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Derek Trucks has looked back on his experience playing Jerry Garcia’s Tiger guitar on stage, revealing the iconic six-string beast is a struggle to tame.
Some vintage gems play like butter and are everything their glittering reputations promise. But there are others that either put up a fight – like Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein – or, as Derek Trucks found out, crumble at the first sign of one.
“It’s a very unique instrument,” Trucks tells Guitar World in a new interview. “It’s super heavy and has a lot of different tones in it.”
But, he adds, “It’s not a guitar where you grab the strings and bend them Albert King-style. I tried twice and broke two strings!”
One of several highly customized guitars the late Doug Irwin made for the Grateful Dead pioneer, the hefty slab of tone was part of the recent Jim Irsay auction, where it sold for an eye-watering $11.5m, making it the second most expensive guitar in the world.
Trucks attended the event when Bobby Tseitlin, of Chicago-based collectors, Family Guitars, became its proud new owner. Hours later, Tseitlin loaned the guitar to the slide guitar ace for a run of shows at New York’s Beacon Theater, and Trucks believes his presence might have helped keep the price slightly lower than the $14.5m that David Gilmour’s infamous Black Strat sold for that same day.
“I was sitting with Bobby, [and] you could just tell that everyone in the room thought I was buying it,” he laughs, “Maybe it benefited in that people were not bidding against Bobby the way they were on some of the other guitars.”
Taking the guitar to the stage so soon after, Trucks says, helped him understand “how fans of Jerry and the [Grateful] Dead revered that instrument.”
“Watching the way people reacted to it was pretty special,” he continues. “I remember the first time I got to hold one of Duane Allman’s guitars, and feeling like, ‘This is the reason that I started playing the instrument.’ That guitar changed the way I thought about life and music. So, I understand the allure of it.”
Thankfully, night two of his brief affair with the guitar went far better.
“I found some spots between the different pickup combinations where you could really get some unique sounds,” he says. “And there were a few sounds where I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s that Jerry shit.’
“On the second night, I went to bend a string, and I could feel it, where I was like, ‘Oh, it’s about to give,’ and I backed off. I found the threshold, and I felt like we understood each other a little bit more.”
Trucks’ full interview will be published in the coming weeks.
