Bob Weir

Robert Hall Weir (/wɪər/ WEER; né Parber; October 16, 1947 – January 10, 2026) was an American musician and songwriter best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. After the group disbanded in 1995, he performed with the Other Ones, later known as the Dead, together with other former members of the Grateful Dead. Weir also founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, and Furthur, which he co-led with former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. In 2015, Weir, along with former Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, joined with singer/guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to form the band Dead & Company.

During his career with the Grateful Dead, Weir played mostly rhythm guitar and sang many of the band's rock and country styled songs. In 1994, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead. In 2024, he was awarded Kennedy Center Honors as a member of the Grateful Dead.

Weir was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1947, to John (Jack) Parber (1925–2015), who was of Italian and German ancestry and fellow college student, Phyllis Inskeep (1924–1997), who was of German, Irish, and English ancestry and who later gave him up for adoption. He grew up with adoptive parents Frederic Utter Weir and Eleanor (née Cramer) Weir in Atherton. Weir began playing guitar at age 13 after less successful efforts with the piano and the trumpet. He experienced difficulties in school because of undiagnosed dyslexia and was expelled from nearly every school he attended, including Menlo School in Atherton and Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he met future Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

On New Year's Eve 1963, an underaged 16-year-old Weir and his friend were wandering the back alleys of Palo Alto, looking for a club that would admit them, when they heard banjo music. They followed the music to its source, Dana Morgan's Music Store. They encountered a 21-year-old Jerry Garcia, oblivious to the date, waiting for his students to arrive. Weir and Garcia spent the night playing music together and then decided to form a band. The Beatles significantly influenced the band's musical direction. "The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock 'n' roll band", said Weir. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing." Originally called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, the band was later renamed The Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.

Weir played rhythm guitar and sang a large portion of the lead vocals through all of the Dead's 30-year career. In the fall of 1968, the Dead played some concerts without Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. These shows, with the band billed as "Mickey and the Hartbeats", were intermixed with full-lineup Grateful Dead concerts. In his biography of Jerry Garcia, Blair Jackson notes, "Garcia and Lesh determined that Weir and Pigpen were not pulling their weight musically in the band… Most of the band fights at this time were about Bobby's guitar playing." Late in the year, the band relented and reinstated Weir and Pigpen back in full-time.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.