Bob Weir

Born in San Francisco, Bob Weir is a guitarist as well as a singer and songwriter. Best known for being a founding member of the band the Grateful Dead, Weir has also performed with the Other Ones, aka the Dead, a band that was founded after the 1995 disbanding of the Grateful Dead. He also went on to form the band Dead & Company in 2015, along with John Mayer as well as fellow former Grateful Dead bandmates Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. Weir first met Jerry Garcia on New Year's Eve 1963 in Palo Alto, Calif. Weir, who was 16 at the time, had been out with a friend, and the two were looking for a club that would admit them so they could listen to music. After hearing banjo music in an alley, the two tracked down the music to its source, and encountered Garcia for the first time. Weir and Garcia spent the rest of the evening playing music together, and by dawn on New Year's Day had decided to form a band. This led to the founding of the Grateful Dead (a name they settled on after briefly being known as both Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions and the Warlocks). Over the next 30 years, Weir would be the rhythm guitarist for the acclaimed band, and would also contribute lead or backing vocals to many of their songs. In 1994, the year before the group disbanded, Weir was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Grateful Dead, along with the rest of the band members. In the years since, Weir has performed as part of several other line-ups in addition to the Other Ones and Dead & Company, including Ratdog, with Jay Lane and others; Furthur, with Phil Lesh; and the Weir, Robinson, & Greene Acoustic Trio, with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes and Jackie Greene. In 2014, he was the subject of a documentary, "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir," which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. He was awarded the inaugural Les Paul Spirit Award at the 2016 Bonnaroo Arts and Music Festival. In September 2016, he released the solo album "Blue Mountain," his first solo album since "Heaven Help the Fool" in 1978. The album was inspired by his experiences as a teenager when he worked in Wyoming as a ranch hand.