One envisions the members of The Dead coming from another dimension. One sees them materialize on a stage just long enough to create the music that inspired millions of fans to remove themselves from the rituals of daily life and create a world to call their own. Then one imagines the band dissolving back into the mythos, where energy and ideas are communicated by producing sonic landscapes.
The impression of other-worldly intervention intensifies when you talk to any of the more ardent Dead Heads. He may find bootlegs of a show more important than food or soap. His house may serve the sole purpose of containing his recordings and his recording equipment. No other band- and very few religions- have been able to inculcate such fanatical acolytes.
This phenomenon becomes less mystical, but more ponderous when it becomes clear that the members of the band had no intention of creating such an obsessive reaction. It is possible that this is part of the reason that Bob Weir throws so much energy into RatDog. Unburdened with a colossal cultural spectacle, the music and the mirth become the message. Any other member of one of the most famous bands on Earth might be accused of dallying in a side project. Nobody calls RatDog a side project. When Bob tunes up for a show with his other band, he’s playing for keeps.
The Crier snagged Bob on break while he was rehearsing for the current tour.

TVP: So you just stepped out of a hefty rehearsal?
Bob Weir: We’re in rehearsal right now and I’m taking a little break.
TVP: Do you feel exhilarated or a little blown out from a hefty workout with the band?
BW: It gets your blood up a bit.
TVP: You’re working on a set that you’re going to dismantle in any number of ways while you’re on tour. How do you rehearse that?
BW: The deal is we rehearse tunes, and we play what you could call little exercises to see what emerges. The basic set is different every night. In the thousand or so shows we’ve done I don’t think you’ll find the same set list. Even if we did play the same set twice they wouldn’t sound remotely alike.
TVP: Rat Dogs tenth anniversary is coming up. How different is touring with Rat Dog from touring with the Dead?
BW: I don’t think it’s all that different on stage. We state a theme and take it for a little walk. That’s what we do, same as The Dead. Some of the material is different, and the guys are different. The chemistry of the players is necessarily quite different. Aside from that, not that much is different.
TVP: There’s a significant cross-fertilization of sound in RatDog. How did you dig up that talent for that band? Everyone seems of a piece, while contributing in very different ways.
BW: We ended up with the players we’ve got by using the left foot/right foot approach and stumbling our way into them. It just happened.
TVP: There’s a natural dynamic and a natural personality to the sound. Nothing seems forced.
BW: I didn’t decide who I wanted and go out and get them, I found my way into working with them one by one. Over the first five years of the band we tried various people out and what we learned early on was that having people who weren’t local was difficult, we needed to get together at the drop of a hat. Somebody would get an idea and we’d all get together.
TVP: The shows are selling out on the east coast. That’s not happening a lot these days. To what do you attribute that kind of success?
BW: We have a good time. We jump, and the kids jump too.
TVP: The synergy between the band and the audience?
BW: Same as it ever was.
TVP: People always describe going to one of your shows as almost a warp of space and time- a sense of otherness. You don’t hear concerts talked about that way, usually.
BW: We live in another realm. That’s where we do our living. Day-to-day stuff, we’re normal humans, but when we work, we go somewhere else. Mickey Hart used to say that we’re in the transportation business- we transport ourselves and anybody else that’s there with us. The audience is part of this endeavor- we’re all going somewhere. That’s the whole point of the evening.
TVP: You’ve lived in that realm for a pretty large chunk of your life. What has it taught you?
BW: It has taught me a bit about who I am, and what it is like to be me, and what it could be like for other humans to be them. The place that we go- when we’re doing a show- is more real for me than anyplace else.
TVP: Do you ever feel like you’re contending with your own legacy?
BW: Always. Any artist is going to have that, good or bad. You’re tied to your legacy but at the same time you have to constantly outdo yourself. It is jihad in a classical sense.
TVP: It has to be gratifying too to have such an imposing magnitude of work behind you, and you’re continuing to create, to add to it.
BW: When we’re doing older material, the challenge as well as the payoff is to recreate it.
TVP: That can’t be easy considering the transformations even the most recognized, most standard material has undergone under the tutelage of the Dead.
BW: The more you love a song, the easier it is to do. The more that you love a song, the more it will show you about itself.
TVP: Looking back over your life do you feel a certain responsibility for spawning at least two generations of improvisational musicians and an entire culture that goes along with it?
