Bob Weir, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and co-founder of the Grateful Dead, whose songs about sunshine daydreams and truckin’ helped turn the jam band into a 60-year musical empire, has died at age 78.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” Weir’s family wrote in a statement; a date of death was not immediately available. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.”
“Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music,” the statement added. “His work did more than fill rooms with music; it was warm sunlight that filled the soul, building a community, a language, and a feeling of family that generations of fans carry with them. Every chord he played, every word he sang was an integral part of the stories he wove. There was an invitation: to feel, to question, to wander, and to belong.”
As the band’s co-lead singer, writer, and guitarist beside Jerry Garcia, his elliptical riffs, eccentric song structures and slightly off-kilter stage presence made him an intrinsic ingredient to the Dead, up to and beyond its demise following Garcia’s death in 1995. Weir often went under-recognized compared to the larger-than-life Garcia (one of the first songs he wrote in the Dead was called “The Other One”). Yet, the band’s bassist Phil Lesh characterized Weir’s contribution as that of “a stealth machine.”
Robert Hall Weir was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1947, to a college student who gave him up for adoption. He was raised in an affluent Bay Area suburb, where he managed to get kicked out of both preschool and the Cub Scouts, and suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia. At Fountain Valley, a Colorado school for boys with behavioral problems, he met John Perry Barlow, who would become his most frequent lyricist.
Weir began playing guitar at thirteen and was soon hanging out at the Tangent, a Palo Alto folk club, where he performed bluegrass numbers with the Uncalled Four and first saw Jerry Garcia playing banjo during a “hoot” night. Weir picked up his first guitar licks from David Nelson and future Jefferson Airplane member Jorma Kaukonen.
On New Year’s Eve, 1965, Weir and his friends heard banjo music emerging from Dana Morgan’s Music Store. He went in and found Garcia, and the two decided to form a band. The acoustic Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions evolved into the electric Warlocks, who changed their name to the Grateful Dead.
As the youngest and best-looking member of the Dead, Weir had to pay some dues. Too much LSD during the group’s stint as house band for Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests made Weir somewhat withdrawn, as Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh were entwining more deeply on a musical level. “I was definitely low man on the totem pole,” he told Rolling Stone in 1989, “especially at the beginning. And for a long time I had to just shut up and take it.”
The lyrics to “The Other One” described Weir’s introduction to both LSD and Neal Cassady, the trickster hero of Jack Kerouac’s beat-generation masterpiece On the Road, with whom Weir shared a room in the Dead’s infamous 710 Ashbury Street house. In 1968, Weir and fellow founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were booted from the band for their musical deficiencies, though both returned within months.
Throughout the Seventies, Weir thrived as a member of a band that could deliver music of nearly ineffable warmth and country-rock majesty – as on their pair of 1970 masterpieces, Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty – while also playing more freely improvised music to more listeners than any band in history. Weir sang the band’s country covers and his own original material, and played rhythm guitar in a brilliantly eccentric manner that belied the job’s second-string implications – even while soundman Dan Healy was turning him down in the mix. Lesh described Weir’s technique as “quirky, whimsical and goofy,” while Weir claimed jazz pianist McCoy Tyner’s left hand as his greatest influence.
With Pigpen’s death in 1972, Weir stepped into the second-vocalist role smoothly. Ace, his first solo album, established him as the band’s second most fruitful songwriting source with solo songs-turned-Dead standards like “Playing in the Band,” “One More Saturday Night,” and “Cassidy.”
Usually alternating lead vocals with Garcia, he developed a repertoire that ranged from country-rock originals and rhythmically unorthodox tunes to his ambitious and gorgeous “Weather Report Suite.” He also began gigging outside the Dead with a vatiety of acts: First with Kingfish in 1974, then the guitarist formed the Bob Weir Band with keyboardist Brent Mydland – who later joined the Dead – in the late Seventies and would release two albums with Bobby and the Midnites in the Eighties. His second solo album, 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool, proved he could sound as slick as any other California rocker.
Over the course of the Eighties, Weir would have to compensate onstage as Garcia sank into drug addiction – and later admitted that he also sometimes served as “bag man” for the guitarist’s drugs. Garcia temporarily recovered toward the end of the decade, an era Weir lauded as the Dead’s finest era. “For me, that was our peak,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “We could hear and feel each other thinking, and we could intuit each other’s moves. Jerry, Brent, and I reached new plateaus as singers. We packed a punch.”
Though hit hard by Garcia’s August 1995 death, Weir continued to perform; as he famously sang in one Dead classic, “The Music Never Stopped.” His band RatDog played his Dead material and originals, and Weir eventually began singing Garcia’s own material in various 21st-century configurations of former Grateful Dead members, including the Other Ones, the Dead, and Furthur. After collapsing onstage with Furthur in 2013 and canceling RatDog performances in 2014, Weir admitted that he struggled with his own addiction to painkillers.
As the remaining Grateful Dead members approached their golden anniversary in 2015, Weir was the first to support a reunion, telling Rolling Stone, “If there are issues we have to get past, I think that we owe it to ourselves to man up and get past them. If there are hatchets to be buried, then let’s get to work. Let’s start digging.”
Following the surviving members’ Fare Thee Well concerts celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary in 2015, Weir enlisted one of the gig’s guests, John Mayer, to join him, Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and other Dead associates in the new offshoot Dead & Company. That group would keep the spirit of the Dead alive for another decade, culminating in a 2023 “Final Tour” and two stints at Las Vegas’ Sphere.
“We speak a language that nobody else speaks,” Weir told Rolling Stone in March 2025. “We communicate, we kick stuff back and forth, and then make our little statement in a more universal language. For us, it’s a look or a motion with one shoulder, or the way you reflect a phrase or something that tips off the other guys where you’re going with this. And then they work on being where you’re headed, getting there with a little surprise for you. That’s a formula that’s worked real well for us over the years, and there just aren’t enough of us left now to do that anymore.”
Weir’s third and final solo studio album, Blue Mountain, arrived in 2016. Two years later, the guitarist embarked on yet another musical project as Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros, alongside bassist/producer Don Was and drummer Jay Lane.
In December 2024, shortly after the October 2024 death of Dead bassist Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s surviving members were recipients of the Kennedy Center honors. Dead & Company marked the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary with a three-night stand at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August. Those concerts marked Weir’s final performances, ending his “long strange trip” onstage.
“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. Those performances, emotional, soulful, and full of light, were not farewells, but gifts. Another act of resilience,” Weir’s family added in their statement.
“There is no final curtain here, not really. Only the sense of someone setting off again. He often spoke of a 300-year legacy, determined to ensure the songbook would endure long after him. May that dream live on through future generations of Dead Heads. And so we send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing. A reward for a life worth livin’.”