The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir Has Died

The music world is in mourning.

The Grateful Dead founder Bob Weir has died following a battle with cancer.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” shared a statement posted to his Instagram. “He transitioned peacefully surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying issues.”

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Per Variety, Weir was born Robert Hall Parber in San Francisco on Oct. 17, 1947, and was adopted. Although he was initially involved in athletics when he was younger, Weir’s interests turned to music after he was exposed to jazz by the family nanny. He briefly studied piano and trumpet, later taking up the acoustic guitar at age 13.

Growing up, Weir had spinal meningitis and severe dyslexia that left him with behavioral problems and poor study habits, so he spent some of his teens in private school. While enrolled at the Fountain Valley school in Colorado, he met future lyricist John Perry Barlow, with whom he would go on to collaborate on some songs for the Grateful Dead. Fountain Valley also led to his interest in cowboy culture that would become a big creative influence.

He later enrolled in Menlo-Atherton High in the Bay Area, where he took an interest in folk music, studying with future Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jerry “Jorma” Kaukonen and founded a folk group, the Uncalled Four, with his classmates. Weir was 16 when he befriended Garcia, then a music teacher at a Palo Alto, California instrument store on New Year’s Eve of 1963. After they formed an old-time music unit, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, they went electric with the rock band the Warlocks before eventually deciding on the Grateful Dead in 1965.

Weir founded the legendary rock band in the ‘60s with lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and keyboardist and harmonica player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. While the group, which had a handful of members throughout its 30-year run, only had one Top 40 single with “Touch of Grey” in 1987, the Grateful Dead remained among the highest-grossing American touring acts for decades.

Weir was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead in 1994, and in 2024, Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart were recognized as part of the Kennedy Center Honors. Aside from the band, Weir recorded three solo albums.

Weir was diagnosed with cancer in July, according to the Instagram post, and began treatment “only weeks into 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.”