The announcement of Bob Weir’s death on January 10 sent shock waves of sadness and grief through the Grateful Dead community. Coming just over a year after the passing of bassist Phil Lesh, it seemed to signal a real, definitive end to a 60-plus-year era.

Lesh and Weir carried the torch high and mighty, together and separately, since Jerry Garcia’s 1995 death, giving the Grateful Dead a robust after-life that was hard to imagine when Garcia “left this mortal coil,” to use Weir’s preferred term.

Weir’s final performances were with Dead & Company last July before massive crowds at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, celebrating the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary.

Dead & Company, originally featuring Weir and GD drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, along with guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, had a 10-year run from 2015 to 2025 that surpassed all expectations, playing before millions of fans and filling stadiums and 48 nights at Las Vegas’ 20,000-capacity Sphere. (Kreutzmann stopped performing with the group in 2023.)

Weir’s contributions in the 30 years after Garcia’s death created a new generation of collaborators who have never stopped singing his praises and cemented his central role in the band.

While Weir’s playing was often misunderstood and under-appreciated while the Grateful Dead was active, the simple fact that Garcia chose Weir as his three-decade wing man speaks for itself. Weir dedicated his musical life to forging a distinct style of rhythm playing that was essential to the Dead’s sound.

Rather than playing repetitive chords, his approach was based around counterpoint, riffs, inversions and partial chords, filling the musical gaps between the band’s drummers and Lesh’s similarly unconventional bass playing.

“He’s an extraordinarily original player in a world full of people who sound like each other,” Garcia said of Weir in a 1982 interview. “I don’t know anyone else who plays guitar the way he does… That in itself is really a score, considering how derivative almost all electric guitar playing is.”

Weir explained the development of his unique style simply; instead of trying to duplicate other guitarists, he tried to mimic jazz pianists, specifically McCoy Tyner of the John Coltrane Quartet.

“I just loved what he did underneath Coltrane’s work, so I sat with that stuff for a long time and tried to absorb it starting when I was 17,” Weir said.

“I got further toward it. I’ve never had much of an idea of what I’m up to, but I have always been there to serve the music and believed that if you do that, your role will present itself to you. Then it’s just a matter of finding the perfect place to play that perfect role, and I’m very fortunate this happened to me at a very young age.”

Weir described his dedication to complementary guitar playing as “putting my shoulder to the wheel,” but bassist Don Was, who played with Weir in Bobby and the Wolf Brothers from 2018 to 2025, says the style is so unique that he hesitates to even call it “rhythm guitar.”

“There is not another guitarist in the world who plays like him,” Was says. “He never played the same thing remotely the same way twice in a row and will alternate between being as raw as John Lee Hooker to as sophisticated as Andrés Segovia from one phrase to another. I’ve worked with a lot of folks, and there’s no-one like Bob Weir. He’s a brilliant artist.”

The unusual choices the guitarist made pushed soloists toward making more interesting choices – and the ensemble toward full band improvisation, traits that astounded and delighted all the younger players who performed with him since ’95.

“Bob’s very unique chord shapes and rhythmic patterns pushed you to play differently and outside of yourself,” says Warren Haynes, who played frequently with Weir, including two stints in the Dead.

“He very naturally led you into a lot of bobbing and weaving, counterpoint, call and response. And he had this wonderful sense of not needing to compare this moment to any other moment. He approached every song, every performance, with a fresh outlook. It’s an intangible thing, but it was so crucial to everything he did.”

Weir’s singular approach extended to his songwriting. Many of his compositions, notably The Other One, employed time signatures that are unusual in Western music, but common in Indian music, from which he took a lot of inspiration.

He chalked that up to the “explosion of Northern Indian classical music in American popular culture” after the Beatles studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation. As with all things, Weir approached this intently, immersing himself in the music of sitarist Ravi Shankar and sarod player Ali Akbar Khan.

He went beyond the Indian flourishes or riffs that many of his peers were employing, working in foreign time signatures that are common in Indian classical music.

“To even begin to appreciate their music, you have to be able to count in their time signatures,” Weir told me.

Weir was with the Dead since the very beginning. The first step of the Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip was taken in Palo Alto, California, on New Year’s Eve, 1963. A 16-year-old Weir and some friends were walking through an alley behind Dana Morgan’s Music Shop on their way to a coffeehouse when they heard banjo music coming out of the store. They stopped in to explore.

“We knew damn well it was Jerry, who was a local hero, playing banjo with the Black Mountain Boys, a really hot bluegrass band,” Weir said. “He was sitting there waiting for his students. I said, ‘This is New Year’s Eve, I don’t think you’ll be seeing anyone.’ He wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost, so he said, ‘Do you guys play? I have the key to the instrument room.’

“He got some guitars, and we ended up playing well into the evening and had enough fun to think about doing something together. The next week we had a jug band.”

Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, featuring a mix of traditional and homemade instruments, quickly garnered a strong local following. Members came and went, including future Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.

Garcia and Weir were constants and were soon joined by Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, a singer/harmonica player who possessed an outgoing stage presence with a love for the blues. A young drummer named Bill Kreutzmann sat front and center at one Palo Alto show, mesmerized by what he was watching.

“Jerry was so charismatic, just bigger than life, and the first time I saw him play, I thought, ‘I’ll follow this guy forever,’” Kreutzmann says. “You could say I was the first Deadhead.”

About three weeks later, Garcia called Kreutzmann and asked if he wanted to join a band. Pigpen was pushing to go electric, and Jerry was growing frustrated with the limitations inherent in the jug band and decided it was time to move in a new direction. The new group was now called the Warlocks.

Bass was handled by the son of music store owner Dana Morgan, which provided the band with free instruments and rehearsal space. Their first gig was at Magoo’s Pizza in Menlo Park in May 1965, and they were a standard dance rock band of the day, playing blues patterned after the Rolling Stones’ versions as well as adapting some of the old-time tunes from their jug band.

After one show, Garcia enlisted Phil Lesh, a casual friend, to become their new bassist, even though he had never touched a bass. On the surface it made very little sense, but the ever-perceptive guitarist saw Lesh’s potential. A classically trained trumpeter and composer, Lesh was a brilliant musician with a wide-open mind.

He embraced the avant garde and had a newfound interest in rock ’n’ roll, thanks to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Given his freewheelin’ background, it was no surprise he quickly discarded any preconceived notion of the bass’s role.

“I’ve always wanted to avoid exact repetition, and that put me against the grain of rock bass, which at the time was tied to the root of the chord or followed the bass drum,” Lesh said.

He played his first gig about two weeks later, and – while he had learned the rudiments – he was still an inexperienced player who would learn on the job. However, with his extensive musical background and curious intellect, it didn’t take long for him to carve out a unique style and become an integral part of the band’s developing sound.

“It’s okay to repeat an idea once, but then I like to do something different, like displacing the rhythm by half a beat or not playing a root in a melodic section,” Lesh said. “The basis of my style revolves out of the more melodic function of the bassline in classical music.”

Lesh’s non-traditional style also demanded that Weir find a new approach to rhythm guitar, and he was immediately searching to do so, even as he, too, was learning his way around the instrument.

The group honed their sound in small clubs, becoming more involved in San Francisco’s emerging psychedelic music scene. Then they hooked up with author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who had been throwing events where the participants dropped acid.

The newly named Grateful Dead became the house band for these “acid tests,” which were soon fueled by the work of chemist Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who would become the band’s soundman and patron, essentially supporting the group with the proceeds of his LSD sales.

“There were no rules at the acid tests,” Kreutzmann says. “It was a place where you could take acid – or not – and play music – or not. No-one was judging if you looked right or were playing a song right. You could be a total free spirit, and that encouraged us to experiment and to just play.”

The group signed with Warner Bros. in early 1967 and released two albums that mostly just pushed them into debt. The year 1969 was epic in all respects for the Dead, however.

They released two primo psychedelic recordings, the labored studio effort Aoxomoxoa and the free-flowing Live/Dead. They played a poor set at Woodstock – bad enough that they refused to appear in the album or movie, eliminating their presence from popular memory.

They also played a central role in planning a free concert at California’s Altamont Raceway that was to feature them, Santana, Crosby, Stills Nash & Young, the Jefferson Airplane and the Rolling Stones. About 300,000 fans arrived to find insufficient facilities and growing bedlam.

The Dead never actually performed, taking off in helicopters when they saw the chaos descending. An audience member was stabbed to death by a member of the Hell’s Angels during the Stones’ set.

In the wake of such a tumultuous year, the Dead looked to scale back, turn inward and make more intimate music. With the band ready for a change of direction as a new decade dawned, Garcia proposed making a quick and easy album, a work he suggested approaching “like a country record” with “simple songs that aren’t going to take us forever to learn?”

Their back-to-their-roots approach was in sync with the wider world of popular music. Country and roots music was impacting rock from Woodstock, where the Band’s music was infused with rustic Americana, to Los Angeles, where the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were making waves, even influencing the Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan had recorded Nashville Skyline. The Allman Brothers Band’s first two albums were out. Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and their gospel-infused good-time blues were drawing George Harrison and Eric Clapton on the road as band members.

“We were certainly well aware of those people, and we were influenced by anything that came our way,” Weir said. “Anything that came within pissing distance of us would be sucked up and incorporated into our music. We osmosed it right up through our systems, and it came out of our pores and into those songs.”

The Dead had already been trending rootsier over the ensuing year. Garcia had picked up pedal steel guitar, which he was playing in the New Riders of the Purple Sage and the acoustic-based music impacted Garcia’s overall outlook and his songwriting with Hunter. The lyricist’s work had also taken a new direction, with mythic Americana imagery becoming more commonplace.

By the end of the year, the Dead introduced country songs like Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried – sung by Weir – and debuted new material like Dire Wolf, Casey Jones, Cumberland Blues and Uncle John’s Band.

They had also become friendly with Crosby, Stills & Nash, who were frequent guests at Mickey Hart’s Marin County ranch. Garcia played the beautiful pedal steel guitar on Teach Your Children. CSN’s gorgeous vocal harmonies had a profound impact on the Dead, who received instructions on stacking vocals from the masters.

True to Garcia’s vision of a quick and easy album, they finished work on their fifth album in less than a month, and it represented a stark change in direction. From the opening strummed acoustic guitar and well-executed three-part vocal harmonies of Uncle John’s Band to the last notes of Casey Jones, Workingman’s Dead was a mature collection of hummable songs that pulled listeners into an intimate communion.

The songs harkened back to the band’s roots in traditional music, even as lyricist Robert Hunter painted modernist lyrical pictures of a mythical American West, evoking a past that never existed.

The next year, Garcia told Guitar Player that these different methods of recording were all part of the learning process. “We’d been experimenting with how to make a record,” he said. Elaborating, Garcia referred to the studio experimentation of Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa as “going in and making a record with nothing at all.”

For Workingman’s Dead, they took a very different approach, rehearsing the material rigorously for a month before they got near a studio. “It works really good,” Garcia said. “Everybody stays alert, and happy, and bright-eyed, and nobody gets bogged down.”

The band took the Workingman’s Dead concepts even further when they returned to the studio in September 1970, to record what became American Beauty. The album is almost fully acoustic, with the only electric guitar solo played by the New Riders’ David Nelson on Box of Rain.

Garcia plays his beloved pedal steel on Candyman and Sugar Magnolia, and most of the other songs don’t have instrumental breaks. The focus was purely on the songs and the singing – and what a collection of tunes they had.

As the recording sessions began, Weir had recently lost both his parents, Lesh and Garcia’s mothers were terminally ill and Pigpen’s health was faltering. The sense of mortality lent the proceedings not darkness so much as depth. Songs like Ripple and Lesh’s Box of Rain grappled with life and death, with philosophical profundity that has had them sung and read at countless weddings and funerals for decades.

The album also contained a trio of the band’s most upbeat, commercial tunes – Truckin’, Friend of the Devil and Sugar Magnolia. Weir wrote the latter, inspired by extensive jamming with Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett and their band members, including bassist Kenny Gradney, who went on to be a member of Little Feat, on the Trans Canada Festival Express. That moving festival involved a train packed with musicians, also including Janis Joplin, the Band and Buddy Guy, rolling across Canada.

Weir explained that Sugar Magnolia was his “take on Southern rock.”

“I loved the way Delaney played rhythm guitar, doing things like sliding into A chords, which I picked up on, and you can also hear Monkey See, Monkey Do,” he said. “At the same time, there was an outbreak of Cajun fiddle music with guys like Doug Kershaw. What I tried to do was a straight overlay of the two.

“The chorus uses a simple trick all the Cajun fiddle songs do, where you go to the IV chord, then walk to its IV chord and back. We were trying to do a rock and roll version of a Cajun fiddle tune – and I must say that it worked! The song fit right in with what Jerry and Hunter were doing.”

The final album of the band’s more stripped-down trilogy was the untitled live album released in 1971 and commonly called Skull and Roses – after the distinctive cover imagery – or Skullfuck, the title Warner Bros. rejected. With Hart temporarily out of the band and no keyboardist other than a fading Pigpen, the album mostly presents the group as a lean five-piece.

“We sort of forgot our roots during our psychedelic era, but as soon as we stopped taking psychedelics with absurd regularity and put our feet back on the ground, our love of American music took back over and those albums resulted,” Weir said.

Pigpen, in failing health, performed his final show with the band on June 17, 1972, and died the following March. He had already been supplemented by pianist Keith Godchaux, who now became the sole keyboardist. The change helped push the Dead in a more polished, musically adventurous direction, tinged at times with prog-rock influences.

That became evident with the 1973 release of Wake of the Flood, the first of a series of strong, more produced studio albums. That recording included Weather Report Suite, another greatly ambitious Weir-penned track (in collaboration with several others). More would follow on albums to come, including The Music Never Stopped (Blues for Allah, 1975) and Estimated Prophet (Terrapin Station, 1977).

All these complex and inarguably beautiful songs became Grateful Dead catalog cornerstones, as did a trio of his songs from 1980’s Go to Heaven – the simmering, funky Feel Like a Stranger and the conjoined Lost Sailor and Saint of Circumstance.

By 1986, the Grateful Dead had not recorded a studio album in six years, and there wasn’t much reason to expect one anytime soon. One 1984 attempt was aborted despite some strong new songs. Garcia had grown badly overweight and concern for his health proved prescient, when he fell into a diabetic coma on July 10, 1986.

He woke up after five days but had to learn to play guitar almost from scratch. No one knew if the Grateful Dead would ever play together again – which made the smashing success of 1987’s In the Dark and its hit single, Touch of Grey, even more improbable.

The band entered a new era of mass popularity, which brought its own problems, as Lesh described to me in 2000 in Guitar World.

“The effects were dramatic,” he said, “It brought in young people who didn’t really have a feel for the scene and the ethos surrounding it, which was considerable after two decades. We were thrilled with the interest in the band, but it just stood everything on its head.

“More people wanted to see us, so we had to play larger venues. Playing in front of larger crowds resulted in a loss of intimacy, and for me, the experience was all downhill from there. Of course, the decline might have happened anyhow, because after [so many] years we were struggling creatively. We were just out there hacking away at it, and the new success made it easier to keep going, because it gave us more resources.”

Still, the band soldiered on, with some excellent tours, before Garcia played his final show on July 9, 1995, at Chicago’s Soldier Field. He died August 9, and the future of his band and its beloved catalog became an unknown.

It took some time to come together, but the surviving members, joined by a variety of guitarists, including Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring and Trey Anastasio, continued to perform in a variety of groups including the Dead, Furthur, the Other Ones and ultimately Dead & Company.

Weir never stopped performing, seemingly on stage somewhere every night in some configuration. In addition to the bands with his former Dead mates, he fronted Ratdog from 1995 to 2014 and the Wolf Brothers from 2018 to 2025.

He sat in with everyone from the Allman Brothers Band to Paul McCartney. He performed solo and duo acoustic gigs. Remarkably, given that he probably performed in front of more people than anyone ever, Weir said he never got over “horrendous stage fright,” insisting that “those last few steps onto stage are like walking into a torture chamber every time.”

He told me that he overcame it by leaving his ego behind and giving himself over to the characters in the songs. Great instrumentalists often speak of themselves as vessels for a higher power. Weir felt the same way about the characters he seemed to regard as dear old friends.

“The music gets me past myself as soon as it starts, because what I’m doing is not about me,” he said. “I give my body to those characters so that they can tell their stories. The more I give myself to them, the less I’m there to experience the stage fright, and it goes away.”

As for why he never slowed down and stopped to smell the roses, Weir was surprised at the question. Why slow down when he finally felt in control of his craft?

“After putting in a lifetime of work, stuff is opening up to me that I just can't walk away from,” he said. “Opportunities are arriving that make life worth living, so I got to go for them. Retiring is not an option.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Most would label Jerry Garcia the ‘frontman’ of the Grateful Dead, a Bay Area band born out of 1960s counterculture. But Bob Weir’s importance cannot be understated.

Weir shared writing credits on Truckin’, Sugar Magnolia, Looks Like Rain and Hell In A Bucket, and his laid-back style of rhythm (and occasionally lead) guitar made him indispensable to the Dead – especially after Jerry Garcia’s drug addiction took hold.

Robert Hall Weir, who we’ll refer to as ‘Bobby’ from here on, was born on October 16 1947. He was 78 when he died on 10 January 2026 after he “succumbed to underlying lung issues” that followed a cancer diagnosis in July 2025, said an official statement.

Bobby was born in San Francisco, an area that helped influence a life spent mainly in Birkenstock sandals with a guitar slung over his shoulder. His biological father, John Parber, and mother, Phyllis Inskeep, gave Bobby up for adoption, and he was adopted and raised by Frederic and Eleanor Weir, who encouraged him to play guitar at age 13. This came after Bob had dabbled with piano and trumpet – and was expelled from school, stemming from a case of undiagnosed dyslexia.

Bobby probably shouldn’t have been so easygoing, but he was. By 1963, a 16-year-old Bobby was digging deeply into music. He met Jerry Garcia, who was 21 – five years his senior. The pair hit it off after an all-night jam session, forming Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, a band that would become named the Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.

Following 1967’s self-titled debut, by the early ’70s the Dead – who now consisted of Weir, Garcia, Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Keith Godchaux – had cemented themselves as staples of the Flower Power era, reeling off a string of classic records in 1970’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, 1973’s Wake Of The Flood, and 1974’s From The Mars Hotel. But there were issues, such as drug and alcohol abuse – especially surrounding Garcia, who picked up a nasty heroin habit.

But Bobby dug in as a player. He expanded his skillset, becoming a fabulous slide player. Then came Weir’s first solo record, 1972’s Ace, which actually featured the Dead as his backup band.

Speaking to Guitar World in 2024 about his playing, Weir said: “I just keep changing. I wake up in the morning and I’m kind of different. You take all those mornings that I woke up kind of different, and you add ’em together, and after a while you start amounting to a different guy.” An interesting outlook on life and music – and perhaps one that helped him weather the ups and downs of a life in music.

By the 1980s, the Dead were on hiatus from recording, and Bobby formed Bobby And The Midnites. Then came the Dead’s final albums: 1987’s In the Dark, a big hit, and 1989’s Built To Last.

After Garcia’s death in 1995, Bobby soldiered on with RatDog, the Other Ones, Furthur and, finally – alongside John Mayer – Dead & Company, who toured until the end, fitting for a man who spent so much of his life on stage.

