The pianist Bob Weir tried to imitate on guitar: “My dirty little secret”
One perfect moment in history where two musicians came together to create something unforgettable might seem like something straight out of a fictional novel. However, for the Grateful Dead, reality mirrored fiction. On New Year’s Eve in 1963, a chance encounter between Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir changed everything.
16-year-old Weir’s foray into something that would unintentionally change the course of his career occurred when he followed the sound of a banjo into a music store in Palo Alto. There, he met bluegrass veteran Garcia, who was waiting for a student at the time. Weir, who played folk guitar, then joined Garcia for an impromptu jam session.
Though each member of the cultish outfit had their own brilliance, Weir’s contributions were perhaps the most significant. Not only was he a supremely talented musician, but he also brought with him a wealth of knowledge and experience gained before his big break. Inspired by classical and jazz greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Weir approached music with a similar sense of innovation.
To Weir, Davis changed the entire infrastructure of what it meant to be a great musician, allowing others to embark on different boundary-pushing journeys of sonic discovery. “This is Miles Davis’ classic record,” Weir said during Amoeba’s What’s in My Bag? “He changed the entire idiom and the way music was conceived, and what people expected of music. He changed everything.”
Alongside Davis, Weir developed his own musical skills by listening to many major country and acoustic blues players, but he also learned a lot from Coltrane, albeit slightly indirectly. “My dirty little secret is that I learned by trying to imitate a piano,” he once told Alan Paul, explaining that, when he was just 17, he discovered the work of McCoy Tyner, who was playing in the John Coltrane Quartet at the time. “That caught my ear and lit my flame,” he said.
Unlike some influences that come and go, leaving behind nothing more than a fleeting sound, technique, or lyric, Weir deeply engaged with Tyner’s style. He absorbed it, got under its skin, and worked to evoke a similar feeling in his own audience. While Garcia might have taken a subtly different approach with his horn-playing influences, Weir saw Tyner’s ability as a visceral connection that defied simple description.
Beyond the music itself, Weir subsequently learned a valuable lesson about grace and gratification, Tyner’s playing proving that resonating with someone’s artistry is about more than just the sound and charisma of the performer. “I’ve never had much of an idea of what I’m up to, and I’m not sure that I do even now,” he admitted. “But I have always been there to serve the music and believed that if you sincerely do so then your appropriate role will present itself. Then it’s just a matter of finding the perfect place to play that role and I’m very fortunate that this happened to me at a very young age.”
