Because he died recently, I have been thinking a lot about Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and I wanted to gather some thoughts, in particular about one of his guitars and the effect it had on me.

The Grateful Dead

I have to preface everything here and say that I am not really a “Deadhead”. I don’t own any Grateful Dead albums and they’ve got so much music out there it’s hard to know where to start. I don’t dislike them. I have in fact listened to them a lot. But I can’t say, “Oh, wow. You have to listen to this record” or whatever.

They’re a band I possibly may start to like more, but…I don’t know. The are a very American sounding band, but not seeming to come from the reasonably familiar blues heritage that drove rock back and forth across the Atlantic. They have more of a weird, embroidered, diddle-daddle folky-country sound that really seems at odds for a band that came out of the radical hippie era and ploughed on through the subsequent years of rock with the most gigantic PA and enormous fanbase following them around everywhere.

So I am happy to admit I’m out of my depth as to their musical meaning in modern culture but they’ve always been really interesting as an actual band because of this weird uniqueness. They played so many concerts to so many people over so many years and made so many records…yet had no real radio hits you’re likely to hear today on any decade-based oldies stations. But still their sheer enormity and longevity mark them out, and as a result, they were always somewhere around when I was growing up and learning to play guitar.

Graphite

I first got fascinated by Bob Weir because there used to be an advert in the back of some of the American guitar magazines like Guitar Player for “Modulus Graphite” instruments. Modulus were a Californian company that made guitars made with composite graphite necks.

If you don’t know, guitars are traditionally made of wood, and wood is an organic material and it is susceptible to temperature and humidity changes and changing shape slightly as a result. So it’s difficult to guarantee its consistency as a raw material for a product like a guitar neck that has to be consistent to stay in tune.

Guitar manufacturers have tried different things over the years like adding steel truss rods inside the guitar neck, but wood can still want to move depending on the moisture in the air and to expect a piece of wood to remain stable in any climate under the tension of six strings tuned to concert pitch is quite a big ask. Most people have experienced a creaky old door or floor, and if you play guitar you will know that if you pick your guitar up on a particularly cold or hot day you can expect it to have drifted out of tune.

Perhaps because of its bigger landmass and greater climatic variance some American guitar companies began experimenting with using epoxy resin and carbon graphite fibres and other man-made materials to build guitars from. You can make very stiff, reasonably lightweight parts for guitars using resin and carbon graphite fibres and consistent techniques like moulds. As a result (in theory at least) you’ve got a better guarantee of a more stable part for a musical instrument. So to say an instrument has a “graphite neck” means the neck is made from carbon graphite fibres moulded together with epoxy resin, rather than a neck made from solid graphite.

The Blackknife and the pink Strat

Anyway…rambling on…Modulus used to have these adverts and they’d have a photo of Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead posing with some exotic guitars and it would say something like “Bob Weir and Phil Lesh play Modulus Graphite”.

In the pictures Bob Weir’s guitar was literally “weird” because not only was it called a Modulus “Blackknife” (which sounded incredibly dangerous) but it was made with this graphite neck and all sorts of exotic woods all laid over each other. It had a normal Fender Stratocaster pickup arrangement of three single-coil sized pickups, but all squished closely together in the middle, almost as if it was one pickup.

I can’t adequately explain the significance of this to any guitar non-nerds, but trust me that it always seemed utterly fascinating to me. Bob Weir, after all, was a player in a super-intense and successful band, so there must have been some super-intense significance to it for him. But this was, like, 1988 and there was no internet to go and find out more, and probably not even any Grateful Dead records for sale in the shops in my hometown at the time. So all I knew was…it looked really different.

As is so often the case with my life, I would have just filed that away at the time for future reference. Then…fast forward to sometime, I don’t know exactly when…sometime in the last 20 years or so…and my brain hiccuped or something like that and Bob Weir turned up in my mind.

By this time of course I had access to the entirety of the internet and so I went on a search for Bob Weir’s guitars and I found not only the Modulus Black Knife, but also what they call the pink “Pepto-Bismol” Strat.

It turns out that this was a Fender Stratocaster that had been modified with a Modulus graphite neck and all sorts of other 1980s things. He’d got that strange all-squished-into-one pickup arrangement and the guitar body was really bright pink like a type of indigestion medicine called Pepto-Bismol. The rest of it was black and it looked very cool. Apparently it was originally meant for Bob Dylan when he collaborated with the Grateful Dead in the late eighties, but it ended up back with Bob Weir in the end.

