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All a friend can say is ‘ain’t it a shame’

“I’ll say this: I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it. But I’ve still got a lot on my plate, and I won’t be ready to go for a while.”

Those were the words of Bob Weir, founding member of The Grateful Dead, in a March 2025 Rolling Stone interview. Sadly, though, the end came sooner than he planned. He died this week at age 78, of lung-related issues following a battle with cancer.

Widely respected as a guitarist, singer, songwriter and humanitarian, Weir had been a relentless musical force for more than 60 years, mostly as the unique rhythm guitarist and occasional lead vocalist of The Grateful Dead from its inception in 1965 until its dissolution in 1995. Since then, he remained a vibrant presence in several spinoff ensembles, most recently on tours with Dead & Company since 2015.

“Heaven’s choir just gained a beautiful new voice,” said guitarist Billy Strings, who has performed in support of and alongside Weir in Dead & Company. “There is joy in knowing he is with some of his old friends again, singing and laughing and playing beautiful songs.”

He added, “Bob was always ready to ‘kick up a fuss,’ as he put it. He always had boundless time and knowledge to share with everyone, and he was truly one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. I’m extremely grateful to have crossed paths with him in this life.”

As far as I’m concerned, Weir was as indispensable to The Grateful Dead as lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who was the group’s spiritual leader and chief singer/songwriter. To my ears, Weir was the better singer, and he wrote or co-wrote some of The Dead’s most enduring songs: “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Playing in the Band” and “Estimated Prophet,” to name just a few.

According to a New York Times obituary by Ben Sisario, “Weir strummed his rhythm chords lightly, nimbly and malleably, charting and shaping the ever-shifting undercurrents of The Dead’s songs and jams. Bluegrass, blues, country, funk, reggae, mariachi and jazz were all at his fingertips. He was a consummate ensemble player — a full participant in the improvisatory mix who was somehow able to almost vanish into the background while he made the other players shine.”

But he was also a charismatic, good-looking guy who stood front and center on stage as the visual focal point between Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh. “It was Beautiful Bobby and the ugly brothers,” chuckled John Barlow, Weir’s lyricist/collaborator. “The women flocked to him.”

While I admired The Dead’s musical chops and what they were able to achieve in their three decades in the business, I would say I’ve been no more than a modest fan of the band over the years. I own the two marvelous LPs from 1970, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”; the awesome triple live album, “Europe ’72”; and their surprising commercial comeback in 1987, “In the Dark.” But if I were to list my favorite rock artists, The Dead probably wouldn’t make my Top 30.

Part of the reason, I think, is that I never felt like I was a part of the one-of-a-kind bond the band shared with its core audience. I felt like an outsider, even though I was sympathetic to the sweet devotion, sharing and general kindness that were the hallmarks of the relationship between the band and its fans, lovingly referred to as Deadheads. I feel as if I missed that era.

Funny thing, though — I’ve immersed myself in The Dead’s catalog over the past several days and have discovered a number of choice studio tracks (“Alabama Getaway,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Picasso Moon”) and live jams that have made me reconsider where I rank them in the classic rock pantheon.

It’s a nearly impossible task, by the way, to try to familiarize yourself with The Dead’s recorded output. You can absorb their 13 studio LPs, and even their nine live albums released during their heyday, but there are also upwards of 250 (!) live concert recordings, which first surfaced as bootlegs but were eventually released officially between 1991 and 2011.

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Weir was a good natured kid but rebellious, raised by adoptive parents in the San Francisco Bay Area. He picked up the guitar at 13 and dropped out of school at 16 around the time he met 21-year-old Garcia, who was playing banjo in a jug band. Weir became “The Kid,” the youngest member of The Warlocks, consisting of Garcia, Lesh, organist-vocalist-harmonica player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and drummer Bill Kreutzmann. Before his 18th birthday, Weir moved into the group’s communal house in the Haight-Ashbury district in 1966.

