Honoree Bob Weir of Dead & Company and of the Grateful Dead performs onstage during the 2025 MusiCares Persons of the Year Honoring The Grateful Dead at Los Angeles Convention Center on January 31, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist, co-vocalist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, has died at the age of 78.
His death was announced in a post on Instagram, which revealed that he had been diagnosed with cancer in July, and had started undergoing treatment just weeks before Dead & Company would take the stage in August for three shows at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” read the statement. “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. A guitarist, vocalist, storyteller, and founding member of the Grateful Dead. Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music,” the statement continued. “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.”
The post noted that the San Francisco shows “were not farewells, but gifts,” adding, “Another act of resilience. An artist choosing, even then, to keep going by his own design.”
“There is no final curtain here, not really. Only the sense of someone setting off again,” the post concluded. “He often spoke of a three-hundred-year legacy, determined to ensure the songbook would endure long after him. 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’.”
Weir co-founded Grateful Dead with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bill Kreutzmann in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1965, with drummer Mickey Hart and lyricist Robert Hunter joining the group in 1967.
He co-wrote many of the band’s songs including “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band,” “Jack Straw” and “One More Saturday Night.”
After Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir continued the Grateful Dead legacy by performing in various Dead offshoots, including the Other Ones, The Dead, Furthur and Dead & Company, the latter of which he formed in 2015 with Hart, Kreutzmann, John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti. He also formed the band RatDog in 1995, and had been touring with Wolf Bros since 2018.
Weir was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Grateful Dead in 1994. The band also received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2024, and was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year in 2025.
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