The biggest fan of Grateful Dead guitarist and co-founder Bobby Weir, who died Saturday at the age of 78, was perhaps his bandmate Jerry Garcia. “He’s an extraordinarily original player in a world of people who sound like each other,” Garcia told Blair Jackson and David Gans in 1981. Surely one of the most-traveled musicians of the past half-century, Weir helped create not only a personal style but a broader school of playing.
Over their 30 years of performing together until Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir, Garcia, and their Dead bandmates evolved a musical language that has become a genre of American music unto itself. Weir’s idiosyncratic style is embedded in its core, a lysergic conversation between rock, bluegrass, folk, jazz, blues, global rhythms, and avant-garde experimentation. More than ticket sales or streaming numbers, the band’s influence is better measured by the sheer amount of Grateful Dead nights at local bars, groups that use the band’s vast repertoire as starting points, and creative spirits of all stripes continuing to find solidarity with the band’s high-flown freak flag.
Born in 1947 and adopted into an affluent family in Atherton, California, adjacent to Palo Alto, the young Weir had a hard time fitting in. He was dyslexic and an enthusiastic troublemaker. Sent to the Fountain Valley boarding school in Colorado, Weir met his future songwriting partner, John Perry Barlow. “Weir’s always felt himself to be an outsider,” Barlow once assessed. “I’ve never seen any size gathering, from five people in a room to the planet Earth, where Weir didn’t feel outside of it.” Unsurprisingly, Weir didn’t last at Fountain Valley either. He found his chosen family back home in California among the slightly older townie folkies around Stanford.
In 1964, he co-founded Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions with popular local music teacher Jerry Garcia and went electric the next year as the Warlocks. Around the time the group changed their name to the Grateful Dead and fell in with the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests, Weir departed high school for good, not long after his 18th birthday. His education, musical and otherwise, would come from life in and around his new band.
Lyrically, “The Other One,” Weir’s first signature jam with the Dead, was inspired in part by an older mentor, Neal Cassady, his onetime roommate at the band’s 710 Ashbury headquarters in San Francisco, and the amphetamine-guzzling sledgehammer-juggling inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The song’s other inspiration was Weir’s arrest after dropping a water balloon on a police officer from the band’s window after he’d spied the cop going through a hippie’s car on the street below. Musically, the song’s rolling triplets made a canyon-like space for Weir’s developing voice.
Exposed to John Coltrane’s classic quartet by bandmate Phil Lesh, Weir’s early folk influences were supplanted by a vision of becoming the rhythm guitar equivalent of McCoy Tyner’s left hand. Developing his style alongside Garcia’s flocking melodicism and Lesh’s never-the-same-way-once bass counterpoints, Weir soon had to also contend for rhythmic space between the band’s two drummers, as well. But even in the Dead, the junior guitarist Weir struggled. In the summer of 1968, he was nearly fired along with frontman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan for not keeping up. “There was a period where he was not on this planet,” old friend Barlow remarked. “I don’t want to say that he failed the Acid Test, but he certainly got a different score than some folks.”
As the ’60s turned into the ’70s, Weir got his act together, asserting more presence in the band’s improvisation with his fast, colorful filigrees—heard most vividly in 1972-1973 versions of “Playing in the Band,” his other signature Dead jam. And, developing his Cowboy Bobby Ace persona through a songwriting burst that yielded his much-loved 1972 backed-by-the-Dead “solo” debut Ace, he took on a more prominent role within the band. The Dead had never worked with a setlist, but after McKernan could no longer tour with the band, Garcia and Weir began to alternate songs in concert, a format they followed for the rest of their career. For a band that made its reputation (and life) onstage, this new democracy elevated Weir to the status of a visible co-captain.
