From a Deadhead: Missing Bobby Weir
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Susan Senator / Boston
The bus came by and I got on, that’s when it all began
–Bob Weir, “The Other One” (1967)
I’m not worthy of writing about Bob Weir, the co-founder of The Grateful Dead, who recently died at the age of 78. I did not follow The Dead around the country; I only saw them once, in 1979 in New York City when I was 15, and then and there I fell hopelessly in love with Weir, the Dead’s rhythm guitarist. Two years earlier, my older sister Laura had brought home their greatest hits album, Skeletons From the Closet. We sat on her lime-green shag rug, listening to the entire thing on her plastic record player, and I remember thinking I liked every single song the very first time hearing it. And when “Sugar Magnolia” came on, I tasted summer love: “She come skimming through rays of violet/She can wade in a drop of dew.” I’ve been hooked on the group ever since.
I am a Deadhead, through and through, though I rarely wear tie-dye and cannot name more than a handful of their concerts by the date and set. Doesn’t matter. I listen to them and only them, making occasional allowances for Jerry Garcia Band and Bob Weir’s Wolf Bros. The real acid test for me was when I realized that if I could travel back in a time machine, I would rather go back to the Dead’s acoustic show at The Warfield in San Francisco on September 25, 1980, than even go back to 1889 and kill baby Hitler.
Before I knew about the Dead, I thought—because of the macabre name—that they were some scary hard rock band for bad boys, like the lascivious Rolling Stones, whose Sticky Fingers album featuring a jeans-clad male pelvis, shocked and embarrassed little teenaged me. The Dead didn’t do that. Theirs were often humorous cautionary tales of people on the Wrong Side of the Law or revived folk songs that were a far cry from the progressive rock groups I loved back then– the band Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Pink Floyd. I heard the rumbling, rolling, bouncy sounds of “Truckin’” and I thought, with mystified delight, “What the hell is this?”
I still don’t know. Every time I try to explain my obsession to a non-Deadhead, I don’t know where to begin. The Dead have been called a true example of Americana, but that sounds too quaint and makes me think of rustic antique shops or stars-and-stripes swags of bunting. Folk rock? Yes, but that doesn’t begin to cover it. The first Jam band? But how does that explain a sweet, all-too-brief ballad like “Ripple”? They’ve even been called “jazz for people who don’t like jazz.” All of those labels are too static a classification. Perhaps the Dead’s concert producer Bill Graham said it best: “They’re not the best at what they do. They’re the only ones that do what they do.”
And what did they do? “We play for life,” Dead co-founder Jerry Garcia sang in “Jack Straw,” They played because it was everything to them. The Dead played for life, and they played for fun. The Dead are probably most famous for the way they played off each other, the way they improvised together and came up with new versions of the same songs over and over. They were not interested in big profits from new albums; they preferred their own live experiences to going into the studio and cranking out song after song.
To Bobby, it was the magic that happened each time they played together—even having a bad night was better than having no night. “We were real good at relating to a live audience,” Bobby said in an April 28, 2023, interview with Dan Rather. “What we were good at was stating a theme and taking it for a walk in the woods.”
Bob Weir’s “walk in the woods” gets to the heart of Bob himself. He epitomized the explorer and wanderer, with that laid-back attitude combined with mischievous, fun-seeking dark eyes. He was usually the one who talked to the audience, calling us “friends,” or making wise or obscure comments on talk shows, like when he told David Letterman that he was having “more fun than a frog in a glass of milk.” Always polite and kind, Weir was the Dead’s designated crowd control. In many concert recordings you can hear Bobby humbly begging fans to “take a step back, and another, and another step back” from the stage, while the rest of the band played “Beer Barrel Polka” in the background. Deadheads still argue about which is the best version of “Take a Step Back”.
Longtime musician and Grammy-winning record producer Don Was played with Weir’s other band, Wolf Bros, starting in 2018, though he knew Bob long before that. Was told The Insider how one day that summer, out of the blue, Bobby called him. Bobby said he'd had a dream about their mutual friend, the late composer/bass player Rob Wasserman, who had died two years earlier. In the dream, Wasserman had come to Bobby and said that Don should be Wasserman's
replacement as bass player. So, the next day, Bobby called Don and asked if he wanted to come over and jam with him. “We just jammed on an A minor chord for about 20 minutes…Bobby took out his phone, called his managers and said, “Okay, book a Wolf Bros tour..” Don described Bobby as “kinda half man, half spirit.”
I got to see Bobby with Wolf Bros in 2022, on his 75th birthday. No longer the sweet boy next door, Bobby, with that huge white hair and Wild Bill Hickock beard, was now a thoughtful sage, a wise old Gandalf, and I, faithful Hobbit, loved him in his new form.
But now? What can a Deadhead do, if we don’t want to wait around to see if Dead & Company comes back somehow? Has our long, strange trip come to an end?
Not by any stretch. Not while there are cover bands. You can find them anywhere in the country on the Grateful Dead Tribute Bands website. In my town, just three miles away from me, I have found my Church: a bar called The Midway Cafe—though it’s not a cafe and I don’t know what it is midway to.
Every Friday is “Hippie Hour,” where I can hear local bands with names extracted from Dead songs or albums, like Reckoning Crew, Uncle Johnny’s Band, and Promised Land. Everyone there looks vaguely familiar, wearing tie-dye, and dancing, with that same air of dreamy worship—just like in the Dead old days. And why? Not because they sound just like the real Dead, or like the polished, media-groomed Dead & Company, but because they are real and live and playing off each other, making mistakes, exploring, and having genius moments. Just like the real Dead.
Sometimes when I’m there in that smokey darkness, with the smell of weed and beer washing over me, I feel like the luckiest person in the world, because I can hear Bobby Songs sung with that same friendly openness, the same authenticity. The same walk in the woods. I get to dance right next to the keyboard, and I never have to take a step back. And as Don Was said, “[Bobby is] living on in his music and in our hearts. We’re gonna miss him like crazy but remember–he’s right here if you need him.”
Susan Senator is an author, blogger and journalist living in the Boston area with her husband Ned Batchelder. They have three sons, the oldest of whom is 36 and has profound autism. Ms. Senator is the author of Making Peace With Autism as well as The Autism Mom’s Survival Guide and Autism Adulthood: Insights and Creative Strategies for a Fulfilling Life. A journalist since 1997, she has a column in Psychology Today, and she has published many pieces on parenting, autism, and living happily, in journals like the New York Times, Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and NPR. Senator has appeared as a guest on “The Today Show,” MSNBC, ABC News, PBS, NPR and CNN. She has been a Barbie fan her entire life.