The Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir: “Honour what you love”

This article originally appeared in the November 2016 issue of Uncut

Judging by the face staring from the cover of his new solo album, Blue Mountain, Bob Weir these days looks more like a member of the Grateful Dead than ever. Back in the band’s early days, he was the most youthful and athletic member of a group of grizzled dudes for whom grooming, diet and health were clearly secondary to the primal demands of the music. Despite a reliably wayward fashion sense, he retained that air of youthful vigour throughout the Dead’s long, strange trip.

These days, though, the wrinkles and downturned eyes evoke a worldliness and melancholia, while there’s more than just a touch of grey to the beard and moustache. But Weir and the Dead managed to prolong the fun as long as anyone, while rejecting the ignominious music industry compromises more unequivocally than any of their baby-boomer peers. Save for wearing (ironic) white suits on one album cover, there were none of the humiliating gambits visited upon so many bands of similar vintage: no disco album, no dismal rock opera, no hip-hop restyling, no final tours, no comebacks.

Until last year, of course, when hundreds of thousands of Deadheads made one last pilgrimage to Chicago’s Soldier Field to catch what were being advertised as the Grateful Dead’s final shows. Not that anyone asked Bob Weir about that, mind. He never regarded those shows as the band’s last hurrah, he reveals, and wouldn’t be averse to taking another swing at it in the future. “It would be sinful to walk away from that body of work,” he says.

But there’s not that much space in Weir’s schedule these days.  Much of his time is spent rehearsing and playing with Dead & Company, the ensemble which allies Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann with guitarist John Mayer. His own band RatDog also resumed performing again last year, with the group’s first show since Weir’s collapse in 2013.

At the moment, his focus is Blue Mountain. His first solo album of new material in three decades, it’s a country-flavoured collection of resonant ballads and rustic reflections, co-written with Josh Ritter and producer Josh Kaufman. It includes contributions from The National’s drummer Scott Devendorf and guitar twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner, who recently curated the colossal triple-album of Grateful Dead covers, Day Of The Dead.

Leaving his more cosmic inclinations aside, Blue Mountain is inspired by time spent as a teenage ranch-hand at the Bar Cross, the ranch in Wyoming run by the parents of his old friend and lyricist collaborator John Perry Barlow. Weir’s fellow cowpokes grew up in an era before radio, and made their own amusements. “Their notion of how to kill an evening was to tell stories in songs, and that’s kind of what I’m going for in this record,” he explains.

The result is another fine addition to an album canon now well into three figures, thanks largely to the Dead’s prolific live album release schedule, offering official recordings of the shows which used to be taped and traded by fans. The band’s laissez-faire attitude towards taping puts into perspective the more recent industry worries over piracy. Weir’s solution to that situation is typically straightforward and ethically sound: “Honour what you love”.

Blue Mountain was inspired by your teenage experiences working as a ranch-hand…
Yes, partly. I worked on other ranches, as well. I did a lot of the grunt work that the kid in the outfit does – I shovelled a lot of soil. But from time to time, when they were moving cattle, if they needed a hand, I would do that. I never participated in branding, I’m happy to say.

Is the story true that you would jump off the tractor sometimes while it was still moving?
Yes, it is. Sometimes you had a situation in the field when all the hay was raked, and I was waiting to move on to the next field, and we would be followed by a cloud of hawks and eagles, because once we’d raked up all the hay, there was nowhere for the field mice and rats to hide, they’d be just running around, and the birds would come down and feed on them. So every now and then I would jump down and chase a rat, see if I could catch it before a hawk or an eagle got to it. I hopped off the tractor a time or two, and sometimes it would get stuck in a drainage ditch.

What’s the appeal of country music at this stage of your career – and this stage of American history, as well?
To begin with, I wouldn’t call this a country record, either by my standards or current standards, which is different. This is more or less country-oriented songs, in so far as the subject matter and the storytelling is kind of in that vein, but the stories sort of hark back to an ethos, if you will, that I found myself steeped in when I was living in a bunkhouse. A lot of that aesthetic carried over into country music, but that’s not exactly what I was going for when we were putting this together.