A mysterious message

I could see this pink guitar in pictures of the Grateful Dead onstage, or in photos amongst all their gear and something about it started to obsessively fascinate me, way more than the “exotic woods” Modulus Blackknife guitar. It wasn’t how it sounded, it wasn’t the parts it was made from, it wasn’t really even the way it looked…and yet all these things were important.

I mean I could see individual parts with my eyes, and I could guess what they could sound like sonically, but that wasn’t it. In fact, you can look up the Grateful Dead on YouTube in the 80s and see Bob Weir playing it, and it isn’t especially unique sounding as an instrument. It looked dead groovy, but there was something more to it.

It was as if, as an object, it seemed to be like a talisman from another universe and I became slightly obsessed with it. This is not unusual for me. I have various guitar obsessions, let alone obsessions with all sorts of other objects and concepts and things.

But Bob Weir’s pink Strat…it’s as if when I saw it, it had a meaning. Not the meaning of being a guitar, but some sort of great significance in the Universe. I grew to be so fascinated by that guitar and I kept thinking about it. I would look it up from time to time just to marvel at how different it looked but in particular how it made me feel.

It looked like a guitar from the 80s of course, so, it had a certain resonance to my own past as a kid who grew up in the 80s. But every time I saw it, it also just had this bigger cosmic “thing”…and I would try and tune in to whatever that was.

It was as if the pink Strat was trying to tell me something really important. I felt sometimes as if it was so close to being understood, I ought to just be able to reach out with my hand and try and touch whatever this meaning was…and I could never reach it. I could sense that something was there, and that if I could only stretch my understanding and perception hard enough, I would be able to grasp it…and…I never could.

It didn’t matter about listening to the Grateful Dead, it didn’t seem to matter about looking at more pictures of the guitar. It “meant something”. It meant something! It was a message in itself. It’s so strange trying to describe that right now, reading myself write all of this out, but it’s true.

Anyway. Time inevitably went on.

Every now and again Bob Weir’s pink Strat would flash into my mind and then I would get that feeling that “it means something” and that I would have to search and find what it means, and I would try…and I would reach…I would reach across the internet with queries and I would reach into my mind and try and tune in to the pulse that it seemed to be sending me. I would read more about it and look at more photos and it would not answer the meaning. It was always beyond my reach.

And literally like right now I’m holding out my hand and arm and trying to stretch them and I know that I cannot…reach…beyond my reach. For example I’m sitting at a desk and I can see my car is outside and I can’t reach my arm long enough to go through the window to touch my car. That’s a sense of something being out of reach, like the sensation that the obscure meaning of Bob Weir’s pink Strat was “out of reach”.

The answer

Anyway, one day in a year like 2019, I was walking through the town I live in, towards the railway station to catch my train to work, which at the time was something I did every working day.

So I got up, had my breakfast, got ready for work, walked to the station, and I always used to take exactly the same route because I knew how long it took. And one day on this very, very mundane, boring commute in a town which had no link whatsoever to the Grateful Dead, whilst turning left onto a road of no significance, it dropped into my mind! The meaning of Bob Weir’s guitar suddenly appeared…and the meaning was that it is “the binioù kozh” (a type of bagpipe specific to Brittany in France).

Yes. “Bob Weir’s pink Strat is the binioù kozh”.

Bagpipes

It’s worth pausing to try and explain about bagpipes for a moment. Growing up in the UK you can easily think “bagpipes…they’re Scottish”. Of course actually bag pipes are not exclusively Scottish.

There are bagpipes in different parts of the United Kingdom and in fact over the sea there are bag pipes in Ireland and on the continent and probably going all the way off over to bits of Asia and things like that. The pipes are called chanters and in all the variants they all have some chanters for drones, like continuous notes, and then a single chanter for the melody.

Some bagpipes are blown into from the player’s mouth, but some have bellows. Some of the chanters are double-reeds like the oboe and some are single-reed like a clarinet. The drone and melody combination is actually in a lot of old singing styles and even things like the hurdy gurdy, which is a totally different instrument using strings instead of chanters has separate strings for a drone and separate strings for a melody, just like the idea of the bagpipes.

