Bob Weir: The Grateful Dead’s Rock and Roll Heart

Yes, the Grateful Dead was the quintessential San Francisco rock and roll band–but New York loved them–and surely respected Bob Weir, a founding member of the band who died on Jan. 10. He was 78 and he lived one of the most admirable lives in rock and roll annals.

Weir, who succumbed of lung issues less than a year after receiving a cancer diagnosis, got a grand gesture of appreciation from the city when the Empire State Building displayed tie-dye lights in Weir’s honor. Tie-dye will forever be a symbol of Weir’s Woodstock Generation. Concerts were also held in his honor, such as “Bushwick’s Dead & Friends” at the Brooklyn Bowl.

These were fitting ways to offer up a recognition of Weir’s rich legacy, for Bob Weir was the rare celebrity whose appeal went beyond his work and fame. While the Dead were instantly identifiable with psychedelia, drug experimentation and a community made up of its hard-core Deadhead fans around the world, Weir made his greatest contributions to the popular culture of the past 60 years through memorable music and an embrace of humanitarian causes dealing with, among others, social justice and the environment.

Through his involvement in the San Francisco rock scene, Weir was linked to the utopian vision that the hippies symbolized in the 1960s, all right. But Weir and his bandmates also had a sensibility to live (and perform music) in the moment and not be trapped by the misty prism of the Sixties. While it would’ve been easy for Weir to lean on the Dead’s history when he played shows in the last 30 years, he never intended for the Dead to be merely a nostalgia act.

How sturdy was the Dead’s popularity? Consider that the Dead had its greatest commercial success a full two decades after it started out, with the song “Touch of Grey,” an ode to getting older, underscoring the Dead’s adaptability to changing times.

Just as his generation evolved, the band did as well, incorporating modern business business techniques to allow fans to have a special concert experience. No wonder the Grateful Dead became justifiably hailed as the rock and roll band of the masses.

“Bobby’s final months reflected the same spirit that defined his life. Diagnosed in July, he began treatment only weeks before returning to his hometown stage for a three-night celebration of 60 years of music at Golden Gate Park,” a statement issued on his behalf said.

The Dead and its audience seemed like one entity, the mutual respect was so great. The Dead helped pioneer sophisticated sound systems in concerts, allowed–no encouraged!–its fans to tape-record shows and share the tapes liberally. This sentiment is verboten at other shows. Weir and the Dead were intuitive enough to realize that their fans were more like partners than strangers and the band embraced them.

Weir was the Dead’s rock and roll heart and spirit. When the Dead threatened to detour concerts with its “drums in space” jamming on stage, invariably Weir brought the proceedings back to a musical core.

Thankless Task

Think about it. Has anybody in rock and roll history ever had a more thankless task than Bobby Weir of the Grateful Dead?

What else would you call the musician who had to play second banana to Jerry Garcia, arguably the most beloved figure in the business? (Garcia died on Aug. 9, 1995, of a heart attack, which was possibly related to diabetes and substance abuse.

Garcia passed at a rehabilitation clinic in his native northern California after years of heroin and cocaine use.)

Nevertheless, Weir, who was five years younger than Garcia, accepted the challenge with grace and grit. He carved out a niche for himself in the band, too. Weir stood for the Dead’s rock and roll heart while his bandmates drifted into endless jams during their concerts. The joke went that Dead concerts ended when the drugs ran out.

Weir was responsible for some of the Dead’s up-tempo classics. He wrote and sang many of the Dead’s signature songs, such as “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Jack Straw,” “Mama Tried” and “One More Saturday Night.”

His ample contributions over the years helped the Dead become one of the most recognizable and celebrated bands of all time. The Dead had a knack for attracting fans from all kinds of corners, ranging from NBA Hall of Famer Bill Walton to Federal Reserve chief Jerome Powell.

Yes, Jerry Garcia was the Dead member that everyone knew and admired. But the band would not nearly have been as successful without Bob Weir’s presence.

As the New York Times noted in its obituary:

As a young man, he played guitar, piano and trumpet. In an event that became part of Grateful Dead lore, a 16-year-old Mr. Weir was wandering with a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., on New Year’s Eve in 1963 when they heard a banjo playing. They followed the sound to a music store, where Mr. Garcia, five years his elder, was preparing to give lessons.

“We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave,” Mr. Weir later recalled. “I had my guitar with me, and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.”

Legacy

Perhaps Weir’s most notable accomplishment was the way he helped keep the Grateful Dead’s legacy intact after Jerry Garcia’s death. Without Garcia, it was assumed, the Dead would soon split up.

But Weir gracefully engineered a continuation of concerts – concerts always being the Dead’s hallmark, even as it released such acclaimed studio albums as Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both in 1970 – in the group’s name. Crucially, Weir did this in a manner that did not seem exploitive or crass to its Deadhead Nation.

Weir had a lifelong affection for his fans and they returned the sentiment to him.