The Long Turn

Time present and time past

Are both, perhaps, present in time future,

And time future contained, in time past.

—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Bob Weir, Bobby Weir as of late, died this past weekend from complications related to lung cancer: either the cancer itself, or the pounding one often takes in surviving it. The lightning eventually gets you, even if the thunder sometimes misses—is one of those lines that stays with you and eventually comes back around.

I don’t remember the first time I heard that line from The Wheel, but I remember the first time I heard the Grateful Dead. It was my freshman year in college, and my roommate—a musician-- was someone whose listening had already been stretched beyond what I knew to ask for—decided it was time to see how far mine could go.

Until then, my musical world had been comfortably occupied by AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and the lads from either the Sugarhill Gang or The Beach Boys, with no real room for Bobby Weir or any of his erstwhile influences: delta blues, sea shanties, or the high lonesome sound of Bill Monroe’s bluegrass.

He would play me songs from American Beauty, the Dead’s fifth studio album, released in 1970 and probably the closest thing the band ever had to an epochal moment. It would eventually go double platinum and now sits at number 258 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time—but none of that mattered to me then.

He played “Box of Rain,” “Friend of the Devil,” and “Candyman,” but it was “Sugar Magnolia”—the only Bobby song on the entire record—that stayed with me. Or maybe that’s not quite right: it didn’t stay so much as it announced itself, the way some things do when they’re going to matter later.

Photographed by Adrian Boot, taken during the Grateful Dead’s 1978 concert at the Pyramids. 

After that, listening became something more deliberate. I started asking questions—about songs, about voices, about why some of them lingered while others passed through. The Grateful Dead had a way of revealing themselves slowly, and I was beginning to understand that attention mattered.

When it did pay off, it did so in ways I hadn’t experienced in music before. A phrase would surface, a harmony would resolve itself, a song would suddenly open from the inside. There was no guarantee it would happen, and no way to make it happen on command. But when it did, it left a mark. I didn’t think of it as a hook at the time, but something had caught. I was listening differently now, whether I meant to be or not.

The Wheel was already there by then, quietly established in the repertoire, a song that didn’t announce itself or demand belief—perhaps because it lacked the kind of Garcia lead that so often commanded the room. Born out of the band’s return in the mid-’70s, it carried the patience of something that had survived its own absence. I didn’t find it right away. But in time—listening more carefully, more willingly—I began to understand what it was offering: not arrival, but endurance; not escape but return.

It took me a while to understand Bobby Weir—not because he was hard to hear, but because he wasn’t trying to be the loudest thing in the room. In a band defined, in so many ways, by Jerry Garcia’s gravity, Bobby occupied a different kind of space. He played inside the songs, not over them, threading rhythm and harmony together, holding the structure in place while everything and everyone else stretched and wandered and walked about.

Over time, Bobby’s voice changed and then kept changing. It roughened, narrowed, and settled into itself. He didn’t chase the range he once had or pretend the years weren’t accumulating; he sang from inside them. There was something reassuring in that, something honest. As the band aged—and as I did—Bobby’s voice became less about youth or transcendence and more about weathering, about showing up and letting the songs absorb the years.

He was always there. Through lineup changes, hiatuses, revivals, reinventions—Bobby remained, steady and working, keeping time even when time itself felt unsteady. Long after things in my own life had proven themselves temporary, Bobby’s presence suggested another model entirely: not permanence, exactly, but continuity.

So, when Bobby Weir died this past weekend, it didn’t arrive as a rupture per se. It felt quieter than that. The songs were still there. The voice was still there. The same sounds that had once opened a door, and later offered steadiness, felt unchanged.

What had changed was harder to see at first: the wheel had made another turn.  Nothing new would be added now, but nothing had been taken away.

Nothing had been taken away.

The lightning gets you eventually. It gets us all. But Bobby Weir spent a lifetime teaching us how to live with the thunder—how to stay inside the noise, the weather, the long turn of things, and keep playing anyway. That was the gift. Not transcendence, not escape, but endurance.

The wheel keeps turning.