BW: I don’t think we spawned it. The Jazz tradition far predates us, and really we just brought that modus operandi into what you would call popular music, though I think this whole Jam Band ilk existed apart from popular. When we started off we were playing popular music. By virtue of the fact that we were listening to a lot of Jazz and a lot of Classical for that matter, we just started drifting into a practice where we used more improvisation. We stretched stuff because that’s where our ears told us to go. We found ourselves taking the music on a little walk in the woods. We started applying it to different kinds of scales and different kinds of lyrical renditions.
TVP: Do you ever look back with pure amazement at the amazing music you helped to create?
BW: I don’t often listen to stuff from the past, but someone will play me something they think will be of particular note to me, and I admit to being kind of tickled by what I hear.
TVP: There are thousands of people, perhaps millions, in basements around the world listening to concerts that were recorded twenty, thirty or more years ago. I believe that that’s an unprecedented phenomenon.
BW: If it gives them direction and it spurs them, if it opens up their creative flow, I couldn’t be too much more pleased.
TVP: There is also a culture of social consciousness and activism that comes along with the tradition. Do you feel that that’s being kept up?
BW: I feel like we did our part last summer and fall, but it might not have been enough. We’re still in deep shit with the drift of our country and its leadership is going. There may or may not be anything we can do about that.
TVP: It may be too late.
BW: As far as I can see the other end of the deal is that uneducated people tend to breed more than educated people. The people who are actually creating the wealth in this country will be increasingly less represented in our government. People want to be spoon-fed what to think, want to be told things that will make them feel good. By virtue of their numbers, those kind of people are going to run the show. The people who know how to tell them what they want to hear will be leading them. The future looks pretty rosy for people like that, not for people like us.
TVP: You have to concede that your efforts are part of the solution.
BW: There could be a solution if more of us get dedicated to being active. It may be that democracy is a dead deal, but we’ll see.
TVP: Democracy has always been contingent on the comprehension level of the populace.
BW: Yup, if people don’t want to know, and they’ve demonstrated that they don’t want to know. Furthermore, you can’t tell them. People are very comfortable being willfully ignorant.
TVP: I’ve always tried to understand who an entire world view can be conveyed through music.
BW: I’ve got no answer for you on that. I don’t know where we caught it, but it sort of caught fire with us and the people who listen to us, and lend their energies to us.
TVP: It strikes me that its all been done in a spirit of mirth.
BW: And in the spirit of quest.
TVP: At this stage of your life you find yourself at the reigns of an economic powerhouse, but still having very crucial social concerns. Is there a balancing act there?
BW: I just try to live my life properly, according to what life has taught me, and hope the other peoples’ lives teach them similar things.
TVP: RaDog is easily as energetic as any band out there. You have a really demanding schedule, you’re know for exciting, flawless performances. Do you see yourself performing for the rest of your life?
BW: Close to twenty years ago I went to the Venetian Room in the Paramount Hotel here in San Francisco to see Count Basie. They were wonderful. They sang like angels. They had an eighteen-year-old drummer but everybody else in that band had been there close to fifty years. They had a cohesiveness that you can’t get any other way. They sung like angels, it was an incredible night. After the show, since that was the end of his run in San Francisco, he packed up his suitcase and flew home to Florida, put his feet up and checked out. When I read that in the paper my jaw dropped, I caught Count Basie’s last show. I felt like Isort of got passed a torch there. Whether or not that’s true, I came to the realization that I have nothing better to do, so I can’t imagine not playing. What great musician ever retired?
TVP: What’s exciting that you’re listening to now?
BW: Basically what I listen to is Jazz and Classical music, and what we call World music, but actually might be East Indian Classical, or African Classical, which is basically drum stuff. When I listen to music I like to go as far as I can get from where I live, otherwise its not a vacation for me. Branford came through town the other night with a really swell quartet. The did “A Love Supreme” and they really nailed it. It was sublime.
TVP: You’ve been performing longer than many of your listeners have been alive-
BW: Most of them-
TVP: Your comprehension of music would have been continuing to grow over that entire period. Not always true with listeners. Do you ever find it challenging to maintain a kind of relevance to your fans?
