How Bob Weir Went From Kid Brother To The Boss

Bob Weir got fired from the Grateful Dead at twenty. But he was already running the show. Ace, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, RatDog: a 27-year campaign.

In 1968, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh told Bob Weir he didn’t count. Rock Scully put it plain: the weight was on four cats, not six. Weir was twenty years old, standing in a construction ditch on his birthday with rainwater up to his ankles. What he did next �� and what the Grateful Dead spent the next three decades refusing to acknowledge �� is one of the stranger power struggles in rock history.

This isn’t a musician biography. It’s a story about creative control, band politics, and what happens when one member of a democracy keeps getting told no. From the Tom Sawyer routine that

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