Large amount of full, unused tickets to final show have kept the cost down 30 years later
Thirty years ago today, a sold-out crowd enjoyed a Grateful Dead concert at Soldier Field in Chicago, not realizing it would be the end of an era for the beloved band.
Exactly one month later, lead guitarist and singer Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack.
As a rule of the collectible world, tickets to final performances are valuable.
Stubs to Nirvana's final performance with Kurt Cobain in March 1994 have sold in the neighborhood of $9,000. A stub of Elvis' last performance from 1977 commands at least $1,500.
But Garcia's last performance doesn't have that distinction. Tickets from that show can be had for a couple hundred bucks.
The answer lies in population.
While the show sold out, there was somehow a tremendous amount of full unused tickets. PSA has graded 35 full tickets of that final show, but it is believed there are hundreds more.
By comparison, PSA has graded 19 tickets to Cobain's last performance, though all are stubs, and 62 total tickets to Elvis' last performance, only 20 of which are full.
Much like Woodstock — another collectible that has been devalued by the slew of tickets that came out in the aftermath — someone with access to Grateful Dead tickets took what they said was a "limited edition of 1,000" tickets and put them in Lucite and sold them.
So at any given time, as there are now, there are a dozen to Garcia's final performance available on eBay.
The Grateful Dead and Garcia are so beloved, but the fact there are enough final-performance tickets out there to satisfy everyone one makes it an affordable collectible.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.
Category: General Sports
