Bob Weir is rightly remembered as a defining figure whose guitar playing made an indelible contribution to the Grateful Dead and improvised rock music as a whole.
In fact, Weir was one such pioneerthat his unique approach to rhythm guitar has been misunderstood, overlooked and underestimated for many years.
The fact that Jerry Garcia chose Weir as his counterpart and partner in the Grateful Dead for three decades speaks volumes. Garcia never spared his praise for his colleague, once calling him “an extraordinarily original player in a world full of people who all sound the same.”
A rhythm guitarist against convention
Weir dedicated his musical life to developing a distinctive rhythm guitar style that was essential to the Grateful Dead’s sound. Instead of playing constant, repeating chords to create a groove, his approach was based on counterpoint and riffs. He filled the musical gaps between the band’s drummers and Phil Lesh’s equally unconventional bass playing.
Weir’s explanation for how he developed this approach – what he called to me his “dirty little secret” – was that he wasn’t trying to copy other guitarists but rather modeled himself on pianists, particularly McCoy Tyner of the John Coltrane Quartet. “I just loved what he was doing under Coltrane’s playing, so from the time I was 17, I sat with that stuff for a long time and tried to absorb it,” Weir told me. “I got closer and closer to that. And I’m very lucky that I found a perfect role for my approach at a very young age…Jerry was also heavily influenced by horns, including Coltrane.”
Jazz, piano and open chords
John Mayer, Weir’s guitar partner in Dead & Company since the band’s formation in 2015, also pointed to a great jazz pianist when I asked him about Weir’s playing in 2016: Bill Evans, best known for his work on Miles Davis’ groundbreaking album Kind of Blue. “Bob is a total savant,” Mayer said. “His use of guitar chords and accompaniment figures is almost too original to be fully appreciated at once until you really deeply understand what he’s doing. It’s a great pleasure to play with him.”
Mayer highlighted Weir’s flair for chord inversions – such as when he placed the root note (the “E” in an E chord) in the middle rather than at the bottom of a chord, where it usually lies. I’ve interviewed many musicians about playing with Weir, and even the most experienced among them light up like children when they talk about him. Names like Mayer, Trey Anastasio, Warren Haynes and Billy Strings are literally showering with praise, as a quick look at social media shows.
A guitarist without repetition
Don Was, whose extraordinary career includes collaborations with the Rolling Stones, Gregg Allman and Bonnie Raitt, speaks with awe of his seven years as bassist with Bob Weir & Wolf Bros. “I wish we could have played 350 shows a year,” he said. “There is no other guitarist in the world who plays like him. He never plays anything close to the same thing twice in a row, going from the rawness of John Lee Hooker to the sophistication of Andrés Segovia in the space of a single phrase.”
Everyone who played with Weir seems to talk about him that way – probably because the guitarist was exceptionally consistent in moving each song in a new direction and offering soloists new inspiration with each transformative chord progression. Weir has probably performed in front of more people than any other artist in the history of live performance, and every time he overcame his stage fear and stepped into the spotlight, he brought joy and magic with him. This effect was also transmitted to his fellow musicians, whom he kept awake and reminded of the pure joy of playing.
“Put your shoulder on the wheel”
Weir described his dedication to complementary guitar playing to me as “putting his shoulder on the wheel.” What he meant, however, was a form of work that actually triggered enormous creative flights from Garcia – and from every other musician who played with Weir. They continually marveled at the guitarist’s unusual choices and how much these soloists pushed themselves to make more interesting choices themselves.
“Bob’s very specific chord shapes and rhythmic patterns make you play differently and push yourself beyond yourself,” said Warren Haynes, who played frequently with Weir, including during two stints with the Dead.
“He naturally led you into a constant evasion, juxtaposition, questioning and answering. And he had this wonderful sense of not having to compare the current moment to any other moment. He approached every song, every performance with a fresh eye. It’s something incomprehensible, but it was essential to everything he did.”
Something new every night
Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge, who – like Mayer – had little contact with the music of the Grateful Dead before forming the band, was taken aback by Weir’s emphasis on looking for something new in every song, every night. “It’s a wonderful environment to just throw yourself into,” Burbridge told me. “The Bible says love covers a multitude of sins, and a really good jam session that takes you to a place you’ve never been before makes any mistake disappear. It’s not about the execution. It’s about finding something new. That’s always been Bobby’s mindset.”
Weir’s idiosyncratic guitar approach extended to his songwriting. Many of his compositions, including “The Other One”, used time signatures uncommon in Western music but common in Indian music – a source from which he drew much inspiration.
Indian influences and spiritual depth
He attributed this to the “explosion of North Indian classical music in American popular culture” after the Beatles studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation. As with all things, Weir approached this exploration with concentrated seriousness.
Not only did he receive the meditation mantra that he used until the end directly from the Maharishi, but he also immersed himself intensively in the music of the sitar player Ravi Shankar and the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan. He did not limit himself to Indian ornaments or riffs, as many of his contemporaries did, but instead worked specifically with the appropriate time signatures. “To even begin to appreciate their music, you have to be able to count in their time signatures,” he told me.
As much as Weir pushed his bandmates in interesting and unexpected directions, he also remained open to influences from their playing. In Dead & Company’s early years, he found great joy in encouraging Burbridge and Mayer to find their own voices and paths within the Grateful Dead’s repertoire. He enjoyed that they approached the music with fresh eyes and ears. “I have to change because of what they’re doing,” Weir said. “I have to listen to it and decide for myself whether this is the path I want to take.”
The songs as living beings
Ultimately, Weir emphasized, the songs themselves decided where they wanted to go. He admitted that talking about songs as if they had free will makes him “sound a bit hippie-mystical.” Then he smiled and acknowledged that description fit.
For Weir, the songs and their characters were living beings that helped decide how they wanted to be expressed on any given evening. Because he knew these characters better than his younger fellow musicians, he saw it as his job to ask each song where he wanted to go.
“Do I try to steer it back toward the original, or do I light a fire in this new direction? Sometimes that’s a pretty arbitrary decision on my part, and there’s a certain adventure in that,” Weir said. “Sometimes I know what I’m doing. This music takes me places and I’m always ready to go.”
Alan Paul is the author, most recently of Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s and the e-book Reckoning: Conversations With the Grateful Dead. He regularly posts “Low Down and Dirty” on his Substack.