In the summer of 1968, three years into the Grateful Dead’s existence, the band fired singer and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. Jerry Garcia, the band’s other guitarist and its reluctant leader, and bassist Phil Lesh had decided that Weir and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan were dragging the band down musically. Weir was just 20 years old, the youngest member of the group and the least technically accomplished. But Garcia didn’t have the heart to pull the trigger himself, and he made the band’s manager do the deed. Or at least he tried to. “It didn’t take. We fired them, all right, but they just kept coming back,” Garcia remembered later.
The failure was auspicious. A few months later, the band performed the shows that would be released as Live/Dead, one of the greatest psychedelic albums ever. The first sound heard on the record is Weir’s guitar, which methodically builds “Dark Star” up, sewing together Garcia and Lesh’s riffing. Weir’s place in the Dead was never again in doubt. When the group disbanded after Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir continued to lead or co-lead iterations of the band for another 30 years, culminating in a three-night 60th-anniversary celebration in San Francisco this past August. He died Saturday at 78, from complications of cancer.
Weir lived his entire adult life in the shadow of Garcia, a formidable genius who died too young, but he was more than just a backing musician. Garcia gave the band virtuosity; Lesh, with his avant-garde training, gave it ambition. Weir gave it soul and fun, and his underappreciated guitar playing was the glue that held the whole Dead sound together.
by David A. Graham, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Mark Sullivan/Getty
[ed. Not only was Bobby an excellent rhythm guitarist with a unique phrasing style, he had to sing and remember all the words to most of the Dead's songs (no small feat given all the drugs involved). The above is a great example. Here's another one. See also: Bob Weir Dies at 78 (NBC); and this famous New Yorker profile of the entire band and its cultural influence: Deadhead.]
