The legendary meeting of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir
It’s either Canadian hard rock power trio Rush or San Francisco’s immortal blues noodlers Grateful Dead that stand as rock’s biggest ‘cult’ band. It’s difficult to guess who just nudges it, both boast an obsessively devoted fanbase and pride themselves on their communal solidarity of rebuffing critical consensus or pop’s weathervane trends, but Jerry Garcia’s psychedelic jam ensemble likely just about eclipses Rush due to their deeper-rooted presence in the 1960s counterculture.
Grateful Dead was everywhere during that turbulent decade. Formed in 1965 in Santa Clara County’s Palo Alto, the roots rock collective would play the legendary Woodstock and Monterey Pop festivals, as well as appear on the billing of The Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont show before staying firmly on the stage’s sides due to the escalating violence. Paragons of the era’s hippy idyll, Grateful Dead would play an exhaustive amount of free shows and benefit gigs well into the 1970s, their most famous being the Unity Fair ’75 gig at Golden Gate Park’s Lindley Meadows to a crowd of over 25,000.
While Garcia served as the face and captain of the band til his death in 1995, Grateful Dead featured a roll call of fan-favourite figures and essential members who formed crucial ingredients to The Dead story.
One big character was founding guitarist Bob Weir. With a playing style forged by a formative love of country and blues, Weir’s unique approach to chord progressions and riffs helped shape Grateful Dead’s unique sound, and penned much-loved numbers such as ‘The Other One’, ‘Weather Report Suite’ and Estimated Prophet’.
Weir had met Garcia a year before Grateful Dead’s birth. Walking the back alleys of Palo Alto on New Year’s Eve, Weir heard a banjo playing coming from Dana Morgan’s Music Store and sought to investigate, discovering a 21-year-old Garcia naively waiting for guitar students to arrive on the day everyone’s hitting the clubs. “I said, ‘Man, this is New Year’s Eve, I don’t think you’ll be seeing anyone’,” Weir regaled in 2015’s Reckoning: Conversations With the Grateful Dead.
He added: “He wasn’t quite ready to give up the ghost, so he said, ‘Do you guys play? I have the key to the instrument room’. He got some guitars and we ended up playing well into the evening and had enough fun to think about doing something together”.
The following week the pair formed Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Garcia already had a local reputation, playing a mean banjo for the Black Mountain Boys and standing as a regional hero of the West Coast bluegrass scene, but his and Weir’s newly-formed jug band reached even bigger musical heights and sowed the seeds of rock destiny: “There was some juice behind it that there’s no explaining. I was 16 and had only been playing guitar for a few years, but I knew I was onto something here”.
Briefly renaming themselves The Warlocks and roping in members of The Wildwood Boys, Grateful Dead played their first official show together on December 4th, 1965, at one of Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Test parties in San Jose. The rest is history. Weir continues his involvement with Grateful Dead’s legacy, playing the 2015 Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead reunion shows and finishing an 18-date Las Vegas residency with Dead Forever Live at Sphere.