When Weir performed his final show at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on 3 August 2025, he was home – doing what he loved, surrounded by friends he saw as family, relaying the songs that he helped make famous to Deadheads.

Bobby put it best while speaking with Guitar World in 2024: “For what it’s worth,” he said of the Dead’s resurgence, “these are the same songs we’ve been playing all along. People from other cultures may have heard us in the past and maybe were not really able to relate. I think we could do better now.”

Following Bobby’s passing, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio shared memories of his “sweet, kind, gentle friend”: “Bobby was completely allergic to compliments. I’d say, ‘Man, that guitar riff you were doing on that song sounded really killer,’ and he’d respond, ‘Well, I’m sure I’ll fuck it up next time.’ I loved that about him… Mostly, he just loved playing.”

John Mayer, among other musicians and some 25,000 fans, paid tribute to Weir during a public memorial in San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza one week after his death: “We were unlikely partners and that was part of our magic… 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.”

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

John Mayer has looked back on his partnership with the late Bob Weir, recalling the early days of the pair’s professional relationship as Dead & Company bandmates.

Weir, who passed away last month, became one of Mayer’s closest collaborators during the latter half of his life. After the pair were put in touch with each other by producer Don Was, a mutual respect – and a love for Grateful Dead’s music – soon developed into something more.

The resulting Dead & Company project continued the jam band’s legacy, resulting in numerous tours that – with the help of Mayer’s contributions – brought its music to a new generation of fans and listeners.

It was a project that Mayer approached with the utmost respect, and took some time getting used to. Playing electric guitar with one of his heroes, after all, was both the opportunity of a lifetime – and rather daunting.

“I spent a lot of shows in the beginning wondering if he was upset,” Mayer remembers in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “I’d think: ‘I hope he’s happy. He might not be. Oh, he just went and turned his guitar amp up. Does that mean he thinks I’m too loud? Is someone going to come into my [dressing] room and say, “Hey, can you turn your guitar down?”’

“Then one day, you walk up onstage and there’s plexiglass between the amps and you go, ‘I have a feeling I’m a little too loud.’”

Mayer clearly learned to manage his insecurities. You don’t embark on global tours – and host two high-profile residencies at the Las Vegas Sphere – if you don’t.

“The first couple of tours were proving to the audience that I had a right to be there. And the rest of the tours were proving to Bobby that I meant well for everything I was trying to do,” Mayer continues when asked about when he finally felt comfortable sharing the stage with Weir.

“You got to understand, I never quantified it. And I don’t think Bob ever quantified it. Looking at it now, I think he never interacted with whatever that energy field was of adulation, or ‘Oh, my God, can you believe?’ He didn’t account for it. And oddly, I didn’t account for it – only when I heard what it meant to people.

“We never talked about it. But towards the end, maybe from ’23 on, and certainly the two Sphere runs, we had done it for so long. How did I read his signals? I just knew the way his head moved – we all do – and had an understanding of what his instincts were night after night. It got to the point where, in those last few tours, he knew when I would step forward and really hit the gas.

“And because I’d figured it out by then, I knew when to step back, look at Bobby and say, 'It’s yours again.' We were aligned. Bobby and I both had the same clock – where he knew what I was going to do, and he knew I’d give it back and go, 'All yours.' There were times where Bobby started singing as a way of letting me know, 'That’s the end of your solo, son.'”

Weir’s death prompted an outpouring of tributes from all corners of the music, with Mayer delivering a powerful and emotional eulogy during a public memorial.

Last year, both Mayer and Weir sat down with Guitar World to discuss their years-long collaboration and ever-evolving musical partnership.

The 2026 Grammys took place last night (February 1) and proved to be something of a guitar music love-in. From Justin Bieber wielding a 1988 Yamaha RGX 612S, to Turnstile winning both Best Rock Album and, perhaps more controversially, Best Metal Performance, pop stars and quintessential rock bands alike were out in full force this year, flying the flag for the instrument.

The Ozzy Osbourne tribute (or should that be tributes?) took center stage across the weekend. Machine Gun Kelly and Jelly Roll both honored the Prince of Darkness at record executive Clive Davis’ annual pre-Grammys gala on Saturday night – with MGK opting for 2007's I Don’t Wanna Stop and the country star giving a heartfelt rendition of 1991's Mama, I’m Coming Home.

The award show’s own tribute took place on the actual Grammy stage, with an all-star lineup that included a Les Paul-laden Slash and Ozzy producer Andrew Watt brandishing an SG, Duff McKagan on bass, and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith on drums.

Post Malone – who collaborated with Ozzy on Take What You Want and It’s a Raid from Osbourne’s first new album in a decade, 2019’s Ordinary Man – took up vocal duties on an abbreviated rendition of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, a version that visibly left the Osbourne family fighting back tears.

Aside from the Prince of Darkness, this year's In Memoriam segment kicked off with a voiceover from Bruce Springsteen, paying tribute to Beach Boys genius Brian Wilson: “The last of the Wilson brothers may be gone, but he leaves behind so many great songs, and good vibrations.”

John Mayer also paid his respects to Dead & Company bandmate and Grateful Dead legend Bob Weir, also in a voiceover: “He understood songwriting to its core, having written and performed some of the most enduring music in American history.

“Bob was a messenger, not only for the music he made with the Grateful Dead, but for the tapestry of influences that birthed it … Bob has left us, but the songs he sang will remain a road map for a better, more meaningful life. See you down the road, Ace.”

Neo-soul pioneer D'Angelo was honored by a host of artists and contemporaries: Lauryn Hill – marking her first Grammys performance since 1999 – Raphael Saadiq, Anthony Hamilton, Leon Thomas, and Jon Batiste.

And while guitar stars, including the likes of Ace Frehley were included in the segment, Mastodon fans pointed out that Brent Hinds was noticeably omitted, with Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert and Zappa Plays Zappa bassist, Pete Griffin, taking to social media to call out the institution: “Shame on @grammys for not including my brother (and fellow Grammy winner) Brent Hinds in their ‘in memoriam’ segment.”

The omission seemed particularly odd, given Hinds had been nominated for no less than six Grammys, and won one in 2018 – Best Metal Performance for Sultan's Curse – during his tenure with Mastodon.

Yungblud, Ozzy’s mentee and part of the new vanguard leading rock into the future, won his first-ever Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance for his career-making rendition of Changes at Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning concert.

“To grow up loving an idol who helped you develop your identity, not only as a musician, but as a man, is something that I’m truly grateful for,” he said in his acceptance speech.

“But then to get to know them and to form a relationship with them, and to honor them at their final show, and receive this because of it, is something that I and I think we are finding a bit strange to comprehend.

“We fucking love you, Ozzy,” he continued. “We would all like to thank Sharon, Jack, Kelly and Aimee [Osbourne] for this opportunity, and everyone at the Back To The Beginning show. Six generations of rock musicians came together in the name of our genre, in the name of Sabbath and in the name of Ozzy Osbourne.

“I deeply love this genre, it’s all I’ve ever known. I want to dedicate it to everyone in the guitar shop that I grew up in, and everyone in a guitar shop or in a bedroom with a dream. Rock music’s fucking coming back – watch out pop music, we’re gonna fucking get ya.”

And speaking of rock music's comeback, Turnstile bagged Best Rock Album for last year's triumphant album, Never Enough.

Accepting the award, frontman Brendan Yates commented, “The community we found through punk and hardcore music has given us a safe place to swing in the dark and land somewhere beautiful. So to our family, our friends, our partners, our peers, and to Baltimore, thank you. We love you.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, the genre-blending band also managed to win Best Metal Performance for Birds, beating the more metal through-and-through acts Dream Theater, Ghost, Sleep Token, and Spiritbox.

More standout guitar moments came by way of Bruno Mars, who, together with K-Pop star Rosé, delivered an overdriven rendition of their global hit APT.

Armed with a black Les Paul – as opposed to his signature Fender – Mars added some extra grit, as well as a squealing guitar solo, to the pop-punk-inflected track as the duo, who were nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, opened the show.

And it very much seemed like Justin Bieber went full-on Mk.gee with a stripped-down, guitar and looper performance of Yukon – from last year's album Swag (which, fun fact, included the contributions of both Mk.gee as well as his frequent collaborator Dijon).

Bieber’s guitar of choice was a left-handed purple 1988 Yamaha RGX 612S that definitely stood out on stage – an off-kilter choice that continues the trend of pop and indie stars à la Kesha and Phoebe Bridgers opting for ’80s and ’90s guitars more typically associated with metal or hardcore, whether for aesthetics or tone (or both).

Here's the full list of winners and nominees in the big four categories – and the guitar-adjacent ones:

Song of the year

Billie Eilish - Wildflower

Lady Gaga – Abracadabra

Doechii – Anxiety

Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.

Bad Bunny – DtMF

Hunter/x – Golden

Kendrick Lamar feat SZA – Luther

Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild

Record of the year

Kendrick Lamar feat SZA - Luther

Bad Bunny – DtMF

Sabrina Carpenter – Manchild

Doechii – Anxiety

Billie Eilish – Wildflower

Lady Gaga – Abracadabra

Chappell Roan – The Subway

Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.

Album of the year

Winner: Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos

Justin Bieber – Swag

Sabrina Carpenter – Man's Best Friend

Clipse – Let God Sort Em Out

Lady Gaga – Mayhem

Kendrick Lamar – GNX

Leon Thomas – Mutt

Tyler, the Creator – Chromakopia

Best new artist

Olivia Dean

Katseye

The Marías

Addison Rae

Sombr

Leon Thomas

Alex Warren

Lola Young

Best pop solo performance

Lola Young – Messy

Justin Bieber – Daisies

Sabrina Carpenter - Manchild

Lady Gaga – Disease

Chappell Roan – The Subway

Best pop vocal album

Lady Gaga – Mayhem

Justin Bieber – Swag

Sabrina Carpenter – Man's Best Friend

Miley Cyrus – Something Beautiful

Teddy Swims – I've Tried Everything But Therapy Pt 2

Best pop duo/group performance

Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande – Defying Gravity

Huntr/x – Golden

Katseye – Gabriela

Rosé & Bruno Mars – APT.

SZA With Kendrick Lamar – 30 For 30

Best traditional pop vocal album

Laufey – A Matter Of Time

Laila Biali – Wintersongs

Jennifer Hudson – The Gift Of Love

Elton John & Brandi Carlile – Who Believes In Angels?

Lady Gaga – Harlequin

Barbra Streisand – The Secret Of Life: Partners, Volume 2

Best rock performance

Yungblud ft Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello, Adam Wakeman, II – Changes (Live From Villa Park) Back To The Beginning

Amyl and The Sniffers – U Should Not Be Doing That

Linkin Park – The Emptiness Machine

Turnstile – Never Enough

Hayley Williams – Mirtazapine

Best rock song

Nine Inch Nails – As Alive As You Need Me To Be

Sleep Token – Caramel

Hayley Williams – Glum

Turnstile – Never Enough

Yungblud – Zombie

Best rock album

Turnstile – Never Enough

Deftones – Private Music

Haim – I Quit

Linkin Park – From Zero

Yungblud – Idols

Best alternative music album

The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World

Bon Iver – Sable, Fable

Tyler, The Creator – Don't Tap the Glass

Wet Leg – Moisturizer

Hayley Williams – Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Best alternative music performance

The Cure – Alone

Bon Iver – Everything Is Peaceful Love

Turnstile – Seein' Stars

Wet Leg – Mangetout

Hayley Williams – Parachute

Best metal performance

Turnstile – Birds

Dream Theater – Night Terror

Ghost – Lachryma

Sleep Token – Emergence

Spiritbox – Soft Spine

Best country solo performance

Chris Stapleton – Bad As I Used To Be

Tyler Childers – Nose On The Grindstone

Shaboozey – Good News

Zach Top – I Never Lie

Lainey Wilson – Somewhere Over Laredo

Best country duo/group performance

Shaboozey & Jelly Roll – Amen

Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton – A Song To Sing

Reba McEntire, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson – Trailblazer

Margo Price & Tyler Childers – Love Me Like You Used To Do

George Strait & Chris Stapleton – Honky Tonk Hall Of Fame

Best country song

Tyler Childers – Bitin' List

Shaboozey – Good News

Zach Top – I Never Lie

Lainey Wilson – Somewhere Over Laredo

Chris Stapleton – A Song To Sing

Best contemporary country album

Jelly Roll – Beautifully Broken

Kelsea Ballerini – Patterns

Tyler Childers – Snipe Hunter

Eric Church – Evangeline vs The Machine

Miranda Lambert – Postcards From Texas

Best R&B performance

Kehlani – Folded

Justin Bieber – Yukon

Chris Brown feat Bryson Tiller – It Depends

Leon Thomas – Mutt (Live From NPR's Tiny Desk)

Summer Walker – Heart Of A Woman

Best African music performance

Tyla – Push 2 Start

Burna Boy – Love

Davido feat Omah Lay – With You

Eddy Kenzo & Mehran Matin – Hope & Love

Ayra Starr feat Wizkid – Gimme Dat

Best Latin pop album

Natalia Lafourcade – Cancionera

Rauw Alejandro – Cosa Nuestra

Andrés Cepeda – Bogotá (Deluxe)

Karol G – Tropicoqueta

Alejandro Sanz – ¿Y ahora qué?

Best música urbana album

Bad Bunny – DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

J Balvin – Mixteip

Feid – Ferxxo Vol X: Sagrado

Nicki Nicole – Naiki

Trueno – Eub Deluxe

Yandel – Sinfónico (En Vivo)

John Mayer has paid an emotional tribute to the late Bob Weir, whose life and legacy was honored at a recent public memorial at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco on Saturday (January 17).

Weir, the counter-culture guitar icon who helped define the jam band movement with the Grateful Dead, died earlier this month at the age of 78, prompting an outpouring of tributes from the likes of Steve Vai, Trey Anastasio, Joe Bonamassa, Bob Dylan and more.

Mayer, who spent the past 10 years of his professional career playing alongside Weir in Dead & Company, was also among those to honor the guitar juggernaut’s memory, with an emotional post that read, “Thanks for letting me ride alongside you.”

As part of a public memorial service for Weir last weekend, Mayer followed his post with a touching speech that looked back on their bond, which first began when the two started performing Grateful Dead music under the Dead & Company banner back in 2016.

“Bob and I were born on the same day exactly 30 years apart. In the 30 years that had preceded me, Bob had become a counter-cultural icon,” Mayer begins. “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, heat, 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, and 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.”

Mayer first crossed paths with Weir via Don Was around 2015. At the time, Mayer had set his sights on recording a followup to 2013’s Paradise Valley but after the opportunity to play with Weir came up, any plans for an imminent record were shelved.

Instead, Mayer and Weir embarked on a journey that will go on to largely define both of their careers, with highlights including a blockbuster Las Vegas Sphere residency and a worldwide farewell tour.

Last year, both Mayer and Weir caught up with Guitar World reflect on 10 years of Dead & Company and discuss their ever-evolving guitar partnership.

At first glance, it might seem that Marlin Perkins should put rock rhythm guitar on the endangered species list. But on higher ground, it's easy to see there is a lot more rhythm guitar playing than most people think about.

Wah-wah guitar, simple strumming, power chords, and chunky R&B phrasing are just some of the family relations that papa Berry's Johnny B. Goode spawned.

The Seventies produced few if any guitar heroes from the rhythm side. The Sixties of Berry, Richards, Townsend, Lennon, and Hendrix still pave much of the most-traveled roads. And while new avenues are beginning to open up in the hands of Andy Summers, Andy Gill, and Buzzy Feiten, it's still too early to tell how much of a mark they'll make on the grand map of time.

Since the mid-Sixties, the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir has been absorbing and redefining the subtle complexities that link the past to the future of rhythm guitar playing. His most recent insights are shared on [the 1981 album] Bobby & the Midnites.

Weir started by copying the guitar figures of Joan Baez and progressed onto the country blues of Reverend Gary Davis, who for a short time was his only “real” teacher. Today his ideas for rhythm guitar playing come from listening to pianist McCoy Tyner and string quartets.

Tapping those years of experience on stage and in the studio, Bob Weir offers the following insights into developing your skills as a rock rhythm guitar player.

1. Playing With The Band

“Gary Davis taught me how one guitar player could be a whole band. I've never applied this directly on stage. It's too complicated for a whole band to fall behind, especially a band with six members.

“When you play with another guitarist or keyboard player, you're either going to dance around or walk all over each other. It's one or the other. So you have to play with other people you like and who will listen to you. And of course, you have to listen to them. Play long jams together, tape them, and find out who is good at what.

“If you're playing in a band, you have to get over the soloist ego hangup. You've got to listen to the whole sound. When you're first starting to learn, it's especially difficult to not sort of concentrate on what you yourself are doing. It's hard to step away from that and hear what the whole thing sounds like. The tape will do that for you. Go back and listen to see how everything fits together.

“You've got to listen for what a song needs. Even if you've got three guitarists in the band (remember Moby Grape?) at one point two of them have got to be comping behind the third one. They are going to have to work as one instrument.

“If you think of yourself as two lead guitarists working together, then suddenly you have a whole new different approach to rhythm guitar. You might play two or three notes and start thinking in terms of counterpoint. If you're thinking of three notes, you can start throwing in leading tones.”

2. On Developing A Part

“When you get close to a song it will tell you what kind of texture to play. Something that I like to do is try and be a horn or string section.

“For instance, on Sugar Magnolia, I'm a cross between a brass section and a guitar. I'm playing lots of triads punctuated by a line here and there and then another triad.

“There are two separate registers that I play off of. The alto register is the brass section and the baritone register is the guitar. It goes back and forth and I try and get a swing thing happening between the two.

“In this particular case the song developed because I was playing brass licks that I heard on a Delaney and Bonnie record. I was going for brass licks and whatever time I had in between was filled in with guitar. Then I thinned the whole situation down so it wouldn't be a big mess that nobody could play over.

“Once again, when you're playing in a six-piece band you have to be sparse and succinct to get through.”

3. On Strumming

“I use my whole hand to play the strings. I do brush strokes with the back of my nails and I pluck with the front.

“About seventy percent of the time I'm playing each note individually, either arpeggiating or plucking a chord all at once. Once you work up a touch for plucking a chord all at once, you have the ability to bring out a certain note within that chord. I use as many as four notes in a chord and I'll still be plucking it.

“I can bring out a certain note and create an ascending or descending line through a series of chords. I'm just playing the chords but there's that one note which sticks out. Besides a line, you can build the whole motion of the song just around that one idea.

“Again, if you listen to a tape of your band playing, you can find out if there's anyone else playing any of the notes in your inversion. If I'm playing an A chord and somebody else is playing my root, perhaps I'll build my inversion on the third or fifth of the chord. I might just leave out the note A, which is the simplest thing to do. And often times the simplest thing is the best.”

4. Time

“There's a wonderful little machine called the Trinome, which you can order from music stores. The Trinome will play polyrhythms. It has a bell and two clicks.

“Let's say you set the bells at one, one click at eight and the other at three. Then you have three against eight. If you want to learn seven, set the bell at one so it will signal every new bar. Set one click at seven and one at four.

“Times like three, five, six, and seven are not all that common in music but they're all real neat. Seven is a favorite of mine because you get the best of four and the best of three.”

