Grateful Dead Auction Proves That Hippies Are Rich

The Grateful Dead may have only really been the inspiration for some delicious ice cream, the belief that beards are good and bands that wank on and on and on even though everyone wants them to stop, but at least their old crap still sells at auction.

Yesterday all kinds of Grateful Dead gear was flogged off at a San Francisco auction - including some of Jerry Garcia's old guitars, a suitcase full of Jerry Garcia's old guitar strings and some of Jerry Garcia's empty boxes - raising over a million dollars in the process. More than anything, though, the Grateful Dead auction proved that even old hippies are capable of buying shit and then wondering how the hell they're going to justify spending $16,800 on a manky old case with some string in it to their wives when they get home.

Here's a good way to gauge how good a guitarist is - see how much cash they can make by flogging their guitars at auction. For instance, The Edge from U2 sold his most iconic guitar at auction recently and made $240,000 while Jimi Hendrix's guitar sold for $400,000. Thus, Jimi Hendrix is far better at playing the guitar than The Edge.

But what about Jerry Garcia from The Grateful Dead? We already know that toilets he's used sell well at auction, but yesterday at a special Grateful Dead auction one of Garcia's electric guitars sold for $260,000. That, by our estimates, makes him also better than The Edge. Poor The Edge. But that wasn't all that was on sale at the Grateful Dead auction, as SFGate reports:

The stuff on the auction block might look like empty speaker boxes, corroded guitar strings and funky old steamer trunks, but it constituted the genuine and authentic castoffs of the great Jerry Garcia. So the bidding started high, and it went higher. One of the empty speaker boxes sold for $1,680. Other empty boxes sold for $1,200 and $900.

All in all, the Grateful Dead auction made around $1.1 million - which isn't bad for a bunch of knackered old rubbish that used to belong to a dead drug addict and his gang of endlessly masturbating musician friends. But did the Grateful Dead auction represent decent value for money?

Hardly. For the same price as people paid for all those Grateful Dead cast-offs, the discerning buyer could have bought a collection of more iconic memorabilia including John Lennon's Abbey Road suit, Audrey Hepburn's Breakfast At Tiffany's dress, KITT out of Knight Rider, Anna Nicole Smith's icky diaries, Freddie Mercury's Rolls Royce and William Shatner's kidney stone, plus there'd be enough spare change to embark upon an exploratory course of therapy to discover why they keep spending so much money on a big lot of other people's shit, too.

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Auction Of Grateful Dead Memorabilia Brings In $1.1 Million - SFGate