Remembering Bob Weir, guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead | Fresh Air

What this episode is about

Bob Weir, the pioneering guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, recently passed away at 78, leaving behind a legacy defined by his inventive rhythm guitar work and the band's iconic improvisational concerts. The Grateful Dead, known for their devoted fanbase and enduring influence, continued to thrive post-Garcia, with Weir remaining active in music, including the release of his original album "Blue Mountain" in 2016.

Key takeaways

• Bob Weir's rhythm guitar was the 'heartbeat' of the Dead's improvisational spirit, proving sometimes it's not the lead that leads.
• From a teenage cowboy to rock royalty, Weir's journey highlights how life experiences can deeply influence artistic expression.
• Weir's storytelling approach contrasts with Garcia's impressionistic style—proving rock can have both narrative and abstract songwriting.
• Weir's songs, steeped in cowboy tradition, show that the essence of Americana lives in unexpected rock legends.
• Despite the Dead's psychedelic reputation, Weir's 'Kai Bossi' reveals a thoughtful take on addiction—reminding us there's depth beyond the haze.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dave Davies (Host) · 5 min speaking
• Bob Weir (Guest) · 13 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Blue Mountain, Josh Ritter
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Blue Mountain, Ken Kesey
4. 12:00 – 15:00: Mil Valley
5. 15:00 – 17:57: Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia

Notable quotes from "Remembering Bob Weir, guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead | Fresh Air"

• Of rock and roll. Spawned by a chance meeting between Weir and Jerry Garcia on New Year's Eve in 1963, the band did plenty of recording, but was probably best known for its…

  about Grateful Dead · at 0:28

• Bob Weir continued to play his own music and was on our show in 2016 when he'd released his first album of original songs in 30 years titled Blue Mountain.

  about Blue Mountain · at 1:31

• Addiction. You know the Grateful Dead had a long and intense history with drugs. like the band got its break as the house band for Ken Keezy's acid tests and ever since then…

  about Ken Kesey · at 6:55

• I told him, Listen, I'm my name is Robert Weir and I live in Mil Valley and I've been doing some research and I turned up some information that might be of considerable interest to you. And he said, Okay, well, I'm on another line.

  about Mil Valley · at 13:59

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Jerry Garcia — Person · Referenced bandmate / comparator in songwriting discussion · 5 mentions · first at 0:31
  Presented as the Grateful Dead's lead guitarist/singer and as Weir's close musical counterpart; his death is used as a key historical marker for the band's end and Weir's later decisions to sing Garcia-led material.
  Grateful Dead, died recently at the age of 78. The Dead were a unique phenomenon of rock and roll. Spawned by a chance meeting between Weir and Jerry Garcia on New Year's Eve…
• Ken Kesey — Person · Referenced cultural figure (counterculture catalyst) · 1 mention · first at 7:06
  Cited to explain the Grateful Dead's early association with psychedelics via Kesey's Acid Tests, framing the band's historical context around drugs and the 1960s counterculture.
• Josh Ritter — Person · Referenced collaborator (co-writer) · 1 mention · first at 1:41
  Mentioned as a co-writer on Weir's album 'Blue Mountain', indicating Weir's later-career songwriting partnership outside the Grateful Dead canon.
  Bob Weir continued to play his own music and was on our show in 2016 when he'd released his first album of original songs in 30 years titled Blue Mountain.

Companies & orgs

• Grateful Dead — Company · Business focus · 10 mentions · first at 0:23
  The band is the central topic of the episode, discussing its history, members, and impact on music.

Products & tech

• Blue Mountain — Product · Secondary owned · 2 mentions · first at 1:38
  Bob Weir's album mentioned as part of his solo career, inspired by his experiences in Wyoming.

Places & events

• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — Event · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:19
  Mentioned as an honor received by the Grateful Dead, highlighting their significance in music history.
  Surviving members continued playing their songs in new groups, including Dead and Company. Weir and the other members of the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
• Kennedy Center Honors — Event · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:25
  Mentioned as an honor received by the Grateful Dead, indicating their lasting cultural impact.
  Given a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 2007 and named Kennedy Center honores in 2024.
• Mil Valley — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 13:59
  Mentioned as the place where Bob Weir lives, adding personal context to his story.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies like the D man together. Just keep trucking.