5. Overtones

“Given the nature of electric instruments, there's often a fair bit of distortion involved. The nature of that distortion will generally supply additional notes of the chord you're playing.

“If you're playing the root and fifth and getting a lot of distortion and overtones, a subharmonic will supply the missing third of the chord. That's psycho-acoustics.

“Often times it's just the physics of acoustics. When you go to a root and sixth the subharmonic goes to a fourth below, which will also give you your chord. This is dense harmonic stuff, and given the nature of electric instruments, all of this is always happening anyway.”

6. Tone

“Timbre is real important. If your tone is too fat for a given section it's gonna make everything too thick. Of course if your tone is too thin for a section the whole thing will sound too thin. The rhythm guitar in this regard is very important. In terms of texture for the whole song, it's the most important instrument in the band.

“As everybody knows, guitarists get tired of one sound and go to another. If you start out, as I did, with double-coil pickups, you almost necessarily end up playing a single-coil pickup guitar. Then in another six or seven years you'll probably go back to the double-coil sound.”

Weir is currently playing his own autograph model Ibanez guitar with a coil-tapped humbucker in the bridge position and two single-coil pickups in the middle and neck spots.

He describes his amp setup as being a “huge montage of things.” Weir is thinking of asking Peavey to make him a compact system. He puts all of these elements into practice when the band's on stage.

Summing it all up for Guitar World he said, “Things are going to emerge under fire. That way you know damn well they're going to work. We play three to four hours a night, sometimes more. I study in real time, 100 gigs a year. That comes out to be a great deal of practice.”

• This article first appeared in the May 1982 issue of Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

A myriad of guitarists from different walks of life have paid tribute to Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who has died aged 78, underscoring the scope of his influence and impact on American culture.

He co-founded the band, whose genre-fusing exploits earned them a status as one of America's greatest, amidst the burgeoning counterculture movement of the 1960s, and never slowed down. Just last year, his GD-adjacent group, Dead & Company, completed the longest residency at Las Vegas' immersive Sphere venue. There was also a cameo with Sammy Hagar’s band across town.

Weir was diagnosed with lung cancer in July, and continued to perform in light of the news, with his Dead & Company co-guitarist John Mayer leading the tributes.

“Okay, Bob. I’ll do it your way. Fkn’ A…” he writes on Instagram. “Thanks for letting me ride alongside you. It sure was a pleasure. If you say it’s not the end, then I’ll believe you. I’ll meet you in the music. Come find me anytime.”

Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, meanwhile, has reflected on his interactions with the man and what his passing means.

“There were times when I was talking to him when I thought he was the last actual hippie,” he says (via the Guardian). “Bobby was completely allergic to compliments in the most endearing way. I’d say, ‘Man, that guitar riff you were doing on that song sounded really killer,’ and he’d respond, ‘Well, I’m sure I’ll fuck it up next time.’ I loved that about him.”

Steve Vai, who had the “great fortune” of playing with Weir at a 2017 charity concert, says, “for a few sublime hours we just sat around and jammed backstage, earthy and inspired, opening up my ears in ways I’ll never forget.

“Bob was a sharp listener, and his choice of chords, melodies, and tempos created an aura that was at once cosmic and playful…where the lines between sound and spirit blur in the best possible way,” he adds. “It was an absolute honor to share these moments with him, and I’m grateful for every note of light he gave this world.”

Country star Margo Price, meanwhile, who has grown close to Weir over the past decade, compared him to one of Dr. Seuss’s most famous creations.

“He always had a twinkle in his eye,” she says. “Like a barefoot philosopher or the Lorax, he was mystical. The records he made with the Grateful Dead are woven into the tapestry of American music forever.”

The Eagles’ Don Felder says he was “blessed” to have him sing on his solo track, Rock You, and Brandi Carlisle wrote that “Bob had time for all of us. He came to our shows, helped us write songs, and got so many of us out on stage to jam and just stand in his light.”

In a move indicative of Weir’s widespread influence, a truly vast cross section of guitar talent including, Warren Haynes, Joe Bonamassa, Molly Tuttle, Alex Skolnick, Robb Flynn, Duane Betts, Scott Ian, Lee Ranaldo and Aaron Dessner have also expressed their love for Weir and his playing.

“I along with my friend James helped him find a bigsby equipped all gold parts 1956 Les Paul,” relays Bonamassa. “The guitar had a very old sticker of two aces on the original pick guard. He politely reminded me that his most successful solo album was called "Ace". Sometimes things are meant to be and the world works in mysterious ways.”

Meanwhile Bob Dylan simply posted a captionless image of the pair performing together, bluegrass virtuoso Billy Strings looked back on his interactions with the guitar hero.

“I’ll always cherish the memories I have of Bob,” he says. “Of hanging out in his hotel room and him showing me his record collection and mobile recording rig. Sitting there listening to Kind of Blue in silence. Soaking in the frequencies. Of him busting into When I Paint my Masterpiece at my wedding, and in an instant, he turned the place into a joyous musical celebration.”

Bob Weir is survived by his wife, Natascha, two children, Shala Monet and Chloe, and a sprawling discography that has forever changed the face of American music.

Grateful Dead guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir has passed away aged 78, according to a post on his social media channels.

The announcement, made on Saturday evening (January 10), says: “It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir. He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.”

Weir was a founding member of the Grateful Dead, joining forces with his bandmates Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, in the mid-’60s. The band initially went by the name The Warlocks, before settling on The Grateful Dead after Garcia found the reference in a folklore dictionary.

The group’s transition from a folksier outfit into a psychedelic juggernaut was a reaction to the rich soup of countercultural influences that swirled around their San Francisco base. (A recently electrified) Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Lovin’ Spoonful provided the musical impetus, while their association with Ken Kesey, as the in-house band during the Acid Test period, brought in the chemical stimulus.

Weir was initially the rhythm guitarist, the youngest of the group and known for his role as a vocalist on many of the band’s rock and country numbers, including probably their best-known song Truckin’.

Across a period of 30 years, the group defined the jam band movement and became a byword for ’60s counterculture and the hippie scene, before Garcia passed away in 1995.

Across that time, Weir became a formidable guitarist and musician, renowned for what Phil Lesh termed his “quirky, whimsical” ear and ability to produce complex, piano-like chord voicings on the fretboard.

Dead historians will point to key moments in which is playing is said to have evolved significantly: notably, the early 1970s – when a creative spark was said to have been ignited by Garcia and Lesh’s decision to jam with other players in the late-’60s – or, again, toward the end of the decade, when he started to incorporate slide guitar parts, drawing on the likes of John Coltrane’s horn playing to influence his phrasing.

In truth, though, and in keeping with the spirit of the Grateful Dead, he never stopped evolving – in his playing, his gear choices, or his songwriting.

“I just keep changing,” Weir told Guitar World last year. “I wake up in the morning and I’m kind of different. You take all those mornings that I woke up kind of different and you add ’em together, and after a while, you start amounting to a different guy.”

Weir remained active following Garcia’s death, performing in various Grateful Dead offshoot groups, including the Others, The Dead and Furthur, plus his group Ratdog.

Despite playing thousands of gigs to enormous crowds across a period of 60 years, Weir once confessed to Guitar World that he still battled stage fright most nights.

“It’s the anticipation, the time before walking out. There is a moment onstage when I think, ‘Thank God, I’m out of here,’” he explained. “I can forget myself, leave the building and let the characters in the songs have my body, my spirit and everything else.”

In 2015, Weir joined forces with his remaining bandmates and John Mayer to form Dead and Company – across the group’s 10-year run he forged a significant playing relationship with Mayer.

“The thing I’ve learned from Bob is to let it breathe,” Mayer told GW last year. “And that’s changed my playing a lot. The two of us now have a very deep relationship. Almost like a telepathic relationship.

“I know where I stand with him in the best of ways. He knows where he stands with me in the best of ways. And we don’t have to talk about it.”

In July 2025, Weir was diagnosed with cancer, but continued to perform as much as possible around his treatment, continuing to play, to evolve, and to keep moving forward.

“There is no final curtain here, not really,” reads the statement following his death. “Only the sense of someone setting off again... we send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing. A reward for a life worth livin’.”

Weir is survived by his wife Natascha and daughters Monet and Chloe.

After 10 years of playing electric guitar together, John Mayer and Bob Weir have forged a truly formidable guitar partnership in Dead & Company – and they’ve learned a lot about one another in the process, too.

Now, as the dust on their second mega-selling Las Vegas Sphere residency settles, an interview clip of Don Was has resurfaced, with the revered producer and musician revealing how Mayer got the gig in the first place – and how he helped facilitate the group's formation.

Was' musical network stretches far and wide, and in 2015 he proved to be the missing link between Mayer and a band he grew up adoring.

Mayer and Was worked on two records prior to the onset of the Dead & Company days: 2012's Born and Raised and Paradise Valley, which arrived a year later. A third album together, Was says, was in the works, but ultimately got kicked to the curb when the opportunity of working with the Grateful Dead’s surviving members arose.

“He was a huge fan,” Was tells the Go with Elmo podcast. “I'd get in the car and drive him to the studio and stuff, and he always had the Grateful Dead channel and Sirius on. He could identify, ‘No, that's not ’78 because Jerry's playing through this pedal,’ or something like that.

“He'd locked out Capitol Studios with an eye towards making a new record, and Bobby and Mickey [Hart, drums] came to see me,” he continues. “So I called him up. I said, ‘You better come up here.’

“He was very eloquent about how much he loved the Grateful Dead and why. They were kind of taken aback, so they invited him to come on up and play sometime. When the opportunity cemented itself for him to go play with those guys, three months later, he shut down the record, cleared out all his stuff, went home, and cracked the code on the Grateful Dead.”

Anyone vaguely familiar with John Mayer’s work will know just how exacting a man he is. Just ask esteemed guitarist and educator Tomo Fujita, who had told him to quit Berklee and come back when he'd written a hit record. He took that advice to heart and carried it out to the letter.

To Mayer, this wasn’t just a chance to kick back and jam with his idols, it was a job interview, and he didn’t waste a moment preparing for it.

“Particularly,” Was says of Mayer's tone-cracking mission, “what was behind what Jerry [Garcia] was doing.

“He knew not to do karaoke. He really studied. I drove up there with him; we got a couple of airstreams, parked in the parking lot of Bobby’s studio, and we stayed about four days. At the end of the fourth day, they came in and said, ‘All right, let's do this. You'll be a partner. You'll be in the thing.

“That’s something I learned from John,” he concludes. “Don't go in unprepared.”

Dead & Company had played what was billed as their final-ever show back in 2023, but the prospect of a stint at Las Vegas’ ultra-futuristic Sphere venue brought the band out of retirement. Now, it seems those two residencies may serve as a prelude to a new era for the band, rather than a final swan song.

Bob Weir and John Mayer are leaving the door open to recording music together, and more gigs don’t seem out of the question either.

“The mission statement has always been forward-facing,” Mayer ascertains. “Whoever dreams up the next something incredible and wants us to be a part of it? I would never say no to that kind of experimentalism.”

A decade earlier, the prospect of him playing with an incarnation of the Grateful Dead would have sounded like wild fancy to Mayer. Was changed the course of the guitarist’s career by connecting them, but nailing the gig lay solely on his shoulders.

His tireless work ethic was shown again as he came towards the end of the first Sphere run. With a finger broken, he spent every day practicing guitar using the other three fingers as he looked to reconfigure his playing style.

Dead & Company’s second residency at the Las Vegas Sphere may be reaching the end, but Bob Weir and John Mayer recently offered fresh hope that the live entity could record new music together.

The band were formed in 2015, with Grateful Dead veteran Weir enlisting Mayer's ever-dazzling electric guitar chops for an elite-level Grateful Dead honoring project. The band was supposed to have played their last gig in 2023 but they reversed that decision when the opportunity to strut their stuff at Las Vegas' futuristic dome fell at their feet.

The final show of their second residency happens May 17, but in an interview with Guitar World earlier this year, Weir left the door open to studio projects – whether that be revisiting the songs they’ve been playing live, or penning original material.

“Oh, it's something I would still love to do,” Weir said at the time. “We've got our best guys on it.”

Answering the same question Mayer, who broke some fingers towards the end of their first residency, is a little more diplomatic. “It hasn't been discussed in a while,” he says. “But I have a boilerplate response to ideas like that. Which is: If Bobby and Mickey [Hart, drums, the band’s other original GD member] want to do it, I want to do it.

“I want to follow them where they want to go. So if that's something that naturally comes up and it starts to materialize, you won't see me being the one to say no.”

Weir, meanwhile, has other ambitions for the band that could well see them take to the stage many more times.

“I wouldn't mind taking it across the seas,” he extends. “This is quintessentially American music that we're doing, and I would love to play it for people everywhere. It would be nice to be able to do that because we put on a pretty tight show.

“And for what it's worth, these are the same songs we've been playing all along, but we've somehow learned to make it a little more accessible. So whereas people from other cultures may have heard us in the past and maybe were not really able to relate, I think we could do better now.”

For Mayer, there aren’t specific goals he’s aiming to smash with any sort of continuation of the band, but in the same breath, he says he’s an open book. He just wants to play.

“Well, right now someone somewhere is coming up with an idea that's so ahead of its time, I couldn't think of it,” he responds. “The mission statement has always been forward-facing. The music is so vast, they're who you'd want to use for whatever your technology is. So I think it made sense to do the Sphere. And whoever dreams up the next something incredible and wants us to be a part of it? I would never say no to that kind of experimentalism.”

The pair’s GW chat also saw them discuss what they’ve learned from one another during a decade of trading licks, which yielded some fascinating answers.

Dead & Company's twin Vegas residencies have been full of highlights, from Mayer playing Jeff Beck’s Custom Strat to his ingenious way of blasting his amps without upsetting the venue’s iron-fisted bosses.

And during a recent break in the band’s Vegas run, Weir made a surprise appearance across town with the Best of All Worlds band, playing a Montrose classic on Sammy Hagar’s Gibson Explorer.

The Grateful Dead legend Bob Weir recently made a surprise guest appearance with the Best of All Worlds band, playing Sammy Hagar's Gibson Explorer alongside Joe Satriani and co. for a rendition of Montrose's Bad Motor Scooter earlier this week (May 7).

The red rocker is in the middle of his Las Vegas residency with his Van Halen-honoring band – whose lineup comprises Satriani, Michael Anthony, and Kenny Aronoff – at the Park MGM. Weir and John Mayer, meanwhile, have been making The Sphere their second home during their second residency at the futuristic venue across the city.

Dead & Company have been enjoying some downtime recently, with their tour schedule set to resume tonight (May 9). However, Hagar wasted no time seizing the opportunity to get his long-time friend up on stage to play the Montrose classic.

“Bob is fearless,” Hagar wrote on Instagram after the event. “He’s always willing to take chances with music of any kind. This was a blast.”

The clip first shows the band running through the track backstage, with Weir playing a Les Paul. But it's Hagar's go-to Explorer that he takes to the stage, and which he uses to deliver an improvised, scrappy-in-a-joyfully-free-flowing-way, solo.

When they aren't supping tequila together, Hagar and Weir are always grabbing the chance to jam. In 2018, Weir joined Chickenfoot to jam Otis Redding with Taj Mahal and REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin during the Acoustic-4-a-Cure concert.

The 2023 edition of the event also saw the revival of the Hagar/Weir partnership, with Taj Mahal, Michael Anthony, and singer-songwriter Chris Isaak also present.

At 77, Hagar has said he prefers residencies to the rigors of touring city-to-city, which explains his current residency slot.

Weir’s own Las Vegas residencies haven’t been without note, either. John Mayer has played Jeff Beck’s Custom Strat at select shows, as well as an off-the-shelf Jerry Garcia Strat replica that was “too good to put down.”

In related news, Mayer also revealed the secret hiding place for his amps as he battles with the venue's stage volume limitations. During their first residency, a hand injury forced him to rethink his playing style.

Weir, who dropped his third signature D’Angelico last August, says he and Mayer have learned a lot about one another from a decade of guitar partnership, believing they now enjoy a “telepathic relationship.”

This year marks a decade since John Mayer teamed up with Grateful Dead singer and guitarist Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann to breathe new life into the band’s iconic catalog under the Dead & Company moniker.

At the time, it felt like a curious, if intriguing combination – a guitar prodigy with pop chops pairing with the legendary Dead members. But what has unfolded over the past 10 years is nothing short of remarkable.

The band, rounded out by bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and, more recently, drummer Jay Lane (who stepped in full time for Kreutzmann in 2023), has transcended its incongruous origins and become a genuine force in its own right, establishing itself as a must-see summer stadium draw – one that’s kept the Grateful Dead’s exploratory, improvisatory and highly musical spirit alive while forging a path forward with an energy all its own.

In 2023, Dead & Company embarked on what was billed as the “Final Tour,” capping a years-long run that saw the group play to an estimated four million-plus fans since those first 2015 shows. But while it seemed like the ’23 outing was it for this other one, Dead & Company soon set out to explore a new frontier: a residency at Sphere, the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue known for its state-of-the-art technology.

Among its many innovations is a massive 160,000-square-foot LED screen that encircles both the audience and the band, along with an unparalleled sound system – the largest concert-grade audio setup in the world – featuring spatial audio, haptic technology and more than 167,000 individual speaker drivers.

At first glance, this ultra-modern setting might seem a mismatch for a legacy band with deep roots in traditional music. But it’s actually a perfect pairing. “We were doing liquid projections on screens and stuff like that, where the visuals could move in time with the music, back in the ‘Acid Test’ days,” Weir points out. Those days, it’s worth noting, were more than a half-century ago.

The Sphere residency, titled “Dead Forever,” spanned 30 shows from May to August in 2024. Mayer was the driving creative force behind the production, and the singer and guitarist skillfully balanced tradition and innovation, staying true to the band’s roots while embracing the futuristic nature of Sphere’s immersive visuals and sonics.

As he puts it to Guitar World, the goal was to find a sweet spot “between Monster Mash and 2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s a fine line, but one he and the band navigated expertly. Sphere’s technology allowed Dead & Company to create breathtaking, dynamic visuals that amplified their performances, but Mayer and the band ensured the feeling stayed grounded – warm, human and connected to the core of their music.

Dead & Company’s run at Sphere was an incredible success, and it’s possible that of the handful of bands who have appeared there, they may have been the most effective at weaving the venue’s unique features into the fabric of their performance. So it wasn’t surprising that they decided to return.

In March of this year, the band launched a second Dead Forever residency, scheduled to run until May. This time, they’re coming in as Sphere veterans. “So we’ve already learned what we can get away with and what we can’t get away with,” Weir says.

For Mayer, it’s an opportunity to further the blend of “heritage and futurism” they explored last year. Sphere, he says, “really wants to be futuristic, so it’s cool to also pull the storytelling back into something really human.

”This run has even more beautiful, situational places to hang out under the Sphere; there’s a lot more feeling like you’re somewhere organic and warm. It’s an opportunity to make more worlds out of the ones we liked a lot and really fell in love with during the shows last year, where you go, ‘Ahh, here it is…’”

Ultimately, the Sphere shows are a natural extension of what Dead & Company is all about. “With this band, we’re able to open a portal,” Mayer says. “And if it’s not a portal to go back in time, it’s a portal to enter those feelings that you didn’t think you could go back and feel again.” Those feelings, much like the music, clearly still strike a deep chord with fans.

