Well, I missed my non-stop streak daily blog post streak this year for 2026. Oh well. I’ll try to get most days, and if I miss something here or there, I’ll get back the next day, or as soon as feels right, where I can.

I found out unexpectedly yesterday that Grateful Dead’s frontman Bob Weir passed away at 78 years old. May he rest in peace, and my deepest condolences to his closest family, friends, and the broader Deadhead community. There are some beautiful posts about him out there that are wonderful to read.

I grew up in close proximity to the Grateful Dead’s music. I learned that my parents played China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider as some of my lullaby music as an infant, which is pretty cool, so to say I got exposed to jam band music young would be correct! Even now, listening to most Grateful Dead songs usually has a naturally calming and sedating effect for me, absent any substances. Some of my favorite songs (which I understand Bobby wrote or co-wrote) include ones like Estimated Prophet, Jack Straw, One More Saturday Night, Playing in the Band, Corrina, Hell in a Bucket, and Picasso Moon (I’m probably missing some good ones, but these come to mind).

This music also influenced my guitar playing and sound preferences, learning jazz chords, and adding mixolydian modal scales, often found in classic jam band tunes, in addition to usual major, minor, and pentatonic keyed patterns. I also credit Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead culture for positively influencing many younger artists in the scene, including Goose, who wrote an amazing tribute on their social media, as did Trey Anastasio, and many others. I’ve always been struck at how most (but certainly not all) jam band musicians like Bobby disproprotionately tended to seem like kind, good, down-to-earth type people compared to other famous people, rarely egotistical, obnoxious, or full of themselves. Seems to go along with the consistently liberal, spiritually-minded counterculture crowd. I often notice many identical parallels with the EDM and rave scene. But like with any big group, you’ll always find few rotten apples in the figurative barrel.

With Bob Weir specifically, I remember hearing Ratdog’s only studio album, Evening Moods, fairly regularly on rotation CD back in the 2000s (strangely, Ratdog and this album is NOT on Spotify even though Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead are), along with various live Grateful Dead albums on CD. To any readers younger than 25 or so, I’m actually old enough to remember when CDs were mainstream, and how cutting edge the first gen iPods and MP3 players were. I remember wired earbuds getting tangled too, before Bluetooth took off. It’s strange how much the music industry economics has changed, these last 20 or so years, both in terms of physical sales versus streaming, and algorithmically priced concert tickets (a darker topic for another post, but there’s also a silver lining with a couple notable smaller Portland, Oregon venues not suffocating under TicketMaster’s headlock).

Although I was too young to have seen the original Grateful Dead, as Jerry Garcia and I only shared about a month on this planet together, I was fortunate to have seen Bob Weir 8 times in total in some of his other post Grateful Dead bands (Ratdog once, Furthur four times, Dead and Company twice, and Wolf Bros once). My dad, family friend, and relatives share their enthusiasm with me as a child and teenager. I know as I get older, I know I’ll be hearing more often about some older legends passing away.