The songs do share that country music fascination with love, loss and death, among other things, either used as metaphors or directly addressed.
Well, those kinds of stories, that aesthetic, you can trace back to the ballads from northern England, Ireland and Scotland catalogued by Francis Child in the late 19th century: the themes are pretty much universal, but in the American musical heritage, those themes are pretty directly traceable back to the ballads from the British Isles, and the communities that migrated from there to Appalachia and kept those themes and traditions alive, they’re still there centuries later. A lot of those melodies are still pretty much intact. I was reaching back for some of that sort of stuff when I was writing.

When did you start co-writing with Josh Ritter and Josh Kaufman?
A couple of years back. The idea for the project was actually theirs. I had wanted to do something like this for years and years, but had been sort of keeping it in my hip pocket. We worked together for a little web broadcast tour we did four or five years ago, and we clicked. Then those guys went back to Brooklyn, where they hang, and got talking, and they came up with the notion of doing a record of these kinds of tunes with me, and in so far as I had been thinking about it for a couple of decades, I was ready to go with it.

Aaron and Bryce Dessner and Scott Devendorf from The National play on Blue Mountain. Did you first meet them through the Day Of The Dead project?
Yeah. Oh no, I didn’t: I met them at that show we did at my studio, TRI, about five years ago.

Did you enjoy the Day Of The Dead album?
I haven’t heard all that much of it, but what I have heard, I’ve loved. But, y’know, it’s kinda lengthy, and it’s gonna take me a while to get through it!

From what you’ve heard so far, were you surprised by what younger interpreters have heard in the Dead?
Not really. Nothing much surprises me! I’m delighted by a lot of it – I’m not gonna get into specifics, because I don’t want to do that until I’ve listened all the way through it, and it could take a couple of years before I’m able to do that!

I was in Chicago on Independence Day last year, when the Fare Thee Well shows were staged at Soldier Field. Do you think the shows were a satisfactory conclusion to the Dead’s story?
Well, I’ll begin by saying that I wouldn’t be in any way averse to pulling that together again, regardless of what’s been said. But if we did it again, I would like to incorporate a little more rehearsal than we were able to schedule for that last event. We only had a couple of weeks to rehearse for it – I spent some time with Trey [Anastasio, guitarist], just one-on-one, on top of that, but altogether, we didn’t have all that much time to work all the stuff out, because everybody had their full schedules going in. I would take another swing at it in years to come, with a little more preparation. That said, I think it came off relatively well.

Listening to the recordings, it reflects well on the Dead’s heritage as an improvising unit that the “Drums” and “Space” sections came across really well.
The downside was that we were never able to get a handle on the onstage volume, which was pretty outrageous; and in those conditions it’s not possible to hear the vocals, so the singing was off, none of us was singing, we were all just shouting!

What did it feel like in the immediate aftermath of the shows?
Well, it was good to get that behind us, I’ll say that. It was good to revisit those tunes – although most of those tunes I’ve been playing for the last couple of decades anyway with various other ensembles. There weren’t all that many tunes that we did that I didn’t already have as the basis of my current repertoire. But playing with that particular ensemble had its worth.

Was there a sense of finality about it? Though from what you’ve said, it doesn’t seem to be that final for you…
No. I think it was advertised as the last and final farewell, and all that kind of stuff, but I never saw it that way, I never said that, and I never affirmed that; and from my point of view, it would be sinful to walk away from that body of work. All those songs are still alive, and still evolving, and will continue to, for me, until I breathe my last breath. I don’t really know where it came from, that business of it being the last and final farewell. Nobody asked me – and if they had, I don’t think they would have heard what they were looking for!

