(Credits: Far Out / Thekingdekalb)
Wed 1 October 2025 19:47, UK
Some bands hang their hat on the spectral brilliance of one member of the group. Every member of the Grateful Dead is a legend in their own right.
Of course, the most notable component was frontman and guitarist extraordinaire Jerry Garcia, an instrumental force in establishing their signature style, which fused psychedelia with Americana. Elsewhere, key cogs such as Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter are also icons, with the fact that the surviving Dead members have remained so prolific a testament to their individual brilliance.
However, arguably the most important of the set is Bob Weir. Currently a member of the spin-off act Dead & Company alongside mainstays Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, Weir was the perfect guitar-playing partner to Jerry Garcia and is a supremely gifted musician. Notably, he first met Jerry Garcia when he was 16 years old on New Year’s Eve in 1963, and the chance encounter would change their lives and the world for the better.
Famous for his playing and his iconic short shorts, Bob Weir has remained a staple of the rock genre since he first broke through with the Dead all those years ago, and due to his artistic achievements, he has regularly been asked about his favourite musicians of all time. One man he and the rest of the band are open disciples of is the late jazz pioneer Miles Davis, a man who made a mark not only on his own field but on all of popular music, with his classic albums ranging from 1959’s Kind of Blue to 1969’s jazz-rock progenitor, Bitches Brew.
Famously, the Dead and Miles Davis would even cross paths. This materialised when promoter Bill Graham made the inspired decision to pair the two acts for a run. The trumpeter joined the countercultural heroes for a string of shows in April 1972 at the Fillmore West, delivering some of the most memorable moments in this chapter of the Dead’s history. Of Davis’ brilliance during this stint, Phil Lesh later wrote in his autobiography that he found himself “leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage.”
Miles Davis impacted the Grateful Dead so much that when appearing on Amoeba’s What’s in My Bag? in 2017, Bob Weir picked Kind of Blue as one of the records to take home with him. Noting the album and Miles Davis’ greatness, he effused so greatly about them that he said the trumpeter “changed the entire idiom” of music.
He asserted: “First thing’s first, bring this out. Alright, this is Miles Davis’ classic record. Everybody’s heard these tunes a million times and people keep playing them, what is it, 60 years later. He so changed the entire idiom and the way music was conceived and what people expected of music y’know, he just changed it, he changed everything.”
Whereas other musicians struggle along for years without recognition, the groundbreaking nature of Davis’ sound was clearly evident from the offset. Severing himself from the safety of Charlie Parker’s quintet and crafting ‘The Birth of Cool’, in the process, the trumpeter set the standard for virtually all forms of modern jazz which followed, much to the chagrin of the big band era and its various stalwarts.
With every release and every movement, Davis didn’t just change the phrasing of popular culture, but he completely rewrote the entire musical lexicon. Without him, there’s a good chance the entire landscape as we know it would be dramatically changed.
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