Bill Kreutzmann Honors Bob Weir: ‘I Just Hope He Was Able to Bring His Guitar With Him’

Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann has written a heartfelt tribute to his late bandmate, Bob Weir.

In a lengthy statement posted on social media, Kreutzmann wrote about meeting Weir back in the mid-Sixties, when Weir and Jerry Garcia were playing in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. “Together, we embarked on a journey without a destination,” he said. “We didn’t set out to change the world, or to become big stars, or to have our own counterculture — we didn’t know any of those things were actually possible and we wouldn’t have been very interested in them even if we did. Well, not too much, anyway. Just enough to dream.”

“During those first rehearsals, which were in the back of a music shop, Bob and I would smoke joints in the back alley, before, during, and after — we had to be careful because it was still taboo back then,” he added. “Also, Bob and I were the younger guys in the band, so we liked to do weird shit. By that I mean, we just liked to play pranks and be silly and not take ourselves too seriously.”

Kreutzmann continued through the years, describing his memories of the Dead’s Haight-Ashbury days and onward. “Bob and I used to enjoy throwing water balloons at each other so one day we started throwing them at the tourist buses,” he said. “That didn’t end well, but it’s making me smile all these years later thinking about it, because it was a time when every day felt like a great American adventure.”