Bob Weir, Grateful Dead Co-Founder, Dead at 78

Updated:

January 10, 2026 6:29 pm

Bob Weir, who co-founded eclectic jam band the Grateful Dead, died Saturday, Jan. 10, following a battle with lung cancer. He was 78 years old.

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Weir’s rep, Samantha Tillman, confirmed his passing in a statement, according to Rolling Stone.

“He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could,” Tillman wrote. “Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.”

Bob Weir, an all-time musician as a founding member of the Grateful Dead and all-time American icon. Huge loss for music and for this country pic.twitter.com/1TCADbTKMn
— Lunar Surfer (@TheLunarSurfer) January 10, 2026

As co-lead singer, writer, and guitarist beside Jerry Garcia, Weir “will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music,” the statement added.

“His work did more than fill rooms with music; it was warm sunlight that filled the soul, building a community, a language, and a feeling of family that generations of fans carry with them,” Tillman continued. “Every chord he played, every word he sang was an integral part of the stories he wove. There was an invitation: to feel, to question, to wander, and to belong.”

More About Bob Weir

Born Robert Hall Weir on Oct. 16, 1947, in San Francisco, he began playing guitar at age 13. Undiagnosed dyslexia complicated his early education, leading to his expulsion from nearly every school he attended. Fountain Valley School, in Colorado Springs, was no different—but his time there did introduce him to future Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

A chance encounter in Palo Alto, California, on New Year’s Eve 1963 brought him into Jerry Garcia’s path. Helming the Grateful Dead, the two would become the poster children for an emerging countercultural movement that centered peace, love, and, yes, LSD.

Following Garcia’s 1995 death of a heart attack at age 53, Bob Weir kept the Dead alive in some form or fashion. The most recent iteration, Dead & Co., played for a crowd of nearly 200,000 people across three shows at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in August 2025.

“A Child of Countless Trees”

In March 2025, four months before his official cancer diagnosis, Bob Weir told Rolling Stone in no uncertain terms that he looked forward to dying. At 78, he was one of the Grateful Dead’s few surviving members.

“I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived,” Weir said. “That’s it.”

Weir’s family and legions of fans will forever remember him as “a man driftin’ and dreamin’, never worrying if the road would lead him home,” wrote his daughter, Chloe, after his passing. “A child of countless trees. A child of boundless seas.

“There is no final curtain here, not really. Only the sense of someone setting off again,” Chloe Weir wrote on Facebook. “He often spoke of a three-hundred-year legacy, determined to ensure the songbook would endure long after him. May that dream live on through future generations of Dead Heads. And so we send him off the way he sent so many of us on our way: with a farewell that isn’t an ending, but a blessing. A reward for a life worth livin’.”

Featured image by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic