<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t decide whether it\u2019s criminal or poetic that news of Bob Weir\u2019s death broke on a Saturday night. If he had any say in the matter, I suspect Bobby would have kept it quiet until at least the following morning and let word slip early enough so as not to overly harsh the vibe for that evening\u2019s festivities. (Deadhead rule no. 1: Never miss a Sunday show.)<\/p>\n
Alas, the cofounder of the Grateful Dead\u2014who passed away at age 78 due to complications from cancer\u2014lived an extraordinary American life. Started one of the most successful, longest-running, and all-around greatest rock bands at the age of 16. Dropped acid with Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and the rest of the Merry Pranksters along the way. Had adventures in all corners of the globe, from the grandest pyramids of Egypt to the dingiest dives of New Orleans to the second- and third-tier hockey arenas of this nation\u2019s hinterlands. Wrote and performed enduring songs in an interpersonal group environment that can be charitably described as \u201cchaotic\u201d (and perhaps more accurately as \u201ctoxic\u201d). Honed the finest set of legs seen on any heterosexual white man in the mid-to-late 20th century (so fine that The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> devoted an entire article<\/a> to it this weekend). Changed music and the world in ways that are vast and all-encompassing and plainly obvious (as well as small and niche and subtle). And made it possible for millions upon millions of people\u2014living and no longer living, friend and stranger, Deadhead and \u201cI like that one song<\/a> about the cokehead train engineer\u201d\u2014to have a really, really <\/em>good time.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n That last point is most important. At least, I imagine, it was most crucial to Bobby. \u201cThe chances are I spent more time standing onstage playing guitar and singing than any human who ever lived,\u201d he says in the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir. <\/em>It\u2019s hard to confirm the veracity of such an assertion, though the breadth of Weir\u2019s onstage life is considerable. It stretched from 1965\u2014when he cofounded the Warlocks with a Palo Alto bluegrass enthusiast five years his senior named Jerry Garcia\u2014to 2025, when Weir\u2019s highly lucrative post\u2013Grateful Dead project Dead & Company headlined a weekend of shows in San Francisco celebrating the band\u2019s 60th anniversary. Upon his death, it was revealed that Weir had already been diagnosed with cancer at the time of those San Francisco shows, though he kept that quiet. (Again, one must not spoil the gig.)<\/p>\n Of all the countless days he was onstage, with his guitar, inspiring crowds to dance (or sway or spin or rock back and forth or freak out or whatever the hell else you wanted to do at a Dead show), the most sanctified part of the week was Saturday night. He wrote about it in holy terms in \u201cOne More Saturday Night,\u201d which debuted in Dead set lists in 1971 and on Weir\u2019s solo debut, Ace<\/em>, <\/em>the following year. The rare Dead song attributed solely to Weir\u2014the band\u2019s frequent lyricist, Robert Hunter, apparently took his name off it after feuding over Weir\u2019s changes\u2014sums up his worldview almost perfectly. It\u2019s not his best song (that\u2019s either \u201cJack Straw\u201d or \u201cPlaying in the Band,\u201d two more Hunter collaborations). Or his most popular (\u201cSugar Magnolia,\u201d again with Hunter). Or his most important to the Dead\u2019s overall aesthetic (the early jam showcase \u201cThe Other One\u201d). Or his most moving (\u201cCassidy,\u201d composed with his old prep-school chum John Perry Barlow, and performed best as a duet in the \u201980s with Brent Mydland). Or his most underrated (\u201cBlack Throated Wind,\u201d weirdly the first Dead song I ever loved, from a tape recorded on the spring \u201991 tour, of all tapes). Or the sleaziest (\u201cMexicali Blues\u201d). Or the most bonkers (the awkwardly titled skronkfest \u201cVictim or the Crime\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne More Saturday Night\u201d is simply the one that\u2019s most definitively Bobby. It functions as a kind of origin story retrofitted to Chuck Berry chords. Born in 1947, Weir was given up for adoption by two college students in their early 20s. He was subsequently raised by a nice suburban couple amid the well-to-do environs of San Mateo County. Destined for a boring, Eisenhower-era existence, he instead received \u201ca mighty sign \/ written fire across the heaven, plain as black and white \/ \u2018Get prepared, there\u2019s gonna be a party tonight.