Grateful Dead co-founder and cultural icon Bob Weir recently passed, and we wanted to just take a moment to add our voice to the chorus of celebration and respect honoring his life and legacy.
RAN’s story with the Grateful Dead goes back to our very roots. Over the years, Bob Weir has been an honorary board member and a steadfast supporter of our work — and what a long, strange trip it’s been.
We couldn’t be more thankful for all that Bob and the Dead have done for RAN and rainforests around the globe. Like the Dead, RAN emerged from the environmentally conscious zeitgeist of the San Francisco Bay Area.
In 1988, when we were still a small, largely unknown organization, the Dead organized a now-legendary Rainforest Benefit concert at Madison Square Garden and invited RAN to participate.
The concert featured Suzanne Vega, Bruce Hornsby, Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones, Hall and Oates and others. The concert proceeds were donated to three environmental groups: Greenpeace, Cultural Survival and Rainforest Action Network.
For a budding, grassroots non-profit, the exposure (and of course, the funding!) was transformative and helped establish RAN as a nationally leading conservation organization with a high public profile equipped to take on some of the world’s most powerful and destructive corporations.
Nearly ten years later, on June 4, 1998 at San Francisco’s historic Warfield Theatre, The Other Ones made their highly anticipated debut performance — a benefit concert for RAN called The Concert for Old Growth Forests. This marked the first time Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Mickey Hart had reunited on stage as a band since Jerry Garcia’s death in August 1995.
Bob was also a main driver in the revival of the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, CA, serving as a founding investor and its “honorary godfather.” Like the community that formed around the Grateful Dead, Sweetwater became a space where people could come together in shared values of collective care, reverence for the planet, and an anti-establishment ethos, while celebrating creativity, activism, and music — which has made it a natural gathering place for many RAN events over the years
And Bob was a regular at RAN’s annual Revel fundraising benefits, often playing with a who’s-who lineup of luminary local musicians. For a rockstar like Bobby, used to selling out stadium shows, to show up and play for a few hundred people at an intimate RAN event is something that will be forever appreciated.
Since the 1980s, whenever one of the many iterations of the Dead was on a major tour, they have invited RAN to set up a booth near the entrance of the venue and engage passersby to take action on the core campaigns we were working on at the time. And they would donate a percentage of profits from the show directly to our work — no strings attached.
While we didn’t realize at the time that it would be Bob’s final set of shows, we were honored to have had a RAN presence for the epic stretch of Dead & Company shows in San Francisco at Golden Gate Park just this past August. The energy was electric, and Bobby’s voice loomed large over the 70,000+ people dancing together in the fog at Speedway Meadows.
We are forever grateful to Bob for the formative and decades-long love and dedication he showed to our mission to keep forests standing, defend Indigenous land rights, and keep fossil fuels in the ground.
Fare Thee Well, Bobby — With Love from Rainforest Action Network