Do you know how the other guys feel about getting back together at some point? Although I know that most of you are together in Dead & Company…
Right. We’re going to give that some time to stretch its legs and breathe a bit. ’Cos that band is way more of a band than the ensemble we had at Soldier Field, because we just had more time to play together: that’s the only way to get a band, by playing together in front of people. There’s no other substitute, there’s no shortcut. And especially if you’re playing the kind of music which we play, with improvisation, and interacting with the audience, only practice makes perfect. We put in way, way, more time in rehearsal, and onstage, with that band than we did with the Fare Thee Well ensemble. So it’s a far more cohesive unit.

How did you get to know John Mayer, who plays guitar in Dead & Company?
Well, it was his idea, once again. I don’t know who turned him on to our music and our approach, but he started listening to it, and he got it. He was guest-hosting a TV show – I think it was The Late Late Show on CBS – for a few nights in the winter of last year, and he invited me to come and play. They slotted us two or three songs, and we showed up for the soundcheck, plugged in and started to play, and two hours later they told us we were done, and unplugged us! Otherwise, we would not have stopped! It was just too much fun to walk away from, so we started kicking around the notion of putting together a band, and this is what came of it.

Will you be writing new material for the band, releasing any albums?
I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s time to start thinking about new material for that ensemble. We’ve spent enough time playing together that we know each other, we’ve learnt how to intuit each others’ moods, and we play to each others’ strengths, and ignore each others’ weaknesses. So the next logical step, for me, is to start coming up with some new stuff.

I read that you had an out-of-body experience during one show, a timeslip sort of thing?
That happened on our Fall Tour. The first part of our Fall Tour was a little rough, we were still getting to know each other, but as the tour progressed it started to come together. There was a point when we were getting into our second set, feeling our way from one song into another, setting up the next song, and nobody was stepping out, nobody was soloing, nobody was leading the charge, everybody was just listening to each other and establishing a groove for the upcoming song, and suddenly I found myself 20 feet behind my own head, looking at the back of my head, and I looked over at John, and it was 20 years later – his hair was grey. I looked over at Oteil [Burbridge; bass], and his hair was white. I looked over at Jeff [Chimenti] on the keyboards, and his hair was all grey. I looked back, and there were a couple of kids on the drumkits, instead of Mickey and Bill. Then I looked back at myself, and it was another kid who had replaced me. Everybody was playing just fine, and the music was rolling along. I snapped out of it, but then that vision came back later in a dream, right as I was waking up the next morning. What that did, it made me think about how the little decisions I’m making with regard to the music, and to larger things, it put it in a different perspective for me. If music can go on like this, there’s every possibility that they might be talking about what I’m doing right now, at any given moment, in two or three hundred years’ time in music school. I’m not sure if I’ll take myself more seriously, but it does put a different perspective on things.

I believe that in the band’s early days, you weren’t keen on the name Grateful Dead?
No, not really.

Were you worried about karma, or something?
No, I just didn’t think it was particularly marketable – I didn’t think it was sexy, or whatever!

In those early days, did the Acid Tests with the Pranksters help in formulating the band’s approach towards performance – integrating improvisation into shows, and creating a special bond between performers and listeners?
Well, of course it did. We were pretty much stripped of all of our abilities, and had to re-architect our approach to playing music on a given Saturday night while we were doing that. The Saturday nights were the Acid Test nights. We’d take LSD, and we were pretty profoundly disoriented also, and as I say, had to re-engineer, re-architect, our approach to playing music. One thing that we discovered pretty quickly was that we could rely on audience reactions to be able to ascertain whether or not we were doing it right, so that became a big part of what we were up to on stage. We also had to listen to each other, because in that situation with that level of disorientation, it was hard to make sense of what you were doing – it’s easier, for me at least, to make sense of what someone else is doing! So I started listening to what the others in the band were up to, and basing what I was doing on that, trying to provide whatever I was going to answer back with before I had too much time to think about it – because if I had too much time to think about it, it was probably going to go awry.

