Bob Weir: 11 Essential Songs
The Grateful Dead co-founder, who has died at 78, grounded their farthest-reaching explorations and kept the band's flame alive
RIP
The Grateful Dead co-founder, who has died at 78, grounded their farthest-reaching explorations and kept the band's flame alive
January 10, 2026
Bob Weir in 1983 Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
Bob Weir was the everyman at the heart of the Grateful Dead, the one who kept the band’s feet on the ground through their farthest-reaching explorations. In the first 30 years of the band’s existence, he was an indispensable foil to Jerry Garcia; he was right there in the instrumental mix, rolling with every extended jam, and when it was his turn to sing lead, his songs became standards. After Garcia’s death in 1995, Weir took a key role in keeping the band’s flame alive, performing their material for new audiences right up through the summer of 2025 with his own projects and with Dead and Co. Here are 11 of the songs we’ll remember him for.
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‘The Other One’
Image Credit: Malcolm Lubliner/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
This song initially appeared as part three of a four-part suite on the Dead’s second album, 1968’s Anthem of the Sun. But while the rest of that sprawling psychedelic vision faded from view soon enough, Weir’s chapter — a rare cowrite with drummer Bill Kreutzmann — stayed a beloved element in their set for many years to come. The line “the heat came round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day” was based on a true story: “I was arrested for throwing a water balloon at a cop,” Weir recalled in Blair Jackson and David Gans’ 2015 oral history of the Dead, This Is All a Dream We Dreamed. “He was conducting an illegal search on a car belonging to a friend of mine, directly below 710 Ashbury…. I thought this was an illegal search, and it incensed me. Besides, we were having a water balloon fight inside the house at the time.” —Simon Vozick-Levinson
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‘Truckin”
Image Credit: Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The Grateful Dead wrote the loping “Truckin’” as a group, but Bob Weir claimed the lead vocals, which meant he got to sing one of the defining lyrics of the 20th century: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” His rhythm guitar anchors the song’s gloriously shaggy, could-only-be-the-Dead groove, which ambles along like a Robert Crumb character come to musical life. (Which is appropriate, since the chorus borrows from a Crumb cartoon that was, in turn, inspired by a Blind Boy Fuller lyric.) —Brian Hiatt
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‘Sugar Magnolia’
Image Credit: Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images
The Dead performed “Sugar Magnolia” more than 600 times, and with good reason. Co-written with longtime Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, it’s a sunny tribute that Weir penned for his girlfriend Frankie, whom he lived with in the early Seventies. (“Takes the wheel when I’m seeing double/Pays my ticket when I speed” — man, this woman was a saint.) The highlight became a joyous anthem for Deadheads, usually the most euphoric moment of any show, and sometimes with a trippy “Sunshine Daydream” coda tacked on (the longer, the jammier, the better). The song also has a memorable moment in , when Julia Roberts nearly marries the Deadhead, but doesn’t — a mistake on her part.
