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 46 – November 11, 1973
How does the song go?
One of the most unique aspects of the Grateful Dead experience is the existence and ready availability of thousands upon thousands of recordings of concerts, studio sessions and other archival material. The band’s willingness – whether intentional or accidental – to allow their fans to freely record and share what virtually any other band would protect as copyrighted music, was either the luckiest or the most brilliant marketing strategy in the history of modern music. What the Dead may have lost in revenue from the sale of live concert material was easily eclipsed by the increase in ticket sales resulting from turning their devotees into promotional agents, replete with product samples that were self-produced and widely disseminated.
This Week in Grateful Dead History: Week 31 - July 31, 1974
All I leave behind me
Each year as the calendar turns from July to August, Deadheads are confronted with both Jerry Garcia’s birthday (August 1) and the anniversary of his death, in 1995 (August 8). This one week period is commonly referred to as the “Days Between,” after a song by the same name that was written by Garcia and his legendary songwriting partner, Robert Hunter. The tune was to have been recorded for a studio album that the band began working on in ’92, that was never finished.
All Material Copyright 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 by Stewart Sallo