It’s an approach that’s more common in jazz than in rock, up to that point, at least.
We listened to a lot of jazz back then. Back in my mid-to late-teens I listened to a lot of jazz; at that point, jazz was quite popular – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, they had a lot to say, and they were saying it.

You developed a bit of a reputation as a prankster yourself in those days. Is it true you handcuffed a cop to his desk when you were busted in New Orleans?
Oh, I seem to remember that! I don’t know exactly how I got that done [chuckles], but everyone got a little edgy at that point!

I can imagine. Wasn’t that a bit risky?
I did it with good nature. I was just having a little fun! Half of the room took it as fun, and half was not amused.

Jerry’s decline in his later years must have made performing very difficult at times. Were there periods when the band considered calling it a day?
By the time Jerry checked out, we had already come to the conclusion that we were going to have to knock off for a while. Jerry wanted to clean up, and staying on the road wasn’t affording him that opportunity. And we were having a lot of trouble with security at our events, ’cos we were too damned popular. Not all of the people coming to our shows were coming for the music – a lot were coming for the famous party. And so there was a lot of trouble at our events, it had become pretty apparent to us that we were going to have to take a little time off, and let people cool off.

Do you think the band’s lack of a leader figure helped its longevity?
Oh, yeah. Because everyone would rise to the occasion from time to time, from moment to moment on a given night, somebody would be leading the charge when we were playing, assessing what we were going to do next, whatever. It was democratic, it was a matter of whoever had the best idea – or ostensibly the best idea – at a given time, and that may simply have been a matter of how well they’d come over with it, or how well they’d stayed with it, but nonetheless, whoever was able to get everybody else’s attention and was able to coalesce the band around a given idea, had leadership.

From a manager’s perspective, it must have been like herding cats.
Yeah!

Warner Bros head Joe Smith was reportedly exasperated by the band’s hijinks, ideas like recording a song “with thick air”…
Oh, that was Dave Hassinger, our producer at the time. That was the last straw for him! We were unmanageable in the studio, and getting more and more so. I was probably the easiest one of the band for him to relate to – the most compliant, shall we say – and then when I voiced the notion that what I wanted was the sound of “thick air”, I think that was the last straw for him:
“OK, now even the kid’s completely out of it!”

There’s a wonderful irony in an apparently disorganised bunch of hippies becoming the world’s biggest-grossing band. Did it cause you guys a wry smile?
I think ‘a wry smile’ is probably an apt description! It took so long for that to develop that it never had a chance to go to our heads. It was such a long slog to get from austerity to the peak of our popularity, it happened incrementally, that nothing perceptibly changed. Then one day we woke up and we were big stars!

It’s especially ironic because you very rarely troubled the charts, which is the way bands usually build up a following – you guys built yours purely on the road.
Yeah: once again, it had to do with the interaction with our audiences.

The way you encouraged audience taping of your shows pre-empted the piracy anxieties that came along in the 21st century, by not defining it as theft.
Well, there’s a difference between gifting and thieving, and what we were doing was gifting. It made sense for us simply because it did. But I’ve got to address all sides of the argument here in order to see the picture as clearly as possible: back in those days when people were taping all of our shows, they would make a copy, then someone would make a copy of that copy, and someone else would make a copy of the copy of that copy, and the generational degeneration of the audio quality was such that it wasn’t possible for pirating to come in and take over the marketplace. The other side of the coin is that a musician has to be able to sell their work in order to make a living – otherwise he or she has to go back to law school, or begging, or whatever, and isn’t able to put the time into his or her art that they otherwise would. The answer to that whole question is: honour what you love. I’ll say that one more time: honour what you love. If you love it, buy it. Support the artists that put a little wind under your sail.

Do you think much about the Dead’s legacy, about what you’ve bequeathed to history?
Aaahm… I’m not done feeling it out yet. It’s not my job to think about that, really, my job is to do what I do, and to see what I can make of it.