Weir finds his birth father and adopts a vintage guitar

Bob Weir was adopted and has never known the circumstances of his birth. His biological mother's name on his birth certificate was a phony -- that much he knew.

So when Weir's office received a phone call in the mid- to late '80s from someone claiming to be his mother, who said she could identify herself by the false name she used on his birth certificate, he was reasonably certain she knew what she was talking about.

His birth mother told him that she and a fellow college student in Tucson, Ariz., had a fling in 1947. When she discovered she was pregnant, she moved to San Francisco, arranged for the baby's adoption, gave birth and went back to Tucson a year later. She never told the child's father. She did tell Weir the man's name.

A private detective informed Weir that a man with the same name was an Air Force colonel running Hamilton Air Force Base in Marin County. Weir let the matter drop. "I'm pathologically anti-authoritarian," he said.

Then in 1996, after some prodding from his wife, Natascha, Weir looked in the phone book and found the now-retired John Parber listed. He called him up.

"I'm Robert Weir of Mill Valley," he told the man. "I've been doing some research and I've run across some information that might be of considerable interest to you."

"The only Robert Weir I know plays guitar for the Grateful Dead," the colonel replied.

Parber and his wife hit it off with his newly discovered grown son and became what Weir called "wonderful doting grandparents" to Weir's two small daughters. The Parbers raised four sons of their own, and the oldest, James Louis Parber, pursued a career as a musician for a number of years. He played with local country-rock outfit Lawrence Hammond and the Whiplash Band, who recorded the 1976 album "Coyote's Dream," and played in the solo band led by Billy C. Farlow, former Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen vocalist, before spinal cancer made it too painful to play. He spent the next 12 years under the care of his parents, dying a slow, agonizing death that finally came in 1991.

James Louis' three brothers split up his guitars, but left one beat-up electric guitar with their parents as a kind of memento.

Every time Weir spent the night in the Parbers' spare bedroom, he practically had to step over the guitar case they left in the room. Inside, he found a battered old Fender Telecaster, the pickup sprung from its moorings, the strings all broken. He finally asked the Parbers if he could take the guitar and have it fixed up. Weir, who was just starting rehearsals with the newly re-formed and rejuvenated Dead, gave the guitar to his roadie. Within 10 minutes, the roadie was back, the pickup screwed down, the guitar strung with Weir's strings.

Weir tried the guitar out with the Dead.

"The Telecaster has a thin, reedy sound," Weir said. "It was instantly perfect. It cleared out a lot of clutter and made the whole band sound jell."

On the back, Weir noticed a five-figure serial number and asked the roadie to inquire with the Fender company. The factory confirmed that the model was a 1956 vintage Fender Telecaster, one of the original models, a true relic. It has become Bob Weir's No. 1 guitar.

James Louis Parber never made the big time. But his guitar did.