Good morning, dear hoddlers. Today is the last day of the Weir-a-thon, a weeklong celebration of Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir, who passed away last weekend.
This whole week we’ve been celebrating the music of Weir throughout the decades, and I’d like to thank you all for being patient with me as I clog the Track of the Day with Weir songs. Today will be the final Grateful Dead song for a while (so we can throw some others into the rotation). I have a few more things to say about Weir.
But first, I’d like to share a bonus track of the day. This one is in honour of the last song I heard Bob Weir play live. It was at The Sphere on May 9, 2025. I’m very grateful to have seen him the few times I did, and never took it for granted. I left that night at The Sphere wholly satisfied, if a little bemused I heard Scarlet->Fire for the third time (what, no The Other One?). But he, John Mayer and the rest of the group finished the night with a roaring version of Casey Jones. They brought the house down.
And I think it’s pertinent to include a song that’s heavily featured by Jerry Garcia. Because where would Weir be without Jerry? And where would Jerry be without Bobby?
Fitzie’s bonus track of the day: Casey Jones, by the Grateful Dead
It took me a long time to understand why people mourn musicians when they die. I had a hard time understanding why people cried when John Lennon died. It isn’t as if they knew him.
It wasn’t until Tom Petty died nearly a decade ago when I understood. His music is the soundtrack to my life, and with him gone, the world feels a bit quieter.
With Bobby Weir, his presence felt like an anchor. Garcia died when I was extraordinarily young, and so I have no consciousness of him. But as I grew into adulthood I gravitated more and more towards the Grateful Dead. It was always Bob Weir’s songs I wanted to listen to though.
It’s quite possible no one in the western world played as many concerts as he did. A world without Weir on stage feels like a world that no longer knows how to spin. And yet, like those crazy spinners that lined the dance halls in the 70s, the world keeps a’spinning after Weir’s death.
Bob Weir - like the entirety of the Grateful Dead - was a man of the underdog. The music he played was unconventional, unfit for radio. The people he played music to were seen as oddballs and outcasts, driven underground. Some of the people who he played with were seen as marginalised at one point or another.
So it feels like a victory when we see Weir celebrated to such a degree, or see Dead iconography entrench mainstream Americana. After all, is it truly possible to understand Americana without the Dead’s place in it?
Their music came at a unique point in the country, where many people sought to retreat inward into their collective consciences. It was this blend of a return home through the prism of bluegrass, folk and jazz that helped propel the Dead to achieve such a cult following.
And then, of course, we have the quasi-mythological stories of Neal Cassady driving the bus, of Ken Kesey, Janis Joplin, Hamza Al Din and more pour colour onto the magical tapestry that the Dead created.
It’s quite difficult for me to dictate my appreciation for the Dead in a technical sense. Of course their songwriting is lush, their musicianship unquestionable, their vocals rough at times but quite unique. But their stretched-out instrumentation and improvisation, I feel, is the closest form to the human experience as music can get. We never know quite where it’s going to end up, and that makes it so exciting.
So as I type here tonight, I struggle to find a way to close out this hoddle. I don’t know how to lead it into the track of the day (I still don’t know what I’m going to choose as I’m writing this now - so it’ll be as much a surprise to you as it is to me).
Perhaps Bill Walton said it best: It’s all one song.
Fitzie’s track of the day: The Music Never Stopped, by the Grateful Dead
And now for your links:
The Athletic ($$): “Do Tottenham Hotspur have a discipline problem?”
Alasdair Gold: “Every word Thomas Frank said on signing a forward, Conor Gallagher transfer and mixed injury news”
NY Times: “Bob Weir Is Gone, but the Dead’s Music Plays On”
GQ: “A Look Back at the Laid-Back Style of Bob Weir”