Photo: Andy Leonard

It only feels right to say before I share all this that after writing for Saddle Mountain Post for a few years, I’m now running the good ship SMP. Sean will continue to write here anytime he wants, but what with time being the most precious resource of all, he decided to hand over the keys to me. I can nearly see Saddle Mountain from my home in Portland, OR. I will look its way each day for his and its wisdom. Not much if anything will change; it's actually been this way for a bit. We will still slow cook thoughtful, longer, more researched pieces and will continue to push on adding more diverse voices, as you’ve seen recently with numerous stories written directly by songwriters living through these times, our times. I am wildly inspired by the belief of contemporary artist Adrian Piper who said, "Artists ought to be writing to break down some of the barriers of misunderstanding between the art world and artists and the general public." It is under that guidance we shall keep on truckin.

I say this in part as a prologue to what you’re about to read. In so much as, well, hi, I’m Adam. I believe the sad songs are always the best songs, and so of course I love country music, and the Grateful Dead. And I believe those are the same thing. This is not a new argument, but it’s prescient. Maybe you heard Bob Weir died Saturday.

I spent the better part of a few days scribbling notes at home, my car, and the booth of my favorite bar, The Laurelthirst Public House, under the power of the Portland Country Underground and as many Diet Cokes as I damn well please… just trying to make sense of why Bob Weir passing hits me so hard. I see him everywhere right now. This one feels final. The Grateful Dead in the big venue, big party sense are gone. The last singing voice has, as he said, earned the reward for a life well-lived: death.

The Grateful Dead is a band, a relationship, a community I’ve been a part of longer and consistently than anything in my life. I felt alone as alone can be when Jerry died. Late summer 1995, I was at a family reunion at some lake in Kentucky. My mom found and then flushed my weed, and then chewed me out. Then: breaking entertainment news on TV.

I do not come from a family of hippies or country-taught-guitar-hero crate diggers. I dug through the trash for the pipe—what my mom didn’t know when she flushed the weed down the toilet and threw the metal and plastic pipe in the trash that there was two buds resinating in its chamber. I walked off into the woods somewhere, got good and high, and balled my eyes out. Life felt long and hard. I was 17.

I found out about Bob passing by group text, naturally, it’s 2026, and I’m nearly 48, equal distance from that 17-year-old and where Bob made it, 78. Death, celebrity, music, songs, it all hits different now. In most ways a lot harder. And I’m one of those sad sacks where it always hit(s) pretty hard. Not a good combo. A friend recently said to me, “we don’t change; we just grow old.” I get probably too upset over the truth in that statement for my life. It’s full of guilt and shame and plenty of blame to go around. And for sure a few I told you so’s and please Faustina’s.

I didn’t get all the things being sold around the music in the 80s and 90s. I didn’t think On The Road was some magical life map, or a very good book, and I didn’t like most of the bands associated with the scene then or now, but hot damn I got the music of the Grateful Dead. It’s an empath lightning rod. Especially the ballads. I hold onto things and ya never quite know what I’ll care about. I surprise myself sometimes on the other side of the bad idea. The music is just about the only thing between me and some unfortunate choices being made. Sure, yes the drugs, but long after kicking the hard stuff, the music remains, more powerful with age than any stimulant. I wish I could explain that to kids out there. I hope my son will understand.

I still love living out of a car occasionally, camping and roadtrips. I do in fact however live in a house and rarely leave. I find the film Nomadland romantic. That was almost me, but I wasn’t as brave as all that. All those lives not often lived. Those American adventures Garcia called out as difficult to find “these days” when asked about the traveling deadhead circus. The idea being too, that if you could put a life together show-to-show, who were they to say that ain’t it. It after all being what they were doing in their own way. Weir’s way. And what a way it was.

Famously the young one, The Kid, Bob Weir was 17 when the Grateful Dead formed. Dyslexic prankster kicked-from-ran-from schools to eventually meander a Palo Alto, CA, back alley behind Dana Morgan’s music shop one New Year’s Eve where the sound of Jerry banjo drew him in.

