San Francisco Will Remember Bob Weir With Special ‘Homecoming’ Event

The late Grateful Dead legend Bob Weir will be remembered in his hometown, San Francisco, this weekend with a special commemoration of his life and career.

“Homecoming: Celebrating the life of Bobby Weir,” a free public gathering, will move through SF this Saturday, Jan. 17 at Civic Center Plaza, starting at 3:45pm ET.

“Homecoming” will remember Weir, whose “music, spirit and humanity shaped generation,” reads a statement from organizers. “Together, we will pay tribute in the community and collective heartbeat that he created.”

Reps say this weekend’s salute is not a concert and there will be no live performances, but will instead center on “gratitude, remembrance, and togetherness,” along with special tributes to honor the late artist. 

A procession will travel three blocks down Market Street between 7th and 9th Streets at approximately 3:30pm ET.

Weir, the guitarist and jam-band pioneer who co-founded the Grateful Dead and continued their legacy in the 21st century with Furthur, Dead & Company and more, died last week due to underlying lung issues after fighting cancer. He was 78. And he was one of San Francisco’s most treasured sons.

In a career spanning six decades, Weir was key to developing the Grateful Dead from garden-variety psychedelic rockers as the Warlocks to godfathers of the jam band genre. Weir’s loping, syncopated guitar style, modeled after “McCoy Tyner’s left hand,” may not have made much sense in a traditional rock band, but to the Dead, it was a crucial puzzle piece.

The band survived through health scares, drug issues and changing moods in music, and remained together and vital until Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, performing over 2,300 concerts and selling over 35 million albums. After they disbanded, Weir stayed busy with band offshoots and new projects, and In 2017, he was appointed a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for his efforts to fight climate change while serving on the board of the company Tribal Planet. “I’d also like to see people reflexively consider the good of the planet in the choices they regularly make,” he told Billboard in 2017.