In June 2024, I sat with Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and John Mayer backstage at Sphere in Las Vegas, the place Useless & Firm was 16 reveals right into a raved-about weekend residency that will finally stretch to the center of 2025.
At one level, I requested the three what they did between gigs. Hart stated he was on a airplane dwelling to California each Saturday evening: “I depart right here at 11:30, and by 2 o’clock it’s lights out.” Mayer echoed his bandmate, describing his try and “return to my life” in Los Angeles on Mondays.
Not Weir, although. Turned out the guitarist had rented a spot on the town and was spending his days off absorbing no matter there was to take in underneath the recent desert solar.
“Thought I’d stick round,” he stated with a bit shrug.
Weir’s reply got here to thoughts when information broke Saturday that the founding member of the Grateful Useless had died at 78 after being recognized with most cancers in July.
Having shaped the Useless with frontman Jerry Garcia in 1965 — the 2 met when Weir heard somebody plucking a banjo in a music retailer in Palo Alto — Weir performed with the band for 30 years till Garcia’s loss of life in 1995. Then he spent 30 extra maintaining the Useless’s legend alive with a succession of initiatives together with the Different Ones, Furthur and Useless & Firm constructed across the group’s rangy but immediately identifiable mix of rock, nation, folks and blues.
As soon as thought to be the band’s child brother — to not point out its youthful heartthrob — Weir grew to become a whiskery image of the Useless’s unmatched endurance.
Musically, he equipped slippery rhythm-guitar riffs for Garcia to solo in opposition to; he sang lead sometimes, too, as in “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin’,” to call two of the hookier numbers from a catalog no person ever measured in radio hits. Weir’s enjoying was nimble and intuitive, his voice a sly croon that received appealingly craggy with age.
However simply as vital as his sound was Weir’s perspective — his willpower to maintain discovering new methods to make the Useless’s music imply new issues to new individuals.
Jerry Garcia, left, and Bob Weir carry out with the Grateful Useless in London in 1972.
(Michael Putland / Getty Photographs)
He collaborated broadly, making pals of the numerous likes of Wynonna Judd, the Nationwide’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner and the teen-pop brothers of Hanson. And he appeared to relish displaying up in pictures subsequent to surprising admirers, amongst them Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. (Be it a Yosemite Sam mustache or a pair of denim short-shorts, Weir understood higher than some pop stars the ability of an excellent look.)
The Sphere present, which put Useless & Firm amid a lavish multimedia spectacle that employed supplies from the Grateful Useless’s expansive archives, was thought by many to be Mayer’s child.
And certainly in my dialog with the band, Mayer described the numerous hours he’d spent overseeing the fine-tuning of the present’s visuals. But it surely was Weir who spoke of how vital it was that the manufacturing, which he likened to an opera, match into the story the Useless had been telling for six a long time.
“We’re simply persevering with on with it,” he stated.
After the interview, I used to be standing round in a hallway chatting with some of us from Useless & Firm’s crew when Mayer popped out of his dressing room to supply a last thought.
“After I speak concerning the thought of a management function on this band, that’s presumably true within the sense of an admin factor,” he instructed me. “However on that stage, Bob Weir is the chief. He calls each shot, and at no time will that ever change.”
