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Bob Weir, a founding member of countercultural icons the Grateful Dead, known for his singular guitar playing, emotive singing and vibrant songwriting, has died at 78.

“It is with profound sadness that we share the passing of Bobby Weir,” a spokesperson for the musician confirmed to The Times. “He transitioned peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, after courageously beating cancer as only Bobby could. Unfortunately, he succumbed to underlying lung issues.”

Weir was diagnosed with cancer in July.

Weir-penned songs include Grateful Dead fan favorites “Sugar Magnolia,” “Jack Straw,” “Playing in the Band” and “Weather Report Suite.” His vocal performance on the rock-radio staple “Truckin’” counts among the band’s finest recorded moments.

The Dead released 13 studio albums with Weir, among them “Aoxomoxoa” (1969), “Workingman’s Dead” (1970), “American Beauty” (1970), “Wake of the Flood” (1973), “Terrapin Station” (1977) and 1987’s “In the Dark,” which featured the Top 10 single “Touch of Grey” and became the band’s highest-charting album, reaching No. 6 on the Billboard 200.

The Dead also released eight “official” live albums, as well as a long-running series of curated live shows known as Dick’s Picks and, later, Dave’s Picks. The band was the first to sanction fan taping at their concerts, spawning an abundance of homespun recordings that have been collected, traded and debated for decades.

Weir’s official role in the Grateful Dead was rhythm guitarist, alongside lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, but his complex style — marked by unique chord voicings, precise rhythms and a willingness to play through his bandmates instead of over them — elevated him from the standard rhythm player. “Bob’s approach to guitar playing is sort of like Bill Evans’ approach to piano was. He’s a total savant,” John Mayer told Guitar World magazine in 2017. “His take on guitar chords and comping is so original, it’s almost too original to be fully appreciated until you get deep down into what he’s doing. I think he’s invented his own vocabulary. … It’s a joyous thing to play along with.”

Weir’s first solo album, “Ace,” released in 1972, contained many songs that became standards in the Dead’s live show, including “Black-Throated Wind,” “Cassidy” and “Mexicali Blues.” “Blue Mountain,” Weir’s solo album from 2016, written in collaboration with musicians Josh Ritter and Josh Kaufman and inspired by Weir’s affinity for cowboy music and western iconography, became his highest-charting solo album, reaching No. 14 on the Billboard 200.

Weir also played in numerous side projects, post-Dead tribute acts and other rock bands, including Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, RatDog, Kingfish, Bobby and the Midnites, and the Weir, Robinson & Green Acoustic Trio with members of the Black Crowes. Dead & Company, featuring Weir, Dead bandmates Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Oteil Burbridge, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti and singer-guitarist Mayer, kickstarted a Deadaissance in 2015, reviving the band’s music and tie-dye-wearing, hacky-sack-kicking aesthetic for legions of new and existing fans. The band’s final tour before an indefinite hiatus, in 2023, drew nearly 1 million people.

Weir also was a dedicated collaborator, inviting friends to perform with him or guesting on their records or in concert. Willie Nelson, Joan Baez, the Allman Brothers, Sammy Hagar, Nancy Wilson, Stephen Marley, Billy Strings, Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, the National, Margo Price and nouveau jam act Goose counted among his many musical compatriots. “Music is like transcendental medication and Bob Weir is my spirit guide,” Price said on Instagram in 2022. Weir’s friendship with the itinerant folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott began in the early 1960s, and in the new millennium, Elliott and Weir frequently performed low-key shows together in Marin County, where both resided.

Robert Hall Weir was born Oct. 16, 1947, in San Francisco to John Parber and Phyllis Inskeep, a college student who later gave him up for adoption. He was raised by adoptive parents Frederic Utter Weir and Eleanor (née Cramer) Weir in Atherton, Calif. Weir struggled as a child due to undiagnosed dyslexia and was kicked out of every school he attended, including the private Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he met John Perry Barlow, who would later contribute lyrics to the Grateful Dead.

