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Bob Weir, the veteran rock musician who helped guide the legendary band the Grateful Dead through decades of change and success, has died at age 78, according to a statement posted to his verified Instagram account on Friday.
The Instagram statement, posted by his daughter Chloe Weir, said he was surrounded by loved ones when he died. Bob Weir had been diagnosed with cancer in July and “succumbed to underlying lung issues”, the statement said.
“Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music,” Chloe Weir wrote. “There is no final curtain here, not really. Only the sense of someone setting off again.”
She requested privacy for the family and was thankful for the support they received. “May we honor him not only in sorrow, but in how bravely we continue with open hearts, steady steps, and the music leading us home. Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.”
Along with his late fellow Grateful Dead co-founder and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who was at the center of the Deadhead universe, Weir was one of the group’s two frontmen and main vocalists for most of the band’s 60-year history.
Photograph: Kyle Gustafson/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
It was Weir who sang the verses on the band’s trademark boogie anthem, Truckin, and who wrote such key songs as Sugar Magnolia, Playing in the Band and Jack Straw.
The youthful, ponytailed “Bobby” grew into an eclectic songwriter whose handsome appearance and diverse musical influences helped broaden the band’s appeal. British newspaper the Independent called Weir “arguably rock’s greatest, if most eccentric, rhythm guitarist”.
After Garcia’s death at age 53 in 1995, Weir carved out an interesting if somewhat neglected solo career – much of it with his band, RatDog – and participated in reunions of surviving Dead members in different configurations.
Weir was born Robert Hall Parber when he was born on 16 October 1947. He was placed for adoption and raised by his parents in Atherton, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. He began playing the guitar at age 13 and soon began hanging out in folk clubs, performing bluegrass music.
It was at the Palo Alto club Tangent where he first saw Garcia playing the banjo.
In 1964, he met Garcia, a San Francisco Bay Area fold musician, and the pair performed as the Warlocks, which then morphed into the Grateful Dead.
The athletic Weir, who enjoyed football, was, at 16, the youngest member of the original band and was sometimes referred to as “the kid”.
He was still in high school when he joined up with Garcia, bass guitarist Phil Lesh, organist-vocalist-harmonica player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and drummer Bill Kreutzmann.
Lesh recalled in his 2005 autobiography that he and Garcia had to make a promise to young Bob’s mother. “The long and short of it was that if Jerry and I promised to make sure that Bob got to school every day, and that he got home all right after the gigs, she would allow him to remain in the band,” wrote Lesh, who died in October 2024 at age 84. “We somehow convinced her that we would indeed see that he got to school every day. In San Francisco. At 8:00 a.m.”
Eventually Weir moved in to the communal Dead house at 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco. The group’s first album, “The Grateful Dead,” was released in March 1967.
As the band’s rhythm guitarist, Weir often played little fills, riffs and figures instead of straight chords. “I derived a lot of what I do on guitar from listening to piano players,” he told GQ magazine in 2019. His musical tastes were eclectic, ranging from Chuck Berry to cowboy songs to R&B and reggae.
In 1972, he launched a solo album, Ace – a de facto Grateful Dead album featuring the band and including well-regarded Weir songs such as Cassidy, Black-Throated Wind, Mexicali Blues and Looks Like Rain. Many of his best-known songs were co-written with his old school friend, John Perry Barlow, who died in 2018.
In 2017, Weir was appointed as a United Nations development program goodwill ambassador to support the agency’s work to end poverty while fighting climate change.
Weir married Natascha Muenter in 1999. They had two daughters.
“Looking back,” Weir once said, “I guess I have lived an unusual life.”