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As a rock critic, I was required to care about the Grateful Dead. Their foundational importance to American culture goes beyond whether you like their music. (It\u2019s like when someone tries to argue that the Beatles are overrated\u2014No, you just don\u2019t care for \u201cHey Jude,\u201d which is your right. But their centrality is a plain fact that\u2019s bigger than your or my taste.<\/em>) In terms of Weir\u2019s specific contributions, his embrace of country music and the integration of Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins standards into the Dead\u2019s repertoire are core threads of whatever \u201cAmericana\u201d means now. More broadly, the Dead were always forward-thinking when it came to anticipating shifts in the music business and the ways those changes are shaped by technology. That carried on right up until the end of Weir\u2019s life, when Dead & Company were making a fortune streaming live video from the road and playing \u201cTouch of Grey\u201d in front of a 160,000-square-foot high-definition screen at Sphere in Las Vegas.\u00a0<\/p>\n But as a fan, I didn\u2019t become a full-blown Deadhead until the COVID-19 pandemic. Right before shutdowns were instituted in March 2020, my friend Rob and I started a podcast<\/a> where we went through the 36 volumes of Dick\u2019s Picks<\/em>, a series of Dead concert archival albums. I originally conceived it as an excuse to dig deeper into a band I liked but didn\u2019t know a lot about while also hopping on Zoom and socializing with a buddy on a regular basis. As the show unfolded, the band\u2019s dynamic became readily apparent\u2014Jerry was the heart, Phil Lesh was the brains, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart were the engine, and Bobby was the spirit, the joie de vivre, what those who prefer gendered nomenclature would call \u201cthe balls.\u201d That also made him ripe for our jokes. You can\u2019t really make fun of Jerry (unless you\u2019re the sort who spits on the Mona Lisa<\/em>), and ribbing Phil isn\u2019t as much fun because Phil was just less fun in general. But Bobby\u2019s comedic fodder was endless\u2014the shorts; the muscle shirts; the various ponytail eras; the corny blues covers he trotted out every night (usually in the set list\u2019s third slot, if we\u2019re talking \u201980s Dead); his intensely committed hamminess when delivering Bob Dylan songs (or his own); his anguished, romantic caterwauling at the climax of \u201cLooks Like Rain\u201d; the way he purred \u201csilky, silky, crazy, crazy night\u201d on \u201cFeel Like a Stranger\u201d from 1990\u2019s Without a Net<\/em>; the entire Bobby and the Midnites oeuvre; and so on.<\/p>\n Lest it should be said: I love all <\/em>this stuff. I am a firm believer in the idea that truly appreciating an artist or band means reveling in all aspects of their work, even the things you might initially scoff at, while also recognizing <\/em>the ridiculousness of those attributes. (If I can impart any wisdom to our young generation of online stans, it\u2019s that laughing at your heroes sometimes rather than reflexively defending them at all costs will make you happier in the long run.) For anyone to be an all-time great, they must have enough personal belief, guilelessness, creative and personal freedom, and extreme fearlessness to transcend the self-consciousness and intolerance for embarrassment and failure that hamstring 99.9 percent of the population. No band personifies this idea better than the Grateful Dead. And no member of the Grateful Dead embodied it more than Bob Weir. The greatness intertwined with goofiness, the silliness inseparable from the spiritual, the guy who was part saint and part Sammy Hagar.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was acknowledged even within the Dead, with Bobby perpetually cast as the \u201ckid brother\u201d figure to Garcia and Lesh. Early on, they both castigated Bobby for his eccentric guitar playing, which for a while imperiled his permanent status in the band. Over time, however, they came to value how his irregular riffs (for a rock band, anyway) formed a glue between their own florid, showstopping jamming. Weir has said he was inspired by how McCoy Tyner\u2019s piano playing complemented the lead saxophone on John Coltrane records, and he set about applying those lessons to his accompaniments to Garcia\u2019s brilliantly beautiful solos. For anyone bound and determined to be worshipped as a conventional guitar hero, it was the opposite of a successful approach. But those obsessed with unconventional <\/em>guitar playing locked into the strange, wondrous sounds that Weir routinely coaxed out of his ax, which even in the band\u2019s stadium-rock years amounted to some of their most genuinely avant-garde elements.