Wolf (serial no. D. Irwin 001)

"Wolf" was Jerry Garcia’s main guitar with the Grateful Dead from 1973 to 1979, a period when he was expanding his "astral" country and blues sound. He commissioned it in late 1972 after playing a guitar that luthier Doug Irwin had made for the manufacturer Alembic. The instrument’s cutting-edge active electronics gave Garcia a wide variety of tonal options; he described it as "twelve guitars in one." "Wolf" was also the first guitar on which Garcia experimented with Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) implementation in the 1980s, a feature included on Irwin’s "Rosebud," another guitar that he custom built for Garcia.

Technical Description:
Quilted maple top and back with purpleheart core, five-piece fiddleback maple and purpleheart neck, ebony fingerboard; 25 in. scale; natural finish with maple and purpleheart binding; neck-through-body construction with ivory inlays to fingerboard, mother-of-pearl bird inlay at first fret, maple and purpleheart binding, player-side silver dot inlays with dyed holly marquetry; headstock with eagle inlay, metal plate on back reading “D IRWIN 001”; one single-coil and two humbucking pickups, three-way selector switch, three-way pickup coil switches, one master volume control and two tone controls, unity-gain buffer, effects loop output with on/off toggle; chrome-nickel Schaller tuners, knobs, and tailpiece with mother-of-pearl inlay, cartoon wolf inlay below tailpiece