Bob Weir's Cosmic Touch

"The biggest fan of Grateful Dead guitarist and co-founder Bobby Weir, who died Saturday at the age of 78, was perhaps his bandmate Jerry Garcia. "He's an extraordinarily original player in a world of people who sound like each other," Garcia told Blair Jackson and David Gans in 1981. Surely one of the most-traveled musicians of the past half-century, Weir helped create not only a personal style but a broader school of playing."

"Over their 30 years of performing together until Garcia's death in 1995, Weir, Garcia, and their Dead bandmates evolved a musical language that has become a genre of American music unto itself. Weir's idiosyncratic style is embedded in its core, a lysergic conversation between rock, bluegrass, folk, jazz, blues, global rhythms, and avant-garde experimentation. More than ticket sales or streaming numbers, the band's influence is better measured by the sheer amount of Grateful Dead nights at local bars,"

Bobby Weir played guitar alongside Jerry Garcia for over three decades and helped shape the Grateful Dead's sound and spirit. Weir developed an idiosyncratic style that blended rock, bluegrass, folk, jazz, blues, global rhythms, and avant-garde experimentation into a distinct musical language. The band's influence spread through live nights, local groups, and creative communities more than through sales or streams. Born in 1947 and adopted into an affluent Atherton, California family, Weir struggled with dyslexia and fitting in, attended Fountain Valley boarding school, and met future songwriting partner John Perry Barlow there.

Read at Pitchfork