{"id":138300,"date":"2026-01-18T01:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T01:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/138300\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T01:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T01:05:08","slug":"deadheads-joan-baez-and-john-mayer-flood-sf-to-mourn-bob-weir-and-the-end-of-an-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/138300\/","title":{"rendered":"Deadheads, Joan Baez, and John Mayer flood SF to mourn Bob Weir \u2014 and the end of an era"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Bob Weir, a co-founder of the Grateful Dead, died at the age of 78 last week, Deadheads in San Francisco have been drawn closer, bonded by shared loss and gratitude.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve gathered in the thousands on streets of the Haight, the meadows of Golden Gate Park, and Civic Center at Weir\u2019s memorial on Saturday, not only to honor the San Francisco native who for so many years was a beacon of the city\u2019s culture, but also to dance to the tunes that brought them all together in the first place.<\/p>\n

For Michael deLeon, though, these gatherings haven\u2019t relieved the grief \u2014 not only for Weir but for the band itself. He recalls that when Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995, it marked the end of the original band. But now, after the passing of Phil Lesh in 2024 and then Weir, deLeon is ready to admit this feels like something final: \u201cthe end of an era.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AMaura Cotter and Seth Shapiro attend a tribute to the late Bob Weir at the Civic Center. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard<\/p>\n

Fighting back tears on Saturday afternoon at the Civic Center, moments before Weir\u2019s memorial began, he said he\u2019s spent the last week binging YouTube videos of the band\u2019s concerts, searching for the spark that once carried him through decades of shows in muddy fields and festival grounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s gone,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s what I feel more than anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Mickey Hart, a drummer for the band and its most well-known surviving member, took the stage at the memorial, it was clear he felt the same way, even if he clung to hope about how the music would live on long past its makers through the fans.<\/p>\n

\u201cBob liked to talk about where the music would be in 300 years,\u201d said Hart. \u201cAfter watching it all build for 60 years, he could envision the depth of our impact hundreds of years down the line.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe songs of our lives are yours now,\u201d he added. \u201cIf it was not for you, there would be no us. Be sure of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AJohn Mayer, who co-founded Dead & Company with Weir, shared his memories of the late musician. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard\"AThousands came out to mourn the recently passed Weir and dance to decades of his music. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard<\/p>\n

The most emotional speech of the afternoon came from John Mayer, a founding member when Dead & Company formed in 2015, who toured around the country with Weir before playing their final shows as part of a three-day festival at Golden Gate Park in August to ring in the original band\u2019s 60th anniversary.<\/p>\n

Mayer said that he and Weir were born on the same day, 30 years apart, and noted how the two learned to trust each other\u2019s intuitions despite their generational gap. He said that the entire time he played with the band \u2014 now speaking entirely in the past tense \u2014 he was both a performer and a fan. Every time he wrapped up a show, he remarked, he too would need a long rest to reenergize, and he too would be counting down the days until the next one.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now it\u2019s easy to feel as if time is speeding up and taking so much from us all,\u201d Mayer said. \u201cBut, I would remind you, as I have tried to remind myself this past week, just how many nights we all lived so fully in each second, hanging on every word of Bobby\u2019s, following the music around twists and turns through forests and over majestic vistas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the other tributes were virtual, like those sent in from 49ers players Nick Bosa and George Kittle. Others, like Mayor Daniel Lurie\u2019s, were short and sweet. Weir\u2019s youngest daughter led the crowd in 108 seconds of silence.<\/p>\n

Joan Baez recalled that Weir was the only other person she knew who danced barefoot on stage. Nancy Pelosi did her best to tie Weir\u2019s efforts to her own, claiming \u201cthat music, like democracy, is not fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is something we make together,\u201d she said. \u201cThe world is a better place because of Bobby Weir.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TwoSa\u2019rai Gutierrez, left, and her sister Sadie-Lou Gutierrez played during the tribute, which included fans of all ages. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard<\/p>\n

For DeLeon, like many others, the long, strange trip started as a teenager. He was a freshman at Washington High School when he skipped class to see the Grateful Dead \u2014 and trip acid \u2014 for the first time. Over the course of the next five decades, he would listen to the band high and drunk in his army barracks, and, once he got out of the military, see them in concert as many as 20 times a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI keep hoping I\u2019ll run into some friends I made back in the day,\u201d deLeon said, looking out into the crowd of Deadheads. \u201cIt\u2019s not so much about the band as it is about the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sentiment held true for Iddei Yasoda, a 70-year-old who discovered the band after moving to America from Japan, where he called himself a misfit for not committing to the traditional life path of working for a corporation after college. In the Grateful Dead, he found something he\u2019d been missing, \u201ca place where he could belong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI found my community \u2014 a place I could fit into,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI wasn\u2019t a misfit anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"FourBuddhist monks chant during a tribute to the late co-founder of the Grateful Dead. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard\"AA person holds up an image of the late Bob Weir. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Bob Weir, a co-founder of the Grateful Dead, died at the age of 78 last week, Deadheads…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[21399,38728,330,101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-138300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-civic-center","9":"tag-grateful-dead","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-san-francisco","12":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","13":"tag-san-francisco-news","14":"tag-sf","15":"tag-sf-headlines","16":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138300","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=138300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}