‘The Kid’s jazz-influenced rhythm guitar made him utterly integral to the Dead and his later collaborations solidified the band’s influence over latter-day alt-rock • Bob Weir, co-founder of rock group the Grateful Dead, dies at age 78 • Bob Weir: a life in pictures • Aaron Dessner: ‘Bob Weir remained completely in touch with the Grateful Dead’s wild wonder. I’ll never forget playing with him’ For most of their career, the other members of the Grateful Dead referred to Bob Weir as “the Kid”. You can understand why. He was only 16 when the band that would ultimately become the Grateful Dead was founded. Moreover, Weir was implausibly fresh-faced and boyishly handsome, particularly compared to some of his bandmates. Jerry Garcia’s photo was used in one of Richard Nixon’s campaign broadcasts, a symbol of all that was wrong with US youth. Keyboard player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, by all accounts sweet-natured, nevertheless gave off the air of a man who would strangle you with his bare hands as soon as look at you. Weir, on the other hand, somehow managed to look like the kind of charming young man a mother would be happy for her daughter to bring home, even in the famous 1967 photo of him leaving the band’s Haight-Ashbury residence in handcuffs after being busted for drug possession. His relationship with Garcia and bass player Phil Lesh – five and seven years older than him, respectively – is regularly characterised as that of a junior sibling: at one juncture in 1968, the pair contrived to have Weir dismissed from the band on the grounds that his playing wasn’t good enough. It never happened – Weir simply kept turning up to gigs and the matter was eventually dropped – but it’s hard to see how the Grateful Dead would have worked without him. For one thing, the band’s famed ability to improvise on stage was rooted in a kind of uncanny psychic bond between the key members – “an intwined sense of intuition”, as Weir described it – that they usually claimed was forged while playing together on LSD as the house band at Ken Kesey’s infamous acid test events of 1965 and 1966. For another, whether Garcia and Lesh thought it was up to snuff in 1968, Weir’s rhythm guitar style was an essential component of their sound. It was less obviously striking than Garcia’s fluid soloing or Lesh’s extraordinary approach to the bass – inspired by his grounding in classical music, he played countermelodies rather than basslines – but no less unique, a mass of alternate chords, harmonic pairings and bursts of contrapuntal lead lines that he said were influenced by the playing of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. More practically, Weir had huge hands, which enabled him to play chords others physically couldn’t. Continue reading...