*The Warlocks in 1965 (L-R): Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Jerry Garcia, Ron McKernan*

As the story goes, the name “Grateful Dead” happened serendipitously when Garcia opened a big book and saw the two words positioned opposite each other on facing pages. It turned out the phrase also had a deeper meaning: It refers to folk tales in which “a dead person, or his angel, shows gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged for their proper burial.” They found this act of kindness in keeping with their overarching spirit of community. Stumbling on that phrase in a book was just the sort of cosmic randomness that fascinated the group, and it came to dominate how the band would exist throughout its lifetime. “Every night that we went out on stage, you never knew what might happen,” said Lesh. “We rarely had a prepared set list. We just played what felt right at that moment. I just loved that about us.”

At first, Weir had to pay some dues. He admitted that too much LSD during the group’s stint as house band for the infamous Ken Kesey Acid Tests made him withdrawn, especially as Garcia and Lesh were uniting more musically. “At the beginning, I was definitely low man on the totem pole,” he told Rolling Stone in 1989, “and for a long time I had to just shut up and take it.” Indeed, he was actually dismissed from the group for not taking his musical development seriously, which lit a fire under him and precipitated his return to the fold in time to be involved in their debut LP in 1967.

By 1970, Weir came into his own as a singer-songwriter when “Truckin'” became a hit single in certain markets (although only #63 on national pop charts). That song and his sublime “Sugar Magnolia” evolved into long jam versions at nearly every concert, with Weir providing ever more sophisticated rhythm guitar parts to complement Garcia’s solos and Lesh’s countermelodies.

Later, in a 1978 interview, Weir explained how he saw his role in the group. “I try to provide counterpoint for what Jerry does. He was lead, and I was rhythm. Those were our defined roles. I was there to play rhythm and chords for Jerry to play over the top of, but the traditional role of a rock and roll rhythm guitarist is somewhat limited. I was feeling a bit hemmed in. At the time, I was listening to a lot of jazz, the piano players like McCoy Tyner and how he chorded underneath John Coltrane, supplying all kinds of harmonic counterpoint to what he was doing on sax. That appealed to me greatly, and I started trying to learn to do that on guitar for Jerry.”

Garcia concurred, adding, “Weir is an extraordinarily original player, in a world full of people who sound like each other. I don’t know anyone else who played guitar the way he does. That was a big score for us, considering how derivative almost all electric guitar playing is.”

To my ears, one of the best examples of stellar ensemble playing by Weir, Garcia and Lesh is on the live version of “Truckin'” from the “Europe ’72” live package. The lead and rhythm guitar interweaving with the bass underpinning is just magnificent. It’s on my Spotify playlist below. Slip in some ear buds and crank it up, paying special attention to what Weir is doing. Serious musical architecture going on there.

Said Talking Heads guitarist Jerry Harrison in 2014, “An awful lot of attention went to Jerry, but to me, it was more really the interplay between Bob and the band that I found the most exciting thing about The Grateful Dead.”

Even more impressive to some was Weir’s debut solo LP “Ace,” released in 1972, demonstrating more clearly that he was a songwriter and singer to be reckoned with, and the rest of the group knew it. Nearly every track — especially “Playing in the Band,” “Cassidy” and “One More Saturday Night” — became staples of The Dead’s concert setlist.

Weir enjoyed the simplicity of country music and cowboy narratives (which showed up most prominently on his rustic 2016 solo LP “Blue Mountain”), but his songwriting explored well beyond the three-chord basics. He experimented with unusual time signatures and tempos, and in his challenging 13-minute piece “Weather Report Suite,” he leaned into old-world lute music and even gospel.

