Bob Weir

Singer, songwriter, guitarist, children's author, environmentalist and mountain bike enthusiast, Bob Weir's talents and interests are as varied and meandering as one of his twenty minute Grateful Dead songs. Weir displayed a love for music from an early age, learning piano and trumpet before picking up a guitar at age thirteen. At sixteen he met Jerry Garcia in a music store and the two soon decided to form a band. Originally called Mother McGee's Uptown Jug Champions (no one knows why that name didn't stick) the band morphed into the Warlocks and finally the immortal Grateful Dead. Even though the Dead toured incessantly and recorded frequently for thirty years, the only extended break coming in 1975, Weir always found time for solo and side projects. His first solo album, Aces, was released in 1972. He formed and played with Kingfish and Bobby and the Midnites. In 1995, the same year as Jerry Garcia's death, Weir formed the Ratdog Review. Tickets are going fast!

A Grateful Dead performance wasn't so much a concert as an experience, or in the flower child vernacular, a happening. The band was known and loved for its freeform, marathon shows. Weir's rhythm guitar guided, prodded, weaved and supported Garcia's lead. Weir's stylings are a mixture of jazz, hard bob and rock. He often sites such varied performers as John Coltrane, Igor Stravinsky and the Reverend Gary Davis as influences.

Weir continues in the spirit of the Grateful Dead with Ratdog. The band tours steadily and their shows are long, meandering, spontaneous journeys. The Ratdog song list often consists of heavy doses of Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon and reimagined Grateful Dead tunes, as well as Weir originals. After ten years and umpteen different lineups, Weir and the boys manage to swing from genre to genre and paint complex textured emotions with music. While most jam bands lead their audience through a long, Strange (re: boring) trip, Weir and Ratdog manage to keep things fresh, kinetic and seamless. He's not out rehashing the glory days and cashing checks on faded glory. Weir isn't a performer that's grown bored but needs to make the mansion payments. He knows what he's doing, rightfully so after forty plus years, but he continues to grow and stretch. Contact Ticketsmyway.com for all your premium ticket needs!

Weir is a human being with varied and wide ranging interests. A few hundred years ago he would have been called a renaissance man; today we'd label him ADD. But he seems comfortable in his skin and undaunted and unafraid of his legacy. We're lucky he picked up that guitar and continues to take us along for the trip.