Down in Brittany, something happened to the bagpipes and they forked off in a weird direction where instead of being one instrument that one player plays with the drones and the melody all coming from the same player, they split off into a two-person thing where one player has the bag and is grooving away with the drones and the other one plays the melody on a chanter, but with no bag and blown with their mouth like an oboe (but without all the metal keys of course).

So the two of them are playing together, but one of them is not relying on the bag to give them a constant supply of air for their melody. I first saw this in a picture in a book with a section about ancient and exotic instruments. In the picture (which is captioned something like “Breton Bagpipes”) these two guys are sat in Breton clothing in an old black and white photograph. They are wearing sabots and fisherman’s smocks and clearly playing something together. It was like, “Oh wow how far out is that?”, you know, some strange evolutionary fork of the bagpipes. I had no idea how they sounded of course, and I have subsequently lost the book (which is very careless as it was really quite big).

I am not quite as nuts about bagpipes as I am about guitars but I do like variation and this odd evolutionary spur going on down in Brittany was sufficiently fascinating for me to spend ages looking up and reading about it all, and when you eventually look up the whole Breton bagpipe thing, actually, the person pumping the bag pipes doesn’t only play the drone part of it. They also have a tiny little chanter on there which is exceedingly high pitched and very strident and that is the binioù kozh. The little chanter is probably visible in the picture in the book but it was a small, grainy black and white photo. There was no further explanation of the instruments actually in the book, and having never spotted it I always assumed the bag-player just provided the drones until the age of the internet and seeing videos of players on YouTube.

Anyway, back to me walking to work in 2019. In that moment, on that morning walking to work, I didn’t even have to reach for the meaning of the Pink strat any more. It fell into my mind and immediately the mystery was over – “Bob Weir’s pink Strat is the binioù kozh”.

I no longer had to reach for what it meant. I no longer had to search for the question of what meaning it posed…the challenge…the..whatever-it-was…was solved. I had been given the meaning! It arrived without me asking.

Within my body and soul, the curiosity was over and, now I know this, there is no need or desire to reach any more for the meaning. It’s like “THAT’S IT!”.

The. End.

The only problem was that the meaning makes no sense whatsoever. As soon as I realised “THAT’S IT!”…I was actually like…”THAT’S IT?”

Because intellectually…I can make zero sense of the meaning.

Why is Bob Weir’s pink Strat the binioù kozh when…

• Bob Weir’s guitar doesn’t sound like the binioù kozh.
• The binioù kozh doesn’t sound like Bob Weir’s guitar.
• They certainly don’t look anything like each other.
• Bob Weir does not play guitar anything like the binioù kozh.
• Let alone even the bagpipes?

The only link intellectually and retrospectively that I can make is that they appear to be an odd evolutionary fork of something we know…in a different form.

So, yes, Bob Weir’s guitar looks like a Stratocaster (but it isn’t when you get close up), and the binioù kozh looks like bagpipes (but not in the Scottish sense when you get close up).

But trying to plaster that intellectual rationale onto things after the fact doesn’t actually make any difference to the meaning, or actually take anything any further. That morning I was very clearly presented with both a meaning which was also an ending.

So what really is the meaning?

I think on reflection both the meaning and the ending (in some kind of symbiosis) is…Bob Weir’s inadvertent gift to me.

I often have a passion within my soul for something, anything, all sorts of things, and be seeking some sort of meaning and have a strong desire to explore it intellectually until I am quenched and the desire to know more is slaked.

Quenched, slaked…these are words based around thirst and desire and satisfaction. Words describing physical, not intellectual satiation.

Intellectually, the tradition is that you go on a quest for learning or an expedition or you undertake research…and you are expected to explain it all when you return or when it is over.

My education was all about being able to explain things:

• Writing essays
• Drawing diagrams
• Carrying out experiments
  • Objectives
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Conclusions
  • Evidence
    • Und so weiter

Fast forward to the age of the smartphone and it’s “pics, or it didn’t happen”. We need an explanation. We need evidence!

Yet here is Bob Weir’s pink Strat saying, entirely alternatively, that it may be that when an answer, an explanation or meaning for something appears and ends the thirst, it could be intellectually meaningless and devoid of reason.

