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Bob Weir
Interviewed by David Gans, San Francisco 3/2/04
Broadcast in Grateful Dead Hour programs 810 and 811
Transcribed by Bill Kramer

Gans: The main reason we're here is to talk about this two-CD set of yours
called Weir Here, which a career-spanning retrospective, one CD of studio
stuff, one CD of live stuff. There are, of course, things I wish had been
put on there - but having produced a few compilation records myself, I know
the answer to that is, "you can't do it all."

Weir: Yeah...

Gans: But how did you decide what to include?

Weir: Well, we went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth,
and then finally we decided that if this one does okay, then we'll do a
volume two. So at that point you're philosophically inured to the omission
of the tunes you wanted on there.

Gans: How did you decide what to put on there?

Weir: Well, I had my bent, just my favorites from over the years, and then
ol' Cameron [Sears] and John Scher and people like that, the guys on the
marketing side, the business side of it, pushed for songs that were most
popular. And we went back and forth, like I say, until we got a suitable
compromise.

Gans: There are five songs from Ace, which is appropriate, since it's
probably your greatest record...

Weir: Thanks..

Gans: ..but things are well represented. There's some stuff from the Bobby
and Midnites record; Heaven Help the Fool; there's a track from your work
with Rob Wasserman; and a couple of things from Evening Moods. I gotta say,
I think Evening Moods is a fantastic record. One of the interesting things
about Evening Moods is you had so many collaborators on that. How did that
work?

Weir: How did it work? It worked in every conceivable way possible. I met
one guy through Mark Karan, I think: Andre Pessis. He's a good wordsmith and
lyricist. And I worked with Barlow. John...the problem working with Barlow
is he's on the road a lot; he does the lecture circuit and all that kind of
stuff. So he wasn't around, so I also worked with Gerrit Graham and I don't
remember who else...

Gans: Did you collaborate by e-mail?

Weir: A little bit, yeah.

Gans: These days you can almost record by e-mail, too..

Weir: Yeah...

Gans: Dennis McNally did the liner notes for this record, and he has some
fun stories in there about how certain songs got written. One of them had to
do with you working on Blues for Allah: You played the changes for "The
Music Never Stopped" over the phone to [Barlow] and he sent back the lyrics.
Is that true?

Weir: There were some plump phone bills that month, but we got it done. We
got in under the deadline and all that kind of stuff. There was sort of a
rush job, because I think he was putting up hay and he couldn't leave the
ranch, 'cause you gotta make hay while the sun shines. That's very real if
you're a rancher.

Gans: A story that isn't in the liner notes that I wanted to check out with
you is, I've heard rumors over the years that "One More Saturday Night"
actually began as a Hunter lyric and he took his name off it. Is that true?

Weir: Yeah, it began as a Hunter lyric. "One more Saturday night" was his
line. I wrote the rest. [laughs]

Gans: How did that happen?

Weir: I don't remember. I think he had a verse or something, a sketch he
gave me. I got started working on it and, it all happened in one night. I
got up a head of steam and cranked the song out, and I used that one line.
And as I was writing, the rest of that verse wasn't ringing my lofty bells,
and I kept intending to work it back in to the tune, and then take
everything I'd written and submit to Hunter and let him correct it, but
he... as far as he was concerned, the song was done, so he took his name off
it.

Gans: A song like "Jack Straw," which is such a classic in the Grateful Dead
canon -- and such a perfect example of Hunter's way of sketching in a story
that leaves big enough holes for you, the listener to fill in. How much of
that song was "born whole," as they say?
Weir: Let me think. There was a fair bit of back and forth on that one was
well. I had just read [John Steinbeck's novel] Of Mice and Men for about the
tenth time. I was completely smitten by that story, and I took a step back
in time into the Depression... and this story emerged between me and Hunter
about these two guys, you know, on the lam, basically. Ne'er-do-wells.
Victims of the Depression.

Gans: That's funny. I guess I've always pictured it as being fifty years
earlier than that, guys on horses....

Weir: Yeah, right. It could easily... we left it open like that so it could
have easily have been...

Gans: There are huge gaps in the picture, so there's plenty of room for you
to imagine your way into it. That's one of the classics... Which makes me
want to ask you just about songwriting in general. What this compilation
does is put all together the work of, as the tag line goes, "the other great
American songwriter in the Grateful Dead"...

Weir: [Laughs]

Gans: You developed a style all your own, right from the very start. It's
quite unique, and I wonder if you could [talk] a little bit about how you
characterize your style?

Weir: Well, when I'm writing the music, I just follow my fingers, and follow
the thread that hopefully emerges in the music. The music, it'll sort of
push its way in one direction or another. And I just, like I say, just be
there with my fingers when it's happening. If I have a printed lyric that
I'm working on, something that either occurred to me or to a guy I've been
collaborating with, I'll try to hammer that in as soon as I find a thread
for the music. If there's a lyric on a page, oftentimes I'll read it and see
if a rhythm suggests itself to me.

Gans: And then there's the matter of the odd time signatures.

Weir: Yeah.

