Life lessons on two wheels to the tunes of the
Grateful Dead
Robert Hall Weir, né Parber,
October 16, 1947 – January 10, 2026
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine.
I first saw Bob Weir on October 19, 1974 with the Grateful Dead at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. I last saw Bob Weir on June 14, 2024 as a member of Dead & Company at The Sphere in Las Vegas. Over the course of almost 50 years, it was my privilege to see Bobby perform countless times as a member of the Grateful Dead, Kingfish, Ratdog, the Other Ones, The Dead, Furthur, Dead & Company, the Weir Robinson & Greene Acoustic Trio, and probably others that I have failed to remember.
Other Posts
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 41 – October 11, 1980
Ripple in still water
After 3 years at a high school in Anaheim, CA and 2 years at UCLA, my life had become as stagnant as the bumper-to-bumper traffic I found myself sitting in on the Santa Ana freeway during the fall of ’74, while waiting for my transfer to UC Santa Cruz to come through. Even against a backdrop of inexperience during the waning months of my teenage years, I had learned enough to allow intuition to lead the way in making my first big grownup decision: moving from Southern to Northern California. There is no way I could have anticipated the ripples this life-changing shift would create that are still being felt decades down the road.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 11 - March 9-10, 1981
A little bit further than you gone before
The 1968 Otis Redding tune, Hard To Handle, famously covered by the Grateful Dead in the late ’60s and early ’70s (and twice in 1981 with Etta James on lead vocals), featured the lyric, “Actions speak louder than words.” This contention is supported by researchers and scholars, dating back to Charles Darwin’s 1872 work of evolutionary theory, “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” in 1872. In the present tense, conventional wisdom suggests that NVC (Non-Verbal Communication) accounts for as much as 70-percent of human communication.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 43 – October 25, 1979
Maybe the dark is from your eyes
There are few opening chords in the Grateful Dead repertoire as recognizable, or as welcome, as the sustained, and then repeated, D-minor of Shakedown Street. Often positioned as the first song of the set, the tune never failed to evoke an amplified sense of excitement, especially as the crowd began to anticipate the extended, often brilliant instrumental jam to follow the final recitation of the mantra, “You just gotta poke around.” Among the many fine versions of this anthemic piece, there are few that rank higher than the one performed on 10/25/79 at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in New Haven, CT, the Deadhead Cyclist’s pick for T.W.I.G.D.H.
All Material Copyright 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 by Stewart Sallo