Something internally, emotionally will be satisfied. But not intellectually in a way you can share by language alone.

That’s a challenge for a curious waffler like me. But like so many of the lessons that we learn later in life, the challenge is often less about conquering something and more about letting go. Letting go of loved ones through death, letting go of youth through age, letting go of the colour of your hair as everything turns grey (even letting go of your hair in my case), letting go of money because life is just endlessly expensive. We think that letting go means losing, right?

It is not. But it is also not a binary opposite either. Oh what a lot to think about, especially when we have so much still to do.

Dreams

So, instead let’s think about dreams for a moment. There is perhaps a link here with dreams and the purpose of dreams. The inexplicable meaning of the pink guitar/biniou seems to make no sense in waking life, but it is reminiscent of the non-logic of dreams.

You could experience such a revelation about a guitar-meaning-exotic-bagpipes in a dream and it could be very satisfying, and then on waking you can cast off the fantastical nature of it all as “just a dream”. You could even explain it to a friend and it wouldn’t sound so daft within the context of a dream.

There is a lot spoken of lucid dreaming and attempts to take control of action in dreams as though this is some sort of mastery of the mind and consciousness. But this was more like a dream experience happening in real life.

To admit to having dream-like experiences in waking life might be considered a sign of losing one’s mind and there is a stigma attached to that.

There’s a chance even, unfortunately given the history of my father’s dementia, that this may be the start of the road map for the ending of my life; that I am starting to make connections that make no sense outside of my own emotional perception because dementia will set in as my brain starts to…well, whatever happens in the old bonce as you get older.

Oh bloody hell…

The inadvertent gift

So! Given the end of the mystery of the pink Strat and the firm message that makes no intellectual sense, and the desire to pause the idea of dementia, and the ongoing reliable mystery of dreams…I am currently preferring to say the whole thing could just be Bob Weir’s inadvertent gift to me. Inadvertent of course because he had no idea of all this going on with me just because I saw his guitar.

What it is trying to tell me is that this idea that you can work it out, whatever it is…

• the meaning of life
• the meaning of love
• the meaning of satisfaction
• the meaning of anything

…is perhaps not always going to be possible.

Don’t worry about something making perfect, portable sense if you realise the search is over. Enjoy the satisfaction of the meaning signalling the end and revealing the space that is available for other uses of your brain.

(Maybe that doesn’t make any sense either…but by now who cares?!?!?! You’ve probably fallen asleep before you got this far anyway).

Bob

In looking for information about Bob Weir beyond his pink Strat and now indeed beyond his time on earth, I found a very nice quote in an interview where he talks about death;

“I don’t tend to think of death as particularly final and if I’m going to be sad that’s my business, because really death is a liberation. My view of things is that death is the last and best reward for a life well lived, you know, because death is where the adventure starts as far as I can see.

We have been sort of messing around in this existence and you get more to the essence of it when you leave behind your mortal trappings.

And so given all that I tend to celebrate death for my loved ones, particularly as liberation and, you know, I look forward to dying. One of these days I’m gonna get around to it”.

That’s not an easy thing to get your head around in a world where grief is real, but it does make the mystery and meaning of life a bit easier to deal with.

All that rambling on about the meaning and the search and that reaching and the notion that if you could just reach it and find it, everything would be sorted. Turns out you don’t even have to reach and find it. It will appear. It will appear at some time of its own choosing. Then the search will be over (albeit leaving you with a stranger answer).

That rings true with that notion of messing around in this existence and getting more to the essence of it when you leave behind your mortal trappings.

That’s perhaps the gift, and that’s enough of a reason to love Bob Weir, even if you aren’t sure about all that music.

Epilogue

I’m still fascinated by his pink Strat. As far as I know, he went and had it modified all the way back to what a normal Stratocaster is like, without the funny pickups and possibly even without the graphite neck. So it may not even really exist any more.

But every now and again, I will find a pink guitar for sale on eBay and think, should I make a Bob tribute? Even though I’m not a Grateful Dead fan. But it’s as if it is honoring the notion that the guitar for me as an object is a talisman of something else.

But I have to be careful because it’s a talisman of unexplainable meaning. It means something internally, but it doesn’t mean anything intellectually.

So, all that being said, I’m glad that Bob Weir was alive, and I hope his adventure continues wherever he is now.