Weir met Garcia on New Year’s Eve, 1963, at a Palo Alto music store, and soon formed the jug band Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions with Garcia and future Dead bandmate Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. Weir was just 16 years old. “There was some tension at home because I was neglecting my studies, and I grew up under the shadow of Hoover Tower,” Weir explained in an interview with Dan Rather. “My folks had Stanford in mind for me, not an itinerant troubadour. But they could also clearly see that I was following my bliss.”

About a year later, at McKernan’s urging, the trio, along with bassist Dana Morgan Jr. and drummer Kreutzmann, formed the Warlocks, an electric rock band, and played a handful of gigs before bassist Phil Lesh replaced Morgan. The group quickly discovered that a band called the Warlocks already existed and renamed themselves the Grateful Dead, a term Garcia found in a dictionary. Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and second drummer Hart joined the group in 1967.

As a member of the Dead, Weir was a kind of shape-shifting clairvoyant, creating ever-evolving sounds and forms that became essential to the fabric of American music culture. With the Dead, Weir was part of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in the mid-’60s, centered around experiments with LSD, and the band’s members were known to use nitrous oxide, marijuana, speed and heroin. The late ’70s launched an evident association with cocaine, and a period known as Disco Dead.

The band’s predilection for live improvisation, in which they refashioned and extended their songs via intuitive jams and imaginative transitions, drew legions of adoring fans — called Deadheads — who followed the band from city to city, and were the bedrock of the jam band movement that followed in the 1980s. The Dead’s graphic symbols, including “dancing” bears, the “Stealie” lightning skull and instrument-wielding terrapins, were plastered across innumerable merchandise and became a calling card of hippie-influenced counterculture over the ensuing decades.

Throughout the Dead’s existence, Weir was sometimes viewed as “the Other One” due to Garcia’s outsize presence in the band. Weir was its youngest member, and its most handsome. (Beautiful Bobby and the ugly brothers, the band used to joke.) He wrote and sang fewer songs than Garcia. But for others, Weir’s deference to Garcia — how he constructed a singular form of rhythm guitar playing to suit Garcia’s natural style, and used his deeper voice as a rich vocal counterpoint — was indicative of his generosity and willingness to put ego aside. In the 2014 documentary “The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir,” he said that he takes no pride in what he’s accomplished because he views pride as a “suspect emotion.”

Unlike his bandmates in the Dead, Weir had a long-running interest in personal style, and frequently opted for tucked-in button-down shirts, western wear and polo shirts instead of tie-dye and ponchos. “I just wanted to be kind of elegant,” he told GQ in 2019. “People were paying good money to see us, and at that time I figured that meant we ought to dress up a bit.” His denim cutoffs, which crept up in length over the years, were known as Bobby Shorts. Weir would grow his gray hair and beard into a style resembling actor Sam Elliott in the 1979 western “The Sacketts,” and began a collaboration with fashion designer James Perse that landed somewhere between cowboy and surfer.

Weir was single for most of his time in the Dead, and didn’t marry until 1999. With wife Natascha Münter, he had two daughters, Shala Monet Weir and Chloe Kaelia Weir. He was vegetarian for much of his life, and was passionate about animal rights, environmental causes and funding for the arts.

In interviews, Weir spoke of Eastern religion and philosophy, and his dreams, which dictated many decisions he made in his life. He frequently said in interviews that his relationship with Garcia never died, even after the Grateful Dead leader passed away in 1995. In 2012, Weir told Rolling Stone that Garcia “lives and breathes in me.”

“I see him in my dreams all the time,” he told the Huffington Post in 2014. “I would say I can’t talk to him, but I can. I don’t miss him. He’s here. He’s with me.”

Times staff writer Carlos De Loera contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — After weeks of meandering through snowy fields of the North and Midwest, the campaign for the presidency now turns South, to a vast region that paradoxically mixes relatively low unemployment with high dissatisfaction.

In Blanco County, Tex., for example, the unemployment rate of 3.5%–down one-third over the last three years–compares favorably with the days when local favorite son Lyndon B. Johnson reigned in Washington in the ‘60s. But that fact does not console Ava Johnson Cox, the late President’s 87-year-old cousin.

