Bob Weir ✝

During his career with the Grateful Dead, Weir played mostly rhythm guitar and sang many of the band\'s rock-n-roll and country & western tunes. In 1994, he was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead.\n', ' Weir was born in San Francisco, California to John (Jack) Parber and a fellow college student, who later gave him up for adoption ; he was raised by his adoptive parents, Frederic Utter and Eleanor Cramer Weir, in the suburb of Atherton. He began playing guitar at age thirteen after less successful experimentation with the piano and the trumpet. He had trouble in school because of undiagnosed dyslexia and he was expelled from nearly every school he attended, including Menlo-Atherton High School in Atherton and Fountain Valley School in Colorado, where he met future Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.\n', ' On New Year\'s Eve, 1963, 16-year-old Weir and another underage friend were wandering the back alleys of Palo Alto, looking for a club that would admit them, when they heard banjo music. They followed the music to its source, Dana Morgan\'s Music Store. Here, a young Jerry Garcia, oblivious to the date, was waiting for his students to arrive. Weir and Garcia spent the night playing music together and then decided to form a band. The Beatles significantly influenced their musical direction. "The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock \'n\' roll band," said Bob Weir. "What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn\'t think of anything else more worth doing." Originally called Mother McCree\'s Uptown Jug Champions, the band was later renamed The Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.\n', '