Bob Weir - Solo Acoustic Live, Tower Theatre, Upper Darby, PA, 9-10-2012

Bob Weir, one of the two main singer-songwriters in the Grateful Dead, died about a month ago as I write this. (He died on January 10, 2026, at the age of 78.) I wanted to post some music in tribute to his musical legacy. So I posted a series of concerts for the closing of the Fillmore West venue in San Francisco that included a Grateful Dead concert. But I also wanted to post something that focused more on him. So I'm posting this, which is a solo acoustic concert he did in 2012.

In the Grateful Dead, Weir was always considered kind of second fiddle to Jerry Garcia. In fact, there's a documentary about his life showing on Netflix right now called "The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir" that expresses that second fiddle role right in the title. But had Weir led a band on his own, I think he would have been quite successful, because he was a very talented singer and songwriter. His solo career began as far back as 1972 when he released his first solo album, "Ace." (It's a great album, by the way, as good as the Grateful Dead albums at the time, and so is "Garcia," the 1972 Jerry Garcia solo album.) 

But his solo career didn't become his full time career until 1995, the year Garcia died and the Grateful Dead came to an end. He performed in a variety of bands, including Kingfish, the Other Ones, Furthur, RatDog, Bobby and the Midnites, and the Wolf Bros. It was pretty unusual for him to perform in solo acoustic mode, but that's what he did here. This was part of a short solo tour, while he also did an acoustic trio tour that year.

After the Dead broke up, Weir's songwriting slowed down quite a lot. (That's not so unusual for someone who has been in the music business three or more decades already.) As a result, I think only two of the songs here are songs he wrote after 1995: "Ashes and Glass" and "Big Bad Blues." Most of the rest are original songs once performed with the Grateful Dead or covers.

As for the sound quality, I read that, during this tour, each concert was recorded and then one could buy a CD of it immediately after this concert was over. If so, that would explain the soundboard sound quality. However, I don't know if that's true, because this one gets around in bootleg trading circles some, but I haven't seen the other ones from the tour shared in the same way.

This album is two hours and nine minutes long. 

01 talk (Bob Weir)
02 The Music Never Stopped (Bob Weir)
03 Shakey Ground (Bob Weir)
04 The Music Never Stopped [Reprise] (Bob Weir)
05 New, New Minglewood Blues (Bob Weir)
06 talk (Bob Weir)
07 My Brother Esau (Bob Weir)
08 Loose Lucy (Bob Weir)
09 When I Paint My Masterpiece (Bob Weir)
10 talk (Bob Weir)
11 Artificial Flowers (Bob Weir)
12 Weather Report Suite (Bob Weir)
13 talk (Bob Weir)
14 Ashes and Glass (Bob Weir)
15 Big Bad Blues (Bob Weir)
16 Easy to Slip (Bob Weir)
17 Peggy-O (Bob Weir)
18 talk (Bob Weir)
19 Hell in a Bucket (Bob Weir)
20 Dear Prudence (Bob Weir)
21 Sugar Magnolia (Bob Weir)
22 talk (Bob Weir)
23 Brokedown Palace (Bob Weir)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UiNPi3Qq

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/U3CBuMTDkWOf2W3/file

The cover is taken from a poster for this exact concert. The poster was rectangular, as posters usually are, so I had to make some edits to make it fit a square space. The main thing I did was I chopped out a section in the middle that included a lot of flowers under the skull.