In June 2024, I sat with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer backstage at Sphere in Las Vegas, where Dead & Company was 16 shows into a raved-about weekend residency that would ultimately stretch to the middle of 2025.
At one point, I asked the three what they did between gigs. Hart said he was on a plane home to California every Saturday night: “I leave here at 11:30, and by 2 o’clock it’s lights out.” Mayer echoed his bandmate, describing his attempt to “go back to my life” in Los Angeles on Mondays.
Not Weir, though. Turned out the guitarist had rented a place in town and was spending his days off soaking up whatever there was to soak up under the hot desert sun.
“Thought I’d stick around,” he said with a little shrug.
Weir’s answer came to mind when news broke Saturday that the founding member of the Grateful Dead had died at 78 after being diagnosed with cancer in July.
Having formed the Dead with frontman Jerry Garcia in 1965 — the two met when Weir heard someone plucking a banjo in a music store in Palo Alto — Weir played with the band for 30 years until Garcia’s death in 1995. Then he spent 30 more keeping the Dead’s legend alive with a succession of projects including the Other Ones, Furthur and Dead & Company built around the group’s rangy yet instantly identifiable blend of rock, country, folk and blues.
Once regarded as the band’s kid brother — not to mention its youthful heartthrob — Weir became a whiskery symbol of the Dead’s unrivaled endurance.
Musically, he supplied slippery rhythm-guitar riffs for Garcia to solo against; he sang lead occasionally, too, as in “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin’,” to name two of the hookier numbers from a catalog nobody ever measured in radio hits. Weir’s playing was nimble and intuitive, his voice a sly croon that got appealingly craggy with age.
But just as important as his sound was Weir’s attitude — his determination to keep finding new ways to make the Dead’s music mean new things to new people.
He collaborated widely, making friends of the varied likes of Wynonna Judd, the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the teen-pop brothers of Hanson. And he seemed to relish showing up in photographs next to unexpected admirers, among them Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. (Be it a Yosemite Sam mustache or a pair of denim short-shorts, Weir understood better than some pop stars the power of a great look.)
The Sphere show, which put Dead & Company amid a lavish multimedia spectacle that employed materials from the Grateful Dead’s expansive archives, was thought by many to be Mayer’s baby.
And indeed in my conversation with the band, Mayer described the countless hours he’d spent overseeing the fine-tuning of the show’s visuals. But it was Weir who spoke of how important it was that the production, which he likened to an opera, fit into the story the Dead had been telling for six decades.
“We’re just continuing on with it,” he said.
After the interview, I was standing around in a hallway chatting with some folks from Dead & Company’s team when Mayer popped out of his dressing room to offer a final thought.
“When I talk about the idea of a leadership role in this band, that’s possibly true in the sense of an admin thing,” he told me. “But on that stage, Bob Weir is the leader. He calls every shot, and at no time will that ever change.”
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