BW: I have a great deal of difficulty with the fact that a lot of Dead Heads won’t listen to anything else. To me that’s fundamentalism and I’m philosophically opposed to that. The fact is that they’re missing the point. IF they can’t hear our influences, they should attempt to, and then go there. Jerry, Phil, myself, all of us were eclectic in the extreme in our tastes. We would go to the farthest reaches to get music because once you develop a facility with your instrument people are going to hear what you’re listening to in the music. People will hear what I’m listening to in the music that I play. I want to take them somewhere.
TVP: You’ve never stopped, for a moment, creating music.
BW: It is my great love.
TVP: What do you do to keep it fresh, to not box yourself in?
BW: Generally speaking, If I start to feel boxed in, its my own damn fault. Nevertheless, when that happens, the music always takes care of that for me. I’ll hear something out of the corner of my ear that grabs my attention and it’ll spark me up again. I make every attempt to be eclectic. I think I was born that was, but I make every attempt to live up to that,
TVP: Where do you feel the music going right now?
BW: I don’t listen to enough popular music to really have any notion of where its headed. I know my own music- at least a dozen major projects- to learn this kind of feel, this kind of scale, this or that harmonic development. That keeps me busy, that and just chasing whims until they open up to kick in some new revelation.
TVP: And you’re probably still going places you never imagined prior to having gone there.
BW: Yup. I try do that on a daily basis. Sometimes, on a weekly or a monthly basis, something big arrives for me.
TVP: You exist in a world that is constantly expanding, changing.
BW: If its not, I’ dying.
TVP: Music itself is in a way concretized for listeners. Is there a way you manage to convey that expansion to listeners? If you compare the world-view of your fans to that of a typical CPA for example, it does seem to be a great deal more encompassing.
BW: Or even certain musicians. I saw a television special, I’ve always been curious about this particular performer. She was doing her act and it was a great big, fully orchestrated act, but all the songs were predetermined and all the passages within the songs were predetermined. I watched with some amount of fascination to see how people could actually live through that kind of experience. I couldn’t, I’d go completely fucking nuts playing a note-for-note show every night.
TVP: You’ve seen Rock and Roll become part of the establishment. You may have been invited to a few ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
BW: Yeah, all that stuff. I don’t know how much real Rock and Roll is available these days. I have a fairly classical notion of what that is. If you want to listen to real Rock and Roll, listen to Chick Berry, Little Richard. That was Rock and Roll. A lot of what gets played these days doesn’t have the lilt. It’s more marching music than anything else.
TVP: Is it still possible to subvert the more negative aspects of authority through music?
BW: That’s what I’m up to.
TVP: You’ve seen a lot of the developments that evolved from the sixties get systematically erased.
BW: Yup.
TVP: But you’ve also seen literally third generation members of a counter culture that exists in opposition to that.
BW: There’s going to be a struggle for a bit. All we have budding in this country right now is fascism in the pure sense. Study up on the what the Romans, who invented fascism, did and compare that to what happened in Washington recently when the rule of law was replaced by the rule of people [Ed. Note: In the Terri Schiavo case]. People were running the show rather than laws. When a State Supreme Court can be overturned by a bunch of people who have an ‘in’ to the President, and the President tries to do that to please a constituency of his; that is definitively fascism.
TVP: There have been relatively narrow pockets of history when fascism wasn’t the rule.
BW: Well, Absolute Monarchy is not fascism. There have been numerous dictatorships that weren’t fascistic. If you have a fairly illiterate population, fascism or a dictatorship will be the logical result, not Rule of Law.
TVP: I suspect that over-literalism is the source of all fascism, and that anything that can’t be easily defined or processed, anything with a certain amount of irony simply causes fascistic ideology to wilt. In a literal sense, creating something that people truly enjoy something that allows people to step outside of themselves, is a political act.
BW: And they will try to shut us down, I’m pretty sure. It was done in Germany. For what it’s worth, abject literalism goes hand-in-hand fundamentalism. Once again you have a people with no or limited imagination, and therefore are almost necessarily drawn to literalism because they can’t accept ambiguity. They can’t deal with it.
TVP: Who other than yourself is carrying the torch of what you and The Dead initialized.
BW: There are lots of bands, lots of artists and writers, so many that I can’t weigh in because I’d be neglecting this or that person. There are plenty of us around.
TVP: Anything you want to bring up?
BW: Not really, time to get back to rehearsal.