And off Bob went, essentially on tour till the day he died, spending more time on a stage, he has mused, than perhaps anyone, ever. Like ever ever. What a big leap of faith—oh remember he was famously the least talented of the bunch to start, kicked out of the band along with Pig Pen; Neither took no for an answer, and both pumped real soul into a band of quiet virtuosos. What belief. What commitment. What hardheadedness. To the lifestyle. To the road. To ultimately the music, the muse, wherever she led.

Which was all over, just like Jerry. Classic and modern country laid heavy across Grateful Dead set lists (Bob sang Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried in Dead sets while Merle was out there singing it too). Weir’s Me & My Uncle, a classic cowboy epic if ever there was one, was the most performed Dead song. Marty Robbin’s El Paso, Cash’s Big River, Kris’ Bobby McGee, Hank Williams You Win Again were all favorite and often played covers. Weir’s writing partnership with American iconoclast John Perry Barlow produced songs that continued to fill this cannon, songs now covered by countless country artists.

Weir put on and played with a more diverse group of musicians than perhaps anyone ever. Like ever, ever. He loved to put on and play with the next generation from Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers and Margo Price to Billy Strings and of course just about anyone with enough skill to keep up with him, from duo acts to symphony orchestras. Billy Cobham on drums in The Midnights. Blue Note exec Don Was on drums in the Wolf Bros. Pop Star prince and one of the greatest living guitarists John Mayer held down the Jerry leads for ten years. Dead & Company lasted Ten years! Your favorite band may not have lasted that long.

Weir might have been particular, but he wasn’t precious. He turned the music on its head time and time again and turned on countless new heads to the music they very likely would never have paid much mind. Tracking histories of even the idea of Americana music, it’s hard to escape the place Weir and the Grateful Dead sit: smack dab in the middle of it. They are American Music, pulling from every corner.

It wasn’t just country music. Folk, reggae, rhythm and blues, even disco and progrock, and jazz. Though it was Phil with the famous avant-classical background, Weir also turned to the America’s bluer past and freeing present. Funky, heady trumpet-trained bass player? Sure, but it’s not the typical pool to dip into for a self-taught rock n roll rhythm guitarist. Miles Davis, McCoy Tyner, those spaces between the notes, those spaces between all the other channels going into that soundboard. Arpeggios and notes and finding a key just about anywhere on the neck of his guitars, which as the 80’s descended began matching the decade’s trends along with his fashion sense. Jerry has this famous quote about choosing fun in this lifetime. Weir certainly followed his big brother’s advice. Go to YouTube; find a video isolating Weir’s playing. There’s plenty. It’s radical. Some would think it unlistenable alone. In the mix, however, it’s hard to dismiss its fittingness, if not downright genius. What a beautifully esoteric team player.

For thirty years he was the front man in a band of reluctant leaders. He was the beautiful face attracting beautiful faces, and let’s face it, kept (relatively) clean and quirkily spiritual as some members started burying themselves.

He then became the man, stepping into that demigod light one can’t control. He’s the one who damn near became a bus-riding bodybuilder by the end of the next 30 years. He’s the one who kept the music not just going but progressing when it seemed capitalism and inter-group politics could tear it down as the century turned.

He’s the one who, with the rest of the band and all its various members over all the incarnations, changed so many lives while simply doing what he wanted. He’s the one, like so many other lives, that cancer finally got.

2022. Sister, OR’s small mom n pop Hoodoo Ski hill felt small as hell for a Bob Weir show. It was a fundraiser. Nearby forest fires turned the sky a hazy, rusty steel hardened by the harsh Mother Nature of the West. After Margo opened, Bob Weir and the Wolf Brothers went on and played two full sets. A few of us hiked the summertime ski slope to get a rare seat for the show. It all felt so fleeting in one moment and so perfectly forever in the next. I remembered what Bob said about the Pyramids when the Dead played at their side in 1978. He was fine to have that be it, bats beating mosquitos out of the skies in a fantastical turn of Mother Earth and Humanity celebrating together under the bright lights of an otherwise dark dark desert. That was it. What is life if not for those moments? I don’t want to know.
At the end of the Hoodoo show Bob walked off stage right into a Toyota Truck, right off to the bus for another ride, to another moment to climb inside. To one more Saturday night for anything but just one more American life.

Cover photo by Michael Ochoa

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love y’all