“At one time, America contained the inspiration and the purifying principles of the world,” Miss Ava told a visiting reporter recently. “But no more.”

Clear across Dixie, in Atlanta, Jackie Rogers, owner of a downtown ladies’ boutique, struck a similar note.

“I’m very upset about this economy,” she said. “This is the first time America is not rewarding their well-educated people.

“They are the ones who went to school and studied so hard to make America No. 1,” she added. Now, “they are the ones on the unemployment lines.”

But while Southerners may agree with citizens of, for example, New Hampshire, about the problems the country faces, they have had much less exposure to politicians’ proposed solutions.

Unlike New Hampshirites, who lived for two months under a steady barrage of campaigning before they voted last week, citizens of the South have only just begun to hear from the candidates. When they vote–March 3 in Georgia and Maryland, March 7 in South Carolina and March 10 in Florida, Texas and several other Southern and border states–they will do so after an intense, but short, campaign.

As a result, for many potential Southern voters, the sense of discontent they share with the rest of the nation remains somewhat separated from the political process, and their feelings about candidates remain largely unformed.

“It’s strange to be so far into the process and not feel more committed to someone,” said Margaret Yoder, a 44-year-old real estate broker in Miami. “I’m feeling confused.”

Southern voters know President Bush, and many in the South still like him despite disapproval of his handling of the economy.

“I’m going to vote Republican,” said Henry Dryer Jr. of Carollton, Ga. “I think, personally, and most of the people in my circle feel, like Bush has done as good a job as any President in his circumstances could have done.

“The poor man can’t do it by himself,” Dryer said. On the other hand, he added: “People in this part of the country are just very disappointed that Bush hasn’t done something to pull us out of the recession.”

On the Democratic side, the name of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton registers with many, but primarily for the controversies surrounding him–unsubstantiated allegations of marital infidelity and questions about his Vietnam-era draft status.

And as for former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, some voters say they like what they have heard of him. Tsongas is “not a showman,” said James Smith, a retiree in Atlanta. But more typically, Southerners interviewed for this story said that despite his victory in New Hampshire, they simply remain unsure who Tsongas is.

“People still have trouble pronouncing his name,” said Beth Carper, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, who said she supports Tsongas but doubts he can win when her state votes March 10.

In Johnson City, Tex., the Blanco County seat in the hill country west of Austin, Ralph Moss, 48, said he has made only one decision about the election. He voted for Bush once and will not do it again. Beyond that, Moss said, he cannot decide what to do.

“There’s not a real good choice to make,” said Moss, who is the mayor, a nonpartisan position. “I may not vote in the primary.”

DeeDee McKennis, a cashier at Johnson City’s Dixie Fried Chicken and Quick Stop, would like to see the country make a change.

Even though she and her husband have had “the best year we’ve had in years” economically, she remains worried. McKennis, 46, and her husband both hold two jobs, she said, but they cannot afford to send any of their four children to college. Nor can they afford health insurance.

Still, McKennis has not found a candidate she feels confident would bring about the changes she would like to see.

Down the street, Duke Rumpf, 68, the manager of the Charles’ Motel, gave Clinton a tepid endorsement and, in the process, summed up what many Southern voters seem to feel.

Clinton, he said, had “got the state of Arkansas in pretty good shape.” But, he added: “I ain’t seen anybody I’m real enthused about. I know I ain’t enthused about the one (President) we got.”

Special correspondents Edith Stanley in Atlanta, Karen Brandon in Johnson City, Tex., Michael Clary in Miami and Patrick Thomas in Nashville contributed to this story.

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has cut federal limits on air and water pollution and promoted fossil fuels, a metamorphosis that clashes with the agency’s stated mission — to protect human health and the environment.

The administration says its actions will “unleash” the American economy, but environmentalists say the agency’s abrupt change in focus threatens to unravel years of progress on climate-friendly initiatives that could be hard or impossible to reverse.

“It just constantly wants to pat the fossil fuel business on the back and turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon era” when the agency didn’t exist, said historian Douglas Brinkley.