Prior to the kickoff of the current residency, Mayer and Weir sat down with Guitar World to discuss a range of topics, including adjusting to the audio and visual demands of the Sphere experience, their guitar playing and gear, and how their musical partnership has evolved over the past decade together.

They also touched on the possibility of, for the first time, bringing Dead & Company’s music from the stage to the studio. Two years after the Final Tour, it’s clear that the phrase “Dead Forever” continues to ring true.”

You’re back for Round 2 at Sphere. I can imagine that building and pulling off the shows last year was a massive undertaking. Did any lessons or insights from that experience shape how you approached this one?

John Mayer: “I suppose one thing I learned was that in terms of sensory experience, the audience can handle more. The first time through, I was being very careful about not disorienting anybody with what the Sphere does or can do.

“But I think I learned that having your senses pushed a little further, but not to the breaking point, the audience can handle it – and wants a little more of it. In terms of motion [of the visuals], you do have to keep it under a certain threshold. But as far as what kind of motion, I feel like people want a little bit of a thrill ride. So we’ll push that just a little bit more this time.”

The concert experience at Sphere is often looked at from the fan’s perspective, but I’m curious – what’s it like for you onstage, especially in comparison to a regular Dead & Company show?

Bob Weir: “As far as the experience of playing, I expect it is different, but I can’t really quantify or qualify how it’s different. We still have our sight lines. John and I still look at each other, we still take each other’s facial expressions into consideration when we’re playing something, all that stuff.

“For what it’s worth, I can’t see what everybody else is seeing of John, which is, you know, his head 30-feet wide on the screen behind me. [Laughs] That particular camera angle, that’s not how I’m seeing him. But that would be great if I could watch him like that, if I could see what everybody else is seeing…”

Is there anything unique about how you interact with the audience, or with the visuals?

Mayer: “The first show, I remember we played Mississippi Half-Step and the crowd was roaring. The energy really hyped us up – so much so that I think we kind of had a hard time putting the song where we wanted to put the song. But over the next two shows we began to learn that the Sphere is our friend. It’s our colleague.

“We know the crowd’s going to ooh and aah, so we don’t have to – we can continue to keep our energy where we want it. Then the Sphere becomes kind of like this big elephant at the circus that we work with. I think that’s a pretty fair metaphor. It’s this massive thing you have to respect, but it’s a part of our show. You almost want to pat the side of the Sphere and go, ‘Good girl, good girl.’

“So it took us about one weekend to learn how to keep our breathing slow, keep our tempo right, even though we know that what’s happening out there is incredibly dynamic. We had to learn to separate the musical dynamic from the visual dynamic.

“But when we figured that out, then things got sensational, because we could continue to make the music at our own tempo, in our own dynamic, knowing that it was merging with what was happening out there.”

Did you have a favorite moment in the show during the first run?

Mayer: “There are only a couple of times where I will let myself be a part of the experience the fans are having. One particular part that I was just so mesmerized by was when we return back to Earth [toward the end of the show], and we move through this particle field.

“I look up and feel it come over my head, and I take that time every night to be swept away by it. It’s like, for one moment I get high on my own supply. [Laughs] And then I go back to the thing.”

How about you, Bob? Are there times when you find yourself getting caught up in the visuals?

Weir: “Yes… but really, when I walk onstage, I walk into a hallucinogenic realm. I’m gone. I’m as out-there as a fellow gets, and I’m not sure I’m even going to notice the tech. We do have to watch the visuals at the beginning and the end of the show, because we have to time everything.

“But the visuals probably hit anybody else in that place harder than they do the people onstage, because the average guy onstage is in a hallucinogenic realm to begin with. That’s the nature of our business.”

What has been your experience from an audio perspective?

Weir: “Well, the sound is real good in there. But I did have to make my peace with in-ears. We have to use them, because the Sphere is basically the world’s largest hard, parabolic, reflective surface, and it’s all pointed directly back at you.

“And with that comes a report that’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of a second that’s every bit as loud as anything that happens onstage. And it’s almost always out of time with the song you’re playing. So there’s various things you can do.

“Overhead microphones, for instance, will hear nothing but slapback. And if you have them in your [onstage] mix, if you’re listening to the drums, for instance, you’re getting at least half slapback. And that’s not what you want to hear, because that slapback is almost always out of time with the song. So we went to electronic cymbals, and we didn’t have to deal with overhead microphones. And we went to in-ears.”

Other guitarists who’ve performed at Sphere, like the Edge and Phish’s Trey Anastasio, have noted that the venue’s unique design makes it challenging, and also somewhat unnecessary, to use traditional amps onstage. The Edge, in particular, mentioned switching from tube amps to Universal Audio amp sim pedals for his setup.

Weir: “Well, you know, at first I had all this stuff with me – an iso chamber with a guitar amp in it, all of that. But very quickly, I was done with it. It was just not necessary.

“Instead, I’ve been using the Universal Audio Ruby, which is basically a [Vox] AC30 in a stompbox. I couldn’t have imagined when I first walked in there that that was going to be pretty much all I’d need. It turns out it was pretty much all I needed. [Laughs]”

Was that a big change from, say, your rig on Dead & Company’s 2023 stadium tour?

Weir: “Actually, on that tour I was using the UA Ruby pretty predominantly, too. In fact, I might have been using it pretty much exclusively. Now, I use a little bit of signal processing, but not much.

“With the amount of high-end that I use on that Ruby, I find that signal processing in general is not a good idea, because I can articulate all the information from the string better if I just let the string speak.

“Other than that, I used compression – I have UA’s 1176 [Studio Compressor pedal], a tiny bit of reverb, and that’s pretty much it.”

John, you actually still had tube amps onstage with you during the first run at Sphere.

Mayer: “I grew up playing tube amps. I grew up feeling the combustion. I really like the UA Enigmatic [’82 Overdrive Special Amp] pedal, and I think if you’re a young guitar player, that’s money well spent. But my style of playing relies on a certain amount of pushback. I need shocks on the tires. And I think that can only come from the ignition inside of a tube.”

During last year’s residency, you shared a video on your socials that gained a lot of attention, showing your guitar sound coming from speaker cabinets inside a shipping crate on the loading dock of the Sphere, which was mic’d up so that the audience heard it as part of the band performance.

Mayer: “This is going to kind of merge into a very hot topic among guitar players – something they like to call ‘pushing air’. The Pushing Air Debate.

“For me, I know for a fact that I need a larger space for soundwaves to come out of a guitar amp and be caught a little bit further away than an iso box allows. There has to be more of a comet tail so that the note can bloom a little bit.

“So we had to devise a system that would give a little more space to the speakers. And what we decided to do was use shipping crates as much larger iso boxes – kind of a ‘mini room’. In fact, Jeremy Nielsen, my guitar tech, decorated the inside of the box as if it were a small-scale studio, because that’s how much of a genius he is.

“That gave us some dimension so that while I was playing, there was just that extra little bit of space for the note to grow. So my amps were onstage, but the speakers were in these boxes on the loading dock of the Sphere.”

It looked like you had a few Dumble amps onstage, as well as a Fender Twin Reverb.

Mayer: “Yeah. I really like the Small Special, and then there was an Overdrive Special and maybe a Dumble-modded Bandmaster, I believe. And the [Fender] Twin. Those are onstage, and the speaker cabinets are in the crates on the loading dock.

“Which… if you deduce from one more level of reasoning, the cabs onstage, let’s just say they’re there to help raise the heads of the amps so that I can reach them with my hand. [Laughs] Otherwise they’d be sitting on the ground.

“But if you walk through the back of the loading dock of the Sphere while the show is happening, you will hear my guitar blaring out of a pile of road cases. That’s what Derek [Featherstone, Dead & Company tour director/FOH engineer] is mic’ing up to use in the room.”

Bob, your main guitar lately has been a Fender Stratocaster. But back in the Grateful Dead days, you weren’t really known as a Strat player. What drew you to the Strat?

Weir: “The one I’m using is a ’64. As for what drew me to playing a Strat, I can’t really say. Every day your tastes change. And it was just one morning, I sort of woke up and I didn’t want to hear the double-coil sound anymore.

“I’d been playing humbucker guitars for a while, and then I woke up and I wanted to play on a single coil. And you know, single coils, they get interfered with and all that kind of stuff, but they are richer [sounding].”

At The Sphere you alternated the Strat with a few other guitars – your signature D’Angelico semi-hollowbody, for one, and several Gibson Les Pauls, including a goldtop and a Black Beauty.

Weir: “My D’Angelico – it’s rich, too. The pickups get good high end, and it’s pretty versatile. There’s a lot you can do with it, a lot of sounds you can pull out. And I’ve actually got three old goldtops and a few more black ones. The goldtops, Joe Bonamassa found one, maybe two of them, for me.

“And then the other one, I was talking to my luthier and he was touting the praises of Gibson’s reissue of the ’50s goldtop. And I just said to myself, ‘Okay, I’ve gotta see what this is all about.’ That was my first one. And I was smitten by the goldtop, especially with the P90s in it. So now I have that one and the two older ones.”

John, you pulled out several unique guitars during the first Sphere residency, including a Fender Custom Shop replica of Jerry Garcia’s famous modded “Alligator” Stratocaster and a white Custom Shop Strat that had previously belonged to Jeff Beck. But you stuck primarily to two trusty PRS models – a McCarty 594 and, mostly, the “Dead Spec” version of your signature Silver Sky.

Mayer: “Yes. Basically 90 percent of the show is handled by the Dead Spec, and then there’s particular cases for the 594. That guitar, I call it the blowtorch.

“When I want to do late-’60s-Fillmore-acid-test Grateful Dead, kind of SG/Les Paul-burning stuff, the 594 is perfect for that. It also has probably the best humbucker neck pickup I’ve ever played on a guitar. So when I want to do that barrelhouse thing, I pick up that guitar.”

The Dead Spec, of course, is a customized take on your signature guitar, drawing inspiration from Jerry’s original Alligator. Your model has several modifications, including an Alembic Blaster preamp that boosts the signal with 3-14 dB of gain, along with brass hardware to enhance brightness and resonance. Jerry’s tone is not an easy thing to approximate, but I imagine having this guitar helps.

Mayer: “There are certain inalienable details in Jerry’s playing that are part of the music. It’s like if you were going to play Miles Davis music you have to have a mute for your trumpet.

“You could say that’s just a gear thing, but it’s part of the vocabulary. So if you’re playing Jerry’s stuff, you’ve got to push the front end of the amp a little bit more than you normally would.

“And then you’ve got to get a little more accent on the high end so that you can really pick those notes. Because there’s so much nuance in what Jerry was doing; he would use dynamics as a way to create motifs, almost like a horn player. So what you have to do is put a certain amount of boost in your signal so that you’re giving the amp slightly more in the front end than the makers intended.

“If you play at, like, a five out of a 10, then the amp is happy. That’s where you get that 'steel drum' thing. And if you hit it a little hard, you’re pushing the amp more than it wants to be pushed. If you can get certain notes to hit the red, that’s the magic, man. That’s where you can really have a blast.”

I assume the Alembic boost helps with that.

Mayer: “Yes, but that little trim pot in there, it’s pretty low. Lower than you might think. You wouldn’t get your money’s worth if that was a boost pedal, because it’s very, very subtle. But it’s just enough to feed the amp a certain amount of level so that it kind of stays on its toes.

“And another thing is that, of course, Jerry’s guitar had so much brass on it. That’s why the Dead Spec has a brass nut, a brass retainer bar over the strings. It’s trying to get that string to pass over as much brass surface as possible to get that ring out. Because we started to learn that that brassiness in the tone comes from… brass. [Laughs]”

In a way, the Dead Spec Silver Sky represents a fusion of your guitar design with Jerry’s. There’s a similar balance you have to achieve in your playing – respecting Jerry’s legacy while still putting your own stamp on it.

My observation is that over the years with Dead & Company you’ve become more comfortable in this space, and now we hear more moments that break from what people might expect – guitar tapping in Slipknot! or St. Stephen, genuine shredding in All Along the Watchtower. Maybe you wouldn’t have done these things in 2015 or 2016.

Mayer: “That’s a really interesting observation. And the answer is very complicated because there are so many variables that were changing from year to year. Let me try to take you on a tour through them. Number one, my understanding of the music in terms of its arrangement, right?

“These song arrangements, early on I would start playing what I thought was the main full solo in a song. And then when I got to the end of that solo, I would realize, that’s the mini solo. [Laughs] Then Bob would go back and sing and I would go, ‘Oh, no, Bob thinks I wanted to take the mini solo and go that long on it. There’s still another solo to go, and that’s the big one.’ So that’s one of the things – understanding the arrangements.”

“Another thing is understanding the totality of the show in terms of the balance of what can be done. On a good night, I can earn myself the right to take one song, leave the [Grateful Dead] philosophy behind and go, you know, pure Jimi Hendrix on Watchtower. Because that’s a cover anyway, right?

“I definitely feel more latitude to do what I want to do on covers, because the main contributor to the style of that song isn’t Jerry Garcia. So I can step up and be me thinking about Jimi, which is, I think, the right thing to do. And it’s probably a good moment of release for the audience as well, because it opens up the vocabulary.

“Then you’ve got my interpretation of Jerry’s playing style, which took me at least four years to figure out how much was enough and how much was too much. When it came to subdividing the notes. When it came to how fast to play. This happens when you’re studying someone’s music and that music has existed for a period of time where there’s different approaches to that music.”

“The way Jerry played in ’69 is totally different than ’74. And ’74 is completely different from ’81. And ’81 is completely different from ’90. And then to add to that, there is the way in which his music, his guitar playing, has been interpreted since his passing. You have to take all of that into a ball, and then you go, ‘I’m gonna do my best.’

“And the constant here is that every tour I’ve ever done from 2015 on was the best I could have done at that moment. It was only after each tour was over that I would get back in the car and listen to more Grateful Dead recordings and realize I hadn’t come close.

“But the only way to realize you hadn’t come close is to have grown somewhere along the line, where you realize you now know better. So to me, every tour up until the Final Tour in ’23 was an opportunity to try to get it right, based on everything I had learned previously.”

Bob, has your guitar playing changed over the past 10 years with Dead & Company? And do you think having John as your guitar partner has led you to approach the music differently?

Weir: “Yes, but I always do that. And that, I think, is more on account of the fact that I just keep changing. I wake up in the morning and I’m kind of different. You take all those mornings that I woke up kind of different and you add ’em together, and after a while, you start amounting to a different guy. That’s kind of where I am now.

“So I’d be reluctant to say that anybody, whether it be Jerry or John or whoever, drew anything out of me that didn’t already want to come out. But one thing I will say about John is that he’s one of those deep blues guys.

“He can listen to a blues tune on a boombox and tell you who it is, who’s in the band, what era it’s from, who wrote the song, all that kind of stuff, just on a quick listen. He can dissect the music, the various styles of playing. That’s somewhere we haven’t been yet that I find very interesting.”

John, what is something that you’ve learned from Bob over the years?

Mayer: “That’s a good question. And don’t think my taking a while to answer it means I have to fight to come up with something. It’s just that there’s so much. But the thing I’ve learned from Bob is to let it breathe. And that’s changed my playing a lot.

“I feel like the two of us now have a very deep relationship, almost like a telepathic relationship. I know where I stand with him in the best of ways. He knows where he stands with me in the best of ways. And we don’t have to talk about it.”

Bob, what have you learned from John?

Weir: “‘Don’t sweat the small stuff.’ I don’t know if there’s more to it than that. I’m constantly evolving, and so is he. And I can’t tell if it’s on account of what I’m getting from him, or if it’s something he’s getting from me, but we sort of make room, make allowances, for those kinds of developments.

“And you know, he is a legendary guitarist. So I might be inclined to be a little bit under-spoken about what I express through my instrument. [pauses] But probably not.

“Because I remember the first night I played with him, when we were on TV. [In 2015, Mayer guest-hosted several episodes of The Late Late Show. During one of them, Weir, who was promoting the Grateful Dead’s upcoming Fare Thee Well concerts, appeared as a guest. Following an interview, the two performed a pair of Grateful Dead songs, Truckin’ and Althea together – a moment often credited with sparking the formation of Dead & Company.]

“I was surprised at how easy and how natural it was, right from the start. He had already mastered the kind of vocabulary I was used to on the instrument, to the point where we readily interacted. I don’t remember any moments where I was thinking to myself, what the hell is he trying to get at here?”

John, did you feel that in the moment?

Mayer: “Maybe with that song [Althea]. But there’s only about 140 other ones! [Laughs] I think anyone who plays Grateful Dead music could tell you, you may have one that you can make it through the gauntlet on. But then there’s another one waiting right around the corner that might take you another two years to get your head around. But I absolutely love the challenge.

“Before every show you will see me pacing my dressing room with Spotify open, with some version of some song I think is helpful for me to listen to before I go up to play the whole show, to just remind myself, ‘This is all it takes.’ Because I can overthink. You can hear me overthinking on the guitar sometimes.

“But every night I get to go onstage is a shot at pitching a perfect game. And I can tell you, when I try to pitch a perfect game, I lose my shutout in about the beginning of the second song. And I just love that moment where I go, ‘Whoops, not a perfect game. Have fun!’”

Up until now, Dead & Company has been strictly a live entity. But back in the early days of the band, 2016 or so, I recall interviews where Bob would talk about maybe going into the studio, either to record new material or to revisit songs that had only ever been played onstage by the Grateful Dead. Is this still a possibility?

Weir: “Oh, it’s something I would still love to do. We’ve got our best guys on it…”

Mayer: “It hasn’t been discussed in a while, but I have a boilerplate response to ideas like that. Which is, ‘If Bobby and Mickey want to do it, I want to do it.’ You know what I mean? I want to follow them where they want to go. So if that’s something that naturally comes up and it starts to materialize, you won’t see me being the one to say no.”

Clearly, you’re still up for anything. You did the Final Tour in 2023, and just a year later, reimagined the Dead & Company experience for the Sphere residency. Is there anything you’d still like to explore with this band?

Weir: “I wouldn’t mind taking it across the seas. This is a quintessentially American music that we’re doing, and I would love to play it for people everywhere. It would be nice to be able to do that. Because we put on a pretty tight show.

“And for what it’s worth, these are the same songs we’ve been playing all along, but we’ve somehow learned to make it a little more accessible. So whereas people from other cultures may have heard us in the past and maybe were not really able to relate, I think we could do better now.”

What about you, John? As the guy who took the lead in helping to manifest the Sphere experience, what’s the next frontier for Dead & Company?

Mayer: “Well, right now someone somewhere is coming up with an idea that’s so ahead of its time, I couldn’t think of it. But I like that they think of, and for the last 60 years have thought of, Grateful Dead – even though we’re not Grateful Dead, but Bob and Mickey represent that – as one of the first bands you would think to ask to be a part of these ideas.

“Because the mission statement has always been forward-facing. The music is so vast, they’re who you’d want to use for whatever your technology is. So I think it made sense to do the Sphere. And whoever dreams up the next something incredible and wants us to be a part of it? I would never say no to that kind of experimentalism.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

It's been 10 years since John Mayer teamed up with Grateful Dead's Bob Weir and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann – a curious pairing that many would perhaps have thought unlikely.