0:19 Bob Weir, the guitarist, singer, songwriter, and founding member of the Grateful Dead, died recently at the age of 78. The Dead were a unique phenomenon of rock and roll. Spawned by a chance meeting between Weir and Jerry Garcia on New Year's Eve in 1963, the band did plenty of recording, but was probably best known for its long improvisational concerts attended by dedicated followers who traveled on the band's tour route and camped out at multiple shows. While Jerry Garcia was the band's lead guitarist and singer, Weir became known for his inventive rhythm guitar. Bob Pereellis of the New York Times wrote that weir strummed his rhythm chords lightly, nimly, and malleably, charting and shaping the evershifting undercurrents of the dead's songs and jams. While the band officially ended with Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, surviving members continued playing their songs in new groups, including

1:15 Dead and Company. Weir and the other members of the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. given a lifetime achievement Grammy award in 2007 and named Kennedy Center honores in 2024. Bob Weir continued to play his own music and was on our show in 2016 when he'd released his first album of original songs in 30 years titled Blue Mountain. Many of the songs were co-written with Josh Ritter. Weir said the album was inspired by the time when as a teen he ran away to work on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was owned by the parents of John Perry Barlo who later became Weir's songwriting partner. Weer spoke with Fresh Air Sam Brigger and they started with the opening track from the album called Only a River.

2:06 Ocean Shannon, I long to see you. Hey hey your rolling river. W Shannon, I long to see you. Hey, hey, hey. Only you're ever going to make things right. Only you're ever going to make things right. Only you're ever going to make things right.

2:56 You said that this album was inspired by a summer when you ran away to become a cowboy in Wyoming. How old were you? I was 15.

3:03 So, did you already know how to ride? Were you hurting cattle? Yeah, when I was a little kid, uh my folks were sort of in the horsey community and uh and also we uh we used to vacation up in Valley, which in the winter time was a in California here. In the winter time, it was a ski resort. In the summertime, it was a cattle ranch. And um during the summers when we were up there, there was a riding stable that we spent a lot of time at. and um the old cow folks in the who ran the the riding stable uh couple of them took a shine to me and and sort of uh taught me how to ride and and some of the basic skills of of cowboy and you know how to cut cattle and stuff like that. I never did really learn how to rope very well. But by the time I was nine or 10, I I had uh pretty good grasp of uh the basics. But through your career, you've seemed to be drawn to uh cowboy and country songs. Some of them

4:01 you've written like Mexicalei Blues. And then you've also covered a lot of songs like Me and My Uncle, uh Marty Robbins song El Paso. You've also done songs like Johnny Cash's Big River. Why do you think you're drawn to those tunes?

4:15 You know, I've actually wondered that myself. And and you know, it just it occurs to me that I just I lived that lifestyle for a little bit. not just that summer, but uh I'd go back out there and uh and work with Barlo and you know, part of working with Barlo and when when I was doing that was uh we'd live on the ranch and we had uh we had the ranch to run and if I helped out, we'd have more time to write. So I I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff and I kind of got steeped in that tradition a little bit. And also, for what it's worth, when I was a kid living there, uh, in the bunk house, there were, you know, in in the evening, the, uh, the old boys would, uh, they'd pop a cork and they'd tell stories and sing songs.

5:02 And I was the kid with the guitar, so I was their accompaniment. And so, I learned a bunch of that stuff. And, as I say, got steeped in that tradition. And, um, and I just sort of carried it around in my hip pocket for for, you know, for the rest of my days. But um it's not so much the songs that stuck with me as as the delivery

5:23 and uh and particularly this the storytelling aspect of uh of singing those songs of putting them across.

5:31 Um well, I wanted to ask you about that because it I've noticed that uh that it feels like you like songs that have a narrative to them. A lot of your songs um they tell us some kind of a story which I think contrasts with the other main songwriting team of the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and Robin Hunter. Their songs were often like impressionistic. They were like they would generally like evoke a mood or something. Whereas when I listen to your songs, I find myself imagining a specific narrator character. Do you think that's true?

6:04 Well, that's kind of my approach. That's what I'm most comfortable with. For for years, I've uh I've held forth with the opinion that uh that every artist of any stripe is first and foremost a storyteller. And the story can be impressionistic or it can be linear in nature. And I'm comfortable with either of them. Though when I set pen to paper, more often than not, it comes out more or less linear. You know, I I see songs as as uh as little movies.

6:34 Mhm. You know, short movies. And uh and I you know I try to let the characters most fully as fully as possible express themselves and and let the story develop so that there's you know there's intrigue and uh and all that kind of stuff.

