Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist Bob Weir dies aged 78

US musician Bob Weir performs onstage during the Farm Aid Music Festival at the Ruoff Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana on September 24, 2023. Photo / Suzanne Cordeiro, AFP

American guitarist and songwriter Bob Weir, a founding member of the revolutionary, psychedelic jam band Grateful Dead, has died aged 78, his family announced on Sunday.

Weir was diagnosed with cancer in July and had beaten the disease, but “succumbed to underlying lung issues”, his family said in a statement on his personal website, without specifying where or when he died.

“For over 60 years, Bobby took to the road,” the statement said. “Bobby will forever be a guiding force whose unique artistry reshaped American music.”

“His work did more than fill rooms with music; it was warm sunlight that filled the soul, building a community, a language, and a feeling of family that generations of fans carry with them.”

Founded in San Francisco by Weir, Jerry Garcia, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann, the Grateful Dead was one of the leading music groups to emerge from the 1960s counterculture movement.

Known for never performing the same show twice, the group revolutionised fan engagement, as followers - known as “Deadheads” - recorded and swapped bootleg tapes of the concerts in a communal, drug-addled camp environment.

The rockers disbanded in 1995, a few months after Garcia’s death, but Weir went on to perform in recent years with the group Dead & Company.

Following Weir’s death, 79-year-old Kreutzmann became the last living member of the Grateful Dead founders.

Lesh died in October 2024 at the age of 84, while McKernan died aged 27 in 1973.

Weir was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Hame in 1994 as part of the Grateful Dead, and received Kennedy Center Honours with the group in 2024, in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency.

“As we remember Bobby, it’s hard not to feel the echo of the way he lived,” the family said.

“A man driftin’ and dreamin’, never worrying if the road would lead him home. A child of countless trees. A child of boundless seas,” the family said, quoting the songs Cassidy and Lost Sailor, written by Weir and the late John Perry Barlow.

- Agence France-Presse