As the surviving members of the Grateful Dead kick off their series of Fare Thee Well concerts this weekend at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, one esteemed member of the band’s family will be there in memory and spirit only. Jack Louis Parber, a retired Air Force colonel who learned late in life that he was the biological father of Grateful Dead singer-guitarist Bob Weir, had been a fixture at his son’s concerts ever since the rock ’n roll hall-of-famer contacted him in 1996, beginning what would become a belated, but close, father-son relationship.
“Jack would go to practically everything Bobby did locally,” said Alan Trist, who ran the Dead’s music publishing company, Ice Nine, for decades. “I would always see him at gigs, and I imagine he would have been at the shows this weekend if he had been well enough.”
In failing health after a series of falls, retired Col. Parber died April 10 of a pulmonary embolism at the Veterans Affairs hospital in San Francisco. Weir and his wife, Natascha, hosted his memorial at Sweetwater Music Hall, their hometown Mill Valley nightclub.
In his eulogy, the 67-year-old musician recalled his father telling him that if he hadn’t gone into the Air Force, he would have liked to have been an opera singer. In keeping with the Grateful Dead’s aversion to sentimentality, the printed program for the service had a color photo of Col. Parber on the front and, inside, a handwritten inscription saying, “They don’t make ’em like Jack anymore.”
The story of how Weir found his birth father and embraced him and the brothers he didn’t know he had is a fascinating sidebar to the long, strange trip of the Grateful Dead.
Remarkably, all four of Weir’s brothers are guitar players. The oldest, Novato resident Anthony Parber, a 63-year-old retired field economist for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, performed at the Sweetwater service with his band, the Beatles Project.
“Bob didn’t want the memorial to be a Bob Weir concert,” he said, “so he thought it would be appropriate for my band to play.”
A secret pregnancy
Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Jack Parber was enrolled at the University of Arizona when a fling with a fellow student resulted in her becoming pregnant. Without telling him about the pregnancy, she went off to San Francisco to have the baby. After arranging for the baby boy (Weir) to be adopted by a wealthy family in Atherton, an affluent enclave south of San Francisco, she went back to Tucson and tried unsuccessfully to rekindle her romance with the child’s father.
“We always wondered if he really didn’t know she was pregnant,” Anthony Parber said. “But it was explained to us that she was going through a divorce, and, at that time, an illegitimate child could affect the divorce settlement. So it had to be a secret. And since they were breaking up, she didn’t want him to know anyway.”
As a condition of the adoption, the birth mother was not to contact her son while his adopted parents were alive. They died in 1972, but Weir didn’t hear from her for another decade. He had just gotten home from a tour, gone to bed exhausted and was in the middle of a strange dream about his family home, a brother and a stillborn baby when he was awakened by the phone ringing. It was the Grateful Dead office saying that a woman named Phyllis had called, claiming to be his mother. It turned out that she was who she said she was.
Meeting his mother
“I went and met her the next day and, unfortunately, we did not exactly hit it off,” Weir wrote in an essay on the Grateful Dead website Dozin.com. “I could ascertain with a fair bit of ease that she didn’t really have a need for me in her life.”
He kept in touch with her, though, calling her on Mother’s Day, and, over time, she told him the name of his father and where she had last seen him. With that information, Weir hired a private detective to track him down. He didn’t have to look far.
As it turned out, Col. Parber was the commanding officer at nearby Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato. He was near the end of a long military career that had begun when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps when he was still in his teens. After cadet school and basic training, he was all set to fly bombing missions in Japan when World War II ended.
After his discharge, he went to college but stayed in the Air Force reserve, serving as a B-29 bomber test pilot. Recalled to active duty, he flew bombing missions for nine months during the Korean War and later flew B-52’s on combat missions in Vietnam. After a 30-year career as an officer in the Strategic Air Command, closing Hamilton was his final assignment before his retirement in 1974.
As distinguished as his father’s military career had been, when Weir found out that his dad was an Air Force officer, he lost interest in taking his quest any further.
“Because I am almost pathologically anti-authoritarian, I figured this would not go well for either of us because it does not get much more authoritarian than the commanding officer of a military base,” he said in his essay. “So I just sat on the info for close to ten years. Finally, I figured this guy’s not getting any younger, I guess I better just buck up and do this.”
With considerable apprehension, he picked up the phone and called his father’s number. When a man picked up, Weir said he was calling for Jack Parber. The voice on the other end said, “That would be me.”
Weir introduced himself by name only, saying he lived in Mill Valley, that he had done some research and had some information he’d like to share.
“OK,” Col. Parber said.
“It concerns events that took place in Tucson about 50 years ago,” Weir told him. “Is it possible you were romantically involved with a woman by the name of Phyllis?”
“Well, yes,” the colonel replied.
“In that case, sir,” Weir said, “I’m not sure how many children you have, but there’s a very strong likelihood that you may have one more than you know.”
After a long silence, Parber said, “The only Robert Weir I know is the guy who sings and plays with the Grateful Dead.”
“Well, sir,” Weir responded, “that would be me.”
Like father, like son
They arranged to meet the next day at a restaurant that Col. Parber suggested that just so happened to be a favorite of Weir’s as well. After that first meeting, father and son, in Weir’s words, “became very, very close.”
Although they were from different generations and social worlds, they were pleasantly surprised to discover how alike they were.
“We both shared a singular inability to take anything seriously and an ability to make light of pretty nearly any situation,” Weir wrote. “The more time we spent together, the more similarities I saw and the more I realized that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And even though I didn’t grow up with him, in many ways I was as much, if not more, like him than his own sons.”
Almost every week after that Weir and his wife and young daughters visited Parber and his wife of 65 years, Milena, who had moved to Nevada.
“We stayed overnight and each morning grandpa cooked me and my family pancakes,” Weir recalled.
He also got on well with his new-found brothers. Anthony was a budding Deadhead as a teenager, taking the bus to a half dozen of the Dead’s San Francisco shows in the late ’60s. At the time, he was blissfully unaware that his favorite band member was his brother.
“I was a fan not just of the Grateful Dead, but of Bob Weir in particular, the way he played guitar and sang back in 1967 and ’68 when their first records came out,” he said. “The Dead were gods to me. Between Beatles albums, I would carry on to anyone who would listen about the brilliance of the Grateful Dead.”
Another of the Parber boys, James, actually worked as a professional musician in the Bay Area in the 1970s. At the same time the Grateful Dead were rising to prominence, he played with a couple of country rock groups until, tragically, he was diagnosed with spinal cancer when he was just 27. His parents took care of him for 12 years until his death in 1991. Weir played one of his late brother’s guitars, a vintage Fender Telecaster, on stage with the Grateful Dead.
“All of the family was overjoyed at seeing a piece of their brother and son make it on the big stage,” he wrote.
In addition to Anthony, he got to know Jonathan, who used to live in Marin and is now in Colorado Springs, and the youngest, Christopher, who lives in Fairfax.
“We had a pretty close relationship right from the start, partly because he bonded so closely with our father,” Anthony said. “Our dad getting sick and dying brought us even closer in the last couple of months. We’re very comfortable around one another.”
This weekend, as he plays the first two Fare Thee Well shows with his surviving bandmates in the Grateful Dead, Weir won’t have his father waiting proudly for him backstage. But he’ll have memories of the precious time he got to spend with him in the last 20 years of his life. And that’s something to be grateful for.
“The whole story is really a little bit of mysticism,” he wrote. “The lesson I learned from my new dad confirms for me that fate follows in your footsteps, so you need to have faith in your path and live life with a sense of wonderment.”
