Bob Weir obituary
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One of the founding members of the Grateful Dead, brilliant guitarist and writer of many of the group’s key songs
Though perhaps not as instantly recognisable as the band’s guru-like lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, who has died from cancer aged 78, was an indispensable pillar of the Grateful Dead as guitarist, singer and songwriter.
Weir, Garcia and their bandmates first came together in San Francisco in 1965, and would become integral players in the psychedelia boom and the city’s summer of love in 1967, fuelled by the mind-expanding drug LSD.
Blending influences from rock, blues, country and folk music, they developed a unique form of collective improvisation that might see a single song stretching out to 45 minutes. Meanwhile the group’s egalitarian philosophy encouraged fans to record their live shows, and their loyal battalions of “Deadheads” would follow the group everywhere they played, like a nation on the move.
But the band proved to have far greater influence and staying power than most of their contemporaries, and continued to work collectively until 1995, when Garcia died, subsequently performing and recording in a variety of solo and collective guises until last year.
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As Weir told Rolling Stone magazine: “We speak a language that nobody else speaks. We communicate, we kick stuff back and forth, and then make our little statement in a more universal language.”
As a songwriter, Weir contributed to many of the group’s key songs, not least Truckin’ (a kind of potted autobiography of the Dead), Sugar Magnolia, The Other One, Cassidy, One More Saturday Night and Playing in the Band.
The last three of those first appeared on his first solo album, Ace (1972), but soon became Grateful Dead staples. He recorded two additional solo albums, Heaven Help the Fool (1978) and Blue Mountain (2016), and was also a member of several bands outside the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog and Wolf Bros. The director Mike Fleiss’s documentary film about Weir, The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir, premiered in 2014 and subsequently appeared on Netflix.
He was born in San Francisco, the son of John Parber and Phyllis Inskeep, two college students who gave him up for adoption, and he was subsequently raised by Eleanor (nee Cramer) and Frederic Weir, in Atherton, in San Francisco’s Bay Area. He displayed an early interest in athletics, but when a family nanny introduced him to jazz it triggered his passion for music.
After experimenting with the trumpet and the piano, he gravitated to acoustic guitar at the age of 13. He suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia which caused him to be expelled from several schools. However, during a stint at Fountain Valley, a Colorado school for boys with behavioural issues, he met John Perry Barlow, who would later become the regular lyricist and musical collaborator on Weir’s solo work.
Back in California, Weir studied guitar with Jerry Kaukonen (later to find fame as Jorma Kaukonen, the Jefferson Airplane’s guitarist) and began performing with a bluegrass group, the Uncalled Four. At the time, Garcia was a bluegrass banjo player. Weir met him in Dana Morgan’s Music Shop in Palo Alto on New Year’s Eve, 1963, and after playing together they decided they would form a band.
This was Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, who played folk and country, but by early 1965, inspired by the arrival of the Beatles, they had evolved into a rock band, the Warlocks, with Ron “Pigpen” McKernan on organ, the drummer Bill Kreutzmann and the bass player Phil Lesh.
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