Bob Weir, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of the Grateful Dead, has died at age 78.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” Weir’s rep, Samantha Tillman, wrote in a statement. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.
“Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music,” the statement added. “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 band’s co-lead singer, writer, and guitarist beside Jerry Garcia, his elliptical riffs, eccentric song structures and slightly off-kilter stage presence made him an intrinsic ingredient to the Dead, up to and beyond its demise following Garcia’s death in 1995. Weir often went under-recognized compared to the larger-than-life Garcia (one of the first songs he wrote in the Dead was called “The Other One”). Yet, the band’s bassist Phil Lesh characterized Weir’s contribution as that of “a stealth machine.”
Robert Hall Weir was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1947, to a college student who gave him up for adoption. He was raised in an affluent Bay Area suburb, where he managed to get kicked out of both preschool and the Cub Scouts, and suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia. At Fountain Valley, a Colorado school for boys with behavioral problems, he met John Perry Barlow, who would become his most frequent lyricist.
Weir began playing guitar at thirteen and was soon hanging out at the Tangent, a Palo Alto folk club, where he performed bluegrass numbers with the Uncalled Four and first saw Jerry Garcia playing banjo during a “hoot” night. Weir picked up his first guitar licks from David Nelson and future Jefferson Airplane member Jorma Kaukonen. On New Year’s Eve, 1965, Weir and his friends heard banjo music emerging from Dana Morgan’s Music Store. He went in and found Garcia, and the two decided to form a band. The acoustic Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions evolved into the electric Warlocks, who changed their name to the Grateful Dead.
As the youngest and best looking member of the macho Dead, Weir had to pay some dues. “I was definitely low man on the totem pole,” he told Rolling Stone in 1989, “especially at the beginning. And for a long time I had to just shut up and take it.” Too much LSD during the group’s stint as house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests made him somewhat withdrawn as Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh were entwining more deeply on a musical level. The lyrics to “The Other One” described Weir’s introduction to both LSD and Neal Cassady, the trickster hero of Jack Kerouac’s beat-generation masterpiece On the Road, with whom Weir shared a room in the Dead’s infamous 710 Ashbury Street house. In 1968, Weir and fellow founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were booted from the band for their musical deficiencies, though both returned within months.
Throughout the Seventies, Weir thrived as a member of a band that could deliver music of nearly ineffable warmth and country-rock majesty – as on their pair of 1970 masterpieces, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty – while also playing more freely improvised music to more listeners than any band in history. Weir sang the band’s country covers and his own original material, and played rhythm guitar in a brilliantly eccentric manner that belied the job’s second-string implications – even while soundman Dan Healy was turning him down in the mix. Lesh described Weir’s technique as “quirky, whimsical and goofy,” while Weir claimed jazz pianist McCoy Tyner’s left hand as his greatest influence.
With Pigpen’s death in 1972, Weir stepped into the second-vocalist role smoothly. Ace, his first solo album, established him as the band’s second most fruitful songwriting source. Usually alternating lead vocals with Garcia, he developed a repertoire that ranged from country-rock originals and rhythmically unorthodox tunes to his ambitious and gorgeous “Weather Report Suite.” He began gigging outside the Dead in Kingfish. He formed the Bob Weir Band with keyboardist Brent Mydland, who later joined the Dead, and would release two albums with Bobby and the Midnites. His second solo album, 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool, proved he could sound as slick as any other California rocker.
Over the course of the Eighties, Weir would have to compensate onstage as Garcia sank into drug addiction – and later admitted that he also sometimes served as “bag man” for the guitarist’s drugs. Garcia temporarily recovered toward the end of the decade, an era Weir lauded as the Dead’s finest era. “For me, that was our peak,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “We could hear and feel each other thinking, and we could intuit each other’s moves. Jerry, Brent, and I reached new plateaus as singers. We packed a punch.”
Hit hard by Garcia’s death, Weir continued to perform. His band RatDog played his Dead material and originals. Weir eventually began singing Garcia’s own material in various 21st-century configurations of former Grateful Dead members, including the Other Ones, the Dead, and Furthur. After collapsing onstage with Furthur in 2013 and canceling RatDog performances in 2014, Weir admitted that he struggled with his own addiction to painkillers.
As the remaining Grateful Dead members approached their golden anniversary in 2015, Bob Weir was the first to support a reunion, telling Rolling Stone, “If there are issues we have to get past, I think that we owe it to ourselves to man up and get past them. If there are hatchets to be buried, then let’s get to work. Let’s start digging.”
“There is no final curtain here, not really,” the statement announcing Weir’s death noted. “Only the sense of someone setting off again. He often spoke of a 300-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’.”
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