Bob Weir: A Life Well and Fully Lived
Remembering and celebrating the Eternal Other One
We didn’t see it coming, that’s the thing.
Maybe we should’ve.
But when Bob Weir died on Saturday, it took those of us who loved his work - and loved the man, by extension - by gut-wrenching and heart-rending surprise.
The reason we were caught off-guard was expressed beautifully and succinctly in an early Sunday morning text from my friend Michael Lee Jackson.
“Weir passing hit me harder than most,” Michael wrote.
“Just something about that guy that made me feel he’s always supposed to be here. And I guess his music will be, and therefore he will be. But you know what I mean…”
That’s it. He was always supposed to be here. Like a river. Or a mountain. Or the moon. Or a worn and dog-eared copy of On the Road.
Without him, we’ve lost our dog star and our Dark Star alike. We feel, suddenly, like lost sailors.
Though I think he’d be disappointed if we didn’t pick ourselves up and get back to it, and quick. There’s still work to do, I imagine him saying, with a slight grin. Barely time to wait…
Weir co-founded the Grateful Dead when he was till a teenager. By his mid-twenties, he was writing some of that band’s most adventurous, forward-looking and beautifully weird music.
In between, he’d greatly aided in building a counter-cultural movement that melded utopian idealism, Jack Kerouac’s wanderlust, the Beat poets’ desire to unearth the reality beneath conventionally accepted reality, and a hazy-but-built-to-last notion of a Democracy on wheels, one forever plunging deeper into that “Mother American night.”
The Weir songs that came were born beneath a formidable shadow, the very one cast by the Dead’s guitarist and reluctant leader Jerry Garcia and his lyricist, the inimitable Robert Hunter. Garcia and Hunter wrote songs that form the bedrock of 20th Century Americana in all its messy, cross-pollinated glory, and the Dead took those songs - rooted in folk music but enamored with jazz - and transformed them into vehicles for ‘never the same way once’ improvisation. How Weir managed to create something equally formidable with that shadow looming between himself and the sun is a testament to his off-handed brilliance.
Those Weir songs, once they started coming, left an indelible mark on the Dead’s songbook, and therefore, on what we might loosely describe as ‘popular music’ in general, at least for those of us for whom such things are matters of great import.
Weir’s songs - “That’s It for the Other One,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band,” “Cassidy,” “Looks Like Rain,” “Weather Report Suite,” “Black Throated Wind,” “Jack Straw,” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Lost Sailor,” “Saint of Circumstance,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Feel Like A Stranger,” “Hell In A Bucket,” “Throwing Stones,” “Victim or the Crime” among them - are some of the Dead’s most adventurous, and became vehicles for many of their boldest ensemble improvisations throughout their long, strange and ongoing trip.
Songs that bear his own imprimatur aside, Weir composed in real time every night on the road, doing the seemingly impossible by finding a way to play with, against, and around Garcia’s idiosyncratically sublime guitar playing and Phil Lesh’s highly unconventional bass work, simultaneously complementing and elevating the collective’s raggedly triumphant sound. (In the case of Lesh, for ‘unconventional,’ read risky, melodic, meandering, largely averse to playing the root note of a chord, iconoclastic, and often wholly brilliant.)
Bob Dylan broke it down best, unsurprisingly.
“Then there’s Bob Weir,” Dylan writes in The Philosophy of Modern Song.
“A very unorthodox rhythm player. Has his now style, not unlike Joni Mitchell but from a different place. Plays strange, augmented chords and half-chords at unpredictable intervals that somehow match up with Jerry Garcia - who plays like Charlie Christian and Doc Watson at the same time. All that and an in-house writer-poet, Robert Hunter, with a wide range of influences - everyone from Kerouac to Rilke - and steeped in the songs of Stephen Foster. This creates a wide range of opportunities for the Dead to play almost any kind of music and make it their own.”
Bobby was indeed an unorthodox player, and that’s likely due to the fact that he wasn’t really emulating other guitarists. It would be a stretch to suggest that the Dead were ever really playing jazz, in the strict sense of the term. But there’s no question that they were playing something that was heavily informed by jazz methodology. Weir in particular found his way to chord voicings that often abandoned conventional renderings, avoiding the root note and emphasizing color tones found in extensions of the implied harmony.
To this tendency he aded a unique perspective on time. One need look no further than the studio recording of “Scarlet Begonias” found on the Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel album. Listen to the way Bobby finds spaces in the rhythm and offers chord stabs, slides and slurs in counterpoint to Garcia, Lesh and the drums. The tune offers a master class in Weir-isms, and yes, it changed, expanded, and morphed radically as the band played it live over the years. But this studio version tells a story. I can already hear the groans from certain quarters should I have the audacity to call the Dead ‘funky’ - and yet, Weir’s playing dances here, lithely, in a uniquely funky way. Make of that whatever you need to.
