Bob Weir was the boomer who did it best

Hands down, the most terminally online thing I’ve ever done was get, somehow, into an internet debate about whether Tom Hanks or Bob Weir was the true Platonic ideal of a baby boomer. It was the kind of enveloping rhetorical skirmish where, at some point, you have to stop yourself and ask: How did I get fired up enough about this to be arguing with strangers? before shrugging and diving back in. So with respect to folks out there who might disagree, I will be more specific and say that Weir, the co-founder and legendary rhythm guitarist for the Grateful Dead, who died on Saturday at the age of 78, was the Platonic boomer ideal, rock edition.

At the age of 16, joining the jug band that would eventually morph into The Grateful Dead, Weir was present at the merging of countercultures in 1960s San Francisco, where the wordy, antiauthoritarian Beats were lured into the sunny, anarchic whimsy of the ascendant hippies. He found a mentor in Neal Cassady, the Beat writer who famously inspired Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and later became prominent among author Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters. Weir was adopted at birth by accomplished parents with high expectations, and grew up in the tony Peninsula suburb of Atherton. But music and the Pranksters offered him a freedom he’d never imagined, and in doing so became his chosen family.

The Grateful Dead were the house band at the parties, known as “acid tests,” that Kesey and the Pranksters organized. There, young people raised in postwar conformity blew open their doors of perception with the too-new-to-be-illegal drug LSD. The drug’s main innovator and producer, Owsley Stanley, became the band’s musical patron (the dancing bear? That’s Stanley). They moved into a Haight-Ashbury Victorian and played almost constantly, jamming in the parks and grand old ballrooms of San Francisco as well as at the era-defining Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock; the band would have played Altamont as well had they not been the ones to suggest that their pals in the Hells Angels run security.

As a boomer, Weir checked many of the key boxes as he and the band matured: interest in yoga and Eastern spirituality, macrobiotic diet, environmental activism. But more important is that, unlike many in his cohort, he stuck with his chosen family even after it was no longer a whirling utopian acid fantasy. The Grateful Dead grew into a music-industry anomaly, its bread and butter a fan base built by constant touring rather than record sales. But the bigger and more professionalized it got, the more complicated and prone to upheaval it became: Chosen families, after all, can be as dysfunctional as any other kind.

Weir followed the lead, literally, of band co-founder Jerry Garcia, whom he met on New Year’s Eve,1963, at the Palo Alto music shop where Garcia taught guitar. Never a straight-ahead rhythm guitarist, Weir took many of his cues from avant-garde jazz pianists like McCoy Tyner, whose driving, tonally complex playing anchored John Coltrane’s dazzling solos. “I don’t know anybody else who plays the guitar the way he does,” Garcia would later say of Weir’s side-door style; he used chord inversions and unconventional time signatures to punctuate the interplay between Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh. Weir co-piloted the lengthy flights of improvisation that became the band’s hallmark, and what he believed was a sonic telepathy with Garcia led to live performances where the band rarely played songs the same way twice.

But where Weir really held things down, by almost all accounts, was within the band itself, which toured constantly throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The Dead’s disinterest in following the standard operating practices of the music industry made for an audience-centered business model that flouted the conventional wisdom of ticket-selling and audience recordings. The result was one of music’s most ardent fan bases: So-called Deadheads followed the band from city to city, cross-country and abroad, camping outside stadiums and staying “on tour” by bartering with one another for food, clothing and, well, other stuff. It was a self-sustaining parasocial fandom that prefigured the ones that the internet and social media would later spawn, and became an essential part of the band’s mythology.

(Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group) A memorial for Grateful Dead founding member Bob Weir in front of the band’s former communal home at 710 Ashbury Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026.

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Though Garcia and Weir shared a musical vocabulary and an improvisational mind meld, their songs had notably different styles and energy. Garcia’s signature tunes fizzed and bounced along with burbling guitar lines buoyed by his reedy, wistful voice; Weir’s, by contrast, were earthier, lustier, and delivered in a baritone that often hovered right at the precipice of corny. He took audiences on spiky, unexpectedly urgent jaunts like “Estimated Prophet” and “The Other One,” but reliably brought the full-tilt good-time boogies like “The Music Never Stopped,” “Truckin’”, and “One More Saturday Night.” Weir, the band’s youngest member, was also its only sex symbol, but he approached even this role with an off-kilter attitude; his pink polo shirts, white sneakers, and cutoff jeans — occasionally short enough to pass for Big & Tall Daisy Dukes — were more Little League dad than rock god.

