Grateful Dead
Get in the groove and let the good times roll ⚡️💀🌹
@icetoad.eth
John Mayer's eulogy for Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir was truly beautiful <3
Good afternoon. Bobby and I were born on the same day, exactly 30 years apart. Libras. While the astrology checks out, three decades is a pretty wide chasm between any two people, whether they share a birthday or not. In the 30 years that preceded me, Bob had become a countercultural icon. I was a child of the 1980s. I come from a world of structural thinking, the concept, the theorizing, the reassessing, the perfecting. Bob learned early on that spirit, heart, soul, curiosity, and fearlessness was the path to glory. We both found success with each of our templates, and then we found each other.
The echoes of the music Bobby and the Grateful Dead made would lead me to him, through whatever strange and nervy knack I have for sidling up next to the things I'm in awe of. What would follow would become the adventure of a lifetime for me. It's hard to find the words to describe the relationship Bob and I had: we never really went looking for them. We didn't need to. We stood side by side together in the music. That's where those 30 years would melt away and that Libra balance would kick in. We'd become comrades, sometimes brothers, even if only by one shared parent. We were unlikely partners, and that was part of our magic.
Over the course of a decade, we came to trust each other. He taught me, among many other things, to trust in the moment, and I'd like to think I taught him a little bit to rely on a plan, not as a substitute for the divine moments, but as a way to lure them in a little closer. I guess maybe what I was really doing was showing him he could rely on me. Bob took a chance on me. He staked his entire reputation on my joining a band with him. He gave me musical community, he gave me this community. I got to know his incredible family, Natasha, Monet, and Chloe, whom I now consider my dear friends for life. He lent me his songbook, invited me into the worlds he'd constructed, and taught me what the songs meant and what it meant to perform them. In return, I gave him everything I had night after night, year after year.
The honor of getting the opportunity to express my heart and soul and take flight over those magical compositions has never been lost on me. It's also never been lost on me that there is very little difference between myself and anyone else who loves this music. In so many ways, our experiences have been the same. So I'd like to say a few words to Dead Heads everywhere: the excitement you felt when you were boarding a plane or packing up the car to travel miles to see the shows was the same excitement I felt about flying to the next city, working out the setlist in a group chat, meeting up with the band on stage for sound check, and getting ready for that magical moment when we take the stage and discover whatever was in store for us that night.
When tours would end, you would come home, dump out on your couch, and sleep for two days straight. I would do the same. I could feel the connection we shared together, all of us tired and weary, our hearts so full of music and memories, waiting on the next bit of chatter that it could all happen again. When we played multiple nights in the same city, the afternoons in between felt as if we were suspended in a dream, waiting to become reanimated as soon as the first note of the next show would play. You might have gone to work and your colleagues wouldn't understand why you were only half there; it's because the other half of you was still at the venue, ready to become whole again by the music. I felt the same. The hours before the next show existed only to bring the next show closer to us all.
To the countless musicians who have shared a stage with Bobby, I share in this sadness with you. To have played behind him is to know how the songs go. We will forever share stories of what we learned from studying under a master, and we will go on to teach others how he saw this music, how to leave room to hang a note, how to embody the main character of each song, giving the music everything those characters require for their stories to come to life. After all we'd shared together, something new has arisen: a sadness so hard to put into words and nowhere near being fully realized. We've only begun to make sense of what's gone missing, and in the end, Bobby was right again. Because all we can do is hold on to this moment, and I don't have the faintest idea of a plan.
I know right now it's easy to feel as if time is speeding up and taking so much from us all, but I would remind you, as I have tried to remind myself this past week, of just how many nights we all lived so fully in each second, hanging on to every word of Bobby's, following the music around twists and turns through forests and over majestic vistas, taking in the magnificent interviews and wondering how we all got so lucky to have been found by this music and invited into this dream together. Bob had mentioned that Jerry had never really left him, that he still felt him up on his shoulder, and now Bob will be forever perched over my shoulder. I expect to see him in my dreams for many nights to come, when we'll take that stage together with the rest of the band and weave notes around one another, and I will wake up with a smile, remembering the beauty of it all.
There are a lot of Grateful Dead lyrics that give comfort at a time like this, but the line I find myself thinking about the most is from a Leon Russell song called 'A Song for You.' I'd like to think I can hear Bobby saying these words to us all this afternoon: 'But now I'm so much better, so if my words don't come together, listen to the melody because my love is in there hiding.' And so we will all keep listening together. 300 years, Bobby, now that's a plan I can get behind."
Thank you, Maestro. You changed my life. I will love you forever. Thank you."
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@seattlecrypto.eth
Damn. I wish I could be in San Fran right now.
Fare Thee Well Bobby
🌹⚡️🐢
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@brydeadhead.eth
To me, this newly released video captures Bob Weir’s talents quite well
https://youtu.be/lw4MBBreWbw?si=aA9_hRFoC6lvo5A4
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@icetoad.eth
Bill Kreutzmann just posted his tribute to Bob Weir:
Jerry Garcia had already been playing music with Bob Weir in a jug band when he called me up to form a rock band with them. That’s how I first met Bob. We called ourselves the Warlocks, playing our first real shows at a pizza parlor in Menlo Park and, long story short (but with a few steps in between)… we became the Grateful Dead.
