Bobby
Around 4:00 on the afternoon of January 10th I came out of the woods from a long hike and when I regained WIFI access a handful of texts came through saying some version of, “RIP Bobby”. A quick Google search confirmed,”Shit. Bobby passed?” One of those passings where it wasn’t a surprise but at the same time it was. I pulled out of the parking lot of the trailhead and with the sun setting and the Pacific Coast on my left I put on the Dead’s “Go to Heaven” album and turned up “Lost Sailor.”
I’d long stopped texting my Dad when celebrities and musicians his age passed on. Just wasn’t feeling right reminding him that the artists he grew up with or looked up to or listened to or watched on the big screen had moved on to the next plane but for some reason I felt like texting him about Bobby. His response, “That’s hitting close to home even if I wasn’t a Grateful Dead fan.” He wasn’t even though when I got all of his records there were three Dead albums in there.
Bobby was always my favorite member of the band. Maybe because he was the youngest. Maybe because his voice…I always liked that growl he could get. Maybe because in a band full of oddballs something about him always seemed the most odd to me. He had this look in eye. Maybe because at times he could be the most animated on stage. Something about him just appealed to me more than the others. Fuck man I don’t know, I just liked the guy. With as much as the ethos and mythology of the Grateful Dead has meant to the music world that I often find myself swimming in I am not shy to say that it has taken me a long time, a really long time, to fully embrace their music. I pushed back on for it years because it felt like that if you got into that music world and liked to experiment that you were supposed to like The Grateful Dead. It was a given. It was a rite of passage. That it was just part of the territory…so I didn’t want to “get into them”. I had their records, records that I liked, but I never really “got” into their live catalog. Didn’t want to give it a real chance even though I appreciated their songs. As cliched as it sounds it took my moving to the Bay Area to embrace it. It’s just part of the DNA out here…much like growing up in the South; in Middle Georgia; puts the Allman Brothers in your blood. The music of The Grateful Dead is as American as it can get…it’s in the DNA of America, and it will live on forever. And I get it now.
The only Dead show I saw and THE only time I ever saw Bob Weir play was on August 3, 2025…the last day of GD60 in Golden Gate Park. I have been to a lot of shows, a lot of festivals, and photographed a ton of artists…how I let not seeing Bobby on stage more is beyond me.
Cheers Kid.
“You're a lost sailor, been away too long at sea.”
Here are some pictures from a gathering in the Haight on January 11, the day after he passed, to celebrate him and the music of the Dead as well as some pictures from the Official Memorial at Civic Center Plaza in downtown San Francisco. When his wife and daughters came out to speak a red tailed hawk flew in and hovered over the crowd for the duration of the service. It was a really moving moment.
