The Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip nearly ended early when Jerry Garcia booted Bob Weir from the band.
Weir — who recently died at age 78, 30 years after Garcia’s death at 53 — recalled that Garcia felt Weir’s shortcomings on the rhythm guitar “hog-tied” the band’s music, according to PrimeTimer.
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The 1968 ouster also included the band’s keyboard player, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, and lasted for a “few months,” Weir recalled.
In a 1992 Grateful Dead Guide blog post, the late Rock & Roll Hall of Famer wrote that the band’s fellow founding members Garcia and Phil Lesh felt Weir and McKernan weren’t keeping up musically.
“We were the junior musicians in the band, and Jerry and Phil in particular thought that we were sort of holding things back,” Weir wrote.
“The music wasn’t able to get as free because it was hog-tied by our playing abilities, which was kind of true.”
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According to Weir, he sent himself to the woodshed and concentrated on improving his skills.
“It wasn’t the best time of my life,” he wrote in a 2011 blog post on the Dead site. “I kept working on guitar and singing. I was thinking about [joining another band], but I figured first things first — I oughta woodshed a bunch.”
Weir recalled that Garcia and Lesh were headed toward fusion jazz, and he and Pigpen weren’t quite there.
“It was complicated and required a great deal of facility on the instruments. So they played without us for a couple of months,” he wrote.
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According to the blog post, Garcia asked band manager Rock Scully to fire Weir and Pigpen. Scully felt they were kicked out as a warning.
“Garcia knew what he was doing,” Scully wrote. “He was just scaring their asses, rattling their cages. They took a couple of weeks off. Weir went and got some more electric guitar training.”
Happily for Deadheads everywhere, Garcia welcomed the two back, and Weir went on to help write the group’s “Sugar Magnolia” and “Playing in the Band” and sing the tongue-twisting travelogue in the Dead’s signature hit, “Truckin’”.
This story The Late Bob Weir Once Recalled Jerry Garcia Booting Him From the Grateful Dead in 1968 first appeared on National Enquirer. Add National Enquirer as a Preferred Source by clicking here.