Bob Weir was a songwriting powerhouse for the Grateful Dead – and the chief guardian of their legacy music

FFor most of their career, the other members of the Grateful Dead referred to Bob Weir as “The Kid.” You can understand why. He was only 16 years old when the band that would eventually become the Grateful Dead was founded. Furthermore, Weir was fresh-faced and impossibly boyishly handsome, especially compared to some of his bandmates. Jerry Garcia’s image was used in one of Richard Nixon’s campaign radio programs and is a symbol of everything that is wrong with American youth. Keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, by all accounts a gentle natured man, nonetheless gave off the air of a man who would strangle you with his bare hands as soon as he looked at you. On the other hand, Weir somehow managed to look like the kind of charming young man a mother would be happy for her daughter to bring home, even in the famous 1967 photo of him leaving the band’s Haight-Ashbury residence in handcuffs after being arrested for drug possession. His relationship with Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh – five and seven years older than him respectively – is regularly described as that of a younger brother: at one point in 1968, the duo successfully fired Weir from the band on the grounds that his playing was not good enough.

It never happened – Weir simply kept showing up to gigs and the matter was eventually dropped – but it’s hard to see how the Grateful Dead would have functioned without him. For one thing, the band’s famous ability to improvise on stage was rooted in a kind of strange psychological bond between the lead members — “an interwoven sense of intuition,” as Ware described it — which they often claimed had been forged while playing together on LSD as a house band at Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Test events in 1965 and 1966. On the other hand, whether Garcia and Leech thought it was about to end. In 1968, Weir’s rhythm guitar style was an essential part of their sound. It was less surprising than Garcia’s smooth soloing or Lesh’s exceptional bass-playing style — inspired by his grounding in classical music, in which he played countermelodies rather than bass lines — but no less unique, a mass of alternate chords, harmonic pairs, and bursts of contrapuntal lead lines that he said was influenced by the playing of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. More practically, Ware had huge hands, which enabled him to play chords that others physically could not.

Additionally, he was quickly emerging behind Garcia as the band’s other songwriting force. He had already contributed two of the best tracks to 1968’s Anthem of the Sun: the ferocious psychedelia of Born Cross-Eyed and the long section of That’s It for the Other One which was titled The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get, but later became known simply as The Other One, one of the Dead’s major live improvisations for the rest of their career. But Weir was just getting started. Excited by the band’s shift away from psychedelic toward country-infused Americana — Ware was always happy to throw a selection of “cowboy songs” on stage, most notably Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” — he began writing at a prodigious rate in the early 1970s, first in the company of Garcia’s poet Robert Hunter, and later with an old school friend, John Perry Barlow. He could write boring songs – Jack Straw, Like Rain, Black-Throated Wind, the latter two from his great 1972 solo debut Ace – the distorted funk of The Music Never Stopped, or convoluted epics: Weir’s Weather Report Suite took up most of the second side of 1973’s Wake of the Flood. But perhaps his specialty was earthy rock ‘n’ roll that wasn’t as clear musically as it appeared on its debut: playing In the band, Sugar Magnolias, Another Saturday Night, The Destined Prophet.

Weir was quite an integral part of the Grateful Dead — and even more so when Garcia descended into heroin use in the 1980s, an addiction that could noticeably affect his performances — but he still represented somewhat of an anomalous figure within their ranks. He was the lonely beating heart of a band that didn’t care at all about image. He stopped taking LSD in 1966, after deciding he had gotten everything he could from experimenting with psychedelics (later, he noted wistfully, secretly adding acid to his drinks became something of a preoccupation with the band’s road crew).

Terrified by the reverence of the Grateful Dead’s most obsessive fans—”The apotheosis these people created for Jerry is basically what killed him,” he once said—yet he was the only member who seemed vaguely interested in commercial success, however theoretical. His 1978 solo album Heaven Help the Fool was a conscious attempt to “go to L.A.” and make mainstream rock, albeit with a raised eyebrow (Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally held up the album as an example of Weir’s “unique sense of humor”); The music he made through his side project Bobby and the Midnites in the 1980s was much more accessible than the Grateful Dead. Judging by his performance in the video for 1987’s Hell in a Bucket, Weir entered the Dead’s brief and unexpected tenure as MTV stars — propelled by their unexpected single Touch Of Gray — with at least a degree more enthusiasm than his bandmates.

Perhaps inevitably, given the big-brother-younger-brother dynamic that helped shape their relationship, Ware was the cast member most affected by Garcia’s death in 1995: “Bob took it right on the chin,” Hunter later noted. “The shock had been written on his face for so long, that anyone could see it with his eyes.” This situation was exacerbated by the fact that, without Garcia’s benign influence, the surviving members quickly descended into factionalism and apocalyptic hostility: throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, various formations would regroup and play live under the names “The Others” or “Further,” but their reunions were punctuated by periods of public squabbling. By most accounts, Weir was not at his best: his desire to tour was strangely compulsive – aside from various Grateful Dead-related reunions, his band RatDog played three six-week tours a year, as well as festivals, benefit shows and weekend gigs. And there was something increasingly troubling about his relationship with alcohol, exacerbated by a back injury caused by decades of gig-playing: he collapsed on stage during a Furthur concert in 2013.

But Weir pulled himself together. He treated his back problems with exercise and neck surgery. Members of the Grateful Dead regrouped one final time for the acclaimed Fare Thee Well shows in 2015 – the band’s 50th anniversary. Weir reinvented himself as the chief guardian of their heritage. Just before the Fare Thee Well shows, he tapped into his friendship with indie band The National at Day of the Dead, a massive tribute fund curated by the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner that revealed the enormous extent of the Grateful Dead’s influence on latter-day alternative rock: contributors included the War on Drugs, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Flaming Lips, Perfume Genius, Courtney Barnett, Anohni, Kurt Vile, Unknown Mortal Orchestra. and Sharon Van Etten; Weir has appeared twice, performing with both National and Wilco.

A chance meeting with a younger fan of the Dead, singer-songwriter John Mayer, led to the formation of Dead & Company, which also included the Grateful Dead’s twin drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, in 2015. They have proven to be incredibly successful – in 2021, Dead & Company were the fifth highest-grossing touring artist in America; Their 2023 tour generated a staggering $115 million in revenue; The following year they released Dead Forever, a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas that became one of the most successful concert residencies in rock history. In between, Weir fronted the Wolf Bros, who reinvented the Grateful Dead and Weir’s solo work in both stripped-down and more grandiose styles: in 2022, the Wolf Bros performed songs from 1972’s Ace with strings and brass accompaniment to critical acclaim; Last June, they appeared at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.

Two months later, Weir played his final live show: it was the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, and Dead & Company played three shows at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead had played many times from the 1960s onward. It was cold, Weir sounded a little frail and there was a certain finality to his choice of songs that ended each night: “Knock on Heaven’s Door,” “A Touch of Gray,” “Brookdown Palace,” and Garcia and Hunter’s wonderful, hymn-like meditation on mortality from the 1970s “American Beauty.” But Weir gamely wrote on the show that 60 years of the Grateful Dead “sounds like a pretty good start,” and whether he was sick or not, he no doubt meant it.

A few years ago, he claimed to have had a vision of Dead & Company not as a band, but as something eternal. He saw them play live, long after his death, and the deaths of other surviving Grateful Dead members: “John [Mayer] “It was almost all grey… There were younger men hanging on and playing with fire and self-confidence.” He suggested that perhaps there would be a version of Dead & Company that would keep the legacy alive in “200 or 300 years,” ensuring – as he once sang – that the music would never stop. “The Kid” had done a good job.