A lot has happened this year at “Trump’s EPA,” as Administrator Lee Zeldin frequently calls the agency. Zeldin proposed overturning the landmark finding that climate change is a threat to human health. He pledged to roll back dozens of environmental regulations in “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” He froze billions of dollars for clean energy and upended agency research.

Zeldin has argued the EPA can protect the environment and grow the economy at the same time. He announced “five pillars” to guide the EPA’s work; four were economic goals, including energy dominance — President Trump’s shorthand for more fossil fuels — and boosting the auto industry.

A former New York congressman who had a record as a moderate Republican on some environmental issues, Zeldin said his views on climate change have evolved. Many federal and state climate goals are unattainable in the near future — and come at a huge cost, he said.

“We should not be causing … extreme economic pain for an individual or a family” because of policies aimed at “saving the planet,” he told reporters at EPA headquarters in early December.

But scientists and experts say the EPA’s new direction comes at a cost to public health and would lead to far more pollutants in the environment, including mercury, lead and especially tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs. They also note higher emissions of greenhouse gases will worsen atmospheric warming that is driving more frequent, costly and deadly extreme weather.

Christine Todd Whitman, a longtime Republican who led the EPA under President George W. Bush, said watching Zeldin attack laws protecting air and water has been “just depressing.”

“It’s tragic for our country. I worry about my grandchildren, of which I have seven. I worry about what their future is going to be if they don’t have clean air, if they don’t have clean water to drink,” said Whitman, who joined a centrist third party in recent years.

The history behind EPA

The EPA was launched under Nixon in 1970 at a time when pollution was disrupting American life, some cities were suffocating in smog and industrial chemicals turned some rivers into wastelands. Congress passed laws then that remain foundational for protecting water, air and endangered species.

The agency’s aggressiveness has always seesawed depending on who occupies the White House. The Biden administration boosted renewable energy and electric vehicles, tightened restrictions on motor-vehicle emissions and proposed greenhouse gas limits on coal-fired power plants and oil and gas wells. Industry groups called rules overly burdensome and said the power plant rule would force many aging facilities to shut down. In response, many businesses shifted resources to meet the more stringent rules that are now being undone.

“While the Biden EPA repeatedly attempted to usurp the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law to impose its ‘Green New Scam,’ the Trump EPA is laser-focused on achieving results for the American people while operating within the limits of the laws passed by Congress,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said.

Zeldin’s list of targets is long

Zeldin has announced plans to abandon soot pollution rules, loosen rules around harmful refrigerants, limit wetland protections and weaken gas mileage rules. Meanwhile, he would exempt polluting industries and plants from federal emissions-reduction requirements.

Much of the EPA’s new direction aligns with Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation road map that argued the agency should gut staffing, cut regulations and end what it called a war on coal or other fossil fuels.

“A lot of the regulations that were put on during the Biden administration were more harmful and restrictive than in any other period. So that’s why deregulating them looks like EPA is making major changes,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.

But Chris Frey, an EPA official under Biden, said the regulations Zeldin has targeted “offered benefits of avoided premature deaths, of avoided chronic illness … bad things that would not happen because of these rules.”

Matthew Tejada, a former EPA official under both Trump and then-President Biden who now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the revamped EPA: “I think it would be hard for them to make it any clearer to polluters in this country that they can go on about their business and not worry about EPA getting in their way.”

Zeldin also has shrunk EPA staffing by about 20% to levels last seen in the mid-1980s.

Justin Chen, president of the EPA’s largest union, called the staff cuts “devastating.” He cited the dismantling of research and development offices at labs across the country and the firing of employees who signed a letter of dissent opposing EPA cuts.

Relaxed enforcement and cutting staff

Many of Zeldin’s changes aren’t in effect yet. It takes time to propose new rules, get public input and finalize rollbacks.

It’s much faster to cut grants and ease up on enforcement, and Trump’s EPA is doing both. The number of new civil environmental actions is roughly one-fifth what it was in the first eight months of the Biden administration, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.

“You can effectively do a lot of deregulation if you just don’t do enforcement,” said Leif Fredrickson, visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Montana.

