The Dead

[thatguy]

Get ready to bid if you want Tiger

Billionaire's unreal pop culture collection up for sale, including a Jerry Garcia guitar


The Jim Irsay Collection, to be auctioned by Christie's, includes ephemera from Prince, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and the Beatles

Paula Mejía
Feb 12, 2026

Ringo Starr’s first Ludwig drum kit alongside a guitar used by John Lennon.
Max Touhey/Christie's Images LTD. 2026

On a summer night in 1995, the Grateful Dead played the second of two sold-out shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field. That concert is not often considered among the jam band’s most transcendent performances — yet the date, July 9, 1995, is seared into the consciousness of every Deadhead regardless. The show turned out to be Garcia’s last-ever performance with the band; he died a month later.

That evening in Chicago, Garcia wielded one of the five guitars that Doug Irwin hand-built for him: “Tiger.” In 1973, Garcia requested that Irwin, a longtime maker and repairer of string instruments, make him the “most extravagant instrument he was capable of,” according to the luthier’s website. The resulting Tiger, assembled from rare timbers like cocobolo and quilted maple, and inlaid with mother-of-pearl spelling out the guitarist’s name and an image of its namesake animal, took Irwin six years to finish. Garcia toured relentlessly with Tiger from 1979 to 1989 — and played the renowned guitar during his final night onstage. 

After Garcia’s death, Tiger landed in the hands of Jim Irsay, the late owner of the Indianapolis Colts, who bought it at auction for $850,000 in 2002. This week, Garcia’s beloved Tiger went on the auction block for the first time in over two decades — one of 400 items in Irsay’s sizable collection of music, sports memorabilia, pop culture, literary and Americana treasures to be sold by Christie’s. The Jim Irsay Collection, which is scheduled to be auctioned off starting in New York in March, went live Thursday morning.

Irsay, who inherited the football team from his father, died in May 2025 in Beverly Hills at age 65. His cause of death has been reported as cardiac arrest, though an FBI investigation is ongoing.

As a collector, Irsay gravitated toward ephemera that represented “generationally important, defining moments” like Garcia’s Tiger, says Amelia Walker, the head of Private & Iconic Collections at Christie’s. As far as pivotal pop culture items go, the collection is staggering in its scale. Besides Tiger, the auction includes Bob Dylan’s hand-scrawled lyrics for “The Times They Are A-Changin’”; the trumpet that Miles Davis used in his 1984 Montreux Jazz Festival performance; the worn Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar that Janis Joplin first strummed “Me and Bobby McGee” on; one of James Brown’s dazzling onstage capes, reading “Godfather of Soul” across the back; one of Prince’s instantly recognizable cloud guitars, in canary yellow; and an eerie poster advertising the Feb. 3, 1959, Minnesota gig where Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were slated to perform. All three musicians died in an airplane accident en route to the event. 

Irsay’s collection includes yet another historical inflection point: the 1969 blue Fender Mustang that Kurt Cobain played in Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” music video — the same axe that he infamously smashed over a bouncer’s head at a 1991 show in Dallas, which led to Cobain getting punched in the nose. The indentations from the rough treatment are still visible on the guitar, which he bought from a shop not far from his LA residence, and was in the studio when the band recorded “Nevermind.” Christie’s is estimating it will sell between $2.5 million and $5 million.

One item in the collection also nods to the exact moment when Beatlemania took hold in the U.S. The collection notably includes Ringo Starr’s logo drum head, which the drummer used on the band’s “Ed Sullivan Show” appearance in 1964 — an appearance seen by millions of Americans that marked the official start of the British Invasion. The drum head is one of a few Beatles pieces, which includes Paul McCartney’s penned “Hey Jude” lyrics and an affidavit for the Beatles’ breakup in 1970, with markings inside by John Lennon.

Over the years, Irsay lent out some of his items to go on tour throughout the U.S. Even Tiger was loaned out for exhibitions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2019 show “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll,” and Grateful Dead tribute shows. Irsay stressed throughout his lifetime that he intended these pieces to be seen by the public, telling reporters that he’d refuse even billion-dollar offers for his prized collection. “You never see a hearse pulling a U-Haul, so it’s like, I borrow it,” he told Bloomberg in 2022. “It’ll be someone else’s someday soon.”

--tg