*Middle-era Dead: Garcia, Weir, Lesh, keyboardist Brent Mydland, Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart*

He was as surprised as anybody when The Grateful Dead, always an “album band” and an “in-concert band” more than a “singles band,” found themselves with a Top Ten hit in 1987 when Garcia’s good-natured “Touch of Grey” reached #9 on US pop charts with lyrics that captured their position as rock survivors: “Oh, well, a touch of grey kind of suits you anyway, /That was all I had to say, but it’s alright, /I will get by, I will survive, /We will get by, we will survive…”

From that same “In the Dark” LP, Weir gave us “Hell in a Bucket,” a rollicking rocker that offers one of the quintessential lines about the rock and roll lifestyle he and others led: “I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

When asked about the fierce devotion of The Deadheads over the years, Weir looked at it this way: “We started to realize our fans were a little bit different when we started seeing the same faces in the front row every night on a tour. It came home a little more when we saw tents set up in the parking lot. ‘Okay, we have a little gypsy entourage going here.’ It was a following of people who had, perhaps temporarily, dropped out of normal society and just followed us around, creating their own little society. That’s kind of what I had done, dropped out, ran off with a rock and roll band, chasing the muse, chasing the music.”

Those who worked with him said Weir always seemed to be inquisitive, seeking new ways to communicate through music. Indeed, in a 2019 interview, Weir noted, “I’ve always known a song was a critter. A new one comes through the door, and I want to check it out. I want to sniff its butt, and I want it to sniff mine. You know, Jerry came to me in a dream not long ago and introduced a song to me. It was kind of protoplasmic – you could see right through it – but it was like a great big sheepdog. And he just confirmed to me what I always suspected: that a song is a living organism.”

He was obsessed with making and performing music in multiple forms and formats. Even when The Dead were on hiatus, Weir formed other collaborative projects with seasoned musicians. In bands like Bobby & The Midnites, Weir joined forces, however temporarily, with jazz greats Billy Cobham and Alphonso Johnson. These efforts didn’t always pay off, but Weir kept trying, kept playing, kept singing. After The Grateful Dead’s denouement in 1995, he was the catalyst behind ensembles like RatDog, Wolf Bros., The Dead, and Dead & Company, with people like bassist/producer Don Was, Rob Wasserman and younger superstars like John Mayer.

“Night after night, in the seven years I played with Bobby in the Wolf Bros.,” said Was, “he taught us how to approach music with fearlessness and unbridled soul, pushing us beyond what we thought was musically possible. Every show was a transcendent adventure into the unknown. Every note he played and every word he sang was designed to bring comfort and joy to our audiences. The music he helped create over the last 60 years will continue to be felt for generations. As he sang in one of my favorite Dead songs, ‘The music will never stop.'”

Mayer, who called Weir “my cosmic mentor and an absolute savant,” spoke directly to him in the wake of his death. “Bobby, 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.”

Kreutzmann, who may have spent more time on stage and off stage with Weir than just about anybody, spoke at length about his bandmate this week. Among his comments:

“We embarked on a journey without a destination. We didn’t set out to change the world, or to become big stars, or to have our own counterculture — we didn’t know any of those things were actually possible.”

“Nothing was more important than having fun, and nothing was more fun than playing music, especially once audiences started coming and we could look out and see a sea of people dancing. Once that happened, it was all we wanted to do. We didn’t want to stop. That was our first real goal — to just keep going. And so, for sixty years, the music never stopped. This was true for all of us, together and apart, but when Bob was off the road, all he wanted to do was get back on it.”

“I just hope he was able to bring his guitar with him, or otherwise, he’ll go crazy.”

Weir’s grown daughter Chloe served as family spokesperson in a statement. “Bob Weir will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music. There is no final curtain here, not really — only the sense of someone setting off again. May we honor him not only in sorrow, but in how bravely we continue with open hearts, steady steps, and the music leading us home. As he liked to say, ‘Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.'”

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For those curious to learn more about Weir’s life and career, Netflix is currently streaming “The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir,” a fascinating 2015 documentary in which Weir offers a feast of observations about life, love and music. I strongly recommend it.

A note about the playlist: I focused mostly on Grateful Dead songs that Weir either wrote or sang, and a healthy handful of Weir’s more impressive solo efforts, all presented chronologically. I own and enjoy his 1978 solo LP “Heaven Help the Fool,” with its excellent opener “Bombs Away,” but for some reason it’s unavailable on Spotify, so you’ll have to find that on your own.