However, what transpired was a decade during which the Dead's repertoire was introduced to a whole new generation of fans – while also serving as an opportunity for the band to keep up with its experimental and exploratory ethos through their younger collaborator.

With the journey culminating in last year's spectacular residency at The Sphere, Las Vegas' cutting-edge venue, we wondered – what did the two guitarists who spearheaded this ambitious project learn from each other?

“It’s just that there's so much,” Mayer says in a new interview with Guitar World. “But the thing I've learned from Bob is to let it breathe. And that's changed my playing a lot.

“I feel like the two of us now have a very deep relationship, almost like a telepathic relationship. I know where I stand with him in the best of ways. He knows where he stands with me in the best of ways. And we don't have to talk about it.”

As for Weir? “‘Don't sweat the small stuff,’” he says matter-of-factly. “I don't know if there's more to it than that. I'm constantly evolving, and so is he. And I can't tell if it's on account of what I'm getting from him, or if it's something he's getting from me, but we sort of make room, make allowances, for those kinds of developments.”

And whether we can expect an actual studio album from Dead & Company, the two tease that it's definitely not off the table.

“It's something I would still love to do. We've got our best guys on it…” hints Weir.

“It hasn't been discussed in a while,” Mayer clarifies. “But I have a boilerplate response to ideas like that. Which is, ‘If Bobby and Mickey want to do it, I want to do it.’ I want to follow them where they want to go. So if that's something that naturally comes up and it starts to materialize, you won't see me being the one to say no.”

In other Dead & Company news, Mayer has recently opened up about his much-discussed amp setup at The Sphere – and how he still managed to crank his Dumble and Fender combos in the notoriously amp-hostile venue.

The late Jerry Garcia played a key role in cementing the Grateful Dead’s legacy as the behemoth it is today, serving as the principal songwriter, lead guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist. His influence was so profound that the rest of the band doubted whether the group could continue without him after his passing in 1995.

“I didn’t think it would [go on], because when Jerry left, that was the end of the Grateful Dead. Period,” drummer Bill Kreutzmann tells CBS Mornings. “There’s just no way that you can replace Jerry Garcia.

He continues, “There’s great, wonderful players out there that can sit in, but Jerry had this thing. He took over the whole stage. He had everybody’s attention. He had all the musicians’ attention, and we followed him very closely. He would hold the rhythm down, sometimes a lot. It was a way of not ever getting lost when he was on stage.”

The band did indeed disband a few month’s after Garcia death. However, since then, there have been a number of reunions by the surviving members and combinations of different musicians – and guitarist Bob Weir insists that Garcia still very much serves as a source of inspiration, even visiting him in his dreams.

“I had a dream not long ago. In the dream, Jerry comes to me and he says, ‘Listen, I’m going to invite a song in to meet you,’” he explains. “‘I want you to meet this song,’ and then he goes and does that.”

He continues, “[The dream] solidified in me the notion that, yes, these characters that we evoke when we sing the songs, and these lines that we play, they're living things. They come and visit our world and they come through us.”

Earlier this month, the Grateful Dead received this year's Kennedy Center Honors alongside Bonnie Raitt, Francis Ford Coppola, and Arturo Sandoval.

The 47th Kennedy Center Honors – celebrating the best of American performing arts – recognized legendary rockers the Grateful Dead and genre-hopping guitarist and singer-songwriter Bonnie Raitt, alongside New Hollywood filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and jazz trumpeter, composer, and pianist Arturo Sandoval.

For the first time in its history, the Honors also inducted a venue: Harlem's history-defining Apollo Theater. The event was hosted by Queen Latifah and taped on December 8, before airing on CBS on December 22.

The 2024 event also saw outgoing President Biden attend the ceremony and deliver remarks about the honorees.

He called the Grateful Dead – whose original members, guitarist Bobby Weir, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, were in attendance – “technical virtuosos fiercely dedicated to their craft,” adding that “they fused decades and dozens of musical styles to create a whole new American sound: experimental, innovative, and brave.”

“This honor, to me, is not just to the band members, it's also to the audience, our Deadheads,” Kreutzmann told CBS Mornings when commenting on the induction. “It's to all the people that have really enjoyed our band and kept us going. It's a creative honor for all.”

As a nod to Bonnie Raitt's immense legacy, Brandi Carlile delivered a rendition of I Can’t Make You Love Me [from Raitt's 1991 album Luck of the Draw], accompanied by Sheryl Crow on piano, while Emmylou Harris and Dave Matthews delighted audiences with their own spin on the John Prine-penned Angel From Montgomery, which Raitt popularized with her version on the 1974 album Streetlights.

“As you get older you reflect on how you got where you got and that’s not just in your career but life, and I attribute a lot to Bonnie,” Crow told Billboard before the show.

“When you’re a 17-year-old girl and you play piano, and you go see Bonnie Raitt and she’s ripping and she’s fronting a guy band and she’s singing truth… I would never have picked up a guitar or seen myself being out front had it not been for her.”

Carlile added, “I was maybe 17 years old at a Bonnie Raitt concert when a ‘No Nukes’ guitar pick landed on the toe of my shoe, and I picked that up and I found out what she meant by that. I carry all of her messages forward.”

Musical and non-musical guests came out in full force, including guitarists Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, and Jackson Browne; singer-songwriters Leon Bridges and Maggie Rogers; filmmaker Martin Scorsese; actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino; and television host David Letterman, to name but a few.

The 47th Kennedy Center Honors can now be streamed in full on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.

The Martin Scorsese-led Robbie Robertson tribute, The Life Is a Carnival: A Musical Celebration of Robbie Robertson, took place at Los Angeles' Kia Forum on October 17 – and it was a veritable who's who of the music industry paying tribute to The Band legend.

The roughly five-hour concert, which included performances by the likes of Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Trey Anastasio, Mike Campbell, Lucinda Williams, Bob Weir, and Warren Haynes, was clearly meant to evoke Scorsese's 1978 classic The Last Waltz, which documented The Band's farewell concert appearance at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom on Thanksgiving Day 1976.

Fast forward to 2024, and the all-star blowout paying homage to Robertson, also set to be released as a concert movie, made its mark on music history.

“We’ve had four days to learn these songs,” announced Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Mike Campbell, setting the tone for the event, “and we’re gonna play every single one of them tonight.”

Heavyweights Van Morrison and Eric Clapton, who both appeared in The Last Waltz, put their own spin on some bona fide classics, with the former delivering back-to-back performances of Tupelo Honey (from his 1971 album Tupelo Honey), Days Like This (from his 1995 album of the same name), and Wonderful Remark – which has a clear Robertson link in that it was part of Scorsese’s 1983 film The King of Comedy, whose soundtrack The Band guitarist oversaw.

Clapton, who recently revealed why he’s not particularly proud of his Last Waltz performance, gave a Strat-laden performance of The Band's The Shape I'm In (from the 1970 album Stage Fright), Chest Fever (from 1968's Music from Big Pink), Forbidden Fruit (from 1975's Northern Lights – Southern Cross), and Out of the Blue (from 1978's The Last Waltz), plus Bobby Bland's Further On Up The Road, which he also performed in The Last Waltz.

Anastasio, who, together with Mavis Staples and Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, gave a heartfelt rendition of The Weight, the Robertson-penned 1968 hit that served as the first single under the moniker The Band, told Rolling Stone right before the show, “In the style of music that I play, the Band is the foundation – I grew up listening to this music and it’s the high water mark. So being able to take part in a couple of the songs from this huge legacy of masterpieces that were left behind by Robbie and the Band it just means so much.”

Brandishing one of his trusty Languedoc guitars, he also performed The Unfaithful Servant (from the 1969 album The Band) and Look Out Cleveland (from that same album).

While the setlist was unabashedly The Band-heavy, pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph and record producer Daniel Lanois – who produced Robertson’s first solo album – chose songs from Robertson's post-Band career, delivering Straight Down The Line (from 2011's How to Become Clairvoyant) and Broken Arrow (from 1987's Robbie Robertson) respectively.

“It’s a song that’s very dear to me,” Lanois told Variety, “and brings up a lot of memories of us huddled up in the little studio at the Village, working up these arrangements. It was a great honor for a Canadian kid, because as a guitar player, Robbie was always a hero for me. And so there I was working with one of my heroes, and we had a nice exchange because he loves imaginative thinking. The wildest idea, he would really accept.”

The evening’s full setlist is below [as reported by Variety]:

Set 1
Peyote Healing – Verdell Primeaux
Up on Cripple Creek – Eric Church
Ophelia – Ryan Bingham
The Best of Everything – Mike Campbell
Evangeline – Margo Price
Acadian Driftwood – Allison Russell, Julian Taylor, and Logan Staats
Straight Down the Line – Robert Randolph
Who Do You Love – Taj Mahal
Down South in New Orleans – Dave Malone and Cyril Neville
Go Back to Your Woods – Bruce Hornsby
King Harvest – Bruce Hornsby
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – Jamey Johnson

Set 2
Broken Arrow – Daniel Lanois
Life Is a Carnival – Warren Haynes
Whispering Pines – Lucinda Williams
Twilight – Nathaniel Rateliff
Across the Great Divide – Nathaniel Rateliff
Rag Mama Rag – Jamey Johnson
Don’t Do It – Nathaniel Rateliff with Margo Price
Tupelo Honey – Van Morrison
Days Like This – Van Morrison
Wonderful Remark – Van Morrison

Set 3
The Shape I’m In – Eric Clapton
Out of the Blue – Eric Clapton
Forbidden Fruit – Eric Clapton
Chest Fever – Eric Clapton
Further on Up the Road – Eric Clapton

Set 4
Forever Young – Ryan Bingham
It Makes No Difference – Jim James
Stage Fright – Warren Haynes
Caravan – Warren Haynes
When I Paint My Masterpiece – Bob Weir
The Unfaithful Servant – Trey Anastasio
Look Out Cleveland – Trey Anastasio
The Weight – Mavis Staples with Trey Anastasio and Bob Weir
I Shall Be Released – Jamey Johnson, Jim James, Allison Russell, and full company

D’Angelico has rekindled its relationship with Grateful Dead legend Bobby Weir for a new signature guitar that has been dubbed the pair’s finest collaborative creation yet.

Officially named the Deluxe Bobby Weir 3, the supremely classy electric guitar is the direct result of years of development and rigorous road-testing, having already seen action onstage during Dead & Company’s ongoing Sphere residency.

The semi-hollow stunner has also been tested in various iterations throughout the years, with Weir putting D’Angelico’s creations through their paces on various tours with Wolf Brothers.

Now, the fruits of their labor has been released, with the Deluxe Weir 3 serving as D’Angelico’s “best work yet”.

Available in Satin Trans Wine and Matte Stone, the single-cut sports a laminated maple body with five-ply binding, and a C-shape maple/walnut/maple neck that’s topped with a 16”-radius ebony fingerboard.

There are a pair of TV Jones DA-Tron pickups which, thanks to four push-pull pots, can produce a huge array of sounds. Among them is “Weir’s notoriously slinky tones”.

These four pots – two volume and two tone knobs – are joined by a three-way selector switch and a master volume control located on the upper bout.

“I’ve been on an endless quest to find a tone that makes me really sit up and beg,” Weir says of his newest D’Angelico. “I don’t remember where it was, but I was on stage at a soundcheck. I plugged it in, cranked it up, and said ‘This is it –this is what I’m looking for.’ I knew it.”

Weir’s new signature guitar also looks as good as it apparently sounds. The thing is dripping in gold hardware, flashing a D’Angelico Shield tremolo, locking Grover Super Rotomatic tuners and a Skyscraper truss rod cover.

There’s also a Graph Tech Tusq nut, Mother of Pearl Split Block inlays, 22 Jescar frets and a five-ply Tortoise Scalini five-ply pickguard.

“Bobby is forever driven to go deeper and deeper into the mystery that is great guitar tone,” says Ryan Kershaw, EVP of Product Development. “Over the years, we’ve been incredibly fortunate to join him on his never-ending journey.

“I’m thrilled with the results that we got this time around. There’s no doubt that this is our best work yet – I hope it’s an inspiration to many players.”

A limited run of 10 hand-signed models will be launched to celebrate the release. Furthermore, two examples will be auctioned for Headcount – a nonpartisan organization that promotes democratic participation through music.

The D’Angelico Deluxe Bobby Weir 3 is available now for $2,199.

Head over to D’Angelico for more info.

Jerry Garcia is revered almost as much for his guitar tinkering as his guitar talent. Now the immense custom guitar rig he used throughout his 1992-1995 dates with The Grateful Dead is up for auction.

Expected to fetch a final price of between $500,000 to $750,000 the rig has several remarkable features. Fortunately, the auction site Analogr has shared some decent pictures and we can get a closer look at the setup.

“Jerry's most sophisticated guitar setup was the culmination of decades of experimentation with state of the art gear and fine tuning,” says Analogr’s listing. 

“Needing the flexibility of working with a speaker-less stage setup with the Dead, and his more traditional three- and four-speaker cabinets with the Garcia band, this rig could perform in both contexts and meet Jerry's lofty sonic requirements.”

Central to the build is a Groove Tubes Trio preamp [the brown unit], which is an interesting model from the firm’s pre-Fender era. 

The triple channel tube amp is designed to replicate the cleans of a classic black panel Fender amp, while the ‘Mean’ channel covers cranked Tweed tones to Marshall’s 2203 circuit and ‘Scream’ brings it into shred-friendly modded-Marshall territory.

Moving down, you can see Garcia’s unique vertical rack-mounted pedalboard. 

Admittedly, with prices of $400+ for each, that vintage script logo MXR Phase 100 and Mu-Tron III wah (said to date back to 1976) are not exactly cheap on the used market.

However, elsewhere it’s inspiring to see how much off-the-shelf gear is included here, with Garcia otherwise favoring a bevy of Boss pedals, including the OD-1 and OD-2 (each paired with a GE-7 EQ) and an OC-2 octave pedal.

The most notable element of the rig, though, is the McIntosh MC-2300 power amp, which was used by Garcia’s bandmate Bob Weir in the Grateful Dead’s iconic 1974 Wall of Sound setup – and favored by Garcia as far back as ’73. 

McIntosh is a name usually associated with high-end hifi products, but the fastidious Garcia insisted on using them for the ’Dead’s power amp requirements. 

The name will also have piqued the interest of the auctioneers as Garcia’s famous Budman McIntosh 2300 sold at auction for $378,000 in 2021 – despite carrying a guide price of just $5,000 – $7,000.

Will the trick be repeated? Well, we’ll have to wait until the auction closes to find out, but at the time of writing, it’s already fetched bids of $75,000. 

For more information and to take part in the bidding on Jerry Garcia’s final tour rig, head to Analogr.

It’s been a busy news day when it comes to the Grateful Dead’s guitarists, as Bob Weir recently teamed up with Jason Isbell to cover Johnny B. Goode at Michael J. Fox’s recent fundraising event.

And in other Grateful Dead gear news, PRS has launched the ‘Dead Spec’ Silver Sky, a new take on John Mayer’s signature model inspired by Jerry Garcia’s Alligator Stratocaster.

Jason Isbell was one of an array of stars in attendance at the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s recent New York fundraiser on Saturday (November 11) and got the chance to fulfill several childhood dreams at once, performing Johnny B. Goode onstage with one of his musical heroes – Bob Weir.

Isbell appeared in front of an audience of numerous actors and musicians, including the charity’s founder Michael J. Fox, wielding a Gibson ES-345 – an accurate nod to the historically inaccurate guitar used in Back To The Future’s iconic Johnny B. Goode scene.

Interest has grown in the instrument among collectors and guitar geeks since the film’s debut in 1985, as the ES-345 was famously not released until three years after the film’s 1955 setting.

As a respected guitar collector and child of the ’80s, when it comes to Back to the Future, Isbell is clearly across the details. As guitar influencer Mike Adams, (aka Puisheen) later commented, “McFly vibes from that 345 Jason!”

Sadly, there’s no full video of the performance out there yet (so we don’t know if Isbell attempted the movie version’s closing shred sequence), but Traci Thorn has posted a short clip on Instagram.

We do know Isbell was accompanied by Grateful Dead/ Dead and Co. guitarist Bob Weir, though, and following his performance, Isbell paid tribute to the influence of the ’Dead on his youthful misadventures. 

“This one’s for the teacher who sent me home from school in the 8th grade because my shirt had Jerry [Garcia]’s handprint on it,” wrote Isbell on Instagram. 

“And since he was missing his middle finger, she thought I was somehow flipping everybody off.”

As such, it seems the night was something of a double whammy for Isbell, who can now check both performing Johnny B. Goode on a Gibson ES-345 in front of Michael J. Fox and jamming with Bob Weir off his bucket list. 

More important than all of our guitar geekery, though is that the annual event had much to celebrate this year.

Back in April, the non-profit announced it had made a major breakthrough in identifying a key biomarker for the debilitating disease, making it easier to identify the so-called “Parkinson’s protein”.

The result? “The promise of a future where every person living with Parkinson’s can expect improved care and treatments – and newly diagnosed individuals may never advance to full-blown symptoms.”

Fox wrote after the fundraiser, “What a night rockin in the breakthrough. Special thanks to our talented and generous friends. We love you.”

Back in guitar land, it was recently reported by a consultant on the film – Norm’s Rare Guitars founder Norm Harris – that Back to the Future’s Johnny B. Goode scene almost featured a Fender Strat, instead of the ES-345.

Last Sunday (July 16), Dead & Company – the Grateful Dead offshoot led by electric guitar heroes John Mayer and Bob Weir – played their final show at Oracle Park in the Dead's hometown of San Francisco.

It was quite the spectacle, with a massive crowd – reportedly over 40,000 people – taking in the epic, 22-song set. 

Thankfully, a few folks in the enormous crowd had the foresight to capture parts of the historic set, particularly the band's three-song encore – made up of the Dead classics Truckin' and Brokedown Palace, and a spirited cover of Buddy Holly's early rock and roll classic, Not Fade Away.

You can see fan-filmed footage of the first two songs below, and the entire encore further down.

As he has for years with Dead & Co., Mayer demonstrates his versatility on Truckin', lending slinky lead lines that – in the vein of late Dead frontman and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia – incorporate blues, country, jazz, and folk stylings. 

Mayer then helps close out the band's stately, emotional version of Brokedown Palace with an absolute stunner of a slow-burning solo.

Finally, the band rolls into a loose, appropriately jam-y take on Not Fade Away – the song with which they opened their tour-closing three-night stand at Oracle Park – with ample assistance from the devoted crowd.

It's not the first time on the tour that Dead & Company closed out proceedings with Not Fade Away, though. Earlier this month, the band ended their third and final show at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colorado with a version of Not Fade Away that featured some acoustic assistance from none other than Dave Matthews.

Though Dead & Company's arc has seemingly run its course, Mayer will almost certainly find ways to keep himself busy. This year alone, he's already embarked on an acoustic tour, and reunited onstage with his blues power trio for the first time in six years. 

Bob Weir is ridiculously busy at age 74. The founding member and rhythm guitarist of the Grateful Dead now spends his summers touring stadiums with Dead & Company, the group that also features Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and pianist Jeff Chimenti. 

Since 2018, he’s also toured with Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros, a group that began as a trio with bassist Don Was – best known as a producer of the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan and many others – and Primus drummer Jay Lane, a longtime Weir collaborator. The band has slowly expanded into a 10-piece juggernaut.

