For most of their career, the other members of the Grateful Dead referred to Bob Weir as “the Kid”. You can understand why. He was only 16 when the band that would ultimately become the Grateful Dead was founded. Moreover, Weir was implausibly fresh-faced and boyishly handsome, particularly compared to some of his bandmates. Jerry Garcia’s photo was used in one of Richard Nixon’s campaign broadcasts, a symbol of all that was wrong with US youth. Keyboard player Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, by all accounts sweet-natured, nevertheless gave off the air of a man who would strangle you with his bare hands as soon as look at you. Weir, on the other hand, somehow managed to look like the kind of charming young man a mother would be happy for her daughter to bring home, even in the famous 1967 photo of him leaving the band’s Haight-Ashbury residence in handcuffs after being busted for drug possession. His relationship with Garcia and bass player Phil Lesh – five and seven years older than him, respectively – is regularly characterised as that of a junior sibling: at one juncture in 1968, the pair contrived to have Weir dismissed from the band on the grounds that his playing wasn’t good enough.

It never happened – Weir simply kept turning up to gigs and the matter was eventually dropped – but it’s hard to see how the Grateful Dead would have worked without him. For one thing, the band’s famed ability to improvise on stage was rooted in a kind of uncanny psychic bond between the key members – “an intwined sense of intuition”, as Weir described it – that they usually claimed was forged while playing together on LSD as the house band at Ken Kesey’s infamous acid test events of 1965 and 1966. For another, whether Garcia and Lesh thought it was up to snuff in 1968, Weir’s rhythm guitar style was an essential component of their sound. It was less obviously striking than Garcia’s fluid soloing or Lesh’s extraordinary approach to the bass – inspired by his grounding in classical music, he played countermelodies rather than basslines – but no less unique, a mass of alternate chords, harmonic pairings and bursts of contrapuntal lead lines that he said were influenced by the playing of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner. More practically, Weir had huge hands, which enabled him to play chords others physically couldn’t.

In addition, he was fast emerging behind Garcia as the band’s other songwriting powerhouse. He’d already contributed the two best tracks to 1968’s Anthem of the Sun: the ferocious psychedelia of Born Cross-Eyed and the section of the lengthy That’s It for the Other One that was labelled The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get, but subsequently became known simply as The Other One, one of the Dead’s key live improvisations for the rest of their career. But Weir was just getting started. Enthused by the band’s shift away from psychedelia towards country-infused Americana – Weir was always happy to roll out a selection of “cowboy songs” on stage, most notably Marty Robbins’ El Paso and Merle Haggard’s Mama Tried – he started writing at a prodigious rate in the early 70s, first in the company of Garcia’s lyricist Robert Hunter, later with an old schoolfriend, John Perry Barlow. He could write weary ballads – Jack Straw, Looks Like Rain, Black Throated Wind, the latter two from his superb 1972 solo debut Ace – the warped funk of The Music Never Stopped, or complex epics: Weir’s Weather Report Suite took up most of side two of 1973’s Wake of the Flood. But his speciality might have been earthy hard-driving rock’n’roll that was never as musically straightforward as it first appeared: Playing in the Band, Sugar Magnolia, One More Saturday Night, Estimated Prophet.

Weir was utterly integral to the Grateful Dead – and became even more so when Garcia sunk into heroin use in the 80s, an addiction that could noticeably affect his performances – but he still cut a faintly anomalous figure within their ranks. He was the solitary heart-throb in a band that paid no attention whatsoever to image. He stopped taking LSD in 1966, having decided that he’d gleaned all he could from the psychedelic experience (thereafter, he ruefully noted, covertly spiking his drinks with acid became something of a preoccupation of the band’s road crew).

