Bob Weir died at age 78 Saturday, and CBS, in one of the network’s better decisions of late, re-released video of some of its recent interviews with the Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist. Interviews in which Weir, as usual sporting abundant gray facial hair reminiscent of a Civil War general, talked about the band’s history and legacy.
Also “living critters.”
By that, Weir did not mean something that might have crawled out of a Deadhead’s VW bus in the wee hours, toasted cheese shrapnel in its tiny jaws. Rather, he was talking about the songs themselves. How the music never stopped, as the Dead put it themselves, and never will.
“A song is a living critter,” Weir declared in a 2022 interview with correspondent John Blackstone, adding that he was about to wax “hippie metaphysical.”
“The characters in those songs are real,” Weir added. “They live in some other world and they come and visit us through the musicians, through the artists, who have dedicated their lives to being that medium, and inviting those critters from other worlds to come and visit our world, and entertain the folks. Because that’s all they want to do. They want to meet us, and we meet them. That’s what we do.”
And you know … well … far out, man.
But Weir, who with his friend Jerry Garcia and others founded the band some 60 years ago, makes an interesting point about the creative process – about birthing something, nourishing it, sustaining it, growing it and then hoping it is built to last. That’s something else the band sang, in a 1989 album of that same name.
It was the last of 13 studio albums they did, and the title track includes these lyrics:
Built to last while years roll past
Like cloudscapes in the sky
Show me something built to last
Or something built to try.
Weir had given some thought to that, too – to what he and his bandmates might leave behind. And he truly believes the Dead will never die.
“My major consideration is, what are people going to say about what I’m thinking or doing in 300 years?” he told Blackstone. “Because it occurs to me that if we do all this stuff right, that they will still be talking about it in 300 years.”
In another interview, this one in 2016 with CBS correspondent Anthony Mason, Weir mentioned a dream he had had, in which he finds himself standing behind the band’s most recent incarnation, Dead & Co., as it is playing onstage. He looks at fellow guitarist John Mayer, three decades years younger than Weir, and sees that his hair has gone gray.
“And,” Weir said, “it’s 20 years later. And then I look back at myself, and there’s somebody with brownish-blondish hair, in his late 20s.”
“And it’s not you,” Mason said.
“Not me,” Weir said. “This is the music going on. … It felt altogether right, and it felt logical. It’s like, OK, that’s what I’ve been up to, all my life.”
And maybe he’s right. Maybe the music truly will never stop. We all hope that something of note survives us, do we not? We all yearn for an ironclad legacy – one like that of Garcia, who died in 1995 at age 53, or like that of two people who would have celebrated birthdays Sunday: Clarence Clemons and Darryl Dawkins.
CC and Double-D. The Big Man and Chocolate Thunder.
An entertainer and a great saxophonist.
Clemons, Bruce Springsteen’s sidekick, was born in 1942. Dawkins, who broke backboards and the hearts of NBA executives in equal measure, came along in 1957. They died in 2011 and 2015, respectively, Clemons at age 69 of a stroke, Dawkins at age 58 of a heart attack.
They are truly unforgettable figures, people whose place in history would appear to be secure. In our mind’s eye Clemons will always be at The Boss’s side, and not just because his nephew Jake is now an E Street Band staple. And Dawkins, frustrating as he might have been as a player, will always be clowning, always leave us laughing.
In August 2024, I interviewed Darryl’s son Nick, who has started at center for Penn State’s football team the last two seasons. Impressive kid, in that he was at that point working toward two degrees and had founded his own clothing line, while taking dead aim on the NFL. He seems bound and determined to realize every dollop of his potential, something Darryl never quite did. Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that Nick doesn’t hold his late father in the highest regard.
“The mark of a man,” Nick said, “is how you’re remembered and how people talk about you and tell stories about you.”
He went on to quote Maya Angelou: “People don’t remember what you said or what you did, but they’re gonna remember how you made them feel.”
“And,” Nick added, “he made people feel good.”
Which is quite true, and a helluva legacy. Certainly the Dead did that, too. Certainly they had an unusual hold over a segment of the population, a hold that persisted well beyond a band’s usual sell-by date.
The New York Times in its obituary for Weir trotted out an old Garcia quote that summed up the Deadheads’ devotion rather well: “Our audience is like people who like licorice. “Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.”
So the Dead will live on with those folks – folks who literally grabbed the music and ran with it, as the band always welcomed their fans to tape live shows, long before cellphones came along. And it will live on with the marketers who have relentlessly hawked the Dead’s wares forever. (It is quite possible, for instance, that a coaster featuring a Garcia mug shot is within reach as I type this.)
Certainly it always lived deep within Weir, too. In his interview with Blackstone, he mentioned that he was “dyslexic in the extreme,” meaning that he was never able to read music.
“I have to get it in my bones,” he told Blackstone. “I’m not relying on my memory for any of this. I need to sit with it until it’s absorbed. It’s not a matter of memory so much as a matter of feeling it.”
Then he would release the little critters, and let them run free. While it might be a long shot given the era in which we live, he can only hope they run forever, that the Dead will never die. That will not only be the true measure of a man, but the true measure of a band.