American country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan rounded out 2025 by marrying his partner, Samantha Leonard, on New Year's Eve. Her wedding gift to her Grammy-winning husband soon garnered even greater sentimentality.
The gift was a guitar — more specifically, a road-worn Fender Telecaster formerly owned by the Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir. Less than two weeks later, on January 10, Weir passed away at age 78.
Posting on Instagram to promote his new album, With Heaven on Top (Acoustic), — released two days after Weir‘s death — Bryan added an important footnote.
“Irrelevant, but rest in peace to Bob Weir, that guy fucking rocked,” he writes. “The day Sammy and I got hitched, she gave me a present; it was his Telecaster from all his days on the road.
“We all love you, and we will all miss you. If this [album] wasn’t previously planned to release today, I would have left this alone and let the world be.”
Although Weir played his signature D'Angelico guitars in his later years, the embryonic days of his music career were dominated by Telecasters. At the time, the San Francisco native felt no guitar was better suited to the job.
“I was mesmerized. It was instant love,” Weir once said of his relationship with the Telecaster (via Blues Show). “The guitar cut through all the traffic in that band really well.
“The Telecaster sound is all the information you need, and no more. Its slightly more asymmetrical overtone scale made me listen to each note a little differently,” he continued. “That was my main guitar for several years.”
When he eventually began to work on a custom guitar, he had the Tele in mind.
“I took what I learned about pickup configuration and scale length from the Telecaster, combined it with the mini-archtop design of my custom Modulus, and came up with the blue Modulus that is now my main guitar,” he had said at the time. “Then, I had my man at Modulus duplicate the Telecaster, because I’m thinking about keeping the original safe at home. I didn’t find that guitar – it fell out of the sky and landed on my lap.”
Weir owned well over 100 electric and acoustic guitars in his lifetime, including a guitar intended for George Benson that he admits he stole. His guitar playing aside, Weir was a big advocate for charities and democracy, and this one-of-a-kind D'Angelico semi-hollow raised a six-figure sum for nonprofit voter registration, HeadCount, when it was auctioned off in 2022.
