The Grateful Dead guitarist who kept the hippie flame
Bob Weir was the quiet linchpin of the Grateful Dead. Though he was uninterested in competing with the mythical presence of Jerry Garcia, saying fans’ deification had ultimately killed the frontman, Weir was a fan favorite: the good-looking one in the very short jean shorts. As a rhythm guitarist with precise timing and inventive chord voicing—in live shows he would play notes from a song’s chords in varying octaves or an unconventional order—he bridged Garcia’s long, noodling guitar solos with bassist Phil Lesh’s effervescent countermelodies. Several of Weir’s compositions, like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Truckin’” and “Playing in the Band,” became standards, helping establish the Dead’s blend of rock, blues, folk, and country. And his constant playfulness onstage helped drive the band’s signature improvisations. We “state a theme and take it for a walk in the woods,” Weir said in 2010. “If I were playing a note-for-note set every night for all these years, I think I would have put a gun to my head.”
Robert Hall Weir was adopted as an infant and raised in the affluent town of Atherton, near San Francisco. His undiagnosed dyslexia “managed to get him kicked out of both preschool and the Cub Scouts,” said Rolling Stone. Instead of school, he devoted himself to piano and guitar, and at age 16 he wandered into a Palo Alto music store where Jerry Garcia was preparing to give banjo lessons. As soon as the two started jamming, they decided to start a jug band. By 1965, it had morphed into the Grateful Dead, the house band for author Ken Kesey’s “Acid Test” LSD parties. The group became the center of a hippie culture dominated by drugs and the “flower power values of peace, love, and anti-Vietnam war protests,” said The Guardian. While they only had one hit single, “Touch of Grey” (1987), “their devoted live audience made them one of the most successful touring artists” ever. The Dead “proved unusually resistant to time,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. Even after their 1970s heyday, a “self-sustaining world” of Deadheads continued selling weed and tie-dyes as they followed the group from city to city. The woman who would become Weir’s wife followed him, too: The two met when he was in his 30s and she was a 15-year-old who sneaked backstage. But he maintained they were platonic at first, and they didn’t marry until much later. It was only when he was “edging toward 50,” he said, that he realized he didn’t want to remain “a rock ’n’ roll tomcat.”
After three decades as “Pied Pipers of the hippie movement,” the Grateful Dead broke up when Garcia died in rehab in 1995, said The New York Times. Weir, though, kept touring for the rest of his life, even after getting cancer last year. He founded several other bands, some of them tribute acts like “Dead & Company,” and was a committed collaborator, playing with Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Sammy Hagar, and myriad other musicians. “I hope I’m remembered for bringing our culture and other cultures together,” Weir said in 2025. “I’m hoping that people of varying persuasions will find something they can agree on in the music that I’ve offered and find each other through it.”
