Bob Weir is rightly being remembered as a transformative figure whose guitar playing made an indelible contribution to the Grateful Dead, and to improvisational rock & roll at large. In fact, Weir was such a pioneer that for many years his unique approach to rhythm guitar was often misunderstood, overlooked and underrated.
The simple fact that Jerry Garcia chose Weir as his three-decade foil and wingman in the Grateful Dead speaks volumes. Garcia was never shy about expressing his appreciation for his partner, once calling him “an extraordinarily original player in a world full of people who sound like each other.”
Weir dedicated his musical life to forging a distinct style of rhythm playing that was essential to the Grateful Dead’s sound. Rather than playing consistent, repetitive chords to build a groove, his approach was based around counterpoint and riffs, filling the musical gaps between the band’s drummers and Phil Lesh’s similarly unconventional bass playing.
Weir’s explanation for how he developed this approach -— what he told me was his “dirty little secret” — was that instead of trying to copy other guitarists, he borrowed from pianists, specifically McCoy Tyner of the John Coltrane Quartet. “I just loved what he did underneath Coltrane’s work, so starting at age 17, I sat with that stuff for a long time and tried to absorb it,” Weir told me. “I got further and further toward it. I’m very fortunate that I found a perfect role for my approach at a very young age … Jerry was [also] very influenced by horn players, including Coltrane.”
John Mayer, Weir’s guitar partner in Dead & Company since the band’s 2015 formation, also referenced a jazz piano great when I asked him about Weir’s playing in 2016 – Bill Evans, who’s probably best known for his work on Miles Davis’ landmark Kind of Blue album. “Bob is a total savant,” Mayer said. “His take on guitar chords and comping is almost too original to be fully appreciated until you get deep down into what he’s doing. It’s a joyous thing to play along with.”
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Mayer noted Weir’s knack for inverting chords — like when he would place a root note (the ‘E’ in an ‘E’ chord) in the middle instead of the bottom of a chord, where it usually resides. I have interviewed many musicians about playing with Weir and even the most seasoned similarly light up like children when they speak about him. The likes of Mayer, Trey Anastasio, Warren Haynes and Billy Strings were all effusive in their praise, as a quick perusal of social media will attest.
Don Was, whose extraordinary career includes working with the Rolling Stones, Gregg Allman and Bonnie Raitt, speaks with reverence about his seven years playing bass with Bob Weir & Wolf Bros. “I wish we could have played 350 shows a year,” he said. “There is not another guitarist in the world who plays like him. He never plays the same thing remotely the same way twice in a row and will alternate between being as raw as John Lee Hooker to as sophisticated as Andres Segovia from one phrase to another.”
Everyone who played with Weir seems to speak like this about him — likely because the guitarist was acutely dedicated to moving every song he played in a new direction, and to offering soloists new inspiration with every transformative chord change. Weir probably performed in front of more people than anyone in the history of performance, and he brought joy and magic with him every time he overcame his stage fright and stepped into the spotlight. He also brought that out in his collaborators, keeping them on their toes and bringing them back to the pleasure of playing.
Weir described his dedication to complementary guitar playing to me as “putting my shoulder to the wheel,” but what he implied was a form of labor in fact inspired tremendous flights of fancy from Garcia — and every other musician who played with Weir. They all consistently marveled at the unusual choices the guitarist made and the way it pushed soloists towards making more interesting choices of their own.
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“Bob’s very unique chord shapes and rhythmic patterns push you to play differently and outside of yourself,” said Warren Haynes, who played frequently with Weir, including two stints in The Dead. “He very naturally led you into a lot of bobbing and weaving, counterpoint, call and response. And he had this wonderful sense of not needing to compare this moment to any other moment. He approached every song, every performance, with a fresh outlook. It’s an intangible thing, but it was so crucial to everything he did.”
Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge, who like Mayer had little background in Grateful Dead music before the band’s formation, was astounded by Weir’s emphasis on searching for something new every night in every song.“ It’s a wonderful environment to just go for it,” Burbridge told me. “The Bible says that love covers a multitude of sins and a really good jam where you go somewhere you’ve never gone before will erase any mistake. It’s not about the execution. It’s about trying to find something new. That was always Bobby’s mindset.”
Weir’s quirky approach to guitar extended to his songwriting. Many of his compositions, notably “The Eleven” and “The Other One,” employed time signatures unusual in Western music, but common in Indian music, from which he took a lot of inspiration.
He chalked that up to the “explosion of Northern 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 focused intent. He not only got the meditation mantra he used ever since directly from the Maharishi, but he immersed himself in the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and sarod player Ali Akbar Khan. He went beyond the Indian flourishes or riffs as many of his peers were doing, also working in those distinct 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, unexpected directions, he also remained open to being influenced by what they were playing. He found joy in Dead & Company’s early years from encouraging Burbridge and Mayer to find their own voices and paths in the Grateful Dead repertoire. He delighted in the fact 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 that and sort of for myself if that’s where I want to go.”
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Ultimately, Weir insisted, it was up to the songs themselves to decide where they wanted to go. He acknowledged that talking about songs as if they had free will likely made him “sound a little hippie mystical.” Then he smiled and acknowledged that the description fit.
To Weir, the songs and their characters were living beings, and they had a say in how they would be expressed on any given night. Because he knew the characters better than his younger bandmates, it was up to him to ask each song where it wanted to go.
“Do I try to shade it back towards the original or do I try to build a fire in this new direction? Sometimes it’s a rather arbitrary decision on my part, and there’s a bit of adventure in that,” Weir said. “I know what I’m doing sometimes. This music takes me places, and I’m always ready to go.”
Alan Paul is an 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 publishes regularly on his Low Down and Dirty Substack.
