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Grateful Dead fans, who have a tough time letting go, were grateful for the chance to shell out big bucks Tuesday in San Francisco for what less enlightened people would call, well, junk.

It wasn't junk, said fans of the defunct rock group. Not hardly.

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. In the 1970s, they had held speakers in the band's enormous Wall of Sound concert loudspeaker system, but the speakers themselves were long gone.

Another treasure was a suitcase full of Garcia's spare guitar strings. It went for $16,800. An empty red steamer trunk sold for $13,200.

The best stuff, two of Garcia's old electric guitars, fetched $312,000 and $186,000. But without Garcia to play them, music historians said, they were two old electric guitars.

Garcia, who died in 1995, has already been the drawing card for memorabilia auctions of dubious transcendence. In a Garcia auction in 2005, a Nevada casino paid $2,500 for one of the maestro's toilets.

As devoted Dead fans know, Tuesday's auction fell on the 30th anniversary of a beloved concert by the band in Ithaca, N.Y., an event so stellar in Ithaca history that the mayor declared Tuesday to be Grateful Dead Day. Devoted Dead fans point out that it is almost always the anniversary of a beloved Dead concert, someplace.

The 115 lots that sold Tuesday for $1.1 million came from the estate of Lawrence "Ram Rod" Shurtliff, the band's road manager, who died of lung cancer last year at 61. The items included leftover wine from Garcia's dressing room ("please note, some of the wine has gone bad," the catalog said), concert posters ("holes, stains and dirt evident") and a tie-dyed speaker cover ("hole in the upper right corner").

Auctioneer Malcolm Barber presided over the affair, deftly juggling bids from the audience, from a dozen assistants representing bidders on the phone, and from a woman who managed other bids coming in by computer. Barber and his minions wore suits and ties. The bidders wore mostly T-shirts, and they clutched their numbered bidding panels as if they were Woodstock tickets.

As with most high-end auctions, there was no gavel and no hollering of "sold American!" The auctioneer spoke softly, urged genteelly, and at the key moment, banged almost apologetically a thing that looked like a large white walnut, making an emphatic noise that would have done credit to the Wall of Sound.

"Fair warning,'' he said. "It's going away from you, sir. ... Now it's against you, I'm afraid ... any interest at 65? ... take a moment to think ... seems a shame to miss it ... fair warning, sir ... (BANG!) ... it's yours."
Anthem of the sum

Among the prices fetched Tuesday for Grateful Dead treasures on the auction block in San Francisco:

$312,000

for Jerry Garcia's white custom Travis Bean electric guitar

$20,400

for Garcia's leather guitar strap

$16,800

for a small suitcase full of Garcia's spare guitar strings

$13,200

for the band's empty red steamer trunk

$1,680

for one empty wooden speaker box

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