6:49 So you have a song on the new album Blue Mountain that's called Kai Bossi which is about uh 12step meetings and addiction. You know the the Grateful Dead had a long and intense history with drugs. like the band got its break as the house band for Ken Keezy's acid tests and ever since then the dead had been linked to psychedelics and you know you've been forthright saying that for a time LSD was very informative to your way of thinking but you know there's also there was a lot of tragedy around drugs and alcohol and the grateful dead band members you know either died from overdose like like Brent Midland or from drug or alcohol-related illnesses like Pigpen and of course Jerry Garcia and I'm I'm not really sure what my question is but I guess I was thinking about all that history and we'll listen to that song and I was wondering how it might have informed the way you wrote it.

7:38 Christ, I don't know how to address that. Um, well, I can't deny that I had a fair bit of uh, you know, either personal experience with uh, with drugs, alcohol or whatever, or um, close friends of mine had uh, intense experiences with them. Um, so I kind of I I guess I know what I'm talking about to some degree when uh when I'm helping a character flesh himself out um in that regard.

8:11 She's takes the double pays my ticket when I sleep. When The Grateful Dead started playing, you were 17 years old and you lived on Ashbury Street at the height of the counterculture in San Francisco and The Grateful Dead and its music was really at the heart of that movement in a lot of ways. You know, at 17, were you prepared for that? It seems like such a young age to have all that thrust upon you.

8:45 I was ready for anything. Come on. Um, I was 17, 18. And uh and the hate ash was popping. Now this was the uh this was the summer of ' 66,

8:59 spring and summer of ' 66. That was the real summer of love. The ' 67 uh the media made it into something that we didn't recognize, you know, and called attention to it and every everything that had rattled loose in uh in the rest of the country uh ended up in in the hate ashbury and things went things went uh kind of sideways there by then. But in ' 66, the Ashbury was a a a youth ghetto, but it was, you know, it was a joyful place.

9:30 Um, you were adopted when you were born and you met your birth parents pretty late in life when you were around 50 years old and and I guess you had a close relationship with your father until he died last year. Um, what did you learn about yourself from finally getting to meet him? Well, for instance, uh little things like I always go outdoors to clip my fingernails and toenails, and he did, too.

9:58 Um there are little mannerisms that uh that you would think that would be you'd pick up by watching, but they were there. We we walked, we carried ourselves the same way. We had the same sort of sense of humor.

10:13 Um that kind of thing. He was a gentleman. Uh he was an innate gentleman and uh and I think of myself as as such as as well. And he had a quality of leadership. Uh he was basically born to it and people always relied on him for it. And I've found that uh that that's more or less come my way as well. You know,

10:39 it's a gig. Everybody has to have one. And um people look to me for leadership a lot. It's just something that I can provide. It's not something that I want. You know, I'd rather people left me alone, but uh in that regard, but uh but someone's got to do it.

10:56 So over the years, you must have imagined um what your birth parents were like. How did that compare to actually meeting them?

11:04 As it turns out, my u my dad uh he had no idea I existed to begin with. He had had an affair with a girl in uh in Tucson where they were going to school and uh she got pregnant and very quietly slipped away and uh and had me in San Francisco, the uh famous liberal city back then and then came back and never let on that anything had happened.

11:29 And so when we met, you know, it was it was a big surprise to both of them. Now, I found out about his existence uh my my birth mother uh after my adopted parents a number of years after my adopted parents had checked out, she contacted me because I' I'd tried to find her and the uh it was not possible. So she she ended up contacting me and um she had 12 other kids so I didn't I didn't feel like I I needed to complicate her life all that much.

12:04 But we kept in touch and I'd call her on Mother's Day and every now and again we'd see each other and stuff like that. I'd send her flowers, that kind of that kind of thing. But she gave me uh she gave me my birth father's uh information last she knew of it. And uh he was uh a guy named Jack Parour and he had been a student at the University of Arizona. And so um I got a private eye with about within about 10 minutes he turned out this the information that he was the uh commanding officer at the uh local uh at our local Air Force base.

12:42 And uh I sort of packed that under my pillow for a few years because I'm pathologically anti- athoritarian. And um and I I didn't figure that uh I needed the rejection that I was sure to find from this guy uh who's probably some sort of military authoritarian kind of guy. Then not long after Jerry checked out, my curiosity got to the point where I couldn't live with it anymore. And so, uh, I had to find find that out. And, uh, so, you know, I I figured I had three choices. I could drive up to his house in in Nevada up north of where I live, you know, about oh, maybe 8 10 miles from as a as a crow flies from where I live. and uh just knock on his door. And I I figured, okay, that I don't want my first and last vision of my father watching him clutch his heart and fall over backwards.