Isn’t life strange, a turn of the page

Posted on October 17 by brucehhackett

Popular music is full of stories of rock groups that were lucky enough to have a #1 single almost right away but then unable to duplicate their success. The record label might stick with them for a year or two, but without sales, the groups lose their contracts and are never heard from again. You’ve no doubt heard such artists referred to as “One-Hit Wonders.”

The Moody Blues, who went on to become one of the most successful British progressive rock groups in history, came pretty close to being saddled with that dubious distinction. They signed a deal with Decca in early 1964 and, before the year was out, they topped the charts in England with “Go Now,” which also broke into the Top Ten in the US. Like much of their repertoire at the time, “Go Now” was a cover version of a rhythm and blues song recorded by an American soul singer, Bessie Banks, with lead singer/guitarist Denny Laine as the front man.

*Their 1964 #1 single, featuring (L-R): Thomas, Warwick, Edge, Laine and Pinder*

But then they struggled unsuccessfully for nearly two years to come up with another hit, and Decca was ready to drop them from their roster of artists. Laine grew frustrated and left, as did bassist Clint Warwick. The core group of keyboardist Mike Pinder, flutist Ray Thomas and drummer Graeme Edge soldiered on by welcoming new members Justin Hayward on guitar and John Lodge on bass.

(Lodge died last week at age 82, and with Pinder, Thomas and Edge all passing away over the past eight years, this leaves Hayward as the sole surviving member.)

The group had built up a debt that Decca wanted to recoup, so they came up with a plan: Use the Moody Blues to create a rock music version of Dvorak’s classical music piece, “New World Symphony,” to help promote the label’s new subsidiary, Deram Records, and its new high-end sonic development they called Deramic Stereo. The band had little choice but to go along.

The Moodies’ revised lineup quickly reached the conclusion that the project wasn’t going to work, but with support from their producer and engineer, they boldly proposed to write a cycle of original songs about “everyman’s archetypical day” (dawn, morning, mid-day, late afternoon, evening, night) which would then be expanded and connected by classical music passages, written and conducted by Peter Knight and recorded with a session “orchestra” that called themselves the London Festival Orchestra. To their everlasting credit, the label agreed.

The album they got, “Days of Future Passed,” was fairly astounding. It is regarded as one of the very first concept albums, released in 1967 in the wake of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” and Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” neither of which utilized classical music structures and instruments as comprehensively as The Moody Blues did. Although Decca had little hope that the album would sell much, it became a surprise hit, reaching #27 in the UK on the strength of its two singles, “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon” (#19 and #24 respectively).

It should be noted that the album tanked badly in the US at the time, and critics savaged it. Rolling Stone said, “The Moody Blues have matured considerably since ‘Go Now,’ but their music is constantly marred by one of the most startlingly saccharine conceptions of ‘beauty’ and ‘mysticism’ that any rock group has ever attempted. They are strangling themselves in conceptual goo.” Truth be told, I’ve found the album to be a bit tiresome to listen to all the way through, and the orchestral sections seem rather heavy-handed. But “Days of Future Passed” stands as a landmark LP in its creative blending of rock and roll arrangements with classical song structures and instrumentation.

In the UK, the album’s success gave the group the green light to continue their experimentation. Fortunately, Pinder was exceptionally well versed in the Mellotron, an analog antecedent to the synthesizer. It was designed as an organ-like device that used tape heads activated by the touch of keys, and tape loops comprised of the sounds of horns, strings and other instruments generating an eerie, orchestra-like sound. Pinder, who not only knew how to play it but also once worked for the company that developed and built them, was able to perpetuate the group’s use of orchestral sounds without the expense of hiring classical musicians for the recording process.

