Grateful Dead Guitarist Bob Weir’s ‘Long Strange Trip’ Exposed In Netflix Rock Doc

In honor of the release of Day Of The Dead, the Red Hot Organization’s 59-track tribute to the Grateful Dead benefitting global AIDS and HIV charities, Decider is looking back at The Other One, the 2015 Netflix documentary about Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir.

It may have taken the bulk of their after-life, but following years of being maligned and misunderstood it’s now a commonly accepted fact that The Grateful Dead are one of rock’s more important bands. Godhead to their fans, anathema to their detractors, love ‘em or hate ‘em, their contributions to rock music and culture can simply no longer be denied, whether its the idea of a band as a lifestyle brand or the downhome delivery of their actually high-minded improvisatory rock. They followed a DIY path to success before that became the modus operandi for indie rock bands, played alt country before the genre existed, and basically single handedly defined the jam band experience, both its music and its socio-economic environment. And just as the band has been reevaluated and rediscovered, so too have the contributions of its founding rhythm guitarist, who is the subject of the Netflix Original documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir.

Often overshadowed by the larger than life figure of hirsute lead guitarist and head Dead dude Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir was the band’s resident pretty boy and helped lay the dense rhythmic bed for Garcia’s solo flights of fancy with spidery chordal webs that drew on jazz pianists like McCoy Tyner for inspiration. In a band of multiple singers and songwriters, Weir would often handle the more straight ahead rock n’ roll numbers, with a forceful delivery that underscored his reputation as a ladies man. Among his contributions to The Grateful Dead songbook are such classics as “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band” and “One More Saturday Night,” the latter two also appearing on Weir’s 1972 solo album Ace.

They just don’t make rock bands like they used to, and by that I mean rock bands that are a hardscrabble gang of individuals who form a surrogate family around a shared love of music and good times. Sorry, but file sharing GarageBand MP3s ain’t the same thing, nor does it breed the same sense of camaraderie. I bring this up because the bonds of family, both adopted and biological, is one of the recurring themes of The Other One. Adopted as an infant, Bob Weir grew up in the affluent San Francisco suburbs in a seemingly normal, loving family, though a history of trouble at school hinted at a deeper alienation. He eventually fell in with Garcia, of whom Weir says early in the film, “Jerry was my older brother, basically.” It was a good time to start a band, and the gestating Grateful Dead found good company in the Bay Area’s post-Beat-proto-hippie counterculture as the house band the Acid munching Merry Pranksters, led by writer Ken Kesey and including Jack Kerouac-muse Neal Cassady in their ranks. The band would eventually live together in a communal house in Haight-Ashbury, the epicenter of 1967’s “Summer of Love,” which we later see him tour with his two teenage daughters. Weir had essentially ran off from one family and found another in The Dead, saying “They say blood is thicker than water, well, what we had was thicker than blood.”

Of course as we all know from one too many episodes of Behind The Music, rock bands aren’t meant to last. Actually, looking at the summer tour schedule, it might be more accurate to say, rock bands aren’t meant to last, they’re meant to break up and then reform to play lucrative reunion tours, but more about that later. The pressures of the Grateful Dead’s late inning mainstream success following 1987’s Top 10 hit “Touch of Grey,” and the ascent of the jam band circuit they helped create, frayed the ties that bound the group together. This was only exacerbated by the cyclical health problems of band figurehead Jerry Garcia, who battled obesity, diabetes and drug addiction. His death in 1995, the result of a heart attack, effectively ended “The Grateful Dead” forever more. One of the most affecting moments in the documentary is footage of Weir speaking at Garcia’s public memorial service in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, obviously emotional over the loss of his longtime bandmate and surrogate sibling.

To cope with the loss, Bob Weir threw himself into touring with a variety of line-ups, with and without his former bandmates. And then a funny thing happened; his surrogate family was replaced with his real one. The adopted Weir finally tracked down his birth parents after years of searching, resulting in a close relationship with his birth father Jack Parber, who died last year. Then in 1999 the eternal bachelor settled down with Natascha Münter, whom he first met backstage at a Dead show when she was 15, and had two children with her. And while not covered in the film, the past two years have seen ongoing reunions of the various Dead offshoots, including a one-off series of shows branded as The Grateful Dead, with Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio standing in for Garcia, and Dead & Company, who include fellow good-looking guitarist John Mayer and are touring this summer. (Additionally, the 3 disc, nearly 60 song Grateful Dead tribute album, Day Of The Dead, is in stores today.)

Like other Netflix Original music documentaries, such as Keith Richards: Under The Influence from last year, The Other One is light, breezy and enjoyable (one could say the same for much of the best Grateful Dead music). It doesn’t get weighted down with too much information that would only appeal to hardcore Deadheads, which is always the danger with music docs. Bob Weir’s life story is a fascinating one, and interestingly intersects with major cultural moments of the past 50 years. Unlike most bands, who simply form, play and either succeed or fail by the rules of the music industry, The Grateful Dead created an alternate musical and personal universe in which to thrive autonomously, which attracted others to truck along for the ride. There’s a lesson there for future generations, not just about how to create unique and inspired music, but also how to live life on your own terms.

[Watch The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir on Netflix]

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician who has played in every bad neighborhood in the United States. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.