American Rock musician Bob Weir performs guitar as he performs on stage, with the band Grateful Useless, at Cal Expo Amphitheatre, Sacramento, California, August 5, 1989.
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Bob Weir, the guitarist and singer who, as an important member of the Grateful Useless, helped discovered the sound of the San Francisco counterculture of the Nineteen Sixties and stored it alive by means of many years of infinite excursions and marathon jams, has died. He was 78.
Weir’s dying was introduced Saturday in a press release on his Instagram web page.
“It’s with profound disappointment that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” a press release on his Instagram account posted Saturday mentioned. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by family members, after courageously beating most cancers as solely Bobby may. Sadly, he succumbed to underlying lung points.”
Weir joined the Grateful Useless — initially the Warlocks — in 1965 in San Francisco at simply 17 years outdated. He would spend the following 30 years taking part in on infinite excursions with the Grateful Useless alongside fellow singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia, who died in 1995.
Weir wrote or co-wrote and sang lead vocals on Useless classics together with “Sugar Magnolia,” “One Extra Saturday Night time” and “Mexicali Blues.”
After Garcia’s dying, he could be the Useless’s most recognizable face. Within the many years since, he stored taking part in with different initiatives that stored alive the band’s music and legendary fan base, together with Useless & Firm.
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the highway,” the Instagram assertion mentioned. “A guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the Grateful Useless. Bobby will without end be a guiding pressure whose distinctive artistry reshaped American music.”
Weir’s dying leaves drummer Invoice Kreutzmann as the one surviving authentic member. Founding bassist Phil Lesh died in 2024. The band’s different drummer, Mickey Hart, virtually an authentic member since becoming a member of in 1967, can also be alive at 82. The fifth founding member, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, died in 1973.
Useless and Firm performed a collection of concert events for the Grateful Useless’s sixtieth anniversary in July at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, drawing some 60,000 followers a day for 3 days.
Born in San Francisco and raised in close by Atherton, Weir was the Useless’s youngest member and seemed like a fresh-faced high-schooler in its early years. He was usually much less shaggy than the remainder of the band, however he had a protracted beard like Garcia’s in later years.
The band would survive gone the hippie second of its beginning, with its ultra-devoted followers generally known as Deadheads typically following them on the highway in a nearly continuous tour that continued regardless of many years of music and tradition shifting round them.
Honoree Bob Weir of Grateful Useless accepts the 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the Yr award onstage in the course of the 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the Yr Honoring The Grateful Useless on January 31, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.
Kevin Mazur | Getty Photographs Leisure | Getty Photographs
“Longevity was by no means a significant concern of ours,” Weir mentioned when the Useless received the Grammys’ MusiCares Particular person of the Yr honor final yr. “Spreading pleasure by means of the music was all we ever actually had in thoughts, and we received loads of that executed.”
Ubiquitous bumper stickers and T-shirts confirmed the band’s cranium brand, the dancing, coloured bears that served as their different image, and signature phrases like “ain’t no time to hate” and “not all who wander are misplaced.”
The Useless gained few precise Grammys throughout their profession — they had been at all times slightly too esoteric — getting solely a lifetime achievement award in 2007 and the perfect music movie award in 2018.
Simply as uncommon had been hit pop singles. “Contact of Gray,” the 1987 music that introduced an enormous surge within the getting old band’s recognition, was their solely Billboard High 10 hit.
However in 2024, they set a document for all artists with their 59th album in Billboard’s High 40. Forty-one of these got here since 2012, due to the recognition of the collection of archival albums compiled by David Lemieux.
Their music — known as acid rock at its inception — would pull in blues, jazz, nation, folks and psychedelia in lengthy improvisational jams at their concert events.
“I enterprise to say they’re the good American band,” TV character and devoted Deadhead Andy Cohen mentioned as host of the MusiCares occasion. “What a marvel they’re.”