*“In Search of the Lost Chord” cover, 1968*

The next Moodies LP, “In Search of the Lost Chord,” revealed the depth of talent of the band’s five multi-faceted musicians. Pinder worked the Mellotron and added piano, harpsichord, autoharp and tambura; Hayward took over on lead vocals and played acoustic and electric guitar, sitar and keyboards; Lodge handled bass, cello and vocals; Thomas provided flute, oboe, sax and French horn and vocals, and Edge played drums and percussion and contributed spoken vocals. All five were songwriters as well, giving the album a wonderful diversity within the group dynamic. Lyrically, the songs examined themes like higher consciousness (Thomas’s ode to Timothy Leary and LSD, “Legend of a Mind”), spiritual development (Hayward’s “Voices in the Sky”), quest for knowledge (Lodge’s rocker “Ride My See-Saw”) and imagination (Pinder’s “The Best Way to Travel”). All this proved to establish the group as pioneers of the new “progressive rock” genre, and gurus of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic, while also showing robust sales in the mainstream, reaching #5 in the UK and #23 in the US.

Not that the Moodies were purveyors of 20-minute epics with multiple time signatures like their prog-rock successors (Genesis and Yes, for example). They wrote what were at heart pop songs, but wrapped them in gorgeous arrangements, with lush harmonies and rich instrumentation (the defining sound in “Nights in White Satin” isn’t guitar, it’s flute). They understood the capabilities of the studio in a way few of their contemporaries did, and in a band packed with capable songwriters, Lodge more than held his own. “Ride My See-Saw” showcased Lodge’s talents: you can hear the earlier R&B band in the rhythm section, but the vocals are layered so deeply the song becomes almost hymnal. It’s very much of its time, but also entirely fantastic — the sound of pop evolving in the moment, in the studio.

Over the next four years, The Moody Blues honed and embraced this formula, offering five rich, diverse, sonically engrossing albums that achieved ever-higher positions on the charts in both the UK and the US, and Canada and Australia as well. “On the Threshold of a Dream” and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children,” both released in 1969, cemented their reputation as an “album band,” with tracks that segued into one another. Their trippy album cover art further sealed the deal, giving their attitude-adjusted audience something to look at while the music played on. “A Question of Balance” in 1970 and “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” in 1971 brought The Moodies back to the singles charts with two vibrant Hayward compositions: the melodramatic “Question,” with its frenetic acoustic strumming, and my personal Moodies favorite, the hard-rocking “The Story in Your Eyes.”

The band toured incessantly throughout this period, and because some of their pieces proved too daunting to attempt on stage, they found themselves consciously writing tunes that could be more easily recreated in a live setting. Consequently, “Question,” “It’s Up to You,” “Melancholy Man,” “Dawning is the Day,” “The Story in Your Eyes” and “Our Guessing Game” from the 1970-1971 LPs became regulars on their concert setlist.

*The Moody Blues in 1970: Ray Thomas, Mike Pinder, Graeme Edge, Justin Hayward, John Lodge*

An unusual thing happened in 1972. While the group’s accurately titled album “Seventh Sojourn” became the first to reach #1 on the US album charts, its two Lodge-penned singles — “Isn’t Life Strange” and “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” — made the Top 40 but were completely overshadowed by the re-release of “Nights in White Satin.” A disc jockey in Washington had been signing off with the five-year-old song, and listeners began clamoring for it. Interest spread to other US markets, and soon Decca/Deram chose to re-release it as a single. It not only soared to #2 on the US Top 40, but also brought “Days of Future Passed” to #3 on the US album chart, giving The Moodies TWO albums in the Top Five in December 1972.

*Re-release single of “Nights in White Satin,” 1972*

Non-stop touring and recording eventually took their toll. The 1973 tour to support “Seventh Sojourn” saw the Moody Blues living a lifestyle more commonly associated with Led Zeppelin. As Lodge recalled in the liner notes for a reissue of the album: “We had our own Boeing 707 aircraft which was decked out with TVs and sound systems everywhere. We had our own butler and our name written on the outside of the plane. I had a very empty feeling knowing that things had got this excessive.”