Horrified by the reverence of the Grateful Dead’s most obsessive fans – “the deification those folks made of Jerry is basically what killed him,” he once opined – he was nevertheless the only member who seemed even vaguely interested in commercial success, however theoretically. His 1978 solo album Heaven Help the Fool was a conscious attempt to “go LA” and make slick mainstream rock, albeit with a raised eyebrow (Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally held the album up as an example of Weir’s “peculiar sense of humour”); the music he made with his 80s side-project Bobby and the Midnites was far more straightforwardly accessible than the Grateful Dead. Judging by his performance in the video for 1987’s Hell in a Bucket, Weir entered into the Dead’s brief and unlikely stint as MTV stars – spurred by their unexpected hit single Touch Of Grey – with at least a degree more enthusiasm than his bandmates.

Perhaps inevitably, given the big brother-little brother dynamic that informed their relationship, Weir was the member of the Dead hardest hit by Garcia’s death in 1995: “Bob took it right on the chin,” Hunter subsequently noted. “Shock was written all over his face for a long time, for any with eyes to see.” It was a state of affairs compounded by the fact that, without Garcia’s benign influence, the surviving members quickly descended into grisly factionalism and feuding: throughout the late 90s and early 00s, various configurations would regroup and play live under the names the Other Ones or Furthur, but the reunions were interspersed with periods of public squabbling. By most accounts Weir was not in the best of shape: his desire to tour was oddly compulsive – aside from the various Grateful Dead-related reunions, his band RatDog would play three six-week tours a year, plus festivals, benefit shows and weekend gigs. And there was something increasingly troubling about his relationship with alcohol, compounded by an injury to his back caused by decades playing notoriously lengthy gigs: he collapsed on stage during a Furthur gig in 2013.

But Weir pulled himself together. He cured his back issues with an exercise regime and a neck operation. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead regrouped one final time, for the acclaimed Fare Thee Well shows in 2015 – the band’s 50th anniversary. And Weir reinvented himself as the chief custodian of their legacy. Just before the Fare Thee Well shows, he parlayed his friendship with indie band the National into Day of the Dead, a vast tribute box set curated by the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner that revealed the sheer extent of the Grateful Dead’s influence over latter-day alt-rock: its contributors included the War on Drugs, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Flaming Lips, Perfume Genius, Courtney Barnett, Anohni, Kurt Vile, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Sharon Van Etten; Weir appeared twice, performing with both the National and Wilco.

A chance meeting with another younger Dead fan, singer-songwriter John Mayer, led to the formation of Dead & Company, also featuring the Grateful Dead’s twin drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, in 2015. They proved astoundingly successful – in 2021, Dead & Company were the fifth highest-grossing touring artist in America; their 2023 tour earned a staggering $115m; the following year they launched Dead Forever, a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas that became one of the most successful concert residencies in rock history. In between, Weir fronted Wolf Bros, who reinvented the Grateful Dead and Weir’s solo oeuvres in both stripped-back and more grandiose styles: in 2022, Wolf Bros performed songs from 1972’s Ace with strings and brass accompaniment to critical acclaim; last June, they appeared at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.

Two months later, Weir gave his final live performance: it was the Grateful Dead’s 60th Anniversary, and Dead & Company played three shows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where the Grateful Dead had played umpteen times from the 60s onwards. It was cold, Weir looked a little frail and there was a certain finality to his choice of songs that concluded each night: Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Touch of Grey and Brokedown Palace, Garcia and Hunter’s exquisite, hymn-like meditation on mortality from 1970’s American Beauty. But Weir gamely wrote in the programme that 60 years of the Grateful Dead “seems like a damn good start”, and, ailing or not, he doubtless meant it.

A few years previously, he claimed that he’d had a vision of Dead & Company not as a band, but something eternal. He saw them playing live, long after his death, and the deaths of the Grateful Dead’s other surviving members: “John [Mayer] was almost fully grey … there were younger guys holding forth, playing with fire and aplomb.” Perhaps, he suggested, there would be a version of Dead & Company keeping the legacy alive in “200 or 300 years”, ensuring that – as he once sang – the music never stopped. “The Kid” had done good.