They are captured on their first album, Live in Colorado, which features highlights from a 2021 tour of the Centennial State, which represented their first live performances in front of an audience in almost a year, due to the pandemic. 

It’s a very strong collection of Dead and Weir tunes, all of which take on a different form in the group, with his distinctive rhythm playing and vocals center stage atop slinky, swirling textures. In October, the group will play four shows with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., performing a concerto of mostly Grateful Dead music, something they’re still hammering out onstage and off. 

Weir also has been working with Taj Mahal on a stage musical about Negro League baseball icon Satchel Paige, as well as an opera and a memoir. He’s also become an unlikely workout icon, posting his daily exercise routines on social media to the delight of fans. We caught up with him on the phone as he was preparing for Wolf Bros’ spring tour.

Your endless activity is inspiring, and the familiar songs on the new live album sound totally renewed. How did Bobby Weir and Wolf Bros come about?

“I started a little trio, the Wolf Bros, and it’s become a… I guess the word is dectet. There’s 10 of us! It can operate in various configurations from three to 10. And now I’m working with a symphony orchestra, which God knows is fairly rewarding. It took a lifetime to crowbar the door open to do all this stuff, and here it is – all the stuff that makes life worth living. 

“I woke up one morning with this dream in my head; I was playing in a trio with Don and Jay. I just rolled over, picked up the phone and called Don and asked him if he wanted to do this and he said sure. As the band has grown, parts of our show still focus on the trio because we really can do something.” 

Then you added pianist Jeff Chimenti, who you’ve played with for years, and pedal steel player Greg Leisz, an absolute master as a soloist and at chordal coloring. How did he come into your orbit?

“Don suggested we give him a try. I halfway grew up on country music, so I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for pedal steel. The instrument is pretty much relegated to country music, but it’s capable of so much more than that. I think you should find it everywhere, but it’s so complicated and there are so few pedal steel players. We don’t have Greg all the time. Sometimes we use Barry Sless, who’s also great.”

Then you added the horn section and some strings. Is this all in preparation for playing with the orchestra?

“Sort of. We still gotta workshop this, but we selected the guys to tour with us with the idea that they’d develop a library of riffs they would then use to lead their instrumental groupings; the violinist would lead the violins and feed them a line, for instance. 

“We have about six months to figure out exactly how we’re going to do this. They’ll be reading, but the section leader will be improvising; we’ll be feeding them lines to play and they’ll never be interpreted the same.” 

Is this an effort to merge the symphonic tradition with your love of improvisation?

“Yeah, that’s what we’re up to. The rehearsals we’ve had with the Marin and Stanford Symphony orchestras have been pretty amazing. It works. Bach was famous for making enormous classical pieces out of folk tunes, which is more or less what we’re up to here with Grateful Dead songs. We’re taking music that’s drawn from the folk traditions and bringing them to full classical orchestration.” 

20 years ago, when I was interviewing you for Guitar World, you said, “I never had too much of an idea of what I’m doing.” Do you still feel that way about your playing? 

“I think that through dogged persistence, I’ve found ways to pull an awful lot of variety out of the sounds an electric guitar can produce. I feel like I’m starting to get a handle on how to bring it all together and make music. 

“I’ve discovered that certain configurations of instrument design and pickup design will give me a broader spectrum to work with, so I’ve pretty much abandoned signal processing. The guitar itself has such variety to offer and it’s so much more elemental. I don’t use delays or envelope filters much anymore because the guitar itself tells me all I want to hear.” 

You’ve talked before about how much your style developed by playing with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, who had such distinct approaches to their instruments. [Dead & Company bassist] Oteil [Burbridge] and John [Mayer] are very different players. Do you continue to evolve playing with different people, or do they have to fit in with you at this point? 

“No, no. We fit in together as best we can, which is essential to our kind of music. We just find the center and go for that. The adaptation has gone both ways. When Oteil is at his best for our music is when he’s framing the songs with a bass line that some of them really have never had, because Phil was playing lead bass – a different deal. Some of those songs never really had a traditional bass line. Oteil is able to find that, and I think the songs are thankful and have grown from that.”

Live in Colorado is a great example of how you can play the same catalog differently in different settings. One great example is your riff that kicks off Big River, which is quite different from the type of thing you usually play. 

“Yeah. It’s more of a traditional lead guitar riff that I found, but it’s actually something I got from what Jerry used to play on the song, and then it sat with me for a couple of decades after he checked out. It’s my interpretation of that. All this comes from our mutual understanding of what Johnny Cash really wanted with that song.”

Are there other songs where Jerry’s stuff seeped into you and came out without you really consciously doing it?

“That was actually happening even when Jerry was still alive. Like the riff that I do in Wharf Rat, which I think I pulled out of Jerry’s psyche one day when we were rehearsing. When I got that right, I could click with it and he started answering and started framing that, so I stuck with it, and it’s stayed with the song for five decades now.”

You’ve said you still have stage fright, which seems amazing. You’ve probably performed in front of as many people as anyone ever has. Can you describe that?

“It’s the anticipation, the time before walking out. There is a moment onstage when I think, ‘Thank God, I’m out of here.’ I can forget myself, leave the building and let the characters in the songs have my body, my spirit and everything else. I can take a breather and not have to worry about it. As far as the size of the crowd, a living room is the toughest for me. Oftentimes the larger the crowd, the way easier it is for me.” 

It’s less personal. I’ve heard Jerry had stage fright, too.

“Oh yeah. And you could make the case that that’s what killed him, because he used those drugs to dull the stage fright, to dull the pain of it, because it physically hurt. We talked about it a fair bit. We compared notes on how we dealt with stage fright. It wasn’t an ongoing conversation, because there wasn’t much new to add to it after the first six months that I’d known him. 

“After we realized we were in the same boat, there wasn’t much more to say about it, but we would sometimes give each other looks that said, ‘It’s okay, I got past it. How are you doing?’” 

Gregg Allman also had stage fright, and to look from the outside it’s impossible to imagine that could be possible for the three of you. 

“People think we can’t wait to get on stage. I want to play, yes, but those last few steps on stage are like walking into a torture chamber every time. It’s not easy.”

• Live in Colorado is out now via Third Man.

John Mayer and Grateful Dead founder Bob Weir brought the house down on Monday (Aug 8) when they took to the state at Pine Creek Lodge, in Livingston, Montana for an intimate open air acoustic guitar set.

The duo are more commonly found packing out ballparks and stadia across the country with Dead & Company, but this performance under the trees was a special occasion. 

It was the first of a trio of Rise for the River benefit shows scheduled by Mayer to raise money for those affected by June 13 flooding of the Yellowstone River, which damaged homes and impacted jobs across Park County, where Mayer has called home for over a decade. 

The flooding closed the entrance to the park, devastating an economy that is reliant on tourism, with hotels reporting that between 50 and 70 per cent of reservations have been canceled. 

Mayer and Weir opened with Friend of the Devil, taken from the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album American Beauty, and played 13 tracks in total, including Dead classics such as Bertha, Uncle John’s Band, Jack Straw, Terrapin Station, Eye of the World and a bravura run-through of Brown-Eyed Women.

• John Mayer’s 2021 Dead & Company pedalboard has been revealed – but what’s that mystery pedal?

All of these tracks are firmly in both players’ wheelhouses, but there was something about the stripped-down acoustic arrangements that afforded Mayer a little extra room, setting the tone for what was a special evening – a Dead & Company show of sorts, albeit with a difference.

There were a few firsts, with Mayer performing Jerry Garcia’s Loser and Marty Robbins’s classic western ballad El Paso for the first time. The pair rounded out the set with a cover of the Crickets' seminal rock 'n' roll hit Not Fade Away.

Mayer and Weir’s performance was livestreamed on the on the PPV Nugs platform, with highlights from their performance on both artists’ YouTube channels. The fundraising efforts were supported by a range of John and Bobby merch items.

You can watch highlights of Mayer and Weir’s set above (and on fan-shot video below), and the full performance is currently on demand via Rise for the River on Nugs.net, priced $20, where it will be available until Aug 28. 

Mayer will next take to the stage with the comedian Dave Chapelle, before playing a headline set on August 21. That solo headline performance will also be available on the Nugs platform for a similar price.

Donate to the Southwest Montana Flood Relief Fund.

John Mayer has announced three Rise for the River relief concerts, which will raise funds for the Park Country Community Foundation to support those who have been impacted by the Yellowstone River flood that occurred in June.

For the concerts, which will take place across August, the electric guitar hero has tapped Grateful Dead guitarist and his Dead & Company bandmate Bob Weir, as well as comedian Dave Chappelle.

The first show on August 8 will see Mayer and Weir share the stage, while the second date on August 14 will have Mayer line up alongside Chappelle. The final show, scheduled for August 21, will be a headlining solo concert for the Sob Rock star.

Rise for the River has been organized in response to the evacuation of the Yellowstone National Park in June, which occurred after heavy rainfall and melting snow lead to catastrophic flooding and mud slides. Roads, bridges and homes were destroyed at the time.

On Instagram, Mayer wrote, “Announcing Rise For The River, three great-big-very-small-shows in Livingston, MT to support a county greatly impacted by flooding and the resulting closure of the Yellowstone Park entrance that the local economy relies on. 

“I’m blown away by the generosity of my friends Bob Weir and Dave Chappelle,” he added, “and can’t wait to celebrate this awesome community with those who share my love for it.”

Proceeds from the concert will go towards providing emergency shelter, drinking water, food, clothing and restoration. People can also support the initiative by texting “Flood22” to 41444.

At the time of the flood, Mayer took to Instagram to share a lengthy statement, in which he pleaded with the public to continue visiting the area in a bid to ensure the community’s income from tourism remains intact.

“Last Monday, June 13, historic flooding of Montana’s Yellowstone River took place, damaging homes, and as you’ve probably seen, closing parts of Yellowstone National Park,” he wrote. “Park County, where I’ve lived for over a decade, resides just north of a major entrance to the park. 

“The community thrives on tourism, doing most of its business for the year during the summer months that attracts tourists to the area. Because of the park closure, hotels in the area have seen 50-70 per cent cancellations, as would-be visitors have opted to make other plans.” 

He continued: “Though the park is closed, other incredible landmarks and businesses remain open for business, and the area is safe, beautiful and still well worth visiting. I write today with a plea: if you were planning to visit Yellowstone and canceled your plans, please, from the bottom of my heart, I ask that you rebook them. If you’re still making summer plans, please consider making a visit to Livingston Montana or a town nearby. 

“I am planning some really amazing events that you won’t want to miss. I’ll be sharing more of what this incredible community has to offer, and you’ll see for yourself just why I fell in love with the place.”

For more info, head over to John Mayer's website.

Dead & Company completed their 2022 summer tour on July 16 in New York – a tour that saw John Mayer debut a revamped touring rig and pedalboard.

John Mayer’s discovery of the Grateful Dead happened by chance. In 2011, while listening to random suggestions on Pandora, he heard the Dead classic Althea, and with that he fell hard and fast. Taking a deep-dive into the band’s vast back catalogue, he became a committed ‘Deadhead’, leading to a remarkable chapter in his career. 

The first evidence of the Dead’s influence on Mayer came with his 2012 album Born And Raised and 2013 follow-up Paradise Valley. Both albums marked incrementally intensifying departures from polished pop, with Mayer doing and playing exactly what he pleased. And both contained subtle but abundant Grateful Dead influences.

Queen Of California, the opening track from Born And Raised, was in tune with the folksy, acoustic numbers that abound on the Dead’s two albums from 1970, American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead.  

In the second verse from Queen Of California, Mayer also made a reference to Neil Young’s After The Goldrush, before a lengthy pedal steel-driven outro took hold over a bedrock of Dead-esque repeating chords.

Another connection was made in this album’s title track. Jerry Garcia – the founding member and de facto leader of the Grateful Dead as vocalist, lead guitarist and principal songwriter – had played pedal steel on the song Teach Your Children from Déjà Vu, the first album featuring Neil Young in the '70s supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. For the song Born And Raised, Mayer had David Crosby and Graham Nash on backing vocals.

And in Wildfire, the first track on Paradise Valley, a comparatively jam-based number with an outdoorsy feel, Mayer sang: “We can dance with the dead/You can rest your head.” Which – depending on how deeply you like to read into things – may well be a reference to the band. 

Fast-forward to 2015, and while appearing as a guest host on The Late Late Show, Mayer was presented with the opportunity to perform with another founding member of the Dead, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir.

The song they played together was Althea. A bond was formed between them, and by the end of that year, Mayer was invited to join Weir in Dead & Company, a touring outfit also featuring Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, two drummers who played together in the Dead for many years. 

For all Mayer’s success, this was a challenge – not only to step out of his pop-meets-blues box into the realm of the jam band, but also to take the place of Jerry Garcia, the talismanic figure who died in 1995 at the age of 53.

With a vast repertoire to learn and a comparatively unstructured style of playing to get to grips with, Mayer entered a bootcamp for the role with all the reverence and sincerity a Deadhead could hope for. 

He wrote on Instagram, alongside a 1970s era photo of Garcia: “I’m only here as an interpreter of a master. I play in constant emotional, psychological and musical deference to Jerry Garcia.”

This being said, long-time Deadheads could be forgiven for reacting with some scepticism to the news that the man behind hits such as Daughters and Waiting On The World To Change could be right for the job – especially as more likely jam band candidates such as Warren Haynes and Phish’s Trey Anastasio had already tried out and then withdrawn from the position.

But Mayer was nothing if not thorough about taking on the role. As he stated in a 2016 SiriusXM Radio interview regarding his training for playing one of rock’s most expansive repertoires: “I’m naturally obsessive anyway, so it suited my way of life.”

Further to the material itself, Mayer went all-in on gear to make his transition to fronting Dead & Company as seamless as possible. 

Jerry Garcia’s tone was made unique by the pioneering addition of in-built pre-amps and effects loops to his custom-made Doug Irwin ‘Wolf’ and ‘Tiger’ guitars. Mayer teamed up with PRS to create the Super Eagle II – a guitar which became his main touring instrument with Dead & Company - and which comes in a super duper trippy hemp green finish.

The Super Eagle II features specially-wound 58/15 JM treble and bass pickups with a Narrowfield JM pickup in the middle position (with three individual coil-tap mini-switches), and a JCF Audio preamp – a layout and design very similar to Garcia’s instruments.

When it comes to playing live, the jam band environment seems to bring out the team-player in Mayer. After-all, Dead & Company is the first band he’s played in where the songs and the spotlight are not all his. Certain songs have bluesy in-roads and Mayer employs his well-honed chops to bring flamboyant interpretations to the music.

Elsewhere, the more psychedelic material leaves room for wandering melodic noodles where the destination may be predetermined, but the route to finding it is a little (or a lot) more flexible. Embracing simple, scale-based melodies without the large leaps and bends associated with blues soloing, Mayer is able to meander rather than race and, with trademark chromatic passages, channels Garcia effectively and respectfully.

On stage, Bob Weir looks like a cross between a wise mentor and a proud father figure as he and Mayer trade looks and licks. Back in 2016, alongside a snap of the band, Mayer posted on Instagram, “I grew up a lone wolf in my bedroom practicing my guitar, and all I ever really craved was a community.”

This is perhaps what best sums up the effect that joining Dead & Company has had on Mayer’s musical outlook. As a band who were able to draw the same crowd night after night in a country-wide “long strange trip”, the idea of community will not be alien to any long-serving Deadhead. Thanks to Mayer, the live experience that captivated fans for decades is far from dead.

On an overcast Tuesday evening in March, Bob Weir and I settled into a few balcony seats at the Manhattan Center Ballroom in New York City to talk about our latest co-design, the new Deluxe Bob Weir Bedford model, which had debuted three months prior at the 2019 Winter NAMM show, and two years after our first project, the Deluxe Bob Weir SS. 

Bob had come straight from another shoot — an in-depth interview and portrait session with GQ. He sat down, slipped off his Birkenstocks and cracked a Yerba Mate, seemingly relieved to now have the chance to talk solely about his greatest love and lifelong pursuit, the guitar. 

What has a lifetime of performance on the guitar taught you about the instrument itself?

If there’s anything my instrument has taught me to do over the years, it’s to listen to the instrument. The more I listen, the more it tells me what I want to be doing. It seems to me if you go into playing something with a notion of how it's supposed to sound, you might get there — you might get it how you thought it was supposed to sound. But if you listen to the instrument, you often times are going to find way more spectacular stuff. The instrument will tell you what it wants to be. What it wants to have done with it. 

So that sounds more like a conversation with the instrument rather than using it as a tool.

Right. I just take my orders. 

I think there’s a tendency for a lot of masters of the craft, like yourself, to know exactly what they want out of the instrument because they have such a defined sound. They tend not to change it. You have an incredibly identifiable sound, but I also know you to be someone who is constantly changing and evolving. Do you think that's due to your listening to the instrument? 

Yeah. The more I listen to the instrument, the more it tells me, “Okay. The next time you design me, for instance, let's try a different winding on the pickups so that I can get a little more high end. Because you're playing these heavy strings, and the overtone series is shading a little sharp, which gives the sound the unmistakable clang of steel, and let’s lean into that for a bit — turn up the treble.” Like I say, I just take my orders from the instrument.

You've probably logged more hours onstage than any living musician, including more than 3,000 shows with the Grateful Dead alone. Has live performance particularly impacted that listening for you? And if so, how? 

That’s an interesting question. Over the years, I've learned to sort of step aside and let the characters in the songs tell their stories. And along with that, they seem to call for certain sounds or soundscapes to accompany them, so that they sort of fill out the coloration. And oftentimes, that'll tell me what kind of sound I'm looking for. 

And then, at the same time, if I'm playing and it's time for me to step out or something like that — I'll just sometimes switch pickups to something I wouldn't have thought of. Just to see what that pickup has to say about the story that's going on. And when that works, it's really, really interesting. When it doesn't work — you know, you’d rather be anywhere on Earth than there. But you live through that stuff, too. 

So you kind of give the instrument autonomy — that’s interesting. Because I know you demand a fair bit of control over the on-stage sound, but it sounds like you still want to give the instrument the opportunity to speak, independent of you. 

Surprise me! It’s nice to do that because the different pickups are sampling the strings in different places, so the overtone series is going to be different. The girth of the note is going to be different. All that kind of stuff. You can play the same thing, but it's going to have certain harmonics ringing, and that's going to take you in this direction or that direction and take you up the neck or down the neck. 

In regards to the storytelling you were referencing earlier — often your sets and songs have these very long arcs to them. You'll leave a song and come back to it much, much later. And the same goes for your playing style. When you first hear it, you can’t quite grasp it. But when you dig in, you can hear that you’re crafting a much longer story than was previously apparent, and it helps illustrate the larger motion of the set. Do you think making room for both your voice and your instrument’s voice is what creates such a long arc? 

Given that there's a big arc that we're describing with our story and leaving a little of it to chance... If I discover something early on that seems like it might be potentially kind of thematic, I'll bring that back sometimes just to see what that little theme has to say under this light, under this part of the storytelling, and that kind of tightens the story up a little bit. It gives it believability, if you can follow me there. It’s also fun. 

Right. So it's something less manufactured. 

Yeah! 

So for your new signature model — do you think part of the intention behind the new Bedford was making sure that it had the room to create some magic? 

