RIP Bob Weir

My fandom peaked for the Dead around 12 years old when I somehow ended up with a CD of American Beauty on a road trip I took with my dad from Kansas City to his hometown of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. For twelve hours across I-80 I remember we kept skipping back to Box Of Rain as it became a lifelong favorite in real time.

A decade later I was in Los Angeles at a house party where someone was giving out free tattoos with a homemade gun. My old friend, the wonderful artist Cali Dewitt, suggested we get matching “Box Of Rain” tattoos given our mutual love for the song and I followed his lead.

Around that same time I woulda been playing in Woods who, because of our band leader Jeremy Earl, constantly had the Dead on in the van. Jeremy was, and is, by all means a certified Deadhead and I spent many hours staring out at America for the first time with various Dead bootlegs and albums as the soundtrack.

It was there that I realized that I wasn’t a huge fan. At least not in the way Jeremy or so many millions of others are. But I certainly loved the idea and vision of the Dead and what they represented. Their ethos and how they elevated and changed the course of live music forever. I guess you could say, until joining Woods, I hadn’t realized just how punk the Dead were.

And while I will always stand by the Velvet Underground being the greatest American rock band, I do believe that it took the Grateful Dead being the Grateful Dead to make the Velvet Underground fully be The Velvet Underground as I know and love them - proof, perhaps, that the Grateful Dead were the most important American rock band.

I digress.

I didn’t mean to come here to talk about how I don’t love the Dead as much as some of my friends. I came here to talk about how I really loved meeting Bob Weir in Mill Valley around a decade ago.

I was asked to do a short tour in a round-robin line up curated by promoter Ramie Egan in 2016. Eric Johnson, Sam Cohen, Joe Russo, Josh Kauffman and myself all traded off songs while backing one another. Josh had recently produced Bobs solo album Blue Mountain and one of our tour stops saw us at Bobs venue in Mill Valley and Josh asked him to sit in on a few songs.

When Bob showed up he was in a suit jacket, slacks and berks and the first words I can recall him saying was “that’s show business!” What was show business, I wondered? All of it, I suppose; being in a venue, sound checking. It’s fucking show business! I loved his vibe immediately.

Backstage we attempted to run through some of the songs we wanted him to sit in on and about halfway through the first one he stopped and handed the guitar back, saying “I don’t know, just get up there and follow me”. And like a true musical icon, the moment he hit the stage, he transformed into the charismatic performer he had been mastering for decades.

I hardly contributed to the songs. I played some rhythm guitar and percussion but really I just sat back and watched it all go down. As maybe the only non-Deadhead on stage, I tried to stay out of the way, just happy to witness a buncha my friends get to jam with their hero.

My favorite moment was when Bob went off script, looking to Eric and telling him to take a piano solo in place of where Bob usually takes a guitar solo. I watched Eric receive this prompt with childlike wonder before jumping into perhaps the most important piano solo of his life. Eric was full on jamming with the king of jamming! The kind of life moments musicians can only dream of as teenagers.

After the set it was all laughs and chit chat backstage. Ask Any of us who were there that night what we remember the most and we’ll likely all tell you the same thing; Bob ate Eric’s burrito he had been saving for after the show. Eric had sequestered it in a corner of the greenroom and when he went looking for it he found Bob hovered of it, the burrito all but gone.

But I also remember my short convo I got to have with Bob. He told me that a lot of people were speaking highly of my album that had just come out, which woulda been Singing Saw, and that he wanted to check it out. That really meant the world to me. “People keep talking about this album of yours” he said, with the look of somebody who had been recommended millions of albums in their lifetime, but genuinely interested in what someone might show him next.

And though I’m not sure how I responded, I like to think that maybe I said; yeah? Well people keep talking to me about yours, too.

Rest easy Bob.

Thanks for changing the world for the better and injecting people with so much joy and music down here on earth. No small feat.

Xoxo