Bob Weir, Guitarist and Founding Member of The Grateful Dead, Dies at 78

His songwriting and rhythm guitar playing helped shape the San Francisco band’s sound as it became an American institution.

Bob Weir, a guitarist and songwriter who was a founding member of the Grateful Dead, which rose from jug band origins to become the kings of psychedelic rock, selling millions of records and inspiring a small nation of loyal fans, has died. He was 78.

His family announced the death in a statement on Saturday, saying that Mr. Weir had “succumbed to underlying lung issues” after receiving a cancer diagnosis in July. The statement did not say when or where he died.

The band, which was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965, blended rock, folk, blues and country, with mellow ease and a gift for improvisation that became its trademark. In a rock milieu that was still based on short songs and catchy hooks, the Grateful Dead created a niche for meandering, exploratory performances that each seemed to have their own personalities.

The band became the pied pipers of the wider hippie movement, providing the soundtrack for 1960s dropouts and LSD dabblers.

Even after hippie culture faded, the band retained a gigantic fan base — called Deadheads, a term worn with pride and later adapted for numerous other fandoms — which followed the group wherever it played, traded recordings of its concerts and set up mini-encampments, complete with craft bazaars, oceans of tie-dye and no small amount of drugs.

It was one of rock’s original subcultures. “Our audience is like people who like licorice,” the band’s lead guitarist and singer, Jerry Garcia, once said. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”

In the band, Mr. Weir — who, like Mr. Garcia, had an early fascination with folk music — stood alongside strong musical personalities. Mr. Garcia was a wizard of improvisation, and gave the group its aesthetic and conceptual direction. Phil Lesh, its bassist, had training as a composer. Mickey Hart, a percussionist, had eclectic tastes and played a major part in introducing Western audiences to world music.

But Mr. Weir also developed a reputation for inventive timing on the rhythm guitar, his chords alternately grounding and contending with the melodic chaos of Mr. Lesh and Mr. Garcia’s instruments. Although Mr. Garcia and Robert Hunter, the group’s lyricist, were the Dead’s primary composers, Mr. Weir was also a contributor to the writing of key songs like “Playing in the Band” and “Sugar Magnolia.”

He also sings the tongue-twisting travelogue verses in “Truckin’,” a 1970 single that became a signature hit for the band, embodying its achievements as road warriors and as witnesses and survivors of 1960s acid culture. “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” the song goes.

With Mr. Weir’s death, the only surviving core members of the band are Mr. Hart and his fellow percussionist Bill Kreutzmann. Mr. Garcia died in 1995 and Mr. Lesh in 2024. Ron McKernan, known as Pigpen, the Dead’s original keyboard player, died in 1973.

After Mr. Garcia died, the band came to an official end, though its surviving members continued its legacy in various ways, including Furthur and the Other Ones. More recently, members performed widely as Dead & Company, including shows at Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024 and 2025.

Bob Weir was born Robert Hall Parber on Oct. 16, 1947. As he learned decades later, his parents were two college students from Arizona, John Parber and Phyllis Inskeep.

His mother had come to San Francisco to give birth and soon gave her child up for adoption. Mr. Weir was raised in Atherton, Calif., by Frederic Weir and Eleanor (Cramer) Weir.

As a young man, Mr. Weir played guitar, piano and trumpet. In an event that became part of Grateful Dead lore, a 16-year-old Mr. Weir was wandering with a friend in Palo Alto, Calif., on New Year’s Eve 1963 when they heard a banjo playing, and followed the sound to a music store where Mr. Garcia, five years his elder, was preparing to give lessons.

“We sat down and started jamming and had a great old rave,” Mr. Weir later recalled. “I had my guitar with me and we played a little and decided to start a jug band.”

Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions was the earliest iteration of what would eventually become the Grateful Dead. Along with Mr. Garcia and Mr. Weir, it included Mr. McKernan and others who would become longtime associates of the group.

By 1965, now with Mr. Lesh and Mr. Kreutzmann, the group renamed itself the Warlocks, and that summer it became the house band at Ken Kesey’s public LSD parties, which he called Acid Tests.

The group, which soon took on the name the Grateful Dead — Mr. Garcia took it from an Egyptian prayer he spotted in a book — became inextricably linked to the explosion of LSD and its mind-expanding properties; in its early days, the Dead was bankrolled by Owsley Stanley, an LSD chemist. (Mr. Stanley, who died in 2011, also later became the band’s audio engineer, building a renowned live sound system.)

The band’s self-titled debut album was released by Warner Bros. in 1967, but its next two, “Anthem of the Sun” and “Aoxomoxoa,” established the group’s psychedelic bona fides with extended jams and collage-like studio experiments. “Aoxomoxoa,” with kaleidoscopic cover artwork by Rick Griffin, an underground comic artist, also set a playfully macabre visual identity.

Later albums, like “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead,” both from 1970, took a turn toward a more stripped-down, country-rock sound. For decades, the band wove through these modes in concert.

After the Dead was signed to the Arista label in the late 1970s, it began to shake up its sound again, and in 1987 scored its only Top 10 hit with “Touch of Grey,” which went to No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

By then, though, the group had long since established its own self-sufficient economy outside the mainstream music industry, with extensive tours and a connected fan base that purchased many tickets and other items directly from the band.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in March 2025, Mr. Weir spoke about death.

“I’ll say this: I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it,” Mr. Weir said. “I’ve still got a lot on my plate, and I won’t be ready to go for a while.”

“If I find myself being proud of something, I try to find the challenges that are associated with that, because I don’t trust pride,” Mr. Weir added. “I try not to allow myself to go there. Being prideful is not going to get you much of anywhere, as far as I can see.”

In 2024, Mr. Weir and the Grateful Dead became Kennedy Center honorees, joining the institution’s 47th class. Mr. Weir also received a Grammy lifetime achievement award and, as a member of the Grateful Dead, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Mr. Weir is survived by his wife, Natascha, and his daughters Monet and Chloe.

Throughout his career, Mr. Weir played in other bands including Kingfish, RatDog and Bobby and the Midnites. He was most recently performing with Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros.

Speaking with Rolling Stone, Mr. Weir said he hoped he would be remembered for bringing cultures together.

“I’m hoping that people of varying persuasions will find something they can agree on in the music that I’ve offered,” he said, “and find each other through it.”

Rylee Kirk contributed reporting.

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