Together, we embarked on a journey without a destination. We didn’t set out to change the world, or to become big stars, or to have our own counterculture — we didn’t know any of those things were actually possible and we wouldn’t have been very interested in them even if we did. Well, not too much, anyway. Just enough to dream.
We were a “group” in the sense that we were five friends trying to have the most amount of fun we could think of as often as we could. That meant playing music and all the other things: taking acid, getting high, goofing around.
During those first rehearsals, which were in the back of a music shop, Bob and I would smoke joints in the back alley, before, during, and after — we had to be careful because it was still taboo back then.
Also, Bob and I were the younger guys in the band, so we liked to do weird shit. By that I mean, we just liked to play pranks and be silly and not take ourselves too seriously.
Right when things really started clicking and the band was getting noticed, there was a period when I lived with Phil Lesh on Belvedere Street and Weir lived with Garcia just a couple blocks over on Ashbury. That part of San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury district, was getting enough national notoriety that busses full of tourists would stop in front of the Ashbury house and take pictures: “To your left is the home of the Grateful Dead.”
Bob and I used to enjoy throwing water balloons at each other so one day we started throwing them at the tourist busses. That didn’t end well, but it’s making me smile all these years later thinking about it, because it was a time when every day felt like a great American adventure.
We used to listen to every new record that came out anywhere. We would go over to Phil’s place, but Bob and I would sit next to each other and we’d listen intently to the music, trying to figure out “How did they do that?” That was a really big thing we used to do together. It was basically like our religion.
Sometimes we’d take STP and sit there and turn the lights down low and the back of the amplifier would glow like a cathedral as we’d listen to the music.
Nothing was more important than having fun and nothing was more fun than playing music. Especially once audiences started coming and we could look out and see a sea of people dancing. Once that happened, it was all we wanted to do. We didn’t want to stop. That was our first real goal — to just keep going.
And so for sixty years, the music never stopped. This was true for all of us, together and apart, but when Bob was off the road, all he wanted to do was get back on it. And in the meantime, he would stop by any bar or club where there was someone playing that would let him sit in. He seemed to always be on some stage, somewhere.
Offstage, we were everything you’d expect from lifelong friends and bandmates. We fought together (both on the same side and opposing), we celebrated together (both personal and professional milestones), and we watched each other, both near and far, as we went from teenagers to old men and all the stops in between.
I once heard Bobby refer to himself as “the greatest rhythm guitar player in the world” and it made me chuckle lightheartedly at my brother’s boastfulness. The thing is… he was probably right.
Time has proven that nobody will ever be able to replace Jerry Garcia — or Phil Lesh — and time will prove the same for Bob Weir.
They were the biggest influence on my own playing, more than any drummer, and they will continue to be the biggest influence on whatever I do next.
Their inspiration will continue to take on many forms, as is the very nature of inspiration, but just as those three brothers of mine took inspiration from others and made something new and original out of it, it’s now time for tomorrow’s artists and visionaries to do the same. Keep going forward. Take the inspiration and do something new.
There are so many people who can rightfully say that their life would not have been the same without Bob Weir. That’s been true for me since I was 17. And through it all, the high times and the low tides, my love for him will not, indeed can not, fade away.
In the end, what more was there for him to do? He played it all… and never the same way, twice. I think he had finally said everything he had to say and now he’s on to the next thing. I just hope he was able to bring his guitar with him or otherwise he’ll go crazy.
“Sleep in the stars.
Don’t you cry.
Dry your eyes on the wind.”
And get there safely, old friend.
Love you forever,
Billy
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@icetoad.eth
This came out so great, particularly cause I already had the Steal Your Face eyes in my PFP <3
Miss you Bob! You know our love will not fade away....
here's what @tryemerge just made for me using Trippy Skeleton with Tie Dye Roses by @atown, spark yours up now!
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@brydeadhead.eth
Rat in a train ditch… caught on a limb… you know better but I know him… Now he’s gone…
Rest easy Bobby
A more lengthy write up to come on my experience with Bobby and 100 Dead & Co shows. ❤️💔❤️
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@icetoad.eth
"I haven't put a lot of thought into my legacy. I'm not proud of anything. If I'm proud of something, I have to take a good look at myself for being proud. I don't trust pride. But when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are. Life has endless depth to it, endless resonances and reverberances throughout time and space. And making sense of all that is something that I'm just taking my time doing. My life has been kind of instructing me to look for the timeless. That's what I'm chasing."
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@icetoad.eth
This fucking sucks. Sigh. What an awful week.
RIP Bobby! Thank you for everything!
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/bob-weir-grateful-dead-founding-member-jam-band-icon-dies-78-rcna244713
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@icetoad.eth
I just got this cool mini replica of one of Jerry Garcia's guitars. This one was named "Tiger", naturally.
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