That's the whole idea! The more different sounds you can get out of that one instrument — it's a matter of learning what skills that instrument is housing and learning where to go to get them, but really the more different kinds of sounds that the instrument has, the more colors you have on your palette, and that's what you're looking for when you're painting. 

How did you specifically identify a need for a guitar like this one? 

Well, I was playing with Dead and Company, and the on-stage volume was kind of loud. My original signature model — the semi-hollow — was doing half the job perfectly, but it occurred to me that, okay, maybe it's time to develop a solid body to complete the picture. So we got to work on a solid body and it's been a lot of joy of discovery — we’re just scratching the surface. What we can get from this particular kind of instrument has been a lot of fun, and continues to be. 

What do you think the Bedford offers that nothing else you have offers? 

Well, the new Bedford can get really bright, and I like that because when you're playing chordal stuff, the harmonic structure of the melody you’re describing is in there. You're ringing a certain number of lofty bells, if you will, with the harmonic structure that you develop through your chordal stuff. Then those become, once again, the colors on your palette. Those are the notes that you're gonna be using, giving you more choices for your melodies. That's what we're getting from this instrument. 

In regards to that responsiveness — if you pack enough tonal options into the design, you're creating an opportunity to multiply the effect of applying different techniques to the instrument. Is that versatility something that you were really hoping to establish? 

Designing a semi-hollow guitar that has acoustical resonance is going to necessarily limit what kind of tonal variety you can get out of it. Its body resonance is going to be everywhere — all the pickups are going to hear it because it's fed back into the string. With a solid body instrument, those resonances aren't there. And so the actual variety of tonal responses you get from the various pickups and in approaches to getting sound out of your strings is wider. It doesn't have quite the woody charm of a semi-hollow instrument, but the trade-off there is you just get more stuff and more places to go. It's going to be years before I really think that I've got a handle on this instrument. 

Is part of the intention designing an instrument that is worth the challenge of learning? 

I mean, that's the whole deal. What we're trying to design is an instrument that's going to keep me amused and flabbergasted for years to come so that I've got stuff to work on. You know — “Oh, here's a new sound. Holy Jesus. How are we going to use that? I'm just going to have to sleep on it for a while.” And it'll come back around and sooner or later I'll find a use for it. 

And when you're not sleeping on it, you're waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

Yep! 

You played a show at our NAMM booth this past January, and you had an experience with that specific Bedford that was powerful enough to make you request that exact one. Even if it's the same model, made at the exact same time, etc., do you believe in the black magic of each individual instrument? What is that bond that you feel with an instrument when something just works? 

Well, you know, in that particular case, that Bedford was bright and broad and it was exactly what I was looking for. We designed the pickups and had them wound to be bright. Not very hot, but very bright, and you just drop the gain a little bit. Eventually you develop an ability to have a variety of colors — you know, this note wants to be muted, this one wants to be full-spectrum loud, this one we can lean into the harmonics, this one wants to be muted again, etc. You can do all that with this. You know, it takes a little bit of work and a little bit of practice, and you have to love what you're doing, because otherwise it will be confounding. But that challenge was what we were going for with the new Bedford, and by God we're getting there. 

More emotionally, the guitar is telling me stuff that I didn't know about the notes that I play. If you play it right, it's going to take you somewhere else. It's going to lead you somewhere else. It's going to lead to this figure or this color, but I know that if I stick with it for a while I'm going to grow on my own — knowing that if I just sit with the instrument for a while, I’m going to grow. It is going to stretch my soul. That's what it's about.

So if the Bedford is enough to keep you flabbergasted and challenged, what do you hope it does for other players? 

I would hope that folks who play this instrument are going to find it as challenging and as engaging as I do, because we've tried to design an instrument that's really got a huge variety of sounds, and of course that means it’s going to take a while to learn what it does for you and with your hands — because everybody is going to have a different touch and what they pull out of it is going to be very different. But you know, I just hope it keeps you amused and it keeps you moving forward. Discovering new harmonic or textural possibilities. The whole idea is to create an instrument that's really dynamic and flexible. 

Last time we spoke, you had told me about a personification of tone that came up in the studio a long while ago, where someone referred to a guitar sounding like a porcupine blowing kisses. I’m curious whether you’ve come up with a personification for the new Bedford. 

Right, that was when we were recording “Tennessee Jed.” We were playing and my bass player took a big hit of pot and then he leaned over to me and says your guitar sounds like a porcupine blowing kisses — it was kind of spiky in the tone. I’m getting way spikier tones now with the Bedford. But I don't smoke that much pot, so those kinds of personifications don't occur to me all that often. 

But you know when you get a tone that's going to be a signature tone for a given song — thematic for a given song. It adds character to the story that you're telling. And like I say, it fills out the colors of the story. You know, if you're painting the sky, you might get a deeper blue than real life has to offer. That's the kind of stuff that we're looking to be able to do with the sound. You're painting a picture that couldn't be painted visually, but you can do it with sound because you can go places sonically that are impossible with any sort of visual. 

That's like adding to the adage of music accesses what’s beyond words. Music accesses what’s beyond visuals, too. 

Bob picks up the Bedford and begins playing. 

What are you responding to and what are you listening for? 

I'm listening to the higher order in the harmonic series because that tells me where I want to go. And then something that just recently happened to me that may change a whole lot of stuff... if I can get a collection of these. Somebody gave me a stone pick. It's made out of Montana agate, and it puts a little tip on the note. If I use that, and I finger pick a note, then they blend together into something that's a third entity. Hard to describe because there is no name for it. 

Bob goes quiet and continues playing the guitar.

Could you describe the electronic configuration that creates all the versatility? 

So on the new Bedford, we have a five-way switch, volume and tone knobs, and then a blender knob, which blends in the odd-man-out pickup — the one that isn’t naturally a part of the position you’ve selected. You can just play a note, and roll the blender knob off, and it'll change color because it will be bringing in the odd-man-out. 

For example, on position 2 — which is the bridge and middle pickup — if you roll off the blender knob, you’ll bring in some of the neck pickup, as well. Which is, you know, a very different sound — much thicker, much more low end so the harmonic content is going to be real rich. Once you play it, you get a feel for it. 

For the pickups, you get the Seymour Duncan Stacked P-90s in the neck and bridge positions. And then you get to blend those with the middle pickup—that Lollar Blonde that’s brighter than a thousand suns, which helps you step out when you need to. There's no end to places you can go with this guitar. 

And what about the volume and tone knobs? 

Right. They’re push/pull. The volume knob is for the neck pickup, and the tone knob is for the bridge pickup. So in the “pull” position, they are standard single-coil P-90’s and they are manically rich. You push it in and they become humbucking pickups. They're thicker. They don't have quite as much harmonic information, but they’re quiet and thicker. Pair that with using the blender knob however you like and what we’re getting at here is just an immense variety of tones. And with that blender knob, if you hit a chord, and then roll the pot — you're going to hear the fundamentals change color right before your eyes. Lots of fun. 

When people see the new Bedford, even before they know it’s a UFO, tonally speaking, they are usually floored by the aesthetics. How did you settle on this look? 

Well the Matte Stone finish, you know, I love it because it draws you in rather than demanding your attention. It has this elegance about it — it’s not shiny and it doesn’t need to be. I've always been real fond of the color grey because you can read whatever color you want into it. Depending on the lights you’re bathed in, this will become a blue, or a muted red, because it takes on the light show. And then we just sort of stumbled upon this pickguard. It’s just a nice contrast with the Matte Stone. It ties in with the abalone in the fingerboard and everything sort of falls together. It's a nice looking guitar. 

I remember you telling me that you played a few shows at Citi Field recently where traditional single-coil pickups just weren’t cutting it on one of your guitars, and that’s what began our exploration towards the stacked P-90s, right? 

I've played numerous shows where you can't get away with a single coil pickup. You just can't do it at Citi Field. You know it's gonna be all hum and buzz. You need a humbucking pickup. And so we went to some lengths to design a Duncan pickup that got bright like a single coil, but that still defeats that hum. And I think we got pretty successful with that. 

In the past, I’ve called you the most restlessly creative person I know. But do you think that the projects you’re working on now, and in particular this signature model project, is in some way a manifestation of all you’ve learned over the years? 

Well, everybody is the sum total of their experiences and what they've gathered along the way. That's what you carry with you. That's your wealth. And I put my wealth of experience into this design here with the Bedford. Somebody had to do it! Somebody had to make a guitar that has these features. You know it really has more variety of tones than any guitar I can think of. And you know, like I say, it's going to be a challenge to learn how to use that. But that's kind of what I live for. 

I’m always so honored to work with you on these things, and D’Angelico is so good about encouraging these projects, which at their inception are purely artistic. How do you envision the next chapter of D’Angelico and your work with us? 

I'm looking forward to working with D’Angelico long term. There are a number of ideas I have that we haven't even kicked around much yet. But the D’Angelico folks understand that there are new archetypes for the electric guitar that have yet to be defined. Of course, D’Angelico has a reputation for making really fine jazz instruments, but this new thrust is a new vision for the company. They seem less tied to what has been done on previous models and more into exploration than any company I can think of. And that appeals to me greatly. 

Well thank you, Bob. It’s always an honor. You know, before we started this interview, someone told me that the Grateful Dead played this stage in 1971. Do you remember that? 

[Bob turns around to see the stage.] What’s the name of this place? 

Ryan Kershaw is the VP of Product Development for D’Angelico Guitars.

D’Angelico has announced the Deluxe Bob Weir Bedford, the company’s first solid body signature model. The guitar features an all-basswood body, a C-shape maple/walnut/maple neck with a natural satin finish and a pau ferro fingerboard with mother of pearl/abalone split block inlays.

Pickups are Seymour Duncan D-90 STK P-90-style single coils in the neck and bridge positions, and a Lollar Blonde single coil in the middle, controlled via a five-way toggle and a blend pot for mixing in whichever pickup isn’t selected.

Other features include a gold Tune-O-Matic bridge, a gold 6-point Wilkinson tremolo and Grover locking tuners.

The Deluxe Bob Weir Bedford is the Dead & Company guitarist’s second signature model with D’Angelico, following the semi-hollow Premier Bob Weir SS in 2017.

The D'Angelico Deluxe Bob Weir Bedford is being offered in a Matte Stone finish for $1,999. 

For more information, head to D’Angelico. 

Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder will release a new solo album, American Rock ‘n’ Roll, April 5th via BMG. The record features a slew of guests, including Slash, Bob Weir, Sammy Hagar, Joe Satriani, Chad Smith and Mick Fleetwood.

In advance of the album’s release, Felder has shared the title track, which features guest guitar work from Slash, as well as drums from both Chad Smith and Mick Fleetwood. You can check it out above.

Regarding the track, which references artists from Jimi Hendrix and Santana to Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses, Felder told Rolling Stone: “Slash lives really close to me. He came over, brought his guitar, plugged into one of my amps and we traded off on some solos. He actually plays on the part of the song that mentions Guns N’ Roses by name.”

Discussing the impetus behind the album, Felder continued: “I wanted to bring in as many people as possible to share the experience with me. I knew it should be bright, cheery and fun or it wouldn’t be worth doing. It should be a labor of love, not a labor of work.”

American Rock 'n' Roll is available for pre-order here.

Dead and Company have announced a 2019 American tour.

The Grateful Dead offshoot—comprised of John Mayer, former Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, former Allman Brothers Band bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti—will hit the road on May 31, and tour the country until July 6.

The band's itinerary, which you can check out in full below, includes two shows each at Chicago's Wrigley Field, Los Angeles' Hollywood Bowl, Boulder, CO's Folsom Field and The Gorge Amphitheatre in George, WA.

For tickets and more info, head on over to deadandcompany.com.

Dead and Company 2018 tour dates:

May 31 – Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheatre
June 1 – Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheatre
June 3 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Bowl
June 4 – Los Angeles, CA @ Hollywood Bowl
June 7 – George, WA @ The Gorge Amphitheatre
June 8 – George, WA @ The Gorge Amphitheatre
June 12 – Noblesville, IN @ Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center
June 14 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field
June 15 – Chicago, IL @ Wrigley Field
June 18 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center
June 20 – Camden, NJ @ BB&T Pavilion
June 22 – Foxborough, MA @ Gillette Stadium
June 23 – New York, NY @ Citi Field
June 26 – Bristow, VA @ Jiffy Lube Live
June 28 – Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion
June 29 – Atlanta, GA @ Cellairis Amphitheatre at Lakewood
July 2 – Dallas, TX @ Dos Equis Pavilion
July 5 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field
July 6 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field

A 19-disc live Grateful Dead box set—Pacific Northwest '73-'74: The Complete Recordings—will be available September 7, Rhino announced today.

The box set—which, for the less fanatical among you, will also be available in 3-CD and 6-LP formats—contains recordings of the band's shows at the P.N.E. Coliseum in Vancouver, B.C. (6/22/73), Portland Memorial Coliseum in Portland, OR (6/24/73), Seattle Center Arena in Seattle, WA (6/26/73), the P.N.E. Coliseum (5/17/74), Portland Memorial Coliseum (5/19/74) and Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA (5/21/74). Each show was mastered in HDCD from the original master tapes by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering. The transfers from the masters were transferred and restored by Plangent Processes.

You can listen to the set's first single—an epic, 26-minute medley including "Truckin'" and Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" recorded at the May 1974 show at the Portland Memorial Coliseum—below.

"This is a boxed set that's a long time coming," said David Lemieux, Grateful Dead archivist and the set's producer. "A couple of the shows have come very, very close to being released on their own through the Grateful Dead's archival release programs of the past 20 years, but we always held off in the hopes and expectations that they'd make a better boxed set."

"The music at each and every one of these six shows is unique, special, inspired, and at times transcendent," Lemieux continued. "The shows contain some of the most famous moments in Grateful Dead live history, including the 'Bird Song' from Vancouver '73, the Portland '74 'Truckin'' jam and the 47-minute 'Playing In The Band' from Seattle '74. Each of these six shows has a distinct musical personality, and we're excited that you can get to know all of them in their entirety, sounding better than we've ever heard them."

The set is available now for pre-order and will be shipped to arrive on September 7. Production of the set is limited to 15,000 individually numbered copies and available exclusively from dead.net for $189.98. The set will also be available in its entirety as a digital download in Apple Lossless ($119.99) and FLAC 192/24 ($149.99) exclusively at dead.net beginning on September 7.

Rhino is also releasing a compilation highlighting the best performances from the box set. Pacific Northwest '73-'74: Believe It If You Need It will will be available as a three-CD set ($24.98) and on digital download and streaming services. The complete Portland Memorial Coliseum show from 5/19/74 will also be released on 180-gram vinyl as a limited edition (7,500 copies) six-LP set ($129.98).

You can preorder the set over at dead.net.

Pacific Northwest '73-'74: Believe It If You Need It

Disc One

"China Cat Sunflower" (5/19/74)

"I Know You Rider" (5/19/74)

"Bird Song" (6/22/73)

"Box Of Rain" (6/24/73)

"Brown-Eyed Women" (5/21/74)

"Truckin'" (5/19/74)

Jam (5/19/74)

"Not Fade Away" (5/19/74)

"Goin' Down The Road Feeling Bad" (5/19/74)

"One More Saturday Night" (5/19/74)

Disc Two

"Here Comes Sunshine" (6/22/73)

"Eyes Of The World" (5/17/74)

"China Doll" (5/21/74)

"Playing In The Band" (5/21/74)

Disc Three

"Sugaree" (5/17/74)

"He's Gone" (6/22/73)

"Truckin'" (6/22/73)

"The Other One" (6/22/73)

"Wharf Rat" (6/22/73)

"Sugar Magnolia" (6/22/73)

Earlier this week, Sammy Hagar teamed up with former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir to host the fifth annual Acoustic-4-a-Cure concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. During the show, Hagar was joined by his bandmates in Chickenfoot—Joe Satriani, former Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith—for an all-star cover of Otis Redding's "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" that also featured Taj Mahal and REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin.

This pro-shot video of the cover opens with an on-stage cameo from Guy Fieri, him of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives fame, presenting Mahal (who turns 76 today) with a birthday cake. The all-star group—with Hagar and Mahal sharing lead vocals, Satriani on acoustic guitar, Weir on electric and Anthony on electric bass—then proceeds to jam on the Otis Redding classic. You can watch the performance above.

"I was a fan of Taj Mahal long before I had a record deal in Montrose 1973," Hagar said of Mahal in a statement. "He's become a dear friend over the years and without a doubt, is one of the few living blues legends left on this planet!"

For more on Chickenfoot, follow along on Facebook.

Deadheads have a lot to look forward to in 2018.

Last month, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh announced that—in the spring—they would embark on their first ever tour as a duo, playing back-to-back sets of acoustic and electric versions of Grateful Dead classics. Now, Dead & Company—the Grateful Dead offshoot comprised of Weir, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboardist Jeff Chimenti—have announced a summer tour that will take the band to stadiums and amphitheaters across America.

The tour is set to begin May 30 at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts, and will run through mid July, when it will close with a two-night stand at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colorado. The tour also notably includes two nights at Citi Field in New York City and one night at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

You can check out the band's full summer itinerary below.

For tickets and more information, stop by deadandcompany.com.

Dead & Company 2018 Tour Dates

• May 30 – Mansfield, MA @ Xfinity Center
• June 1 – Camden, NJ @ BB&T Pavilion
• June 2 – Camden, NJ @ BB&T Pavilion
• June 4 – Cincinnati, OH @ Riverbend Music Center
• June 6 – Noblesville, IN @ Ruoff Home Mortgage Music Center
• June 8 – Atlanta, GA @ Cellairis Amphitheatre at Lakewood
• June 9 – Raleigh, NC @ Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek
• June 11 – Saratoga Springs, NY @ Saratoga Performing Arts Center
• June 13 – Hartford, CT @ XFINITY Theatre
• June 15 – New York, NY @ Citi Field
• June 16 – New York, NY @ Citi Field
• June 19 – Darien Center, NY @ Darien Lake Amphitheater
• June 20 – Cuyahoga Falls, OH @ Blossom Music Center
• June 22 – East Troy, WI @ Alpine Valley Music Theatre
• June 23 – East Troy, WI @ Alpine Valley Music Theatre
• June 29 – George, WA @ Gorge Amphitheatre
• June 30 – Eugene, OR @ Autzen Stadium
• July 2 – Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheater
• July 3 – Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheater
• July 6 – Chula Vista, CA @ Mattress Firm Amphitheatre
• July 7 – Los Angeles, CA @ Dodger Stadium
• July 11 – Albuquerque, NM @ Isleta Amphitheater
• July 13 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field
• July 14 – Boulder, CO @ Folsom Field

For the first time ever, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, two founding members of the Grateful Dead, will tour together as a duo performing back-to-back sets of acoustic and electric versions of Grateful Dead classics. The pair will play select U.S. markets including New York, Boston and Chicago as part of the Bobby and Phil Tour, which kicks off March 2 and 3 at Radio City Music Hall.

Fans can sign up for the Ticketmaster Verified Fan Presale starting 7 a.m. EST today (December 11) at bobbyandphilduotour.tmverifiedfan.com/. Tickets will be available to the public 10 a.m. local time Friday (December 15) via Ticketmaster.

