Pass this way

Bob Weir, R.I.P.

Bob Weir’s 9th grade Menlo School yearbook photo, ca 1962. Menlo School was a prep school for future Stanford students, located on El Camino Real in Weir’s home town of Atherton. Atherton was a well-to-do suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, 30 miles South of the City, and just North of Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

Bob Weir (1947-2026) died this week. The Grateful Dead are part of Palo Alto’s invention of itself, like Stanford University, Perry Mason and Google. The Grateful Dead have both more and less to do with Palo Alto than everyone thinks, but Palo Alto’s role in the universe is to make everything about Palo Alto. If we have to invent Semiconductors or make LSD popular in order to make that happen, well, that’s what we do. The Dead aren’t my thing, however, so I’m not really qualified to comment; such that I am interested in them, it is because we share a geographical past, rather than a musical one. They are my brother’s thing, though (he even has a blog about them), so this week, I will pass the baton to him. Corry, on Bob Weir:

Girl Scouts marching in a downtown parade c.1970, past Magoo’s Pizza at 639 Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park. The Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) played their debut concert at Magoo’s on May 5, 1965.

Bob Weir’s recent death inevitably triggered a flood of memorials. Weir had kept the Grateful Dead flag flying for another 30 years after the initial 30-year run had ended with Jerry Garcia’s death on August 9, 1995. Amazingly, the Dead seem to be even bigger now, 30 years after Garcia’s death, and Weir’s ubiquitous performing is a huge part of that post-longevity. The Grateful Dead are not just a band, but a genre, with groups inspired by, and re-inventing, the Dead’s music playing in bars and theaters every weekend, all over the country and the world. Elvis impersonators implicitly require you to remember Elvis, but the Grateful Dead multiverse doesn’t mandate any such recollection.

The Grateful Dead is always about Palo Alto for us, however, because we’re from Palo Alto. Every Weir obituary or historical tribute to the Dead evokes them as a Palo Alto band. Yet Weir was the least and most of the Palo Altans in the band. Unlike his original bandmates, Weir never actually lived in Palo Alto. Weir was from Atherton, two towns over from us, and in those days a much wealthier community (Palo Alto has since caught up), and he was just a dozen or so years older than us, so our families drove the same roads. Weir’s engineer father and our architect one must have been on the same train to San Francisco many mornings. Since Atherton (famously) had no retail businesses (on purpose), downtown Menlo Park was their main drag. Weir’s mother and ours must have parked next to each other at Stanford Shopping Center, or stood in line together at the Pink Pastry bakery on Santa Cruz Avenue downtown, across the street from where the Warlocks would debut in May 1965.

Menlo School JV football team, from the 1962 Oak Leaves yearbook. Freshmen Bob Weir is bottom row, fifth from the left.

In another way, Weir was unlike any of us because his family wasn’t really like ours, and Weir himself was unlike other members of his band. Garcia’s father was a musician, Pigpen’s was a DJ and Lesh and Kreutzmann’s families actively encouraged their music. Weir seemed destined to be a more typical Atherton product, a handsome preppy headed for Stanford and social status. He went to Menlo School, a jockish Stanford feeder Prep School, and played on the football team. Handsome, smart, affable and dyslexic, Weir was kicked out of Menlo School, as well as other prep schools and even the local free-thinking proto-hippie school. He ended up at the public Menlo-Atherton High School in the Fall of ‘65. Lindsey Buckingham was probably a sophomore there at the time.

Given Weir’s wealthy background, good looks and charm, he was arguably a bigger hippie than anyone in the Grateful Dead, and that’s saying something. Garcia, Pigpen and the rest of them would have anticipated a life in music or the arts, having fun, being on the margins and maybe being beatniks. Weir, however, was on the football team and had the implied access to wealth and success that supercharges good looks and financially sound parents. Yet he threw it all over to play folk music. When the psychedelic revolution dropped by, Weir got on board with no hesitation and didn’t look back. Garcia and Lesh had already chosen to be oddball musicians, but they would have been that anyway. Weir actually had a choice, and he chose the Grateful Dead.

Weir liked performing and touring, long past the time that he had money and a family and could have put it on hold. In the last few years, he regularly played the Guild Theater on El Camino Real in Menlo Park. The Guild had been a movie theater until 2019--it was just around the corner from the site of the Warlocks debut at Magoo’s Pizza. In 2022 The Guild re-opened as a snug concert hall, seating 200 (but 500 if everyone stands). Bob Weir played there a number of times, not because he had to, but because he liked to play. He had surely seen movies at the Guild. It was just a few miles from where he grew up, and where he was kicked out of prep school, and where he dropped out of high school, and where his band got their start. Weir had completely rejected his Atherton “heritage,” and yet ended up as the King Of The Peninsula by a road of his own devising.

None of us will pass this way again. Sic Transit Gloria Psychedelia.