Hirsch said the number of legal filings isn’t the best way to judge enforcement because they require work outside the EPA and can bog staff down with burdensome legal agreements. She said the EPA is “focused on efficiently resolving violations and achieving compliance as quickly as possible” and not making demands beyond what the law requires.

EPA’s cuts have been especially hard on climate change programs and environmental justice, the effort to address chronic pollution that typically is worse in minority and poor communities. Both were Biden administration priorities. Zeldin dismissed staff and canceled billions in grants for projects that fell under the “diversity, equity and inclusion” umbrella, a Trump administration target.

Zeldin also spiked a $20-billion “green bank” set up under Biden’s landmark climate law to fund qualifying clean energy projects. The EPA chief argued the fund was a scheme to funnel money to Democratic-aligned organizations with little oversight — allegations a federal judge rejected.

Pat Parenteau, an environmental law expert and former director of the Environmental Law School at Vermont Law & Graduate School, said the EPA’s shift under Trump left him with little optimism for what he called “the two most awful crises in the 21st century”: biodiversity loss and climate disruption.

“I don’t see any hope for either one,” he said. “I really don’t. And I’ll be long gone, but I think the world is in just for absolute catastrophe.”

Phillis, John and Daly write for the Associated Press.

Dec. 26 (Asia Today) — A South Korean public opinion survey released Friday found majority support for a concept described as a “peaceful two-state” approach aimed at long-term unification, with respondents saying tensions should be eased first to pursue peaceful coexistence.

The Democratic Peaceful Unification Advisory Council said its fourth-quarter national unification opinion survey found 55.5% agreed with the view that hostility between South and North Korea should be resolved first to achieve peaceful coexistence and pursue long-term unification. About 40.5% disagreed.

The survey also found 56.8% approved of the Lee Jae-myung administration’s North Korea policy direction, including goals described as a Korean Peninsula “free from war worries,” “a new era of peaceful coexistence” and “joint growth” between the two Koreas. About 35.1% disapproved.

On prospects for inter-Korean relations next year, 49.4% said they expected no change, 34.3% predicted improvement and 13.6% forecast deterioration.

Asked about the necessity of unification, 68% said it is necessary, down 0.6 percentage points from the previous quarter. The most-cited reasons were economic development, at 28.2%, and eliminating the threat of war, at 27.6%.

Views of North Korea were nearly split, with 44% seeing it as an object of vigilance and hostility and 42.7% seeing it as an object of cooperation and support.

The council said the survey was conducted over three days from Friday through Sunday among 1,000 adults ages 19 and older. It reported a 95% confidence level and a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, using proportional allocation by gender, age and region and a combined telephone interview method on landlines and mobile phones.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Dec. 19 (Asia Today) — President Lee Jae-myung said Friday that while North Korea’s “hostile two-state” line may reflect current realities, South Korea must “return to our proper place” and work to restore channels for contact, dialogue and cooperation.

Speaking at a joint work report by the Foreign Ministry and the Unification Ministry at the Government Complex Seoul, Lee pointed to what he described as an unprecedented buildup along the inter-Korean boundary.

“For the first time since the 1950s war, North Korea has erected triple fences along the entire demarcation line, severed bridges, cut off roads and built retaining walls,” Lee said. He added that North Korea may have acted out of concern that the South could invade, but said it was regrettable and appeared tied to “strategic desires.”

Lee said the moves could be part of Pyongyang’s strategy, but argued South Korea must respond with patience and sustained effort to improve what he described as a situation in which the North “fundamentally refuses contact itself.”

“As I’ve said before, we must find even the smallest opening,” Lee said. “We need to communicate, engage in dialogue, cooperate and pursue a path of coexistence and mutual prosperity between the North and South.”

He said there is currently “not even a needle’s eye of an opening,” repeating that the situation is “truly not easy.”

Lee also appeared to criticize the previous administration’s approach to North Korea, saying “one could call it a kind of karma.” He added that if a strategy contributed to the current impasse, “then we must change it now.”

Lee said the government should make proactive efforts to ease tensions and create conditions for trust to emerge, adding that the Unification Ministry should now take a leading role.

“It is certainly not an easy task, but it is equally clear that it is not something we should give up on,” he said.

– Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.