On New Year’s Eve 1963, a 16-year-old Bob Weir heard the plucking of a banjo off in the distance. The teenager followed the sound down a Palo Alto street to a music shop where Jerry Garcia was playing. Then and there, Weir and Garcia, who was 21, started jamming.

For Weir, the music never stopped until his passing Saturday at the age of 78.

When the Grateful Dead coalesced in 1965, Weir was still a teen and the youngest member of the band (a full seven years younger than bassist Phil Lesh). On one side of Weir stood Garcia and his endless exploratory guitar solos, on the other Phil Lesh and his basslines informed by his classical, jazz, and avant garde music education. Weir had to become the Other One and find his space in the world’s most iconic improvisational rock band.

Weir’s contributions came through his own unique, artistically savvy talents. As a player, singer, and presence, he asserted himself in the right spots and hung back when he needed to. This approach turned him into a wildly creative and curious rhythm guitarist — turns out carving out that space between Garcia and Lesh meant pioneering chord voicings and strange vamps rarely heard in rock ‘n’ roll.

As a writer, he had a range that defined the Dead’s artistic scope. Think of the band’s poles with earthy Americana at one extreme and freaky, knotty jams at the other. Now think of how “Jack Straw” and “The Other One” fit perfectly at those two extremes.

And between the poles, Weir had his hand in writing a long list of classics. Every Deadhead would put half a dozen Weir tunes in their list of favorites — I’d go with “Cassidy,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Truckin’, “Playing in the Band,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Looks Like Rain,” “Throwing Stones”…

But of the many little miracles Weir performed, maybe the most underappreciated was his ability to keep the Dead alive. When Garcia died three decades ago, the legacy of the band could have fizzled. Instead, slowly and naturally, Weir became the ringmaster of a scene that continues to blossom.

Many people have many opinions about the post-Dead projects with a string of aces including Trey Anastasio, Warren Haynes, and John Mayer. And while hating any incarnation of the band without Jerry is valid, so is loving the further trips into music. Weir stood, firmly but unassumingly, at the center of all the best trips.

“Whatever I’m going to be doing, a lot of it will be furthering this heritage, this legacy,” Weir said a decade ago. “I’m not the guy who was saying it was the last show. I’m good to play.”

Basically, the music never stops. And even after Weir’s death, it won’t stop for a million fans spread across four generations. The Dead is as popular, maybe more popular, today as it was half a century ago. A lot of that is because of what Weir did at 16, and at 70.

Bob Weir, right, and John Mayer perform their free “Pay it Forward” show with Dead & Company at The Fillmore in San Francisco, Calif., in 2016. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)
Kennedy Center Honors recipients from left; filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the legendary American rock band the Grateful Dead band members Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Bob Weir and blues rock singer-songwriter and guitarist Bonnie Raitt, applaud at at the 2024 Kennedy Center Honors reception in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta,File)