At a charity auction in Brooklyn Wednesday night, a Jerry Garcia guitar sold for $1.9 million. The late Grateful Dead frontman’s guitar, which he named Wolf, was one of Garcia’s signature axes, being played everywhere from San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom to Egypt’s Great Pyramids. The guitar also appeared in the 1977 Grateful Dead movie.
The guitar was auctioned off by then-owner and deadhead Daniel Pritzker. Pritzker is a movie-maker and philanthropist who purchased the guitar in 2002 for $790,000.
The proceeds are for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which seeks to offer legal support for those dealing with bigotry issues in Alabama.
The Law Center president Richard Cohen thanked Pritzker for being “willing to part with this piece of musical history.”