Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist, co-lead vocalist and one of the primary songwriters for the Grateful Dead, died Saturday at the age of 78. His passing leaves only two surviving founding members of the band, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, both of whom performed with Weir as part of what is likely the last “official” Dead offshoot band, Dead and Company.
Often seen as the little brother figure to the larger-than-life Dead co-founder Jerry Garcia, Weir was the subject of a documentary appropriately titled, “The Other One” — which was also the name of a Dead song known for its particularly freaky jams when played live.
The mystery and the adventure and the promise of the new — even now, that’s the draw of a Dead show.
Weir, who was only 16 when he first started playing with Garcia, was known for rocking his signature short jean shorts on stage, and for being the relative sex symbol among a comparatively motley-looking group of hairy hippies. Among the band’s best-loved songs, Weir had a primary hand in tunes like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Cassidy,” “Jack Straw,” “Estimated Prophet,” and “The Music Never Stopped.”
Never heard of any of those? You’re not alone. That’s one of the most curious (and to the band’s critics, infuriating) things about the Dead: They’re a titan of classic rock-and-roll, and basically had no hits.
The Grateful Dead’s one hit single, “Touch of Grey,” reached No. 9 on the Billboard charts in 1987. They had only a handful of radio-friendly studio tracks, and yet they’re one of the most enduring, iconic and highest-grossing live acts of all time. And they still draw, as evidenced by eight years of stadium tours by Dead and Company, followed by several residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas and a run of shows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last summer to commemorate the Dead’s 60th anniversary. Even Dead cover bands, like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) and Dark Star Orchestra, regularly fill huge venues like Red Rocks.
Despite its unconventional path to superstardom, of any rock band born in the 1960s — with the exception of the Beatles — I’d argue the Grateful Dead’s music stands the best chance of enduring among future generations.
As “kids these days” stop buying guitars as a right of passage, and as rock-and-roll continues its terminal descent from being the dominant genre of popular music, there are a number of reasons for why young people continue to gravitate toward the Dead. Among them is the fact that although the band stopped releasing original music decades ago, the ways the songbook is performed have continued to evolve radically over the years, in keeping with the Dead’s spirit of improvisation, collaboration and generosity toward young musicians.
The Grateful Dead’s first gig (billed as the Warlocks) took place in a Northern California pizza parlour in May 1965. For the next three decades they would play thousands of shows — including Woodstock and its evil twin, Altamont. They would evolve from their early bluegrass and blues-heavy sound into something more psychedelic, heavy on jams — many of them a gormless mess, but still more of them capturing an ecstatic and transcendent musical kaleidoscope.
They’d incorporate jazz, funk, even disco into their sound (again, with various degrees of success, but never inhibited by a fear of failure). But they were always a dance band. People came to Dead shows to dance. And they still do.
When Garcia, the group’s de facto leader, died of a heart attack in a rehabilitation center in August 1995, the Grateful Dead never performed under that name again. But there were many Dead side projects, mostly led by Weir or bassist Phil Lesh, who died in 2024.
They were always a dance band. People came to Dead shows to dance. And they still do. Deadheads are fond of touting the fact that no two Dead shows are the same — setlists are never duplicated — and it’s rare for the band to play the same song twice during a particular run of shows. To that end, no two Dead side-project bands are the same, either. Whether under names like Furthur, Rat Dog, Wolf Bros, etc., Weir’s bands typically played at a slower tempo, while Lesh’s virtuoso “Phil and Friends” pickup bands changed so often that the audience not only didn’t know what songs would be played, they didn’t even know what style the band would play in. The mystery and the adventure and the promise of the new — even now, that’s the draw of a Dead show. And the Dead not only continues to bring in younger fans, grumpy Gen Xers like myself — who formerly made a show of their disdain for boomer hippies like the Dead — have come around in recent years as “mid-life Deadheads,” a phenomenon I wrote about in 2023. The music writer Steven Hyden noted in his book, “Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the Center of Classic Rock,” that Weir and Lesh, in particular, took “a lead role in handpicking the people who will carry their music forward once they’re gone.” I was one of the delighted — and stunned — audience members who saw Weir join Joe Russo’s Almost Dead on stage for their 10th anniversary show at Brooklyn Bowl in 2023, and I was also in the audience for Lesh’s last New York area show at the Capitol Theater in 2024, when he performed his entire final encore with JRAD as his backing band. Next weekend, JRAD is coming back to the Cap for a run of sold-out shows, and I’ll be there with a few thousand friends, laughing and dancing and maybe crying a little bit, but all in joyful remembrance of Bobby — listening to the music evolve some more. Weir, who was reportedly diagnosed with cancer in July, leaves behind his wife Natascha and daughters, Monet and Chloe. It’s the Dead’s anarchic spirit of freedom that places no limits on what the music could become. And it’s the generosity and humility of guys like Bobby Weir who gave the gift of the Dead to generations he’ll never get to see.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW. 