\u00a0<\/p>\n A running bit on our Grateful Dead podcast was about their lack of sentimentality in the wake of losing friends, collaborators, and even bandmates. If there was a show that happened to take place around the death of a famous rock star, like Janis Joplin or Duane Allman, we would scan for any mention or tribute. And it never came. Not once. At best, you could strain your ears during \u201cNot Fade Away\u201d or \u201cHe\u2019s Gone\u201d and speculate on whether a notably impassioned vocal on a particular lyric denoted a stealth <\/em>expression of grief. Maybe it did. But probably not. The Dead were just not that kind of band. During their 30-year run, they lost a different keyboard player to tragic circumstances every decade or so, and they always immediately returned to the road with a replacement. Men will overlook multiple dead bodies in their midst rather than go to therapy, blah blah blah. <\/em>But it\u2019s just how it was. Ending the band or even taking a year off was out of the question. \u201cThe Music Never Stopped\u201d was not just the name of a Grateful Dead song; it was their animating philosophy.\u00a0<\/p>\n And Bob Weir had a lot to do with that, too. After Jerry\u2019s death in 1995, it was reasonable to assume that the Grateful Dead were also finished. And, for many diehards, they were. But Weir was only 47 at the time, still a relatively young man. (Virtually the same age I am now, so take that with a grain of salt.) Besides, it\u2019s not as if Saturday was suddenly removed from the calendar once Jerry left this world. At a Dead show, the audience is at least as important as the band, and the Dead\u2019s audience proved to be remarkably resilient no matter the changes in culture and music everywhere else. They were told there was gonna be a party tonight, and they expected a party tonight. So, there was gonna be a party tonight.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 1998, the first post-Jerry iteration of the Dead hit the road. They were called the Other Ones, a nod to both Jerry\u2019s preeminence and Bobby\u2019s own status in relation to the fallen icon. Over the next 15 or so years, there were other assemblages featuring Weir and a revolving cast of Dead regulars and Dead-adjacent auxiliary players: the Dead; Furthur; Weir\u2019s side vehicle, RatDog. But the Garcia-less Dead didn\u2019t reach critical mass until the Fare Thee Well concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago in 2015. A return to the stadium-rock extravaganzas of the \u201980s and \u201990s, these 50th-anniversary gigs celebrated the so-called surviving \u201ccore four\u201d of Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart. (A boys\u2019 club to the end, they didn\u2019t invite Donna Jean Godchaux, a member of the beloved \u201970s lineup, who passed away in 2025.) This was ostensibly a series of \u201cfarewell for good\u201d shows, but the publicity for Fare Thee Well teed up the unveiling that fall (just over three months later) of Dead & Company, a Frankensteined version of all the previous post-Jerry lineups (sans Lesh) that also featured John Mayer in the role of GQ-<\/em>ed <\/em>Garcia. For the next decade, they were one of the most popular touring bands on the planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n Purists scoffed, of course. But they missed the point. That mighty sign, written in fire across the heavens, plain as black and white, it was still there, telling us to get prepared: There\u2019s gonna be a party tonight<\/em>. And the party always takes precedence. The music never stops. Not even for Bob Weir.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the Facebook post announcing his death, Weir\u2019s daughter Chloe said her father \u201coften spoke of a three-hundred-year legacy\u201d of the Grateful Dead and that he was \u201cdetermined to ensure the songbook would endure long after him.\u201d Weir himself reiterated this to Rolling Stone <\/em>in 2025<\/a>\u2014he saw Dead & Company carrying on after he was gone and declared that his side-project band, Wolf Bros, was \u201cconstructed so that anyone can step in and do it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n And so it shall be. Saturday will return next weekend, and some version of the Dead will be back on the road in the foreseeable future. You can literally set your watch to it. Maybe even by this summer, at your local neighborhood shed, where there\u2019s a lawn big enough for dancing and drum circles. As for Bob, I think about that verse in \u201cOne More Saturday Night\u201d where he imagines \u201cGod way up in heaven\u201d creating the planet Earth as \u201ca big old party,\u201d which presumably peaks right before His day of rest, Sunday. \u201cDon\u2019t worry about tomorrow, Lord, you\u2019ll know it when it comes,\u201d Bobby sings. \u201cWhen the rock and roll music meets the risin\u2019 planet sun.\u201d The sun will keep on risin\u2019, surely. It will just be a little less bright without Bob Weir.<\/p>\n