in the group mind and the energy flows freely from stage to audience and back again,” Blakesberg wrote. “And we all knew that everything is exactly the way it should be!”.