Bob Weir

• 1. Introduction

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  Bob Weir was sixteen on New Year's Eve 1963, far too young to be let into any club in Palo Alto. He and a friend wandered the back alleys anyway, hunting for a door that would open. What they found was the sound of a banjo. They followed it to Dana Morgan's Music Store. Inside sat a 21-year-old named Jerry Garcia, waiting for his guitar students and oblivious to the date.

  Weir and Garcia spent that whole night playing music together. Before it ended, they had decided to form a band.

  How does a teenager who was expelled from nearly every school he attended end up as a founding member of the Grateful Dead? What made his guitar playing so strange that his own bandmates once pushed him out? And what did he build for himself in the years when the Dead were no longer a single band? The answers run through jug bands, cowboy songs, symphony halls and a stadium rainbow.

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• 2. Expelled From Nearly Everywhere

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  Robert Hall Weir was born in San Francisco on the 16th of October 1947. His birth mother, Phyllis Inskeep, was a fellow college student of his father, John Parber, and she later gave her son up for adoption. He grew up in Atherton with his adoptive parents, Frederic Utter Weir and Eleanor Weir.

  At age thirteen, Weir took up the guitar. The piano and the trumpet had both gone worse for him. School went worse still. He had undiagnosed dyslexia, and he was expelled from nearly every school he attended, including Menlo School in Atherton.

  Another of those schools was Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There he met John Perry Barlow, who would later write lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Weir's restless school years, in other words, still delivered a future collaborator. The guitar, meanwhile, was about to find its audience in a Palo Alto music store.

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• 3. Benched in 1968

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  A jug band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions was where the story began. It was later renamed The Warlocks, and eventually it became the Grateful Dead. What pushed it toward rock and roll was a British group. "The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock 'n' roll band," Weir said. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing."

  Weir played rhythm guitar and sang a large share of the lead vocals through the Dead's whole 30-year run. Yet in the fall of 1968 he was briefly shut out. The band played some concerts without him and without Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, billed as "Mickey and the Hartbeats." These shows were mixed in among full-lineup Grateful Dead concerts.

  The reason was blunt. In his biography of Jerry Garcia, Blair Jackson wrote that Garcia and Lesh felt Weir and Pigpen "were not pulling their weight musically in the band." Most of the band's fights then, Jackson noted, were about "Bobby's guitar playing." Late in the year the band relented, and Weir and Pigpen were reinstated full-time.

  The episode seems to have sparked a leap in Weir's playing. In early 1971, drummer Mickey Hart left for a time, and Phil Lesh could hear Weir more clearly than ever. Lesh recalled being "astonished, delighted and excited beyond measure at what Bobby was doing." What exactly was he doing that sounded so odd?

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• 4. A Quirky Style

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  Phil Lesh had his own words for it. He called Weir's playing "quirky, whimsical and goofy." He also marveled at something technical. Weir could fret chord voicings with only four fingers that a listener would normally expect from a keyboard player using as many as ten.

  The inspiration was not a rock guitarist. Weir's style was strongly influenced by the hard bop pianist McCoy Tyner. He also cited John Coltrane, the Rev. Gary Davis and the composer Igor Stravinsky. That mix explains why his rhythm parts often sounded less like strumming and more like a second melody line.

  In the late 1970s, Weir added slide guitar to certain songs in Dead shows. His choice of instrument changed over the years too. Early photographs of The Warlocks show him with a Gretsch Duo-Jet. After passing through a Rickenbacker 365, a Guild Starfire IV and a Fender Telecaster, he settled on a cherry red 1965 Gibson ES-335 as his main guitar for about a decade.

  In 1974, Weir began working with Jeff Hasselberger at Ibanez on a custom instrument. It began with the Ibanez 2681, a testbed guitar with sliding pickups. The collaboration led to Weir's custom "Cowboy Fancy" guitar, which he played from 1976 until the mid-1980s. Then came a Modulus Blackknife, which he kept for the rest of the Dead's history.

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• 5. Side Roads

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  Weir's first solo album, Ace, appeared in 1972, and the Grateful Dead served as its band even though the members were credited individually. Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna were on the record, and both were in the band by the time it came out. The album's best-known song, "Playing in the Band," had already appeared in a live version on Skull & Roses the year before.

  Then the side projects multiplied. In 1975 and 1976 he played with friends Matt Kelly and Dave Torbert in a Bay Area band called Kingfish. In 1978 he fronted the Bob Weir Band alongside Brent Mydland, who joined the Dead the following year. In 1980 he formed Bobby and the Midnites.

  Shortly before Garcia's death in 1995, Weir started RatDog Revue, soon shortened to RatDog. The band played covers of The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, plus many Dead songs. Its own originals mostly landed on the album Evening Moods.

  After the Dead stopped, former members regrouped under changing names. These included the Other Ones in 1998-2000 and 2002, and The Dead in 2003-2004 and 2009. In 2009 Weir and Phil Lesh formed Furthur, named in honor of Ken Kesey's psychedelically painted bus.

  In 2011 Weir turned to technology. He founded the Tamalpais Research Institute, known as TRI Studios, a recording studio and virtual venue that streams live concerts in high definition. It would later host some of his most unusual shows.

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• 6. Fare Thee Well

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  A fall in Port Chester, New York, on the 25th of April 2013 interrupted Weir's schedule. He tumbled onstage during a Furthur show at the Capitol Theater, and the band finished the set without him. He played two days later in Atlantic City, but on the 29th of April a representative said he would be "unable to perform in any capacity for the next several weeks." He returned that summer. Six weeks after the fall, he made a surprise appearance at the small Huichica Music Festival.

