The first thing I want to talk to Bob Weir about is the dead.

Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.

“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.

We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.

Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. “He had a full-on Yosemite Sam mustache. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. On account of all the beard.

Then Weir tells the story about the night Jerry Garcia died. ... Sometime in the early-morning hours, Weir had a dream about Garcia: “He had a real sort of intense look in his eye,” Weir says. “He looked straight at me, and then through me”—and here he adds the new part—“and then he stepped into me.”

There's a similar quality to the haze of laid-back mellowness that floats like spun sugar around Weir, ever threatening to obscure the sharp, observant intelligence beneath. He tends to take a few seconds before speaking, which can present as either spaciness or thoughtfulness, though it might be both. When he does get there, he favors a kind of baroque cowboy vernacular, a folksy deadpan that takes sly pleasure in words. “Slower than a slug in a trance,” he'll say, describing how he writes. Or, to a group of students watching him sound check later that day, “Well, I thank you for your kind attention.”

He reaches for a tin of Copenhagen chewing tobacco and puts a pinch in his lower lip. “I think death means more to most folks than it does to me. I take it fairly lightly,” he says. “I don't know how much of a divide death puts between us and the hereafter—if after is even an applicable adjunct there.”

Then he tells the story about the night Jerry Garcia died. He's told it before, but he tells it well and this time with a detail I hadn't heard before. That night—August 8 into 9, 1995—the Dead were between tours and Weir and his band RatDog were staying in the small resort town of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, preparing to play a show the next day. Sometime in the early-morning hours, Weir had a dream. He was playing in a funky music club, wandering around backstage between sets. On a shelf, he found a can of what he knew, in the way you know things in dreams, was invisible paint: