Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) – American guitarist and songwriter Bob Weir, a founding member of the revolutionary, psychedelic jam band Grateful Dead, has died aged 78, his family announced Saturday. Weir was diagnosed with cancer in July and had beaten the disease, but “succumbed to underlying lung issues,” his family said in a statement on his personal website, without specifying where or when he died.
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the road,” the statement said. “Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music. His work did more than fill rooms with music; it was warm sunlight that filled the soul, building a community, a language, and a feeling of family that generations of fans carry with them.”
Founded in San Francisco by Weir, Jerry Garcia, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh, and Bill Kreutzmann, the Grateful Dead became one of the leading music groups to emerge from the 1960s counterculture movement. With its trademark improvisational, genre-blending style, the band became known for never performing the same show twice, winning an avid and diverse legion of fans, and selling millions of records.
The group revolutionized fan engagement, as followers — famously known as “Deadheads” — recorded and swapped bootleg tapes of the concerts in a communal, drug-addled camp environment that traveled from stadium to stadium, a trend later copied by other bands’ fandoms. The rockers disbanded in 1995, a few months after lead guitarist Garcia’s death at the age of 53, and a year after the group was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Weir would however continue to perform intermittently with other living band members, more recently in the group Dead & Company, which also included guitarist and singer John Mayer.
“As we remember Bobby, it’s hard not to feel the echo of the way he lived,” the family said. “A man driftin’ and dreamin’, never worrying if the road would lead him home. A child of countless trees. A child of boundless seas,” the family said, quoting the songs “Cassidy” and “Lost Sailor,” written by Weir and the late John Perry Barlow.
Following Weir’s death, 79-year-old drummer Kreutzmann became the last living co-founder of the Grateful Dead. Bassist Lesh died in October 2024 at the age of 84, while keyboardist McKernan died aged 27 in 1973. Drummer Mickey Hart, 82, joined the group in 1967.
In 2024, the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, Weir and other living Grateful Dead members were given Kennedy Center Honors, among the highest American arts awards. “The Grateful Dead has always been about community, creativity, and exploration in music and presentation,” Weir, Hart, Lesh and Kreutzmann said at the time. “Our music belongs as much to our fans, the Dead Heads, as it does to us. This honor, then, is as much theirs as ours.”
© 2024 AFP
