Bob Weir spent the first thirty years of his long, strange trip happily playing a supporting role in the Grateful Dead, offsetting and complementing the whims and idiosyncrasies of Jerry Garcia. His boyish good looks and enthusiasm, attributes he managed to preserve long into middle age, helped foster the notion that he was something of a junior partner in the Dead. That idea was strengthened by how so many of Weir’s Dead songs brought earthy pleasures to the Dead, not spiritual transcendence.

Blame that somewhat on John Perry Barlow, the childhood friend who became Weir’s lyricist after Robert Hunter washed his hands of the guitarist around 1971. Barlow didn’t aim for the poetry of Hunter, although he could muster a true sense of grace, as he did on “Cassidy,” a roundabout tribute to the Beat legend Neal Cassady, who once was a roommate of Weir’s.

That Weir is the thread that ties together Cassady and John Mayer speaks to his reach and elusiveness, how he could slide between the counterculture and mainstream. David Browne’s definitive Dead biography So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead argues Weir was the one member of the band who felt comfortable talking with record company suits, an assertion borne out by his own music. He played ball with Clive Davis at Arista, agreeing to bring Keith Olsen—a producer fresh from Fleetwood Mac’s first album with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—aboard to produce not only the band’s Arista debut Terrapin Station but Heaven Help The Fool, the 1978 solo set from Weir that reimagined him as an L.A. studio rat.

Heaven Help The Fool wasn’t a momentary lapse in judgement. Weir often succumbed to the temptations of bad taste, claiming the tackiest elements of a given era as his own. Witness Where the Beat Meets the Street, the misbegotten second album from his good-time rock’n’roll band Bobby & the Midnites whose slick synth presets tie it to the precise moment it was released in the summer of 1984. It’s the aural equivalent of the cutoff shorts he’d wear onstage with the Dead: he embraced the bad taste with such gusto, it couldn’t help but be endearing.

Weir changed with the fashions as Garcia stood static at the center of the band, allowing the Dead to dabble in disco simply because he didn’t care to push back. With Jerry abdicating the throne of leadership, Weir didn’t step into the void so much as dance around it, keeping the show moving with cowboy songs and oldies. His energy and open heart provided a necessary counterweight to the wry wisdom of Garcia and deep space explorations of Phil Lesh, even if it forever consigned him to the status of the little brother in the Dead organization.

Somewhere in the years after Garcia’s death, Weir cultivated an air of dignity. There’s a world of difference between the refined dignity of Blue Mountain, the Josh Ritter-assisted 2016 album that turned out to be Bobby’s last, and the loose-limbed mess of Kingfish, the first of a series of extracurricular projects that kept him busy during downtimes with the Dead. Wisdom didn’t come quickly. The guitarist made some halting moves toward maturity in the 1990s, finding a fruitful partnership with bassist Rob Wasserman, but the Weir that emerged in the middle of the 2010s carried weight: his grey hair sculpted into mutton chops, he seemed to be one of the wizened old characters that populated Workingman’s Dead.

This incarnation appeared around the time the Grateful Dead experienced one of its periodic revivals, this one fueled by their Fare Thee Well 50th Anniversary concerts and by indie-rockers championing the band, a trend that culminated in the 2016 tribute album Day of the Dead directed by the National. All this allowed Dead & Company, the last incarnation of the post-Jerry Grateful Dead to rove the land, to play on bigger stages than, say, the Other Ones. Watching Weir play in Dead & Company made it clear he’d somehow had finally slipped into the spot vacated by Garcia, occupying the center of gravity within the band. There was a palpable poignance to this final act, possibly because it happened so gradually, so naturally. Weir needed to go through the years of boundless exuberance to achieve a place of serenity, striking a note of grace that helped pull his entire career into perspective.

A decade has now passed since the release of Blackstar, which means that David Bowie is ten years gone. The two events are intertwined due to fate: Bowie died two days after the album’s unveiling, a departure that forever framed it as a farewell.

In the days immediately following Bowie’s death his longtime producer Tony Visconti helped fuel this narrative, telling Rolling Stone that he told Bowie ‘You canny bastard. You’re writing a farewell album.” The singer only laughed at his friend, a response that lends credence to the notion that the album was intended as a parting note. That’s not quite true. Bowie had designs on a sequel to Blackstar and was working on The Spectator, a musical set in 18th Century London. Deep in the throes of cancer, he remained busy creating art.

Certainly, Blackstar is littered with apparent allusions to mortality, culminating with “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” where Bowie arrives at an acceptance of his own transience. It’s one of the sweeter moments on a record that pointedly doesn’t lack humor: with its tart melody, ominous march and refrain of “where the fuck did Monday go?,” “Girl Loves Me” lightens the mood. Then again, even the setpieces of “Blackstar” and “Lazarus” don’t play as descents into darkness to my ears. The skittering tempos, minor-key churn, eerie harmonies and fleeting dissonance don’t convey impending gloom, they crackle with adventure.

Whenever I play Blackstar, which I do every so often, I reconnect to my initial reaction, my excitement at hearing something unexpected. The album is so dense, it often will kick up a surprise, whether it’s an instrumental phrase floating out of the mix or a nuance in Bowie’s vocal delivery. The way the music heightens or lightens the lyrics makes Blackstar seem alive: it’s not a morbid meditation, it’s playful as it is profound.

Those are qualities that wouldn’t have diminished even if Bowie managed to record another album in its wake. The 2017 release of the No Plan EP buttresses this argument. Its three Blackstar-era outtakes, all versions of songs featured in the Lazarus musical, are strong songs that benefit greatly from his imaginative, dextrous band, yet they don’t feel as contemplative or as deep as the finished album. Similarly, the original versions of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” and “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” both released in conjunction with the 2014 compilation Nothing Has Changed, feel formative in these initial drafts, lacking the nocturnal grace and insistence that made them crucial parts of Blackstar.

When I first heard Blackstar in advance of its release, I registered some mild internal disappointment that the nine-song album recycled two songs from 2014. The distance of a decade has erased these distinctions as a footnote, not too dissimilar from the fact that Bowie felt compelled to trim its title track to fit the dictates of the iTunes download store. Back then, if a song spilled over ten minutes, users couldn’t purchase it as an individual track, so he chopped a section out of the recording so it clocked in at a tidy 9:58. So far, the original unedited version of “Blackstar” has yet to emerge—it did not appear on last year’s weighty I Can’t Give Everything Away (2002-2016), the last installment in Parlophone’s extensive chronological Bowie box sets—and while it’d be interesting to hear, it’s not needed. The version that ushers in Blackstar feels finished, the overture to an album that retains a sense of wonder and urgency even as it fades into history.

Further reading:

Bowie expert Chris O’Leary has a piece commemorating the 10th anniversary of Blackstar.

Alfred Soto explores the state Bowie’s legacy in 2026.

Chris DeVille on the album’s 10th anniversary. His anecdote of waking up to the news of Bowie’s death mirrors my confusion that morning.