Bob Weir, the unassuming singer, songwriter and nuanced rhythm guitarist known as the “other” founding member of the Grateful Dead, has died, his family announced Saturday on Instagram. He was 78.
Weir “transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues,” they said. He was diagnosed in July.
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the road. … He will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music. His work did more than fill rooms with music; it was warm sunlight that filled the soul, building a community, a language and a feeling of family that generations of fans carry with them. Every chord he played, every word he sang was an integral part of the stories he wove. There was an invitation: to feel, to question, to wander, and to belong.”
As the leader of such bands as Dead and Company, Phil Lesh and Friends, Further, Rat Dog and Wolf Bros, Weir carried on the Dead’s legacy following the sudden death of bandmate Jerry Garcia in 1995.
Asked in an interview in April 2014 with Vanity Fair if he “takes psychedelics, still, once in a while?” the forthcoming rock star replied: “Not much. Every now and again. I haven’t done it so much recently, but over the last decade, for instance, if one of the bands I’m hangin’ with, and all the guys want to take mushrooms, I’m not going to … you know, I’ll go there. But not a whole lot.”
Weir and lead guitarist Garcia formed the Dead in 1965 with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (keyboards, harmonica), Lesh (bass) and Bill Kreutzmann (drums), and he wrote and/or sang on such songs as “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band,” “Truckin,’ ” “Throwing Stones,” “Let It Grow,” “I Need a Miracle,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Let It Rain,” “Mexicali Blues,” “Hell in a Bucket,” “Cassidy” and “The Other One,” to name just a few.
The last one, which appeared on the Dead’s second album, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun, became perhaps Weir’s most widely performed tune, and a 2014 documentary about him, directed by Mike Fleiss, was titled The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir. Executive produced by Justin Kreutzmann (Bill’s son), it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In the film, Weir said that he “took LSD, every Saturday without fail, for about a year” and served as Garcia’s “bag man,” holding onto and dispensing his drugs.
With the boyish Weir expertly filling in between Garcia’s upbeat guitar work and Lesh’s innovative bass lines, the Dead — the most famous jam band of all time — took to the road for long stretches, playing improvisational, psychedelic shows that lasted for hours, much to the delight of the tie-dyed Deadheads.
In an interview published in March 1973, Weir told Cameron Crowe about how the group fashioned its free-form shows.
“We have certain numbers that we use for certain pivot points, of course,” he said. “We have the crowd pleasers for the end. A little bit into the second set, you can expect us to do a number that we’re gonna stretch out on … for like 45 minutes or an hour. And you can expect us to pull out of that with some fairly forceful rock ’n’ roll just to shake out the cobwebs of the people that are … well, we space out on the space-out numbers, and if we may be losing some of our audience at that point, we bring them back with a little rock ’n’ roll.
“We try to take the numbers that we stretch out on and develop them very gradually from level to level to level so that we’re not all of a sudden introducing them to a whole new weird realm of music. I guess essentially, if it makes sense to them, then they can keep up with us; if it doesn’t, then they don’t. You have to have that positive feedback from an audience to keep you going.”
The modest, fame-fleeing Weir, known for wearing shorts onstage — he also soaked his T-shirts in beer coolers to beat the heat of the hot lights — had big hands that enabled him to “voice chords that most people can’t reach,” Garcia once said, “and he can pull them off right in the flow of playing.”
“We all feel Bob’s the finest rhythm guitarist on wheels right now. He’s like my left hand,” Garcia noted in a 1978 interview. “We have a long, serious conversation going on musically, and the whole thing is of a complementary nature. We have fun, and we’ve designed our playing to work against and with each other. His playing, in a way, really puts my playing in the only kind of meaningful context it could enjoy.”
Garcia died of a heart attack in a California rehab center at age 53 on Aug. 9, 1995, but Weir, Lesh and others soldiered on in such groups as Bobby and the Midnites, The Other Ones and an incarnation known simply as The Dead. As the Rat Dog frontman, put together shortly before Garcia’s death, Weir played more than a thousand shows.
The Grateful Dead was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. After that night of celebration, Weir once recalled, he emerged from “the fog” while under a table with Chuck Berry.
Weir was born on Oct. 16, 1947, in San Francisco and adopted as an infant by a family in the Palo Alto area. He was expelled from nearly every school he attended and struggled with dyslexia, which went undiagnosed.
Weir became obsessed with the guitar by age 14 (one of his influences was Jorma Kaukonen of Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane fame), and a couple years later he came upon Garcia on New Year’s Eve 1963.
“I was wandering the back streets of Palo Alto with a friend when we heard banjo music coming from the back of a music store,” he recalled. “It was Garcia [who was teaching music at the time] waiting for his pupils, unmindful it was New Year’s Eve. We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave. I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.”
That band, with McKernan also in tow, was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions; they played country blues and “race” songs and became a hit with the folkies. When Kreutzmann came aboard, they turned to electric instruments (finding inspiration from The Beatles’ success) and were known as The Warlocks. And after Lesh joined, they rechristened themselves the Grateful Dead.
For a time, Weir lived in the “Dead house” at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco and shared a room with Neal Cassady, the Beat Generation luminary who would serve as the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s counterculture novel On the Road.
The Dead issued their first album, a self-titled Warner Bros. effort in March 1967, and followed through the years with such LPs as 1969’s Live/Dead, with an immortal rendition of “Dark Star” that lasted more than 23 minutes; two stellar 1970 studio efforts, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty; 1977’s prog-ish Terrapin Station, their first album for Arista; 1987’s In the Dark, containing “Touch of Grey,” a hit on MTV and their first track to make it into the Top 10 on the Billboard pop charts; and the 1989 live album Dylan & the Dead.
In 2011, Weir opened TRI Studios, a multimillion-dollar recording, broadcast and live audio/video streaming facility in San Rafael, California.
He called the place “the ultimate playpen for a musician” and performed there with The National, Vampire Weekend, The Hold Steady, Phish and Sammy Hagar, among others. His thick brown wavy locks by then had showed more than a touch of gray, and he sported a big bushy beard and ‘stash.
He reconnected with his biological father, Jack, who died in 2015.
Survivors also include his wife Natascha, whom he met after a show when she sneaked backstage. She was 15 at the time, and he was in his mid-30s. They married in 1999 and had daughters Chloe and Monet.
“There is no final curtain here, not really,” his family said. “Only the sense of someone setting off again. He often spoke of a three-hundred-year legacy, determined to ensure the songbook would endure long after him. May that dream live on through future generations of Dead Heads. And so we send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing. A reward for a life worth livin’.”
After Garcia died, Weir faced a void in his life, Fleiss told Rolling Stone in 2014. “It was surprising to hear how he only saw one way to cope with Jerry’s death, and that was to keep on playing. That experience with Jerry’s death cemented that in his life. He doesn’t know how to live his life without plugging in his guitar and stepping out in front of people.”
He told the Los Angeles Times in February 2022 that he had “absolutely no fear of dying. In fact, to look forward to it. In my view, death is the last and best reward for a life well-lived. But, that said, I still have a fair bit of life to live before I get there.”
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