Bye Bye Bobby

Some deaths hit you hard. Bob Wier, who was still in his teens when he hooked up with Jerry Garcia to start making music, passed on January 10 after a brief illness, and Deadheads everywhere mourned and celebrated his life. 

I first saw the Grateful Dead on their "Live at Last" tour in the late '80s, after Garcia came back from a coma to re-learn the guitar. I thought, "This is where the 60s went" when I saw the parking lot scene: hippie selling colorful crafts, grilled cheese sandwiches and other goodies in a makeshift community that followed the band from show to show. I saw them play with Bob Dylan and several other shows back in the day when you could send in for tickets as part of a lottery for big shows. 

Bill Clinton float with a phattie at the 1993 Grateful Dead Mardi Gras show.

My hemp activism started when a cute hempster guy invited me to the 1991/92 New Year's Eve show at the Oakland, CA colosseum he'd pulled tickets for. It was an unforgettable show, with Baba Olatunji starting it out drumming through the crowd, and Bela Fleck and the Flecktones blowing us away with a drummer whose kit looked like a guitar. It was the year the band's manager Bill Graham died, and since he would traditionally come out as Father Time at midnight at their epic NYE shows, film of him playing Father Time year after year was shown instead. 

I also got to their Mardi Gras show in 1993, when one of the floats depicted the newly-elected Bill Clinton with a saxophone in one hand and a huge burning joint in the other (pictured). As a hemp activist, I wo-maned a table selling tie-dyed hemp shorts and shirts at a string of shows in Sacramento and at Shoreline amphitheater in the Bay Area. The band's keyboardist Vince Wellnick stopped by the booth and picked out our most colorful shirt, which he wore onstage. I ran into Wellnick later on his way to Wier's wedding in Mill Valley. 

A memorial for Wier was held Saturday in downtown San Francisco where thousands gathered. 

Joan Baez spoke, saying Wier was part of a group that created a loving, caring community. "I didn't get it. I was a Mom saying, 'You can go, but don't smoke any of that dope.'....It's been a long journey for me. My own kid, who I was not that present for, found a family with you, Bob, and your people."

John Mayer, who Weir recruited to step into Jerry Garcia's (by way of Trey Anastasio's) huge shoes to  form Dead & Co., shared at the memorial that he and Bobby were born in the same day, exactly 30 years apart. "I come from a world of structural thinking....Bob learned early on that spirit, heart, soul, curiosity and fearlessness was the path to glory. He taught me to trust in the moment, and I like to think I taught him a little bit to rely on a plan. Not as a substitute for the divine moments, but as a way to lure them in a little closer."  

"How many nights we all lived so fully in each second, following the music around twists and turns, through forests and over majestic vistas, taking in the magnificent inner views and wondering how we all got so lucky to have found this music invited into this dream together," Mayer recalled. 

Wier's wife Natascha (left) and daughter Monet (right) notice a hawk flying over the crowd
as daughter Chloe (center) speaks at the memorial. 

When Bob's youngest daughter Chloe ("the other daughter") spoke about azimuth, a nautical/navigational term Wier used to describe the connection between the band and their fans, a beautiful hawk appeared in the sky and began to circle the crowd, joined in the end by a second hawk before flying away. Bob would say that Garcia never really left him, that he still found him up on his shoulder. He and Jerry died 11,111 days apart. 

Wier's wife Natascha lead the crowd in 108 seconds of silence, something Bob would call "Taking a holy instant" in the day. To end the gathering, Mayer played "Ripple" (a Garcia/Robert Hunter tune) on Bob's guitar, and the crowd sang along: 

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music?
Would you hold it near as it were your own?

A song Bobby wrote and sang, "One More Saturday Night," took the crowd out and Chloe, holding a red rose, boogied down with Baez. 

Now everybody's dancin' down the local armory
With a basement full of dynamite and live artillery
Temperature keeps risin', everybody gettin' high
Come the rockin' stroke of midnight, the place is gonna fly...

Wier's Politics, and Pot

Deadheads also gathered last week at 710 Ashbury Street, the house bandmembers were living in when, on October 2, 1967 the place was raided by San Francisco narcotics officers, and Wier and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan were arrested for pot possession. The arrest made national news, and Garcia's picture was used as example of a lawless hippie in an ad for Nixon's presidental campaign the next year. When the band was busted in New Orleans in 1970, they made music out of it for one of their most famous songs: "Truckin."  

Rock/pot journalist Steve Bloom recalled working at High Times when the Dead were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994: "During the media session I fired off a question about Deadheads getting busted by narcs at shows for marijuana and LSD. The band members (Garcia was not there) seemed surprised by the question, but then Bobby stepped forward, decrying the situation and calling for drugs like that to be legal." 

In 2015, NORML was invited to table at the "Fare Thee Well" shows in Santa Clara, the 50th anniversary celebration that many thought would be the last Dead shows. HeadCount, the better-funded group that organized the "Participation Row" there that I participated in, noticed the long lines at our booth and soon started a campaign to register pro-pot voters, which doubtlessly helped with coming ballot measures. 

According to the LA Times, Dead & Company said they would bring at least 300 supporters of legal pot to their May 10, 2016 performance on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” when a legalization measure was heading for the California ballot. "Members of organizations including the California Cannabis Industry Assn. and the Los Angeles medical marijuana collective Buds & Roses were encouraged to wear T-shirts, carry signs and even dress up as giant joints to get their message seen on national TV," the Times reported. 

The band hoped marijuana-advocacy groups could sponsor their Kimmel appearance, but programmers wouldn't permit a cannabis ad to run (they still don't). “The folks it would be hitting on that broadcast would be outside our normal sphere of influence,” Wier said in an interview. “We’re about music, but we’re about other stuff as well, and we always have been. We need to make our feelings on the subject as apparent as we can.”

Bob and the band at the Kennedy Center

Nancy Pelosi spoke at the memorial, about Wier being a lifelong Democrat who loved his country, and who tried to get her to flash a "Vote" sign in a Grateful Dead motif at an event, but she insisted he do it instead. He gave her the sign though, and she showed it this time. His daughter said he would always speak of finding ways to get along with "our friends the Repubs." 

Pelosi noted at the memorial, "Isn't it great that Bob got the last Kennedy Center Honor (when they were truly Kennedy Center Honors)." Interviewed on the red carpet at the event, Wier said that the band was persona non grata for most of its history, but now "everything's changed. Except us....That roar that I'm hearing is the sound of doors opening."  

With a name that practically spelled "Weird," Bobby was unique. Will anyone step into his huge sandals and keep the music going? One way or another, it's bound to happen. It was said that Bob imagined the band's influence lasting 300 years; symphonic, bluegrass, and other forms of interpretation of their extensive catalog of songs have been mentioned and imagined.