The jazz influence is indeed something that Bobby talked about freely over the years.
“At the age of seventeen, I listened to the John Coltrane Quartet, focusing on McCoy Tyner’s work, feeding Coltrane harmonic and rhythmic ideas to springboard off of - and I developed an approach to guitar playing based off of it,” Bobby wrote in a tribute to Lesh after the bassist’s death in 2024.
“This happened because Phil turned me on to the Coltrane Quartet.
“Early on, he also introduced me (and us) to the wonders of modern classical music, with its textures and developments, which we soon tried our hands at incorporating into what we had to offer. This was all new to peoples’ ears. Igor Stravinsky’s work wasn’t news to me at that point, but what he did and how he did it were ongoing topics of discussion for Phil and I - and boy, did I ever grow.”
And further…
“My dirty little secret is that I learned by trying to imitate a piano,” Bobby told journalist and author Alan Paul for a Rolling Stone piece, noting Tyner’s work with the Coltrane Quartet as a major influence.
“That caught my ear and lit my flame,” Bobby said.
That flame never went out, as evidenced by the words of John Mayer, who played with Weir in Dead & Co. for the better part of a decade, and was alongside him when Weir played his final show, last summer’s Grateful Dead 60 celebration at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
“Bob is a total savant,” Mayer told Rolling Stone in 2016. “His take on guitar chords and comping is almost too original to be fully appreciated until you get deep down into what he’s doing. It’s a joyous thing to play along with.”
We’ve all got our stories about ‘getting on the bus’ with the Dead, and mine dates back to June of 1985, when the Dead arrived for their second-ever show at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), where I spent my summers as a box office attendant and occasional backstage liaison.
The entire experience was a transformative one, introducing 16 year-old me to both the band’s sense of musical adventure and the wondrously circus-like atmosphere created by the community that traveled with them.
A return trip the following summer deepened my love for the band. And that was it. I was completely hooked.
I never followed the Dead around on tour, but I caught all the SPAC shows as well as a pair of Rich Stadium gigs following my move to Buffalo. After Garcia died in 1995, I experienced every incarnation that included Weir in it - Ratdog, the Other Ones, Further, the Dead, and eventually, Dead & Co. - as many times as I possibly could. Some of these shows were positively transcendent, but even the “average” ones were touched by something magical.
After befriending Grateful Dead biographer and publicist Dennis McNally - whose A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead remains the definitive text on the band - I was lucky enough to meet Bobby on a few occasions. He was exactly how I hoped he’d be - quiet, but kind, funny, gracious, generous of spirit. He struck me as that rarest of rare beings - an actualized human. Someone who was doing exactly what he was meant to do.
Weir became the principal steward of the Dead’s legacy following Garcia’s death. There are some among the band’s immense fan-base who never forgave him for it. I don’t number among them. In my view, Weir was incredibly well-suited to drive the bus, and he did so in a way that would have made band mentor (and Kerouac pal) Neal Cassady proud - with clear-headed abandonment, one eye on the road unwinding, another scoping out all the sights along the way, and declaring the equal potential of every moment to become a magical one. He did this until the very end.
“I can’t think of anyone that needed to play live music any more than Bob,” wrote his Dead & Co. bandmate Oteil Burbridge in the wake of Weir’s transformation.
“It went past devotion, past dedication, past obsession. It seemed to me more like self identification. I think he felt it is what and who he was. I also cannot think of anyone who played more live shows. We could depend on it, like the sun coming up.
“He was so unique as a human and a musician. His mannerisms when he spoke were just as singular as the way he played guitar, sang, composed and lived day to day.”
Bobby’s words, written as a eulogy for Lesh, form a farewell that is equally fitting for his own passing.
“The Muse gives us the people and tools to work with. Where we go with that work emerges from somewhere between our intuition and her inspiration. It’s a process always cloaked deep in Mystery, and at its best, the Mystery is forever lasting, after its rendering.
“‘Look out of any window…’ has that ring to it.
“Meanwhile, given that death is the last and best reward for a life well and fully lived, I rejoice in his liberation…”
And we rejoice in yours, Bobby. Thanks for all of it.
I cannot express enough how much it means to me that you are still writing and sharing your thoughts and views of not just music but humanity, Jeff. My partner and I were devastated when you stopped writing for the Buffalo News. You were our North Star on all things entwined with music and the soul. I am so grateful that I can come here and still read and fill my cup. A beautiful piece. Thank you.
Thank you Jeff,for being someone “who gets it”RIP Bobby!