Gans: One of the hallmarks of Bob Weir's songwriting style is that
seven-beat thing...

Weir: I've love the time signature 7/4 because it's really the best of three
and the best of four, you get to play with both of them within a bar or two
bars. And there are just endless possibilities for rhythmic punches and
stuff like that. I don't understand why more people don't use that time
signature.

Gans: Does it take a little bit of work to make it swing?

Weir: Well, you gotta learn to breathe and think in seven, but that happens
quick enough.
Gans: Certainly the payoff is there in all the songs you've done in 7/4. I
mean "Estimated Prophet" certainly grooves beautifully, and "Lazy Lightning"
.... That's a great song. It was great to hear the remastered, original
studio recording of that. It's another one of those songs that sound almost
kind of tame in the studio version --

Weir: Right.

Gans: -- and grew a lot of hair live over the years. And there's "Money,
Money" also in seven, but strangled in its crib for one reason or another.

Weir: [Laughing] Right... it promoted an aesthetic that flew in the face of
the feminist movement in the early '70s. It was tongue-in-cheek, but it
wasn't taken that way.

Gans: Randy Newman just stood up to them with "Short People. "I guess maybe
you were...t hey beat you down over that, didn't they?

Weir: I needed a female voice for that one, and Donna Jean, who was in the
band at the time, just didn't want to do it. [Laughs]

Gans: Brent Mydland commented once on the difference between how you brought
songs to the band and how Jerry brought songs to the band. He said, "Jerry
would come in and he would just play the song, and play the song through
again and by the second time, everybody knew the song and where they were
going and what they were doing in it. Bobby, on the other hand, would bring
a song in and he wouldn't even really know it yet." And a lot of times your
songs would develop on stage. A good example of that might be "Lost Sailor"
and "Saint of Circumstance." Those songs really were kind of tentative when
they first showed up. I hope you don't find that offensive.

Weir: No, no, no. Well, the deal, particularly with those tunes and
especially "Lost Sailor" -- first part was... I had that pretty much worked
up and I could sing it and play it, but I didn't know how a band was going
to approach that kind of rhythm and that kind of tune, particularly the
Grateful Dead. You know, it's like pulling teeth to get the drummers to play
a ballad without throwing all kinds of double-time and stuff like that
sometimes. And so it was sort of a wrestling match, but I finally got them
to settle down and play the ballad without making it into an Afro-Cuban war
dance.

Gans: It had plenty of dynamics; it had lots of peaks in it, lots of places
where it opened up.
Weir: And now they can play it just fine. We're still doing that with The
Dead.

Gans: You don't have to answer this, again, if you're not comfortable doing
it, but going back through the liner notes and reading your history here,
there was a moment when your songwriting relationship with Hunter dissolved
or ceased. What was up with that?

Weir: Well, he likes to have his lyrics they way he wrote them, and I would
take all kinds of liberties with them, and he wasn't real appreciative of
that and so he gave up on me for a while. I've got a couple of his lyrics
that I'm working up into tunes now, so we're back at it.

Gans: And now you have two bands and... I gotta say, Ratdog has really come
into its own in the last year or so. Bringing in Robin [Sylvester] on the
bass made a gigantic difference in this band's ability to jam and groove.

Weir: Well the grooves got a little deeper. Rob's a wonderful bass player --
Rob Wasserman -- but he's much, much better in small ensembles. It was
tough, it didn't feel right, to get him to pare down what he was doing for
the larger ensemble that Ratdog had become. So we parted ways.

Robin was one of the guys who auditioned for the bass slot, and he won,
hands down. He's a veteran; he really knows how to make a song sit up and
beg. He serves the song rather than trying to take it somewhere; he lets it
develop on its own rather than to take it somewhere with melodic development
and stuff like that.

Gans: Do you feel like you have the band you need now, with Ratdog?

Weir: Yeah, I think I have for some time, now. Right now, we're a week into
the tour and we're just now getting around to having done most of the tunes
in our repertoire. In preparation for the tour, instead of rehearsing all
the old tunes we figured, okay, we'll just get to them when we get to them
onstage. And we started working on newer stuff, a fair bit of which we've
done, and so the first week or two is often kind of rough because some of
the tunes are complicated and they require some woodshedding to bring 'em
back around, and the woodsheeding they get generally is the first few gigs.
If a song is really a challenge, we'll do it during a soundcheck. Otherwise,
if people more or less remember how it goes, we'll trust our luck and just
follow our footsteps through it the first time it comes out on the tour.

Gans: Do you write your set lists out ahead of time with this band?

Weir: Yeah, yeah.

Gans: But there's a nice continuity and a flow from song to song. A lot of
times a song will end and it'll just open up into this little sort of jam.

Weir: Right

Gans: So everybody knows where they're going, they're just not in any big
hurry to get there?

Weir: Yeah.

Gans: So what did you do in rehearsal?

Weir: We worked up a few old chestnuts, and we worked up some new music for
Ratdog, which isn't ready to go yet, but will be soon.
Gans: One thing that really glaringly absent from this 2-CD set is perhaps
the most deceptively simple composition in your book, "The Other One."

