Bob Weir & Ratdog Biography

Bob Weir was born in 1947 in California. Difficulties in school as a child led to his pursuit of music as an outlet, and he studied guitar, trumpet, and piano as a teenager. When Bob Weir was sixteen years old, he encountered Jerry Garcia one evening and, after a night of playing music together, the two decided to form what would become the Grateful Dead.

After Jerry Garcia’s passing and the Grateful Dead’s dissolution in the mid 1990’s, Bob Weir turned his attention to the formation of a new band. He’d already teamed up with Rob Wasserman in the 1980’s, performing together under a variety of names, and so the two added Jay Lane and Matthew Kelly to the lineup and in 1995, they performed for the first time as RatDog Revue. The band eventually became RatDog.  

Bob Weir & RatDog perform mostly covers and Grateful Dead classics. They released Evening Moods in 2000 and followed up with Live at Roseland in 2001. Over the years the lineup has changed, but currently RatDog consists of Bob Weir, Jay Lane, Jeff Chimenti, Robin Sylvester, and Steve Kimock. The group is currently on hiatus while Weir performs with Dead & Company, but in 2016, Bob Weir release his own solo album of “cowboy songs,” titled Blue Mountain.