Some thoughts on Bob Weir

"Awoke today, felt your side of bed, the covers were still warm where you were layin.'"

My wife happened to be sitting on a N.J. Transit bus poking at Instagram when she saw Bob Weir’s official account announce his unexpected death. She was among the first to see it. She texted me, but I was unable to find a confirm anywhere — not even TMZ, which, whatever you may think about that organization, is always first and usually accurate when it comes to these things. I saw the official post and hoped it had been hacked. Everyone on X and Bluesky was writing “say this isn’t true.” Then it became clear that it was true. This all happened in about eight minutes — you can time these things nowadays thanks to social media.

It was a fitting way to learn of his passing. Bob Weir’s group The Grateful Dead was always an early adopter of technology, as detailed by Jesse Jarnow’s fantastic book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America and Fred Turner’s deeply researched (but kinda boring) From Counterculture to Cyberculture explain. The very first regular non-governmental use of enormous, room-sized computers were at U of C colleges sharing Dead setlists with one another via ARPANET. The Dead were also the glue of the first internet bulletin board, a precursor of Reddit called The WELL, an acronym for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, a digital off-shoot of the Whole Earth Catalogue, a “back to the land” hippie publication that saw no contradiction in bringing modems to yurts.

Contradictions abound in the Grateful Dead. Mickey Hart, the second percussionist whose rhythmic explorations moved in both ethnographic and synthetic directions, was the driving force behind the most far-out, Space-y aspects of their live shows — an aspect that, for me, was always the highlight (and unreproducible) part of their concerts. And yet, the tours he sat out leaving just Bill Kreutzmann to man percussion duties are the shows that rock out the hardest, and are regularly my favorite.

There’s also the accepted wisdom that the Dead were a bunch of zonked-out hippies whose lyrics rambled on about peace and love and flowers and that’s really not the case — especially for Bobby’s songs. Indeed, nearly everything he wrote or sang was about working in a coal mine, truckin’ with his chips cashed in, sharing the women and wine, teaching weeping willows how to cry cry cry, drinkin’ last night with a biker who showed him a picture of you, or beatin’ it down the line. (Many of these were older tunes from the folk or country and western tradition, inspired by the lodestar of the Harry Smith collection, probably introduced to him by Jerry Garcia, as he was just a 16 year old kid when he joined the band.)

And yet! The one song that kinda fit the common misconception of free love and girls with pinwheel eyes and flowers in her hair is Bobby’s “Sugar Magnolia” with the big singalong ending “Sunshine daydream/Walkin' in the tall trees/Goin' where the wind goes/Blooming like a red rose” etc etc.

Jerry Garcia was, for many people, all there was to the Grateful Dead. I remember, back in the mid-1990s, I knew an older guy who went to shows mostly to take drugs and score with girls who wore no underwear, and he said (rather foolishly, I felt even then) that the songs Jerry didn’t sing were there so you could take a little break. But by and large a Dead show would trade back and forth between Jerry songs and Bobby songs. He was second-in-command but he was still in command, and sang lead on very close to half a given night. Moreover, his weird phrasing on rhythm guitar (“I’m told I have big hands,” he said when I interviewed him for Vanity Fair) made him one of the most unorthodox accompanists in rock. Many a scholar, and the man himself, compared the Weir-Garcia dynamic to McCoy Tyner and John Coltrane.

Anyway, Bob Weir is gone, and everyone is sad. I never saw him with the Dead, but have spent way too long watching old shows on YouTube. I saw him with Dead and Company several times, and though I always left with a few notes of constructive criticism, it was always with an enormous smile on my face. I’m so glad I went to those shows.

There is now only one founding member of the Grateful Dead still alive: Bill Kreutzmann, the drummer — the position that, historically, kicks off first. They never did play any rules.