But while Garcia and Weir operated as co-leaders, fans’ almost mystical reverence for the sagelike Garcia grew, over time, into an unwitting cult of personality. Turning to harder, less carefree drugs, Garcia retreated into addiction and isolation; and despite slipping into a diabetic coma in 1986, he resumed life on the road with no long-term plans to quit either the band’s grueling tour schedule or the drugs that helped carry him through it. (Garcia died in 1995 at the age of 53.) Weir would later talk about death as another force following the band (its keyboard lineup was second only to Spinal Tap’s drummers in apparent cursedness), and recall that, on the night he died, he had a dream in which Garcia “stepped into” him. It was a goodbye that Weir found comfort in, but fans who would mourn Garcia like a member of their own family took a bit longer to come around.

(John Shearer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy) Taylor Swift and Bob Weir attend the 67th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Crypto.com Arena on February 02, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.

But of course they did, turning out for Weir’s post–Garcia projects like Ratdog, Furthur, the Other Ones, Bobby and the Midnites and a new incarnation of the band known simply as The Dead. Musicians who played with Weir thought of him as a consummate collaborator, always game to team up with younger artists even when it was, frankly, a little bizarre. (I refer, of course, to the time when cuddly teen popsters Hanson, at the time ruling the airwaves with “MMMBop,” joined Weir onstage at New York City’s Wetlands.

And much like the Grateful Dead wove its groovy, noodle-y spell around a new generation in the late 1980s, in 2015 Weir and Grateful Dead drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann returned with the touring band Dead & Company, whose addition of John Mayer on lead guitar again refreshed the fan base. (It also let Mayer rehab his image as blues-pop’s preeminent douchebro.) By 2024, when their first successful residency at the immersive Las Vegas venue Sphere began, it seemed entirely possible that the Dead might live forever.

As a music writer in the 1990s and 2000s, I met a lot of stealth Grateful Dead fans. By this, I mean people who didn’t do the squiggly dancing unique to Dead shows or have an encyclopedic knowledge of set lists or even cite them as musical influences at all. Nevertheless, they would almost sheepishly mention the Grateful Dead as a band that had expanded their foundational musical knowledge, introducing them to George Jones or Muscle Shoals Sound Studio or Buddhist philosophy. I was gobsmacked to find out that Elvis Costello was an avowed (if, again, low-key) fan; the Dead, it seemed, were like a pinch of seasoning that added something unexpected to everything from alt-country to indie to electronica.

Weir resonated with experimentalists and iconoclasts in a different way than Garcia did. Among the musicians who discuss his influence in the 2014 documentary “The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir” are Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo; members of The National, who toured with one of Weir’s latter-day projects, Campfire Band, credit him with helping them see the necessity of chill. The jam-band universe that the Grateful Dead spawned, meanwhile, encompasses everything from ’80s skronk and late-’90s butt rock to jazz fusion and neotraditional bluegrass. Weir even made a name for himself as a fitness influencer in recent years, with Instagram workout reels featuring medicine balls, mace swinging and those toe sneakers that, sadly, no one will ever look good in.

For a lot of fans, the Grateful Dead is a conduit back to their actual families. One of my closest friends is the only child of a single dad; bucking a time-honored teen tradition, she declined to rebel against his musical taste. Of the Grateful Dead, she notes, “It’s like going home when I hear them, and I often put them on when I need to go home.” Another friend remembers Grateful Dead tunes mostly as sing-alongs with her mother and aunts. This might be part of why Weir’s death seemed to hit many people unaccountably hard: Somehow, he became a musical and cultural elder statesman without ever coming across as, well, old. And what is that if not the brass ring of the baby boomer?

Remembering Weir in a piece for The Guardian, The National’s Aaron Dessner noted that the guitarist “seemed to remain completely in touch with the fresh wonder and wildness of Grateful Dead music. It never felt as if these songs [had] already been performed thousands of times.” Passing the torch but keeping the original flame stoked is what makes music endure, and Weir was conscious of how he did so: honoring a party he helped start at a time when anything and everything seemed possible, and never making latecomers feel like they’d missed all the fun.