Driving Wheel

Hard, driving rock and jammy, blues-based Americana, with a smooch of Southern Fried twang.

01/11/2026

Well said.

Bobby Weir was one of my favorite musician friends, and for that matter, one of my favorite people anywhere. Always a warm, jovial presence, but with a mischievous look in his eye, he was ready with banter, a quip, a wise-guy crack or bon mot most all the time.

Weir had a completely original take on playing rhythm guitar in a rock band, inspired by disparate sources but maybe mostly from studying McCoy Tyner’s comping behind John Coltrane in the classic Coltrane Quartet of the sixties. He found the ideal and unique voicings and rhythmic style to underpin Garcia’s flights of fancy, and kept developing it through the years. Often when I played with them I wouldn’t play, just lay out, because I thought that the symbiosis between the two longtime partners was so evident and anything else added was unnecessary and possibly intrusive.

Bobby also wrote a large number of songs that became beloved classics of the Grateful Dead corpus. As a writer he had a very broad range stylistically, and wrote songs that featured a wide palette of musical colors: original chord progressions with unexpected and exciting harmonic movement (“Estimated Prophet,” “Weather Report Suite”), beautiful ballads (“Looks Like Rain,” “Black-Throated Wind”), stirring jam vehicles (“The Other One”), titanic old-time western country-rock songs (“Jackstraw” — wow, “Mexicali Blues”), and durable, jamming night-closing rockers (“One More Saturday Night,” “Playing In The Band,” “I Need A Miracle,” “Truckin’,” “Sugar Magnolia”).

This hits hard. We just worked together in 2025 on some new music and had a joyful time with it. This piece, a song I wrote with Robert Hunter, will stand as our mutual final collaboration, and I will always cherish it, along with all the times we played together through the years, from 1988 until last year. Sometimes it was pretty freaking magical. I love you, Bob, and will always fondly remember our many moments, so often transcendent, throwing chords and notes around in space, through the air, together.

📸 Susana Millman