On Wednesday night, Bob Weir played a solo acoustic set as part of special benefit benefit event for Northern Light School hosted by his own Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, CA, and the Grateful Dead guitarist honored Robert Hunter—the late poet who penned the lyrics to some of the Dead’s most enduring tunes—by filling his performance with tunes from Hunter’s impressive catalog. The lyricist passed away at the age of 78 on Monday.
Weir kicked off his set with “Corrina” and the spacey Dead classic “Dark Star” before moving through “Jack Straw” and “Loser.” The guitarist then offered a couple of his favorites, starting with Hunter’s “Loose Lucy” followed by the one non-Hunter cut of the night, the traditional “Peggy-O.”
“I thought it’d be appropriate to do all songs by Robert Hunter tonight, with one exception,” Weir said before the tune. “You see Bob Hunter was a huge fan of Scottish folk ballads and had he been around, oh, 500 years ago he’d have written this one too.”
Weir’s set also featured “Bird Song” and “Truckin’,” plus set-closer “Friend of the Devil.” He then wrapped up his performance with two classic heartfelt encore tunes, “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace.”
Earlier this week, Weir posted a photo of Hunter and Jerry Garcia on social media, captioning the shot, “If I’m gonna count my blessings, Robert Hunter and his imagination are gonna be up at the top of that list. I think I can speak for a lot of people In saying that. And then there’s the added blessing that he left us with plenty to go forward with…”
12 Comments comments associated with this post
ED KALEY
September 28, 2019 at 2:18 pmI’m sure that as soon as Bob Hunter gets off the Starship Jerry will be waiting for him.
R.I.P Robert Hunter
Kurt Haug
September 28, 2019 at 3:57 pmAnd don’t forget JPB (John Perry Barlow). Wildly different men touched by a similar muse with much in common as the wordsmiths on the bus.
Thx for the love Bobby: https://jambands.com/news/2019/09/26/bob-weir-remembers-robert-hunter-with-dedicated-solo-setlist-at-sweetwater-music-hall/ – INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION
September 28, 2019 at 10:42 am[…] Thx for the love Bobby: https://jambands.com/news/2019/09/26/bob-weir-remembers-robert-hunter-with-dedicated-solo-setlist-at… […]
Bob Weir Remembers Robert Hunter With Dedicated Solo Setlist at Sweetwater Music Hall – BTC News Paper
September 27, 2019 at 5:50 pm[…] fbq('track', 'PageView'); Source link […]
Jim
September 27, 2019 at 3:18 pmKevin Bazur According to a web search Hunter’s net worth is 12 million. Numerous other shave about the same number. remember with his name as writer on so many tunes, he gets a piece every time one of his songs is sold or played on the radio or sold on a CD. Just his royalties from the recently released Giant Stadium box set will bring his family a nice chunk of change. He still gets a piece of cash any time a Grateful Dead CD is released with a song he wrote. He also wrote songs that Dylan, Jim Lauderdale, Elvis Costello, Cesar Rosas, and Bruce Hornsby, among others including the New Riders recorded so he gets a piece of their sales and when they are played. He is well covered by copywriting laws.
Thx for the love Bobby: https://jambands.com/news/2019/09/26/bob-weir-remembers-robert-hunter-with-dedicated-solo-setlist-at-sweetwater-music-hall/
September 27, 2019 at 2:26 pm[…] Thx for the love Bobby: https://jambands.com/news/2019/09/26/bob-weir-remembers-robert-hunter-with-dedicated-solo-setlist-at… […]
Apryl
September 27, 2019 at 2:25 pmThis was an amazing evening, on so many levels. I had the good fortune to be there, right up front…it was a night I’ll never forget. And though the set list says one thing, as is his prerogative, Bobby opted for sugar magnolia instead of bird song and ripple instead of brokedown.
Woodstock950
September 27, 2019 at 1:45 pmNot everything the Dead family does is publicized, Did you know Phil and Jill donated 1,000 meals to the victims of and first responders to the Northern California wine country fires two years ago? That was never publicized.
kevin Bazur
September 27, 2019 at 1:32 pmNot to be cynical but it seems to me the Grateful Dead people could have helped a bit more with Mr. Hunters medical bills? Maybe a benefit show or two may have helped him in his last few years. I read where he had to tour to pay his mounting medical bills. KB
Greg
September 26, 2019 at 8:45 pmPretty cool of Bob to do that. He did spell friend as freind but it’s all good. Maybe that is somewhere between friend and feind or just mild dyslexia. Playing guitar is more important than spelling,
anonymous
September 27, 2019 at 12:58 amyes, very cool of bob to do show in honor of RH.
bob is dsylexic. Published in 1988.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-weir-friend-of-the-devil-233694/
(snip)
Bob Weir is fifty. He used to look like a girl; now he looks a rancher. As a young man, he was hollow cheeked and wiry, but he has thickened slightly, his hair is shorter, and his slotlike mouth has turned down at the corners, so that if he’s tired or distracted, he looks grumpy. When he is engaged by the turn of a conversation, he listens with exceptional attentiveness. This heedfulness is perhaps the result of being dyslexic. His dyslexia is so severe, he says, that sometimes when he looks at trees on a hillside, they shift from one place to another. Throughout his childhood the condition went undiagnosed; he realized he had it about ifteen years ago, when he heard someone describing its symptoms. As a boy he assumed that everyone found reading as difficult as he did. What his classmates learned from books, he derived from what he heard. He listened carefully to his teachers so that he could repeat what they’d said with sufficient elaboration to sound thoughtful. When a phrase struck him as notable, he retained it, especially if it was ornate
creativemuffin
September 27, 2019 at 4:32 amBobby is dyslexic. That’s why he had such a hard time in school as a kid.