13:41 Yeah. Uh I figured I could write him a a letter, but he might crumble that up and throw it away. So I I figured, okay, I'll I'll call him. And so I did. And u he was on another line. He you know, I was I was disturbing him at the time. He said, listen, can you call back in 10 minutes? I told him, "Listen, I'm my name is Robert Weir and I live in Mil Valley and I've been doing some research and I turned up some information that might be of considerable interest to you." And he said, "Okay, well, I'm on another line right now. Can you call me back in 10 minutes?" And so that was a long 10 minutes I waited.

14:16 Yeah. Called him back and said, "Can I ask you a question or two regarding certain events that took place in Tucson 50 years ago?" and he got real quiet and uh he said, 'Well, okay. And I said, 'Well, did you know and were you perhaps romantically involved with a young lady by the name of Phyllis back in that time? And he said, "Well," and he was alone. I could kind of hear it over the phone. He he said "Well yeah." And I said, "Uh, okay. Well, sir, I don't know how many kids you have, but there's a a strong uh strong likelihood that you have one more than you know."

14:57 And uh he got real quiet. And then he said, "Okay, the only uh Bob Weiran I know of is this guy who sings and plays with the Grateful Dead. Apparently his kids were uh fans." And I said, "Well, sir, that would be me." And then it got quiet again. and we talked for a little while and then we met the next day for lunch at both of our favorite Mexican restaurant in uh here in Marin County and we got real tight real fast.

15:31 There's a there's a touching story that um one of his sons I think died of spinal cancer. Um

15:38 yeah, but he was a musician too. Yeah. And the family gave you that guitar and for a long time you would play that guitar on stage, right?

15:48 Yeah. It finally got stolen. Oh, it did? Oh, that's terrible. Yeah. And the son was a was a Grateful Dead fan, wasn't he?

15:58 Well, all four of his sons were Grateful Dead fans, though. The the one the one who I never met was probably the least a Grateful Dead fan.

16:07 Um, he was more on his own. He was kind of into uh you know that countryesque style of uh of music that was real popular back in the 70s. He was a flashy uh but good telecaster player.

16:23 You and Jerry Garcia were the two lead singers of the Grateful Dead and uh and he died in 1995 and you've said before um that he was like an older brother to you. it at some point you started singing his songs in shows. Was that was that tough for you? Was that a an easy decision to make? And was it or was it hard for you to sing those songs at first?

16:47 No, actually um it was a while before I decided I was going to go ahead and do it. I I just had to feel it out. I knew it was coming, but I didn't know when. Um and I so I just waited until, you know, until the time was right. You know, early on with Rat Dog, uh, after Jerry checked out, um, I didn't do much Grateful Dead material at all. I did as as little as I could, um, to still keep people coming in the doors, but I wasn't I wasn't quite ready to go back there. And I, it's not an emotional sort of deal. Um, I guess there was a little of that involved, but I just wanted to take a pause. It just seemed like I ought to

17:31 Mhm. And then when I started doing it again slowly it uh all the songs came and and uh and one by one they uh they just sort of they demanded that uh okay it's time I got to breathe again and you can help me do this and so I I went with it.

17:50 Well Bobber thanks so much for speaking with us. Well, thank you.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Remembering Bob Weir, guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead | Fresh Air"?

Dave Davies (Host), Bob Weir (Guest).

What is "Remembering Bob Weir, guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead | Fresh Air" about?

Bob Weir, the pioneering guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, recently passed away at 78, leaving behind a legacy defined by his inventive rhythm guitar work and the band's iconic improvisational concerts. The Grateful Dead, known for their devoted fanbase and enduring influence, continued to thrive post-Garcia, with Weir remaining active in music, including the release of his…

What is mentioned in this Fresh Air episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, Blue Mountain, Ken Kesey, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Honors. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Remembering Bob Weir, guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead | Fresh Air"?

The episode runs 18 min; the transcript is about 3,027 words in 39 timestamped sections.

More from Fresh Air

• All analyzed episodes
• Books mentioned on Fresh Air
• People mentioned on Fresh Air
• Topics mentioned on Fresh Air