Robert Hall Weir ( WEER; né Parber; October 16, 1947 – January 10, 2026) was an American musician and songwriter best known as a founding member of the Grateful Dead. After the group disbanded in 1995, he performed with the Other Ones, later known as the Dead, together with other former members of the Grateful Dead. Weir also founded and played in several other bands during and after his career with the Grateful Dead, including Kingfish, the Bob Weir Band, Bobby and the Midnites, Scaring the Children, RatDog, and Furthur, which he co-led with former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. In 2015, Weir, along with former Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, joined with singer/guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti to form the band Dead & Company.
During his career with the Grateful Dead, Weir played mostly rhythm guitar and sang many of the band's rock and country styled songs. In 1994, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead. In 2024, he was awarded Kennedy Center Honors as a member of the Grateful Dead.
Weir was born in San Francisco on October 16, 1947, to John (Jack) Parber (1925–2015), who was of Italian and German ancestry and fellow college student, Phyllis Inskeep (1924–1997), who was of German, Irish, and English ancestry and who later gave him up for adoption. He grew up with adoptive parents Frederic Utter Weir and Eleanor (née Cramer) Weir in Atherton. Weir began playing guitar at age 13 after less successful efforts with the piano and the trumpet. He experienced difficulties in school because of undiagnosed dyslexia and was expelled from nearly every school he attended, including Menlo School in Atherton and Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he met future Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.
On New Year's Eve 1963, an underaged 16-year-old Weir and his friend were wandering the back alleys of Palo Alto, looking for a club that would admit them, when they heard banjo music. They followed the music to its source, Dana Morgan's Music Store. They encountered a 21-year-old Jerry Garcia, oblivious to the date, waiting for his students to arrive. Weir and Garcia spent the night playing music together and then decided to form a band. The Beatles significantly influenced the band's musical direction. "The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock 'n' roll band", said Weir. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn't think of anything else more worth doing." Originally called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, the band was later renamed The Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.
Weir played rhythm guitar and sang a large portion of the lead vocals through all of the Dead's 30-year career. In the fall of 1968, the Dead played some concerts without Weir and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan. These shows, with the band billed as "Mickey and the Hartbeats", were intermixed with full-lineup Grateful Dead concerts. In his biography of Jerry Garcia, Blair Jackson notes, "Garcia and Lesh determined that Weir and Pigpen were not pulling their weight musically in the band... Most of the band fights at this time were about Bobby's guitar playing." Late in the year, the band relented and reinstated Weir and Pigpen back in full-time.
The incident apparently led to a period of significant growth in Weir's guitar playing. Phil Lesh said that when drummer Mickey Hart left the band temporarily in early 1971, he was able to hear Weir's playing more clearly than ever and "I found myself astonished, delighted and excited beyond measure at what Bobby was doing." Lesh described Weir's playing as "quirky, whimsical and goofy" and noted his ability to play chord voicings on the guitar (with only four fingers) that one would normally hear from a keyboard (with up to ten fingers).
In the late 1970s, Weir began to experiment with slide guitar techniques and perform certain songs during Dead shows using the slide. His unique guitar style is strongly influenced by the hard bop pianist McCoy Tyner, and he has cited artists as diverse as John Coltrane, the Rev. Gary Davis, and Igor Stravinsky as influences. Weir's first solo album Ace appeared in 1972, with the Grateful Dead performing as the band on the album, though credited individually. This lineup included Keith Godchaux and his wife Donna, both of whom would be in the band by the time of the album's release. A live version of the album's best-known song, "Playing in the Band", had been issued on the Skull & Roses album of the previous year. While continuing to perform as a member of the Grateful Dead, in 1975 and 1976, Weir played in the Bay Area band Kingfish with friends Matt Kelly and Dave Torbert. He later contributed to Kelly's 1987 album A Wing and a Prayer, on Relix Records. In 1978 he fronted the Bob Weir Band with Brent Mydland, who joined the Grateful Dead the following year. In 1980 he formed another side band, Bobby and the Midnites.
Shortly before Garcia's death in 1995, Weir formed another band, RatDog Revue, later shortened to RatDog. In RatDog, Weir performed covers of songs by various artists, including The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, and Willie Dixon while also performing many Grateful Dead songs. In addition, Ratdog performed many of their own originals, most of which were released on the album Evening Moods. Weir has participated in the various reformations of the Grateful Dead's members, including 1998, 2000, and 2002 stints as the Other Ones and in 2003, 2004 and 2009 as The Dead. In 2008 he performed in the two Deadheads for Obama concerts. In 2009 Bob Weir and Phil Lesh formed a new band called Furthur—so-named in honor of Ken Kesey's famous psychedelically painted bus.
In 2011, Weir founded the Tamalpais Research Institute, also known as TRI Studios. TRI is a high-tech recording studio and virtual music venue, used to stream live concerts over the internet in high-definition.
In 2012, Weir toured with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes and singer/songwriter Jackie Greene as the Weir, Robinson, & Greene Acoustic Trio.
Weir revived RatDog in March 2013. The RatDog Quartet, featuring Weir, Jay Lane, Robin Sylvester, and Jonathan Wilson debuted on March 3, at the Sweetwater Music Hall. Jason Crosby was their featured guest at the first two shows. On April 25, 2013, Weir fell down onstage during a Furthur performance at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York. The band finished the show without him. He performed with the band two days later in Atlantic City, but on April 29 a representative announced that Weir would be "unable to perform in any capacity for the next several weeks" for unspecified reasons. Weir resumed performing that summer. Six weeks after his fall, he made a surprise appearance at the small Huichica Music Festival on June 15.
On April 23, 2014, The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival directed by Mike Fleiss, husband of Miss America 2012, Laura Kaeppeler. On August 10, 2014, Weir abruptly canceled all of his upcoming appearances, according to The Huffington Post, "The cancellations include all shows for the rest of the year with his band Ratdog, as well as a concert with Furthur". According to Jambase, Ratdog performed without Weir in Las Vegas in July 2014. "A statement from the venue said Weir was 'under the weather'."
In early July 2015, Weir joined the other original living members of the Grateful Dead —Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, and Phil Lesh — for three shows at Soldier Field in Chicago. These four surviving members (known as the "Core Four") were joined by Jeff Chimenti on keys and Phish's Trey Anastasio on lead guitar and shared vocals, and Bruce Hornsby on piano. The reunion was 20 years nearly to the day since the band's final concert with Jerry Garcia at the same venue in 1995. "Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead" was billed as the original four members' last performance together. Based on demand, two additional Fare Thee Well concerts were added to the series, performed in late June 2015 at Levi Stadium in California. The first show was on June 27, and featured a rainbow that appeared in the sky over the stadium. Billboard noted that one longtime Deadhead in attendance exclaimed, "This is the band that jams with God." The website said, "the sentiment prompted massive cheers which led to an hour-long intermission." Billboard had previously reported that one insider claimed the production paid US$50,000 for the effect, but an update said that further investigation revealed that "this band really does jam with God."