Bob Weir, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of the Grateful dead, whose songs about sunshine daydreams and truckin’ helped turn the jam band into a 60-year musical empire, has died at age 78.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” Weir’s family wrote in a statement; a date of death was not instantly available. “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 J
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 with solo songs-turned-Dead standards like ”Playing in the Band,” ”One More Saturday Night,” and “Cassidy.”
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 also began gigging outside the Dead: First with Kingfish, then 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.”
Though hit hard by garcia’s August 1995 death, Weir continued to perform; as he famously sang in one Dead classic, “The Music Never Stopped.” His band RatDog played his Dead material and originals,and 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, Weir was the first to support a reunion, telling Rolling Stone, “If the
