American Rock musician Bob Weir performs guitar as he performs on stage, with the band Grateful Lifeless, at Cal Expo Amphitheatre, Sacramento, California, August 5, 1989.
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Bob Weir, the guitarist and singer who, as a vital member of the Grateful Lifeless, helped discovered the sound of the San Francisco counterculture of the Sixties and stored it alive by a long time of countless excursions and marathon jams, has died. He was 78.
Weir’s demise was introduced Saturday in an announcement on his Instagram web page.
“It’s with profound unhappiness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” an announcement on his Instagram account posted Saturday stated. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by family members, after courageously beating most cancers as solely Bobby may. Sadly, he succumbed to underlying lung points.”
Weir joined the Grateful Lifeless — initially the Warlocks — in 1965 in San Francisco at simply 17 years previous. He would spend the subsequent 30 years taking part in on countless excursions with the Grateful Lifeless alongside fellow singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995.
Weir wrote or co-wrote and sang lead vocals on Lifeless classics together with “Sugar Magnolia,” “One Extra Saturday Evening” and “Mexicali Blues.”
After Garcia’s demise, he can be the Lifeless’s most recognizable face. Within the a long time since, he stored taking part in with different tasks that stored alive the band’s music and legendary fan base, together with Lifeless & Firm.
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the street,” the Instagram assertion stated. “A guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the Grateful Lifeless. Bobby will perpetually be a guiding pressure whose distinctive artistry reshaped American music.”
Weir’s demise leaves drummer Invoice Kreutzmann as the one surviving unique member. Founding bassist Phil Lesh died in 2024. The band’s different drummer, Mickey Hart, virtually an unique member since becoming a member of in 1967, can also be alive at 82. The fifth founding member, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, died in 1973.
Lifeless and Firm performed a sequence of live shows for the Grateful Lifeless’s sixtieth anniversary in July at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, drawing some 60,000 followers a day for 3 days.
Born in San Francisco and raised in close by Atherton, Weir was the Lifeless’s youngest member and regarded like a fresh-faced high-schooler in its early years. He was usually much less shaggy than the remainder of the band, however he had a protracted beard like Garcia’s in later years.
The band would survive long gone the hippie second of its beginning, with its ultra-devoted followers often known as Deadheads typically following them on the street in a just about continuous tour that persevered regardless of a long time of music and tradition shifting round them.
Honoree Bob Weir of Grateful Lifeless accepts the 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the 12 months award onstage in the course of the 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the 12 months Honoring The Grateful Lifeless on January 31, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
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“Longevity was by no means a serious concern of ours,” Weir stated when the Lifeless obtained the Grammys’ MusiCares Particular person of the 12 months honor final yr. “Spreading pleasure by the music was all we ever actually had in thoughts, and we obtained loads of that completed.”
Ubiquitous bumper stickers and T-shirts confirmed the band’s cranium brand, the dancing, coloured bears that served as their different image, and signature phrases like “ain’t no time to hate” and “not all who wander are misplaced.”
The Lifeless received few precise Grammys throughout their profession — they have been at all times just a little too esoteric — getting solely a lifetime achievement award in 2007 and the most effective music movie award in 2018.
Simply as uncommon have been hit pop singles. “Contact of Gray,” the 1987 tune that introduced a giant surge within the getting old band’s reputation, was their solely Billboard High 10 hit.
However in 2024, they set a document for all artists with their 59th album in Billboard’s High 40. Forty-one of these got here since 2012, due to the recognition of the sequence of archival albums compiled by David Lemieux.
Their music — known as acid rock at its inception — would pull in blues, jazz, nation, people and psychedelia in lengthy improvisational jams at their live shows.
“I enterprise to say they’re the good American band,” TV character and devoted Deadhead Andy Cohen stated as host of the MusiCares occasion. “What a marvel they’re.”