  In August 2014 he abruptly canceled every remaining appearance of the year, including all RatDog and Furthur dates. A film about him, The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir, had premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April of that year.

  The next summer brought the biggest reunion of all. In early July 2015, Weir joined the other living original members, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Phil Lesh, for three shows at Soldier Field in Chicago. They were nicknamed the "Core Four" and were joined by Jeff Chimenti, Phish's Trey Anastasio and Bruce Hornsby. The shows came almost exactly 20 years after the band's last concert with Garcia, at the same stadium.

  The series was billed "Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead" and promoted as the four members' last performance together. Demand added two more shows at Levi Stadium in California in late June.

  On the 27th of June, a rainbow appeared over the stadium. Billboard quoted one longtime Deadhead who exclaimed, "This is the band that jams with God." The cheering was so loud that it led to an hour-long intermission. Billboard first reported an insider's claim that the production had paid US$50,000 for the effect. A follow-up said further investigation showed that "this band really does jam with God."

  The four members did not stay apart for long. In late 2015 Weir joined Hart and Kreutzmann, guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to form Dead & Company. Their first run covered 22 shows and finished with a three-set New Year's Eve concert. The band ended its final tour on the 16th of July 2023 at Oracle Park in San Francisco. Then came a residency at Sphere in Las Vegas, announced on the 31st of January 2024. Eighteen shows were announced at first, the run grew to thirty, and it ended in August 2024.

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• 7. Wolf Bros and the Orchestras

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  In 2018 Weir formed Wolf Bros, first a trio with Don Was on upright bass and Jay Lane on drums. They toured the United States in the fall of 2018, the spring of 2019 and early 2020. Weir also played that spring with Phil Lesh in a duo billed as Bobby and Phil.

  During late 2020 and early 2021, the band played several concerts at TRI Studios with Jeff Chimenti on keyboards and Greg Leisz on pedal steel guitar. After the first of those shows, a horn and string section called the Wolfpack joined them. Brian Switzer played trumpet and Adam Theis trombone, while Sheldon Brown handled saxophone, clarinet and flute. Mads Tolling played violin, and Alex Kelly played cello.

  In 2022 the larger group began a symphony series. It opened with four sold-out shows with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. The concerts offered "sonic elaborations" of Grateful Dead classics, Weir solo songs and covers. Three concerts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra followed in February 2023, and a show with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra at Frost Amphitheater came that October.

  The fall 2024 tour added the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, the Chicago Philharmonic and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, for five shows in all. Programs included "A Grateful Overture" by Giancarlo Aquilanti, along with music from the albums Aoxomoxoa, Wake of the Flood and Shakedown Street.

  The last symphony show took place on the 21st of June 2025 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra. Earlier that year, in January, Weir had curated the second Dead Ahead Festival at Riviera Cancun in Mexico, where Sturgill Simpson, Brandi Carlile and Oteil Burbridge were on the lineup.

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• 8. Cowboy Songs

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  Wyoming gave Weir his most personal album. When he was fifteen, he worked as a ranch hand there. That experience inspired Blue Mountain, a September 2016 album of what he called cowboy songs, followed by a tour starting in October. In August 2016, during a preview, he said the only instrument he used on it was a Martin acoustic guitar.

  The year brought honors as well. In June 2016, at the Bonnaroo Arts And Music Festival, he received the first Les Paul Spirit Award. Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation, said that if Les were alive, he and Bob would be experimenting together at TRI Studios. Weir also received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2016 Americana Honors & Awards in Nashville.

  His instrument collection kept growing. His acoustic guitars included several Martins, a Guild, an Ovation and a signature line from Alvarez-Yairi. From 2017, he worked with D'Angelico Guitars of Manhattan on signature models. The Premier, a semi-hollow guitar, arrived in 2017, and the solid body Deluxe Bedford followed in 2020. In 2024 he and D'Angelico introduced the Deluxe Bobby Weir 3.

  One old guitar carried family history. It was a 1956 Fender Telecaster that had belonged to his late half-brother, James Louis Parber.

  Police raided the band's communal home on the 2nd of October 1967, and Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan were arrested for marijuana possession. Weir remained unmarried through his years with the Dead. From 1969 to 1975 he lived with Frankie Hart, a former go-go dancer who had worked in Apple Records' American marketing department. She was allegedly the inspiration for the song "Sugar Magnolia" by Robert Hunter and Weir.

  On the 15th of July 1999, he married Natascha Munter in Mill Valley, California. They had two daughters.

  In 1991 he co-wrote the children's book Panther Dream: A Story of the African Rainforest with his sister Wendy Weir, who painted its illustrations in acrylic. The publisher, Hyperion, donated the book's proceeds to reforestation programs in Africa. Weir was a long-term vegetarian and an animal rights advocate, and he helped found Farm Sanctuary. He sat on the boards of the Rex Foundation, the Furthur Foundation and HeadCount, and on the honorary board of Little Kids Rock.

  His hobbies were just as active. He was an avid mountain biker in the sport's early years and often rode with pioneer Gary Fisher. In February 2004, his Super Bowl prediction of New England beating Carolina, 33-24, came closest to the real 32-29 score. That earned him the Scripps Howard Super Sage Award, ahead of 148 other celebrities.

  In the summer of 2025, Weir was diagnosed with cancer. He survived it, but died of underlying lung problems on the 10th of January 2026, aged 78. A "Homecoming" memorial was held a week later in San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza. Thousands attended, and John Mayer, Joan Baez and Mickey Hart were among the speakers and performers.

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