Encouraged by the band’s propensity for vague but faintly profound-sounding lyrics, fans took to thinking the group members possessed more wisdom than they actually did, a situation that provoked these lyrics in Lodge’s “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)”: “And if you want the wind of change to blow about you, / And you’re the only other person to know, don’t tell me, / I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band.”

Consequently, The Moodies chose to go on hiatus for a few years, much to the displeasure of their record label. Pinder had grown tired of England and relocated to California to start a new family there, and Hayward, under pressure to come up with new Moody Blues-like material, teamed up with Lodge and their longtime producer Tony Clarke to make an album as a duo (“Blue Jays”) in 1975, which reached a respectable #16 in the US and #4 in Britain, even without any noteworthy singles.

The whole band reunited in 1978 to record the rather flat “Octave” LP with the below-average single “Steppin’ in a Slide Zone,” but Pinder was so dissatisfied with the result that he refused to participate in the subsequent tour and officially left the group for good. It seemed that the music scene had moved on, eschewing prog rock for disco, funk, New Wave and heavy metal.

In 1981, though, The Moody Blues came roaring back with “Long Distance Voyager,” a synthesizer-driven #1 pop/rock album carried by two Top 20 Hayward hits, “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice.” Pinder’s replacement was Patrick Moraz, a keyboard wizard who had similarly replaced Rick Wakeman in Yes for a spell several years earlier. The Moodies’ triumphant return to touring, including songs from throughout their catalog, was made possible by the industry’s improved technical improvements in concert sound. I saw them in concert that year, and again a decade later in a double bill with Chicago, and found their show exhilarating.

This album, and those that followed over the next decade (1983’s “The Present,” 1986’s “The Other Side of Life,” 1988’s “Sur La Mer” and 1991’s “Kings of the Kingdom”), bore only a little resemblance to the psychedelia and mind-expanding albums of the band’s prime, but the accessible melodies, crisp production and Hayward’s ever-present voice kept the band in the limelight. Indeed, Hayward’s catchy pop song, “Your Wildest Dream,” and its similar sequel, “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” got as much exposure as anything they’d ever done. Still, there were precious few memorable deep tracks behind the singles, certainly a discouraging development to older fans.

*The Moodies in 2002, L-R: Edge, Hayward, Lodge, Thomas*

The band’s last time in the recording studio was in 2003 when they cobbled together a Christmas-themed album called “December,” which came and went quickly, like most seasonal records. The Moody Blues, augmented by additional performers on stage, continued performing well into the 2010s, with Hayward and Lodge carrying the load. First Thomas and then Edge were forced to reduce their participation due to health issues. Thomas ultimately died of cancer in 2018, and Edge passed away of cancer in 2021.

Lodge never took music lightly. He always saw in it the potential for something more than entertainment. In a 2023 interview, he was asked what “psychedelic” meant to him, and his answer was thoughtful: “I hope your mind will explore the music and take you wherever the music takes you. It’s not a case of just singing along, it’s listening. It can be one note and that transports you somewhere. And I think you can conjure up experiences and stories in your mind where the music takes you. To me, that’s psychedelic. You have to listen to things, not just hear them.”

I can’t think of any other rock band that had the audacity to offer tracks of cosmic poetry, spoken rather than sung, on almost every album. “In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” said Hayward about Graeme Edge in the wake of his death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”

There’s a song on “Long Distance Voyager” that, while not one of their better efforts, perfectly describes how The Moody Blues were perceived in their later years — “Veteran Cosmic Rockers.” Their spacey music and intelligent lyrics mesmerized a sizable fan base during their 1967-1974 era, and their 1981-1991 period perpetuated The Moodies brand as a worthy rock band that absolutely deserved their long-overdue induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

As Edge himself put it in a 2008 interview, “I never get tired of playing the hits. I think we have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s our duty, and the audience’s right.”

R.I.P. John Lodge, and The Moody Blues as a band. You left a valuable legacy.

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