When the surviving members of the Grateful Dead — including Bob Weir, whose death at 78 was announced this weekend — hit the road as the Dead in the early 2000s, guitarist Warren Haynes was asked to join the band on tour. The experience helped forge a musical bond between the Gov’t Mule leader and Weir that lasted more than two decades. In this exclusive remembrance of Weir, Haynes remembers the man he calls “Unique. Unexplainable. A mystery.”
He was like the missing link to the puzzle for the Grateful Dead’s music. All the parts made sense, all the pieces to the puzzle made sense. But Bob’s was the least predictable and the hardest to explain. It is something about what he brought to the table, what he added that just defied what came before.
The first time we played together was at Wetlands in New York City. I had gotten a call inviting me down to sit in with Bob. It was a really unique experience. That Wetlands audience was so great, and there was nothing like it.
We hit it off from the beginning. I had been working a lot with Phil [Lesh], but he and Bob were not doing a lot together. Then they mended their fences and started communicating again. And Bob joined our band, the quintet, that version of Phil and Friends onstage at the Beacon [Theatre]. Things just started moving in a really positive way. And I was getting to know Bob for the first time. He was a really easy person to talk to and hang with.
There was this one show, Fourth of July, at [the Rothbury Festival in Michigan in 2009] that we did with the Dead. There was a moment in “Viola Lee Blues” where the band just stumbled upon this energy. It reminded me of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. It was some of the greatest collective music that I’ve ever been a part of. It came, and then it was gone, and we all felt it. We looked at each other like, “Wow, what was that?” And it’s because everybody was riding the wave and everybody, which includes the audience, was taking the exact same approach to the music, which was to just let it happen and let it flow through you. I could tell from the smile on Bob’s face and the smile on Phil’s face that we were all experiencing that same thing, which was what the Grateful Dead waited for in their intense improv search of the note.
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There was all this talk about that philosophy, how the Grateful Dead never rushed the magic. I remember Dickey Betts telling me one time that was the difference between the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. The Allman Brothers forced the magic to happen, and the Grateful Dead waited for it to happen. I always thought of it as both being beautiful approaches to music, but an interesting way to describe the differences between the two entities.
All the times we played together, I would spend a lot of time onstage listening to what he was doing and adapting to it in my own way, doing the same thing that he does with trying to kind of augment his approach, which is what the jazz approach to music is all about — conversation. His thing was all about call and response, and his response was unique. The way he responded to what somebody else was playing was always unexpected.
His love of music went all over the place: Buck Owens to traditional blues to R&B and Chuck Berry. Early on, he was listening to Indian classical music and stuff that the average person wasn’t really exposed to. One of the really interesting things about Bob’s songs is that they were deceptive. When you went to learn them, you would think, “Oh, this is pretty straight ahead.” And then you go, “It’s much more complex than it appears.” And he was complex, but in a very relaxed, mild mannered sort of way.
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He never stopped believing what he believed. He never stopped the messaging [of the 1960s counterculture]. He never outgrew that. It was who he was, what he felt, and what he felt from the beginning to the end.
Obviously, the songs that he wrote are going to live forever. But, as a person, there was something about his demeanor that I’ll always think of. He always had an interesting twist in whatever conversation you were talking about, and he was much more informed on any given subject than a lot of us are. But his message was always subtle, it was always there. And his slant on how to look at things would always make you stop and think twice about the way you looked at it yourself.
