The legacy of Bobby Weir and the Grateful Dead

When he was 75, Bobby Weir told me that he looked forward to dying — just not right away. He had too many things to do first.

“I have to live to my fullest capacity first, and then dying will take care of itself,” he said when I asked him about mortality and the inexorable aging and fading of the ’60s generation. “The bigger picture for me is that I view death as the last and best reward for a life well lived. So I’m all about living as fully as I can for the moment.”

RELATED: Bobby Weir public memorial happening this weekend in San Francisco

Long one of Mill Valley’s resident rock stars, Weir died Jan. 10 at age 78, sending waves of grief through our local music community that radiated out into the larger universe of the Grateful Dead and beyond.

Since his death, due to lung issues after a bout with cancer, he has been honored by the national media with respectful obituaries and articles on his life and music.

At Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, where Weir was an early investor, supporter and celebrity face of the club, musicians have been playing nonstop Grateful Dead music in the patio since hearing the shocking news on Jan. 10.

All this week, social media has been inundated with tributes from fellow musicians and celebrities as well as from regular folks who came in contact with the celebrated Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Famer over his 60-year career, each with their own Bobby story to tell.

When the Empire State Building is lit up in tie-dye colors in your memory, you can be pretty sure that you’ve lived that full life you were talking about, that you’ve made an impact not only with your songs but also with your way of being in the world.

Many of us may still be processing that this steady presence in our lives for so long is gone. I know I am. I watched the 49ers game last Saturday, thinking all the while how Weir, a self-described “pathological” ‘Niners fan, would have been overjoyed when the Niners won. His death was also a reminder of our own mortality, especially for those of us who grew up and grew old with him and the band.

I first interviewed a young Bobby Weir in 1973 when he was a boyishly handsome 26-year-old budding rock sex symbol, the youngest member of a hippie band that otherwise couldn’t have cared less about the glitz and glamour of show business. This was after the Dead, the Band and the Allman Brothers played for 600,000 fans at Watkins Glen, a New York auto race track. It was the largest outdoor concert at the time, eclipsing even Woodstock.

“There was definitely a spirit of cooperation there like Woodstock,” he said then, an early indication of the importance he placed on the peace and love ethos of the San Francisco counterculture. “But this was better than Woodstock because this time people knew what to do, what to expect.”

For many of those halcyon years, before he more than came into his own as a singer, songwriter and Birkenstock-wearing frontman, Weir was like a younger brother to his beloved bandmate, the sainted Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995 at age 53.

“When Jerry checked out, I didn’t spend a lot of time kicking furniture and mourning my loss because the guy made my life immensely richer,” he told me in an interview four years ago. “Who am I to complain about not having him anymore when I can quickly focus on the richness that he brought to my life? And that’s plenty to go on. It’s kept me plenty busy, plenty occupied. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of the stuff that I know he would want me to get to.”

And he got to a lot. After Garcia’s death, the band retired the Grateful Dead name. But Weir went right back out on the road, his distinctive baritone and inventive rhythm guitar work becoming an integral part of the subsequent Grateful Dead spinoff bands — Furthur, the Dead, RatDog and the Other Ones.

While he was often in Garcia’s shadow as a songwriter, it’s important to remember that Weir wrote or co-wrote many of the classic songs in the Grateful Dead canon — “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “One More Saturday Night,” “The Other One,” “Hell in a Bucket,” “Playing in the Band,” “Cassidy” and “Looks Like Rain.” It’s a long and impressive list.

In the improvisational spirit of the Grateful Dead, he was forever reinterpreting and reinventing the band’s repertoire. In other words, he never played a song the same way twice.

“His sense of adventurousness and exploration is the essence of the Grateful Dead,” said the band’s historian, Dennis McNally, author of “A Long Strange Trip.” “He took the book of the Grateful Dead and cast new eyes on it.”

Classic rock meets classical music

That musical vision extended beyond the traditional rock band format in securing the Grateful Dead’s legacy. Working with Stanford University professor Giancarlo Aquilanti, he went on a decade-long mission of turning the Dead’s songs into classical music scores that he hoped symphony orchestras would be playing hundreds of years from now, inspiring generations of Deadheads far into the future.

His mashup of classic rock and classical music began in 2011, when he joined forces with the Marin Symphony in a sold-out benefit concert for the orchestra. In 2022, his ensemble Bobby Weir & the Wolf Bros performed for four nights with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the first time the orchestra had ever joined forces with a rock band.

“My operating assumption is that there’s not a whole lot of folks who get to do something people will be talking about for 300 years,” he said in that 2022 interview. “But I think we have a chance to be doing that. I think the Beatles will be remembered in 200 or 300 years, but we’ll see who else.”

Family man

Over six decades, Weir evolved into a revered rock elder, husband and father. My heart goes out to his widow, Natascha, and daughters Chloe and Monet. Family was important to him. Adopted at birth by a wealthy couple in Atherton, as an adult Weir hired a private detective to help him find his biological father, Jack Louis Parber, a retired Air Force colonel and former commanding officer of Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato.

Although they came from vastly different worlds, they became “very, very close,” Weir said. When Col. Parber died in 2015, Weir and his wife hosted a memorial at Sweetwater. In an essay in the program for the event, he wrote:

“We both shared a singular inability to take anything seriously and an ability to make light of pretty nearly any situation. The more time we spent together, the more similarities I saw, and the more I realized that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Dead & Company

With his more than touch of gray hair, full beard and wild west mustache, the onetime heartthrob of the Grateful Dead, as he aged, took on the world-weary patina of a weathered cowboy on the Wyoming ranch where he’d worked one summer when he was 15, strumming guitar in the bunkhouse.

In 2015, he formed Dead & Company with John Mayer taking Garcia’s slot on lead guitar and vocals. Grateful Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann (replaced by Jay Lane in 2023) and Mickey Hart were also part of this crack band, along with keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and bassist Oteil Burbridge.

“I can’t think of anyone that needed to play live music any more than Bob,” Burbridge wrote in a Facebook post. “It went past devotion, past dedication, past obsession. It seemed to me more like self-identification. I think he felt it was what and who he was. I also cannot think of anyone who played more live shows. We could depend on it like the sun coming up.”

Dead & Company became a live music juggernaut, grossing hundreds of millions of dollars with its tours and its “Dead Forever” residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024 and 2025. Celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, the band played three historic shows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last August. Under a cowboy hat and a long poncho, Weir looked visibly frail on stage. Those would turn out to be the last concerts of his life.

At those final shows, he sang a heart-wrenching rendition of “Estimated Prophet,” a song he wrote with John Barlow in 1977. This verse seems a fitting epitaph for a life well lived:

“My time coming any day, don’t worry about me, no/Gonna be just like they say, them voices tell me so/Seems so long I felt this way, and time sure passin’ slow/My time coming any day, don’t worry ‘bout me, no/And I’m in no hurry — oh no, no, no — I know where to go.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net