Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Dead at 78

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49. He wished Jerry had taken better care of himself. From a Rolling Stone interview last March:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bobby-weir-grateful-dead-company-interview-1235290296/
Archive: https://archive.ph/K3VLb

You joined the band in your teens. At this point you’ve seen so many of your brothers go. What has that been like for you?
Every day, things change. I’ll say this: I look forward to dying. I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well-lived. That’s it. I’ve still got a lot on my plate, and I won’t be ready to go for a while. I wish … well, Phil made it to his eighties. Jerry didn’t, and there was a lot that Jerry had to offer that he didn’t get to offer.

Fifty-three is very young.
Yeah. There’s a cautionary tale in that. He burned brightly while he was alive. But …

We did an interview with Trey Anastasio recently, and he spoke about Jerry: “I wish everybody had just stopped, and left him alone, and let him get his shit together.”
It would’ve been nice. Jerry made attempts. He went vegetarian for a while, or he made a stab at it. He was into living healthy. We used to vacation together, and he got me into scuba diving. He made attempts. Really, I think it was the fact that he was too goddamn famous. And too many people had too many notions about who he was. All erroneous, none of them really hit home.

It’s easy to say we wish Jerry had been able to take a break, but realistically, there were so many people who were depending on him to keep the circus going.
Well, he had to play. He had to connect with people. He found an equilibrium of being on the road a certain amount of time and being home a certain amount of time. And that worked for him, pretty much. What didn’t work for him was the diet. He couldn’t go out, and it wasn’t easy to eat healthy in hotels back then. It was the diet and lack of exercise, really. The only exercise he ever got was onstage, and he got that pretty much nightly when we were on tour. And that kept him alive for 53 years, in spite of a horrendous diet. You can’t eat like he ate and live for all that long. It’s not going to happen for you.