{"id":129593,"date":"2026-01-11T23:23:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-11T23:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/129593\/"},"modified":"2026-01-11T23:23:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T23:23:11","slug":"bob-weir-was-a-symbol-of-the-grateful-deads-unrivaled-endurance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/129593\/","title":{"rendered":"Bob Weir was a symbol of the Grateful Dead’s unrivaled endurance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In June 2024, I sat with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer backstage at Sphere in Las Vegas, where Dead & Company was 16 shows into a raved-about weekend residency<\/a> that would ultimately stretch to the middle of 2025.<\/p>\n

At one point, I asked the three what they did between gigs. Hart said he was on a plane home to California every Saturday night: \u201cI leave here at 11:30, and by 2 o\u2019clock it\u2019s lights out.\u201d Mayer echoed his bandmate, describing his attempt to \u201cgo back to my life\u201d in Los Angeles on Mondays.<\/p>\n

Not Weir, though. Turned out the guitarist had rented a place in town and was spending his days off soaking up whatever there was to soak up under the hot desert sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cThought I\u2019d stick around,\u201d he said with a little shrug.<\/p>\n

Weir\u2019s answer came to mind when news broke Saturday that the founding member of the Grateful Dead had died at 78 after being diagnosed with cancer in July.<\/p>\n

Having formed the Dead with frontman Jerry Garcia<\/a> in 1965 \u2014 the two met when Weir heard someone plucking a banjo in a music store in Palo Alto \u2014 Weir played with the band for 30 years until Garcia\u2019s death in 1995. Then he spent 30 more keeping the Dead\u2019s legend alive with a succession of projects including the Other Ones, Furthur and Dead & Company built around the group\u2019s rangy yet instantly identifiable blend of rock, country, folk and blues.<\/p>\n

Once regarded as the band\u2019s kid brother \u2014 not to mention its youthful heartthrob \u2014 Weir became a whiskery symbol of the Dead\u2019s unrivaled endurance.<\/p>\n

Musically, he supplied slippery rhythm-guitar riffs for Garcia to solo against; he sang lead occasionally, too, as in \u201cSugar Magnolia\u201d and \u201cTruckin\u2019,\u201d to name two of the hookier numbers from a catalog nobody ever measured in radio hits. Weir\u2019s playing was nimble and intuitive, his voice a sly croon that got appealingly craggy with age.<\/p>\n

But just as important as his sound was Weir\u2019s attitude \u2014 his determination to keep finding new ways to make the Dead\u2019s music mean new things to new people.<\/p>\n

\"Jerry <\/p>\n

Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir perform with the Grateful Dead in London in 1972.<\/p>\n

(Michael Putland \/ Getty Images)<\/p>\n

He collaborated widely, making friends of the varied likes of Wynonna Judd, the National\u2019s Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the teen-pop brothers of Hanson. And he seemed to relish showing up in photographs next to unexpected admirers, among them Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. (Be it a Yosemite Sam mustache or a pair of denim short-shorts, Weir understood better than some pop stars the power of a great look.)<\/p>\n

The Sphere show, which put Dead & Company amid a lavish multimedia spectacle that employed materials from the Grateful Dead\u2019s expansive archives, was thought by many to be Mayer\u2019s baby.<\/p>\n

And indeed in my conversation with the band, Mayer described the countless hours he\u2019d spent overseeing the fine-tuning of the show\u2019s visuals. But it was Weir who spoke of how important it was that the production, which he likened to an opera, fit into the story the Dead had been telling for six decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just continuing on with it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

After the interview, I was standing around in a hallway chatting with some folks from Dead & Company\u2019s team when Mayer popped out of his dressing room to offer a final thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I talk about the idea of a leadership role in this band, that\u2019s possibly true in the sense of an admin thing,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut on that stage, Bob Weir is the leader. He calls every shot, and at no time will that ever change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In June 2024, I sat with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer backstage at Sphere in Las…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[11416,66342,1804,7363,22001,14897,38728,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,63861,66741,66740,24843,1860,66739,66738],"class_list":["post-129593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-band","tag-bob-weir","tag-company","tag-country","tag-folk","tag-garcia","tag-grateful-dead","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-mayer","tag-mickey-hart","tag-music-store","tag-saturday-night","tag-show","tag-symbol","tag-unrivaled-endurance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}