Whether he’s playing with the Grateful Dead, John Mayer, or in any of his multiple side projects, the 75-year-old California-born songwriter and performer Bob Weir is known to many jam band fans. The artist, who has played in front of millions of people throughout his life, is a legend.
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But at American Songwriter, we love to dive into more than just what the music has to say, we want to know what the former Grateful Dead member has to say about life, love, reincarnation, his infamous group, Adele, and much more. Find the best Bob Weir quotes below.
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1. “What I like best about music is when time goes away.”
2. “The same song on a different day was a different song.”
3. “I don’t believe in death.”
4. “When we started out, there was so much cash involved that it attracted an element you’d rather not do business with.”
5. “The Grateful Dead played for three hours on a given night, plus sound check.”
6. “Both my kids like Adele, and I gotta say, the girl can sing.”
7. “I thought being a cowboy would be a terribly romantic thing to do. But it wasn’t. I shoveled a lot of stalls.”
8. “I’m looking forward to some more solo acoustic dates. That’s a lot of fun for me, because I get to be alone with the song. And I get to hear every little nuance; if my instrument does something that I wasn’t expecting, I get to chase that. Chase that down a little bit.”
9. “Be as in touch with your dreams as you can be.”
10. “I don’t know if I discovered I had any talent. It was dogged persistence. I had to have the music.”
11. “One of the things that the Grateful Dead did, way back when, was we spent a lot of time just turning each other on to music. If somebody was listening to something that really caught their ear, they’d make sure that everybody else in the band heard it, and that came home for us in innumerable ways.”
12. “We wanted to establish a new fan base over here. And second, we wanted to challenge ourselves. We wanted to bring what is ostensibly new music to fresh ears and see what lights them up.”
13. “I think if people value democracy, they had damn well better get out and exercise their right to vote while their vote still means something.”
14. “Whatever I’m going to be doing, a lot of it will be furthering this heritage, this legacy.”
15. “I have always had a certain aversion to heat. And for me, the name of the game on the stage is ‘beat the heat.’ It’s always July under the lights.”
16. “Songs go through cycles for me. And sometimes I lose my passion for some of them.”
17. “Obviously I believe in reincarnation and all that kind of stuff—I don’t think anyone’s going to be surprised to hear that.”
18. “The premise that we’re working with is that when most people go to a show, they’re not really watching what’s going on onstage. They may be watching what’s on the screen. But when the songs are playing in their mind’s eye, they’re actually watching a movie.”
19. “We’d just signed with Arista, the record company. Arista was freaking about the phenomenon of tapers showing up at our shows. They were insisting that we put an end to this. And we just didn’t want to do that.”
20. “Looking back, I guess I’ve lived an unusual life.”
Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Across the Great Divide
