The Song That Defined Bob Weir’s Role in the Grateful Dead

The instrumental theme of “Playing in the Band” consists of four notes, played in dueling harmony by the Grateful Dead’s two guitarists. Jerry Garcia, the ragtag band’s monkishly charismatic de facto leader, takes the twinkly top line; Bob Weir, the humble rhythm guitar man, supports him from below. The melody arcs inquisitively upward, then drifts down, then up once more, then finally tumbles to the bottom of the scale. But it never settles there. Thanks to the unusual rhythmic sense of the song’s two composers, Weir and drummer Mickey Hart, the line seems to begin again before ever really ending: the punctuation of one phrase becomes the introduction of the next. The image it gives me is of a leaf falling infinitely from its branch. Just as you think it might finally touch down, it catches an updraft and begins its graceful and lackadaisical descent anew.

Weir, who died at 78 on Friday, played “Playing in the Band” around 600 times onstage with the Grateful Dead between the song’s live debut in 1971 and Garcia’s death in 1995, and many more times with various post-Jerry bands in the three decades since. Weir co-wrote the music, sang it, and recorded a crackling studio version on Ace, his first solo album. RatDog, his primary band for years after the Dead, played it nearly 300 times, more than any other song in their repertoire. Its lyrics, penned by Grateful Dead poet-in-residence Robert Hunter, are a celebration and a defense of rock’n’roll as a way of life: other people cast judgement while searching fruitlessly for meaning in their own lives; the singer is too busy with his guitar to let their criticisms and philosophies bother him much.

You can see why the words might have meant something deep to Weir, who gave up any prospect of a normal life among normal people when he joined the Dead’s traveling circus as a teen. His ongoing devotion to life on the road, even after the band’s demise, is difficult to fathom. A few years ago, fans calculated that Weir had played something like 4,500 concerts since the ’60s: That’s a show every day for 12 years; or, given that three-hour performances were the norm for the Dead and its offshoot bands, 18 months of his life spent onstage.

Deadheads sometimes poked fun at Weir, especially in his younger years: He was gawky, he sang out of tune, he wore cutoff jean shorts. If Garcia was the messiah figure, Weir was the regular guy who seemed to stumble into greatness. The jokes were surely rooted in part in the audience’s own identification with Weir, their misguided but understandable sense that it could have been them up there. But by the time Weir and his comrades linked up with John Mayer to form Dead & Company in 2015, he had acquired the bearing of a shaman, regal and wizened. For those of us who were too young to catch the Dead while Jerry was alive, he was the keeper of the flame. The chorus of “Playing in the Band,” which involves a lot of excited repetition of the title, sounds on one hand like the outburst of someone who can’t believe his good luck to be onstage. On the other, when Hunter and Weir rhyme it with “Daybreak on the land” or “Like a wave upon the sand,” they imbue the hard and lonely work of all that touring with elemental, almost mystical significance. It must have felt good to sing.