Singer, guitarist, and songwriter Bob Weir died last weekend. He was the youngest member of the Grateful Dead, and he became the group’s energetic– if occasionally slow tempo’d– standard-bearer in the group’s legacy-cementing second chapter. Appearing on bandmate Oteil Burbridge’s podcast a few years ago, he described death as “the last and best reward for a life well-lived.” Weir certainly appeared to have wrung a lot of life out of his seventy-eight years, a large proportion of which he spent on stage and on the road. As those years wore on, he opened himself more and more to the audience, exposing his sparse-yet-nuanced guitar playing and the depth and breadth of his connection to the music. We should have known those things had been there all along, but being “the normal-looking guy” in the Grateful Dead apparently was enough to distract us from the fact that he was responsible for creating some of the band’s densest, most-complex songs: “The Other One,” “Weather Report Suite,” and “Estimated Prophet.” His final solo offering, 2016’s Blue Mountain, also is a dark horse gem of an album of cowboy songs recorded inside an ancient wormhole that opened up along a Teton mountainside, the last place Weir was spotted before he encountered Jerry Garcia and began the shoulder-grinding work of altering the axis of American music.