Although Weir and Lesh have played together since the inception of the Grateful Dead in 1965, they've appeared jointly infrequently since 2015’s Fare Thee Well shows, where they played for the last time with all four surviving members of the Dead. They've never performed as a duo without a backing band.

This project came about as Weir and Lesh celebrated the 40-year anniversary of the Grateful Dead’s 1977 album, Terrapin Station. The two performed at Lesh’s own Terrapin Crossroads, as well as Lockn’ Festival and Sound Summit on Mount Tamalpais earlier this year. Fans can expect to hear Grateful Dead favorites as well as additional musical surprises. You can check out the dates below.

BOB WEIR AND PHIL LESH DUO DATES

• March 2 /// New York, NY /// Radio City Music Hall
• March 3/// New York, NY /// Radio City Music Hall
• March 7 /// Boston, MA /// Wang Theatre
• March 8 /// Boston, MA /// Wang Theatre
• March 10 /// Chicago, IL /// Chicago Theatre
• March 11 /// Chicago, IL /// Chicago Theatre

The Grateful Dead offshoot group Dead & Company have announced a fall North American tour.

The tour, which follows their extensive jaunt through North America this summer, begins with a two-night stand at New York City's Madison Square Garden on November 12 and 14, and rolls mostly through the East Coast, with a few scattered stops in the South. You can see the full itinerary below.

"It’s been great all around and we’re starting to navigate uncharted waters, which was the whole idea of the endeavor from the beginning," Weir told Guitar Worldlast year about Dead & Company's inaugural summer tour. "We’re just now getting there, but the band was spitting fire all summer."

For more info, stop by deadandcompany.com.

Dead & Company Fall Tour Dates

November 12 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
November 14 – New York, NY @ Madison Square Garden
November 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
November 17 – Boston, MA @ TD Garden
November 21 – Washington D.C. @ Capital One Arena
November 22 – Hartford, CT @ XL Center
November 24 – Detroit, MI @ Little Caesars Arena
November 25 – Columbus, OH @ Nationwide Arena
November 28 – Charlotte, NC @ Spectrum Center
November 29 – Atlanta, GA @ Philips Arena
December 1 – Dallas, TX @ American Airlines Center
December 2 – Austin, TX @ Frank Erwin Center
December 5 – New Orleans, LA @ Smoothie King Center
December 7 – Orlando, FL @ Amway Center
December 8 – Sunrise, FL @ BB&T Center

Since the formation of Dead & Company in 2015, Grateful Dead fans have reveled in the return of their musical heroes.

Now, the most dedicated fans in the world have yet another reason to celebrate. After more than a year of research and collaborative design, D’Angelico Guitars has released the all-new Bob Weir Signature SS.

Celebrating the partnership between the legendary guitar company and world-renowned guitarist, the Bob Weir Signature SS is a single-cutaway, semi-hollow electric that comes in a custom Stone finish. To guarantee accessibility for every fan, it will be available at three different price points (including a hand-signed collector’s edition), all of which boast exceptional quality.

“D’Angelico’s quality and craftsmanship are the stuff of legend,” Weir says. “Working with them on design ideas is a glorious opportunity.”

Through multiple rounds of research and design over the course of 2016, D’Angelico and Weir co-designed with innovation in mind. Featuring a gold Bigsby tremolo system, coil-tapping push/pull tone knobs, a master volume pot, and a full center block for feedback resistance, the Weir SS is fully equipped to produce both the artist’s legendary sounds and allow players to craft their own voice.

“After a pretty full lifetime of playing music for people, a guy is just naturally going to have some ideas about how to improve his instrument,” Weir says. “History has shown us that as innovation creates and changes instruments, music changes with them. That’s what we hope we’re up to here.”

Below, watch the latest installment of D’Angelico’s “Showroom Sessions” video series, where Weir discusses the process of designing his new signature SS model, performs material from both Blue Mountain and the Grateful Dead catalogue, and tells a story about his old friend, Jerry.

The Premier Bob Weir Signature SS is available now at all local authorized D'Angelico dealers, as well as a limited run of 35 hand-signed Deluxe models.

For more information, visit dangelicoguitars.com.

Bob Weir is on quite a roll. The release of Blue Mountain, his first solo album in 10 years—and his first collection of entirely new material in three decades—is the culmination of 18 very active months for the founding member of the Grateful Dead.

It started in the summer of 2015 when the Dead’s surviving Core Four—Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart—played Fare Thee Well, five shows in California and Chicago which they said would be their final performances together.

Joined by Phish’s Trey Anastasio and keyboardists Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Chimenti, the group sold out Levi’s Stadium and Soldier Field, while thrilling legions of Deadheads around the world who watched live feeds in theaters and at home. It was the kind of triumph that was impossible to imagine when Jerry Garcia died in 1995. The Grateful Dead broke up a few months later but over the ensuing years began to regroup in various configurations.

The “final” Fare Thee Well shows were once again, predictably, not the end of the story. Soon after, Weir, Kreutzmann and Hart announced the formation of a new band, Dead & Company, joined by Chimenti and two unlikely new members: bassist Oteil Burbridge, fresh off 16 years in the Allman Brothers Band, and singer/guitarist John Mayer, best known for his pop songs and Stevie Ray Vaughan-inspired blues playing.

A new group in the shadow of the much-hyped final shows raised some critical hackles, but the fans never blinked. They understood that this was an entirely different venture. And indeed the group has reinterpreted the Dead’s vast, treasured catalog of music, with Mayer, Burbridge and Chimenti adding a more straightforward swing and youthful vitality. The band has been another big hit, selling out stadiums and amphitheaters filled with a mix of old Deadheads thrilled for another ride and a new generation of fans. Weir looks reborn with his new younger mates, singing and playing with vim and vigor.

“It’s a wonderful environment to just go for it,” says Burbridge. “It’s not about the execution. It’s about trying to find something new. The Bible says that love covers a multitude of sins and a really good jam where you go someplace you’ve never gone before will erase any mistake. That is the mindset of both the fans and the band. And Bobby is such an interesting player, who is so much fun to work with. Maybe because Jerry was playing long solos, Bobby found a really in-depth approach to rhythm playing, laying into chords all the way up and down the neck. He’s also a very underrated singer, with a pleading quality that really connects.”

Weir has always been a peculiarly underrated, sometimes even disrespected, guitar legend. Maybe it was his lack of soloing, the fact that the Dead’s soundman spent years mixing him too low or that he was always the clean cut handsome guy in a band of grizzled hippies. Probably it had more to do with three decades spent serving as a low-key sidekick to a revered guitar hero. But the mere fact that Garcia chose Weir as his foil and wanted him by his side for all those years speaks for itself.

And Garcia was never shy about discussing his appreciation for Weir, noting in 1982 that his partner was “an extraordinarily original player in a world full of people who sound like each other.

“I don’t know anyone else who plays guitar the way he does, with the kind of approach he has,” Garcia continued.

Like Dead & Company, Blue Mountain pairs Weir with a younger generation of admirers, in this case a core of Brooklyn-based musicians orbiting around the band the National. Weir co-produced with Josh Kaufman, co-wrote much of the material with Josh Ritter and is backed by the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner on guitar and Scott Devendorf on bass.

Enjoy this excerpt from the December 2016 issue of Guitar World. For the full interview, plus our official Bob Weir Axology, check out the new issue of Guitar World.

Your collaborators on Blue Mountain feel like a left turn. How did you hook up with these guys?
our or five years ago we did a web broadcast from my studio [TRI] celebrating Jerry’s 70th birthday and we assembled a crew of young bucks to focus on Jerry’s songs, and the Devendorfs and their Brooklyn crew showed up in spades and we got along real well. I was impressed by how hard they listened and how economical they were in what they offered. A couple of years later they called, said that they had been talking amongst themselves and come up with the notion of doing a record of cowboy tunes with me. And that seemed like a great idea, like something right up my alley.

What about cowboy songs appeals to you?
Cowboy songs have always had an allure to me. I spent time as a kid, a young teen, in a bunkhouse kind of living that life. I’d spend my evenings with these old guys who had grown up in an era before radio had reached the nether regions of Wyoming and their notion of what to do for an evening was to tell stories and sing songs. I was the kid with a guitar so I became the accompanist and I learned a bunch of the tunes and the delivery and the esthetic—the ethos, if you will.

And is that where you learned country songs you brought to the Dead, like Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” and Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried”?
Yes, more or less. I heard that stuff and developed an affinity for it and an understanding about how to approach it. Not necessarily those exact songs, but I could hear where they were coming from and understand their value.

You sing these songs like they are from the bottom of your heart. How difficult was it to develop that level of sync with a songwriter like Josh Ritter whom you had not known before?
He’s a gifted songwriter and there was actually a lot of back and forth. There weren’t all that many tunes that he offered that we did straight the same way. He’d come up with a line and I’d say, “Now how about this?” One thing tripped something else in my thinking and so forth. We went back and forth and I definitely had a feeling of collaboration on the songs—and that’s always been my preferred way of collaborating with guys like John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter.

This album is so different from the Grateful Dead. That’s how you approached solo projects throughout the Dead’s prime—for instance, Heaven Help the Fool (1978) and Bobby and the Midnites. Ratdog became very Dead-like, so in a way this is more of a throwback.
Well, yeah! That’s really what I like to do because otherwise it’s not a vacation. If I’m going to use the same approaches and methods then I might as well do it with the guys I’m used to doing it with because we have that worked out. No one’s going to do it better with me. If I’m going to go exploring, then all bets are off and let’s just see what we turn up.

So is the goal finding a balance between Dead Bob and solo Bob?
[laughs] Yes! That’s what I’m always working toward.

“Ki-Yi Bossie” is one you wrote with your guitar tech, AJ Santella, and it’s a very interesting tune, addressing a 12-step program in the context of a real cowboy song. Did you set out looking to write a song about the program?
It’s rarely that direct! I don’t know how I found myself there. I had a notion for what the song was going to be about, that it would end with a guy who’s punching cows, which is his refuge from another existence. So I wanted to go to another existence first and I thought I better start out real bleak—and that took me to a basement room and a 12-step program. I took the 12-step to be literal and the cow punching to be a metaphor for chord punching—being saved by music. Well, yeah. That’s it.

The guy could have ended up in a monastery but then he wouldn’t have ended up on a cowboy record. I should make mention that Lukas Nelson kicked me along while I was developing the song and he had a lot to do with the setting—the rhythm, the key, the tonalities. This totally slipped my mind when I was doing the credits!

Will Dead & Company work up and play any of these songs?
I’m not sure that they work in that context. The bulk of them don’t lend themselves to what Dead & Company do. I’m hugely looking forward to playing these songs live with this band on tour this fall. They’re all good players and the places we’re playing are fun places that we’ve carefully chosen. We’re gonna have some fun on this tour.

I assume that’s what it’s all about for you at this stage of your career. Would you do anything that didn’t seem like it would be fun?
No. [laughs] I can happily say that I’ve come to the point in my life where the stuff that I do is the stuff that what I want to do.

Did you enjoy the summer Dead & Company tour as much as you seemed to onstage? The whole vibe was as positive and upbeat as anything I recall in Dead world for a long time.
Yeah. It’s been great all around and we’re starting to navigate uncharted waters, which was the whole idea of the endeavor from the beginning. We’re just now getting there, but the band was spitting fire all summer.

For the full interview, check out the December 2016 issue of Guitar World.

Former Grateful Dead guitarist—and current Dead & Company guitarist—Bob Weir has announced a new solo album.

Blue Mountain, which is set for a September 30 release via Columbia/Legacy Recordings, is Weir's first solo album in a decade and his first solo set of entirely new material in 30 years.

It was produced alongside Josh Kaufman and features collaborations with Josh Ritter and instrumental contributions from Aaron and Bryce Dessner of indie-rock band the National.

In addition, Weir announced a brief North American tour that will take him to a handful of theaters this fall. You can check the dates, and Blue Mountain's tracklist, below.

For more information, visit bobweir.net.

Blue Mountain Track List

• 1. "Only a River"
• 2. "Cottonwood Lullaby"
• 3. "Gonesville"
• 4. "Lay My Lily Down"
• 5. "Gallop on the Run"
• 6. "Whatever Happened to Rose"
• 7. "What the Ghost Towns Know"
• 8. "Darkest Hour"
• 9. "Ki-Yi Bossie"
• 10. "Storm Country"
• 11. "Blue Mountain"
• 12. "One More River to Cross"

Bob Weir on Tour:

10-07 San Rafael, CA — Marin County Civic Center
10-08 Oakland, CA — Fox Theater
10-10 Los Angeles, CA — The Wiltern
10-12 Upper Darby, PA — Tower Theatre
10-14-15 Brooklyn, NY — Kings Theatre
10-16 Port Chester, NY — The Capitol Theatre
10-19 Nashville, TN — Ryman Auditorium

Fans attending Dead & Company concerts this summer have a chance to take home unique, hand-painted guitars signed by the entire band, commemorating historic venues on their tour.

The collection was created by New York City-based guitar brand D’Angelico Guitars and will be auctioned to raise funds for over a dozen charities.

The first guitar in the series, the “Dancing Bears” model, will be auctioned throughout the tour—closing at the final show in Mountain View, CA (July 30). The other guitars each celebrate one of four legendary venues and will be displayed and auctioned at those specific locations: Citi Field in New York (June 25 and 26), Folsom Field in Boulder, CO (July 2 and 3), Alpine Valley in Elkhorn, Wisconsin (July 9 and 10) and Fenway Park in Boston (July 15 and 16).

The auctions will take place at the “Participation Row” social action village inside each venue, organized by the non-profit organizations HeadCount and REVERB.

Last July, HeadCount auctioned a signed custom D’Angelico guitar—previously played by the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir on stage—for an eye-popping $526,000 in a Participation Row auction at the final Grateful Dead concert in Chicago. Seventeen charities received over $32,000 each from that auction.

Some beneficiaries of the Dead & Co. auctions will include: HeadCount, Reverb, NORML, Rainforest Action Network and Equality North Carolina. This is all on the heels of Dead & Company donating an additional $100,000 to the Human Rights Campaign and Equality North Carolina to support their fight against the controversial HB2 bill.

Fans who don’t wish to bid on a guitar will also have the chance to win a signed D’Angelico “Lightning Bolt” guitar by visiting non-profit organizations on Participation Row. Anyone who completes actions with three organizations is entered into a free drawing for the signed guitar, and also receives a free “VOTE” pin compliments of Participation Row sponsor Clean Energy Advisors.

Dead & Company includes Grateful Dead members Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir; singer/guitarist John Mayer; Allman Brothers' bassist Oteil Burbridge; and "Fare Thee Well" and RatDog keyboardist Jeff Chimenti.

For more, visit deadandcompany.com.

The Les Paul Foundation has announced the Les Paul Spirit Award, and its first recipient is former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.

Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead who co-wrote some of the band's best-known songs, will receive the award, which is presented to an artist who has exemplified the spirit of Les Paul through engineering, technology or music, at this year's edition of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

“I cannot think of anyone more fitting to be honored with the first annual Les Paul Spirit Award than Bob Weir. Not only is he an extraordinary talent who has given us an amazing array of legendary music, but he is an innovator who understands music, technologies and the spirit of Les Paul,” said Michael Braunstein, executive director of the Les Paul Foundation. “If Les were still alive today, I have absolutely no doubt that he and Bob would be experimenting together at TRI Studios or at Les’ house and the results would be extraordinary."

If you’re anything like most musicians, you probably don’t have more than a vague idea of what mastering really is.

Once you attempt to produce your own recording, however, you learn quickly that quality mastering is essential if you want to end up with a professional-sounding track.

While recording equipment and software has become increasingly more affordable and easy to use, mastering has remained an elusive and expensive final step in the recording process. To successfully master a track, you either need to download and learn how to use a pricey plug-in or bite the bullet and hire a professional.

LANDR, an online mastering tool, is looking to change all that.

Here’s how it works: You simply upload a .wav file to the site, and within minutes the cloud-based application masters your track and makes the file available to you for download. The system is built upon a dynamic algorithm that "listens" to your recording and reacts to its musical properties in real time—utilizing mastering tools, including compression, EQ, stereo enhancement and limiting.

It’s not just independent musicians who benefit from using LANDR. When Bob Weir—rhythm guitarist and founding member of the Grateful Dead—needed to master more than 200 hours of live recordings, he got in touch with the LANDR team.

Dating back to his days with the Dead, Weir has long been a proponent of new musical technology. His studio, Tamalpias Research Institute in northern California, serves as a personal sonic laboratory equipped with state-of-the-art tools like the Meyer Constellation Acoustic System, a software-based technology that utilizes specifically placed microphones and speakers to alter the acoustic properties of a room.

When TRI’s chief technical officer, John Harkin, was tasked with figuring out how to master the bevy of live recordings for a release on Rdio, he found it would take a professional engineer an average of 20 minutes to master each track. Seeking an efficient and affordable alternative, he turned to LANDR.

“On this project I was looking for a consistent sound throughout the catalog," Harkin says. "The LANDR treatment equaled what my engineer could do in 20 minutes.”

LANDR’s software is very responsive to different genres of music, a huge plus for Harkin and TRI, who have recorded live in-studio performances for artists ranging from rocker Sammy Hagar to Americana/folk singer Jackie Greene. In addition, LANDR utilizes a "learning algorithm"—meaning the more tracks that are uploaded into the system, the better it becomes at listening to and analyzing different types of music.

“My experience is that when started, it did a nice job of generally making it louder," Harkin says. "That's always an engineer’s first impression of LANDR, just that it's louder. In the past few months, I've noticed they don't just pull everything up in the mix ... it's gotten a lot better at recognizing different types of music, whether it's a rock band or acoustic.”

Another important factor in TRI’s decision to use LANDR was its ability to master at a high sample rate. Describing Weir’s feelings on digital recording, Harkin says, “Bob believes the lower sample rates mask some of the experience we have listening to music and people respond to it by not wanting to listen as much.”

Like Neil Young, Weir has become an outspoken advocate for increasing the quality of digital music. After using LANDR for the Rdio release, Weir spearheaded the Artists for Quality Initiative, a joint venture between Rdio, LANDR and TRI to convert the entire Rdio catalog to an AAC format streaming at 320KbPS.

In making the case for higher sample rates, Harkin says much of what is lost in a digital recording are the high frequencies that exist in the upper-harmonics of different tones.

“My theory is that what we perceive at much higher frequencies is transience," he says. "I think of it in terms of survival; if I was out in the savannah, what I’d really want to hear and locate is that tiger’s footstep. It’s not the steady state tone that is interesting, it’s that transience. That low-level high frequency stuff… There’s part of our brain that’s real aware of that stuff and gets disconcerted when it’s missing.”

Weir is perhaps the highest-profile musician expressing his support for LANDR; and as more people discover the possibilities of online mastering, it’s easy to imagine artists and recording engineers throughout the music industry joining him. Professional mastering is expensive for everyone, and an easy, affordable and high-quality service like LANDR is a welcome option for professional and independent musicians alike.

Whether you’re a savvy Pro Tools engineer or just tinkering around on GarageBand, it’s more than worth your time to give LANDR a try.

For more information, visit landr.com.

Ethan Varian is a freelance writer and guitarist based in San Francisco. He has performed with a number of rock, blues, jazz and bluegrass groups in the Bay Area and in Colorado. Follow him on Twitter.