The namesake inlay was made of warthog tusk. It consisted of a walnut core with laminated cocobolo top and back, maple and rosewood neck, laminated headstock,įret board with recycled ivory inlays, and black Schaller hardware. If I don't like it, I'll send it back." The guitar he eventually built came to be known as Top Hat. He said a member of the staff suggested he simply wing it. Jerry briefly met Stephen Cripe backstage at a 1994 Florida concert, where he commissioned him to build a backup copy of Lightning Bolt.Ĭripe was flattered, but unprepared since he hadn't measured or photographed the original. Share Delivered in April 1995 Stephen Cripe commission - $6,500 It came to be called Lightning Bolt due to the inlay that Cripe designed. For the body, Cripe reused East Indian rosewood taken from a bed once used by opium smokers in Asia-acknowledging the irony, but insisting it was about the quality of wood. Cripe constructed the neck with an unusual accuracy in the higher end, which allowed Jerry to play where he usually avoided. Jerry quickly pronounced the piece "the guitar I've always been waiting for" and began playing it exclusively.īuilt totally by feel, the instrument honored Jerry’s interest in preserving the rainforests, using recycled rosewood originally harvested in Brazil for the fingerboard. In 1993 he sent the completed guitar off to the Grateful Dead offices. He studied the "Dead Ahead" video until he wore it out, and replicated Irwin’s Tiger-with some flourishes of his own. View more details SEE IMAGES VIEW MORE DETAILSĪfter spending years building custom interiors for Caribbean yachts, Stephen Cripe decided to try his hand at crafting guitars. I mostly work off the middle pickup…and I can get almost any sound I want out of that.” And that’s just the electronics the rest of it is touch. In one interview he said, “ like twelve discreet possible voices that are all pretty different…That gives me a lot of vocabulary of basically different tones. Jerry loved Tiger for the wealth of sounds it gave him to play with.
#GRATEFUL DEAD LIGHTNING BOLT PLUS#
Named after the tiger inlay just below the tailpiece, the body features several layers of wood laminated together face-to-face in a configuration referred to as a "hippie sandwich." The combination of heavy woods (cocobolo, vermilion, maple), plus solid brass binding and hardware resulted in a 13.5 lb. Irwin obliged, and six years later Tiger hit the stage and became his most-played guitar. When Jerry asked Doug Irwin, immediately after receiving Wolf, to make another guitar, he told him, “don’t hold back.” He was told to make it the way he thought was best, and not worry about cost.
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