Weir: Yeah, you know, there's no studio recording of that. Maybe someday
we'll do a studio recording of it, just as an exercise -- we'll see.
There're probably thousands of live recordings of it. Wading through those
would be something of a chore.

Gans [laughing]: That's true. But somebody went through and picked out good
live versions of your tunes. I guess you could do a 3-CD set of just one
version of "The Other One" chained onto another.

Weir: And still not round out the top three percent of the performances.

Gans: Are there plans for Ratdog to record again?

Weir: I'm not sure we're ever gonna go in the studio again, because you can
do a, quote, "studio record" on the road. You can get your basic tracks live
these days, and if you want to sing into a real good microphone for your
vocals you do that during soundchecks.
Gans: So are you feeling pretty good about the whole thing these days?

Weir: Yeah, but what do you mean by the whole thing? My musical
presentation, I'm having a lot of fun, but I'd like to write more. I'd like
to get some songs finished. And I imagine I'll get around to it as soon as I
get back into my studio at home.

Gans: You don't try to write on the road?

Weir: A little bit, yeah.

Gans: You guys jam during soundchecks?

Weir: Oh, you bet.

Gans: It seemed like there where various things, occasionally an idea would
come from a jam. You'd hear something in a Grateful Dead jam and then later
it would turn out to be a song. Ever manage to recover ideas that way these
days?

Weir: We always have taped everything, so when a jam would turn out
particularly nicely I oftentimes would get a copy of that evening's
performance and go back and listen to that section and use that as a carpet
to put together a song on top of.

Gans: Also, it would seem in developing material with this band, everybody
has contributions to the arrangements. Again, I keep coming back to Evening
Moods, just really a great record that sort of seemed like it came out of
nowhere. Maybe just because, as you say, I didn't hear you playing it along
the way. But it' really strong material and it's great that you're featuring
that. Do you -- how to put this delicately -- do you feel pressure from the
audience to play old favorites and Jerry tunes instead of more recent
material?

Weir: Uhhhh, well, as you'll see tonight, it's sort of a juggling act. We
found in the late '90s that if we didn't do a certain number of the old
chestnuts, people weren't gonna come to hear the new stuff....

When Ratdog got started it was me and Rob Wasserman, then later we added Jay
the drummer and one by one the other pieces, but it started with me and Rob
Wasserman playing in the late 80's and it was a vacation from the Dead for
me. So I was doing hardly any Grateful Dead material; I was doing all other
stuff. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a vacation. When Jerry checked out
that was the kind of repertoire we had, and I just stayed on the road. And I
really wasn't ready to work up a bunch of Grateful Dead stuff. I don't think
I was emotionally ready to do that. We kept touring and kept our old
repertoire up and happening, and our audiences started to dwindle on account
of the fact that they weren't hearing the old chestnuts. And so we started
working them back up, and audiences got bigger. The band also got better,
for what it's worth, but I think that we've found a pretty good balance.

Gans: I want to talk a little bit about the bigger picture. What do you
think about what's going on in the world these days?

Weir: I think one thing you'll find if you come to a Ratdog show or a Dead
show in the next few months is we have voter registration booths out front.
I think if people value democracy, they had damn well better get out and
exercise their right to vote while their vote still means something. Because
it's pretty clear to me that otherwise, corporations are gonna take over our
government and that's gonna be that.

Gans: That's a subject that's of great importance to me as well, and in fact
I've been putting a message in at the end of every radio show that I produce
asking people to participate in democracy and register and pay attention and
vote. Is there anything else that you're doing above and beyond having the
booths at the shows to promote that idea?

Weir: Not yet. I'll get more hooked in as... actually, I'm planning on
getting more hooked into that whole process after I get off this tour, but
I'm not endorsing candidates -- at least yet -- and anyway I don't really
feel good about doing that onstage. But, at the same time, I don't think
there's gonna be much in the way of surprises if our audience gets out and
votes. For instance, if every Deadhead in the state of Florida had voted in
the last Presidential election, it'd be a very different world today. And so
if you don't think you make a difference, that's not right. You will make a
difference. Especially if you get your friends to register and vote as well.

Gans: I just saw something in the paper the other day, some fashion outfit
is selling t-shirts that say "Voting is for Old People"..

Weir: Wow. Jesus Christ. "Voting is for old people"?

Gans: I was one of those people who was nineteen on Election Day in '72; I
was one of the people who got to vote because they changed the law to let
eighteen-year-olds vote during the Vietnam War, and I've never missed an
election since.

Weir: Yeah, I never have, either.

Gans: And they've somehow over the years endeavored to make it so
unpleasant, the political process so disgusting, that they've made people
just not pay attention -- which means only the really motivated voters turn
out. We do need to get our side of the slate motivated somehow.

Weir: I'm still sort of thunderstuck by that t-shirt, "Voting is for Old
People."

Gans: It's supposedly meant to be ironic, or meant as a joke -- but it's the
sort of thing the idea can slip into people's heads and be taken literally.

Weir: Right

Gans: It is kinda creepy..

Weir: It is creepy