Grateful Dead Guitarist Bob Weir Dead at 78
Bob Weir, the guitarist and co-founder of jam band legends Grateful Dead, has died at the age of 78. Weir’s family confirmed the news of his death in a social media post.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” the post began. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the road,” it continued. “A guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the Grateful Dead. Bobby 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.”
Born in San Francisco, California, on October 16, 1947, Weir met Jerry Garcia when he was 16 and together with Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, formed the Grateful Dead. Mixing psychedelic rock, blues rock, country, and folk rock along with a splash of jazz, the group is widely known as the original jam band. Weir’s jazz influences, along with his virtuoso approach to blending slide elements, added uniqueness to the Dead’s sound and served as one of the engines of the improvisational machine that not only made each show and song different but also turned the band into legends with a devoted cult following.
Reflecting on the band’s 1972 legendary European tour, Weir told us, “Well, that was like going to summer camp except you take all the kids at summer camp and put them smack into the middle of Europe. We were just having a ball over there. Every day, there were different activities between the gigs. It was a lot of fun.”
When Garcia died of a heart attack in 1995, Weir formed RatDog Revue before joining forces with his surviving Dead bandmates to form The Other Ones in 1998, 2003 as The Dead, and Further with Lesh in 2009.
In July 2015, Weir and his surviving Grateful Dead bandmates played three final shows in Chicago to commemorate the band’s 50th anniversary, nearly 20 years to the day and place where and when the Dead played its final show. Also, that year, Weir was diagnosed with cancer, which he beat.
Since then, Weir joined forces with Hart and Kreutzmann, guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to form Dead & Company. In the years since, the band played Dead covers at arenas and stadiums across the U.S., culminating in its final tour in 2023. After that, Dead & Company played several residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and its final shows took place last August to honor the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary with three shows in Golden Gate Park.
Later, he’d release albums under his own name and as part of Wolf Bros.
In our 2016 interview with the guitarist, Jeff Weiss referred to Weir as “the other one, the McCoy Tyner to Jerry Garcia’s Coltrane, the clean-shaven, straw-haired Casanova among bandmates who looked like Blackbeard’s lysergic ghost. If Jerry’s premature demise led him to being immortalized as the psychedelic diamond-eyed dancing bear skeleton saint, Weir always projected something more tangible and grounded—more Big Boi than Andre, less interested in six-string levitations than ensuring that one more Saturday night went smoothly.”
When asked if he had hope about the future, Weir said, “The fact that we’ve made it this far, given all the forces of entropy in our culture. I can only speak for our culture, I can’t speak to European or Asian culture, but I think I get our culture pretty well. The fact that we’ve had all these negative influences on our culture and yet we’re still pretty functional, it bodes well for us.”
Reflecting on his favorite Dead era, he picked a time that most Deadheads might disagree with.
“Musically speaking, I like the late Brent [Mydland] era (the late 80s),” he said. “Practice makes perfect and we’d been at it for a long time. Jerry was in good shape and the band had a bright dynamic and we were really getting good, I think at that point we’d taken what we’d done to a unique level of presentation.
“It feels somewhat nebulous and hard to point out exactly what made it so special, but that’s what it’s all about anyway. We just got so good at piecing together a show and including the audience in that.”
In 2024, Lesh died at 84, and in November, former vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay died at 78.
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