Bob Weir, co-founding member of the Grateful Dead and a pioneer of American jam rock, whose rhythmic genius defined a genre for over sixty years, passed away at the age of 78. Weir had been battling cancer and died due to underlying lung issues.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” Weir’s daughter, Chloe, announced in a statement on Saturday (January 10th). “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.”
“For over sixty years, Bobby took to the road,” the statement continued. A guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the Grateful Dead. 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. Every chord he played, every word he sang was an integral part of the stories he wove. There was an invitation: to feel, to question, to wander, and to belong.”
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“Bobby’s final months reflected the same spirit that defined his life. Diagnosed in July, he began treatment only weeks before returning to his hometown stage for a three-night celebration of 60 years of music at Golden Gate Park. Those performances, emotional, soulful, and full of light, were not farewells, but gifts. Another act of resilience. An artist choosing, even then, to keep going by his own design. As we remember Bobby, it’s hard not to feel the echo of the way he lived. A man driftin’ and dreamin’ never worrying if the road would lead him home. A child of countless trees. A child of boundless seas.”
Born Robert Hall Parber in San Francisco on October 16th, 1947, Weir met Jerry Garcia at the age of 16 while wandering the back alleys of Palo Alto and stumbling upon Dana Morgan’s Music Store. The two decided to form a band, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, which was later renamed the Grateful Dead in 1965. As the youngest member of the band, Weir developed a distinctive playing style on rhythm guitar, drawing on jazz, country, and classical influences, that became a cornerstone of the Dead’s improvisational sound. Along with Garcia, he also shared lead vocal duties on much of the band’s repertoire.
For his efforts in Grateful Dead, Weir was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, and was the recipient of a Kennedy Cent Honor in 2024.
Following the Grateful Dead’s disbandment in 1995, he continued to tour prolifically with acts such as RatDog and The Dead, Furthur, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, and the Grateful Dead offshoot Dead & Company.
In August 2025, just weeks after his diagnosis, Weir performed his final shows, a three-night celebration of the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
In a final tribute to her father, Chloe Weir shared Bob’s own hope for how he would be remembered. “There is no final curtain here,” she wrote, echoing his dream of a “three-hundred-year legacy” for the Grateful Dead songbook. “May that dream live on through future generations of Dead Heads. And so we send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing. A reward for a life worth livin.’”
