A Grateful Dead Shirt Was Purchased for a Record-Breaking $17,640

That massive Grateful Dead auction held by Sotheby’s continues to crush expectations. Shortly after Jerry Garcia’s “Budman” amp sold for $378,000 — despite only being expected to fetch between $5,000 and $7,000 — a vintage Dead t-shirt from 1967 sold for $17,640, setting a new record for the most expensive vintage rock shirt sold at auction.

The yellow shirt, designed by Allan “Gut” Terk, crushed the previous record set by a Led Zeppelin shirt from that band’s 1979 Knebworth concerts that sold for $10,000 in an eBay auction in 2011. Prior to the auction, the Dead shirt was expected to sell for somewhere between $350 and $700.

So who shelled out the big bucks for this rare t-shirt, which is listed as being in “excellent” condition? That’d be Bo Bushnell, who paid a total of total of $19,315.80 for it after expenses and fees. Bushnell operates the Outlaw Archive page on Instagram, which documents 1960s motorcycle club artifacts. (Presumably, the fact that Terk was a Hells Angel is of particular interest to him.) After the acquisition of the shirt, the account posted a message that read, “We just did this to keep the memory of Gut ‘Terk’ alive and to keep his history under one roof.”

Another Dead t-shirt in the same auction also became the second-most expensive rock tee ever sold at auction. That shirt, from a spring 1977 tour stop at Cornell University, sold for $15,120.

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Bonnie Stiernberg

Bonnie Stiernberg is InsideHook’s Managing Editor. She was Music Editor at Paste Magazine for seven years, and she has written about music and pop culture for Rolling Stone, Glamour, Billboard, Vice and more.