Remembering Bobby

It's truly the end of a 60-year run but the music and spirit of the Grateful Dead lives on

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I spent 38 years on the bus. I saw close to 80 shows — 32 before Jerry left us. Saturday, that long, strange trip ended when Bob Weir departed this mortal coil.

“Such a long, long time to be gone
And a short time to be there.”

I started going to Grateful Dead shows in the late 1980s. What brought me to the band’s music was Jerry Garcia's songs, the band’s lead guitarist and gravitational force.

Bobby was, lack of a better term, the “cheesy one.” He wore those ridiculous short shorts, the purple polos and tank tops, and running shoes with the socks pulled up. He did those silly kicks and lunges at high-energy moments of the show — screeching to the crowd.

Case in point

Bobby was the “cute one” in a band that overtly eschewed cuteness.

It wasn’t just the aesthetic with Bobby. I was always a Jerry guy. His songs were better, and they were always the emotional high points of shows. For me, he was the Grateful Dead — the band’s musical and emotional core.

Don’t get me wrong, Bobby was a one-of-one rhythm guitarist who added subtle brilliance to the Dead’s music. In ways that took me years to fully appreciate, he was the glue in the band’s sound, driving its aural explorations during long-drawn-out jams with his unusual chord progressions, harmonics, and contrapuntal leads. And his songwriting, while perhaps not as consistently brilliant as Jerry’s, was at times magnificent. “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin’” might be the two greatest songs the band ever performed. “Saturday Night,” “The Other One,” “Throwin’ Stones,” and “Feel Like A Stranger” are pretty great too. But there were also plenty of duds in Bob’s catalog. The new tunes like “Eternity” and “Picasso Moon” were boring. First sets would often get dragged down by Bob’s blues number, a “meh” Dylan cover, or one of those annoying cowboy tunes (“Mexicali Blues” was, for the longest time, my absolute least favorite classic Dead tune). And while I like the song “Playin’ In The Band,” I generally found Playin’ jams interminable.

For me, Jerry could do no wrong. He was the band’s sun, moon, and stars.

Then, in 1995, Jerry left us (and for some of us who grew up with the Dead, we’ve never really recovered from that loss). In the years after his death, Bobby went through a lot. He spent years on the road, drowning his sorrows in alcohol, feuding with Phil, and piecing together somewhat underwhelming incarnations of the Dead.

But in 2015, the surviving members of the band performed a series of shows for the Dead’s 50th anniversary. Musically, the shows were fine, but for many, they restored the spirit of the Dead that had been missing since Jerry passed in 1995. Several months later, Bobby started Dead & Company, bringing in John Mayer to replace Jerry on lead guitar and joined by original band drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, as well as keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and bassist Oteil Burbridge.

Dead & Company was, by far, the best post-Jerry version of the band. Mayer emulated Garcia’s sound while also expanding on it, bringing a musical voice to the band that was both reverent and wholly original. And they got better and better as it went along. Ask any fan, and they will tell you that D&C, which triumphantly toured the country for the last time in 2023, had by the end of their run turned into a musical juggernaut.

In the process, Bobby evolved too, from Jerry’s little brother to the wizened keeper of the flame. Bobby was now the coolest member of the band, a distinction that, for us who followed the band back in the day, would have seemed unimaginable.

Bobby morphed into Jerry, unkempt beard and all - the spiritual core of the group, center stage at every concert, driving the sound, leading the band, and keeping the Dead’s legacy truckin’ along.

Two members of the original band are still alive — Kreutzmann and Hart. (Only Hart was playing with Dead and Company.) They will hopefully keep the flickering flame ablaze, but the connection to the Grateful Dead that took me across the country to see Dead and Company is forever broken. One of the reasons I was so obsessed with D&C was that it kept me tethered to the original band, whom I loved with such fierceness during my formative years.

But here’s the thing about the Dead. Contrary to what I thought about Bobby three decades ago, it was never about the guys playing in the band … it was about the music and the songbook that they created.

The ethos of improvisation, freedom, and exploration that defined not just the Dead’s music but the community that took root around them will live on — in what incarnation I cannot say.

Jerry once called the Dead, “one of the last adventures in America,” and that spirit can’t die simply because Bobby is no longer with us. Weir once said that “if we serve [the Dead’s] legacy, it’ll go on and people will teach this in music school in 200 or 300 years."

I won’t be around to find out. None of us will. But I’m confident that Bobby wasn’t wrong. And none of that would be possible without him.

“Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul.”

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Musical Interlude