The first thing I want to talk to Bob Weir about is the dead.
Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.
“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.
We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.
Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. “He had a full-on Yosemite Sam mustache. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. On account of all the beard. (...)
“This motion”—he mimics strumming a guitar—“this one limited motion, repeated a million times, has turned my right rhomboid muscle into a strip of gristle that gets extremely painful after a couple of hours, to the point where it's like trying to play with an ice pick in your back. I went to doctors. I went to physical therapists. But the only thing that really worked was opiates, and so I got good and strung out on them. I would have to come home and go through withdrawal after every tour.”
He's always used alcohol, too—wine, in particular—to combat stage fright, a condition he says he shared with Garcia. “Every night, before I go on, it's I can't believe I put myself in this position again. Thousands of times.” He is so self-conscious about his playing before warming up that he needs to do so in solitude.
Weir's struggles became publicly apparent in 2013, when he collapsed onstage with Furthur. The next year, RatDog called off an entire tour. Today he is, to all appearances, healthy. He has replaced a drink before getting onstage with a shot of ginseng and, for the most part, pharmaceutical painkillers with herbal supplements. But he stops short of saying he's sober.
“I've tried that, and I'm not as happy as when I drink,” he says. He is adamant that he is able to have a glass of wine these days and stop there. Likewise, the occasional painkiller when the exercise and herbal remedies prove inadequate.
“There was a time, way back, when getting trashed and completely nuts was, I felt, my best approach to the blank page—which is a horrifying prospect in and of itself,” he says. “But I've been there and done that, and I don't think there is anything more to be found there for me. What I want now is to be in the same frame of mind when I wake up in the morning as when I went to bed. That's pretty much how I operate.”
This flies in the face of conventional thinking about how addiction works, but Weir says he's not cut out for traditional 12-step programs. “I'm not sure I buy the basic tenet, which is that you're powerless,” he says. “I think that we humans are enormously powerful, and I tend to think there's nothing that you can't do. It's a matter of self-mastery, and if self-mastery amounts to total abstinence, I think that's incomplete. I think you're selling yourself short. But I get that that's real dangerous for some people. So I don't talk about it much.” (...)
In New Orleans, Weir had told me a story to illustrate how, by the end, addiction and the pressures of fame had conspired to shrink Garcia's life.
“One time we came here after a long absence, and our publicist, who was also a good friend, asked Jerry how was it getting back to New Orleans, because it's such a great music town,” he said. “Jerry's answer was, ‘Well, one hotel's the same as another.’ That was pretty much the life he was given.”
We sat there for a few moments, listening to the bus's air-conditioning hum, sunlight peeking in around the edges of the blackout curtains.
“Yeah, well,” Weir said dryly, “I don't get out much, either.” (...)
There is a sequence in the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir in which various musical admirers struggle to describe Weir's style of rhythm guitar, falling back on such terms as “unique,” “unusual,” and “strange.” It would be easy to conclude that these were euphemisms, but it's apparently not so. When I ask Don Was about it, he is silent for several seconds.
“I've spent hundred of hours focused on him in the past few months, and he's still absolutely enigmatic to me,” Was says. “He's part Segovia and part John Lee Hooker, and he does both simultaneously—this exotic blend of the raw and the cerebral. He obliterates the lines between rhythm guitar and lead guitar. He doesn't just bash out chords—his rhythm parts are really melodic, so they also serve as lead parts. Sometimes I think there's a second guitarist sitting in, because he can also play separate lead lines and rhythm parts at the same time.”
This is reminiscent of Weir's description of his lifelong dyslexia, how words on the page, as he tells it, refuse to hold their shape and meaning, threatening always to go off in some new direction. “I let my brain run, I guess. I let it go and have more freedom than some folks do,” he says. “So if I'm reading a word, there are innumerable considerations to take into account about what I just read.”
According to Mickey Hart, “He became totally unique because he was in a band that was totally unique! Remember that Bobby had to play under the shadow of Jerry. It was a benevolent shadow, but that was challenging. Once Jerry got cranked up, he could really take a band away. So Bob had to learn a new way of playing. He had to re-invent himself as this partner, this other side to Jerry. He started playing strange.”
“I derived a lot of what I do on guitar from listening to piano players,” Weir says, citing McCoy Tyner's work with John Coltrane in particular. “He would constantly nudge and coax amazing stuff out of Coltrane.”
He says Garcia is still present when he plays. “I can hear him: ‘Don't go there. Don't go there,’ or ‘Go here. Go here.’ And either I listen or I don't, depending on how I'm feeling. But it's always ‘How's old Jerry going to feel about this riff?’ Sometimes I know he'd hate it. But he'd adjust.”
Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.
“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.
We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. “He had a full-on Yosemite Sam mustache. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. On account of all the beard. (...)
“This motion”—he mimics strumming a guitar—“this one limited motion, repeated a million times, has turned my right rhomboid muscle into a strip of gristle that gets extremely painful after a couple of hours, to the point where it's like trying to play with an ice pick in your back. I went to doctors. I went to physical therapists. But the only thing that really worked was opiates, and so I got good and strung out on them. I would have to come home and go through withdrawal after every tour.”
He's always used alcohol, too—wine, in particular—to combat stage fright, a condition he says he shared with Garcia. “Every night, before I go on, it's I can't believe I put myself in this position again. Thousands of times.” He is so self-conscious about his playing before warming up that he needs to do so in solitude.
Weir's struggles became publicly apparent in 2013, when he collapsed onstage with Furthur. The next year, RatDog called off an entire tour. Today he is, to all appearances, healthy. He has replaced a drink before getting onstage with a shot of ginseng and, for the most part, pharmaceutical painkillers with herbal supplements. But he stops short of saying he's sober.
“I've tried that, and I'm not as happy as when I drink,” he says. He is adamant that he is able to have a glass of wine these days and stop there. Likewise, the occasional painkiller when the exercise and herbal remedies prove inadequate.
“There was a time, way back, when getting trashed and completely nuts was, I felt, my best approach to the blank page—which is a horrifying prospect in and of itself,” he says. “But I've been there and done that, and I don't think there is anything more to be found there for me. What I want now is to be in the same frame of mind when I wake up in the morning as when I went to bed. That's pretty much how I operate.”
This flies in the face of conventional thinking about how addiction works, but Weir says he's not cut out for traditional 12-step programs. “I'm not sure I buy the basic tenet, which is that you're powerless,” he says. “I think that we humans are enormously powerful, and I tend to think there's nothing that you can't do. It's a matter of self-mastery, and if self-mastery amounts to total abstinence, I think that's incomplete. I think you're selling yourself short. But I get that that's real dangerous for some people. So I don't talk about it much.” (...)
In New Orleans, Weir had told me a story to illustrate how, by the end, addiction and the pressures of fame had conspired to shrink Garcia's life.
“One time we came here after a long absence, and our publicist, who was also a good friend, asked Jerry how was it getting back to New Orleans, because it's such a great music town,” he said. “Jerry's answer was, ‘Well, one hotel's the same as another.’ That was pretty much the life he was given.”
We sat there for a few moments, listening to the bus's air-conditioning hum, sunlight peeking in around the edges of the blackout curtains.
“Yeah, well,” Weir said dryly, “I don't get out much, either.” (...)
There is a sequence in the 2014 documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir in which various musical admirers struggle to describe Weir's style of rhythm guitar, falling back on such terms as “unique,” “unusual,” and “strange.” It would be easy to conclude that these were euphemisms, but it's apparently not so. When I ask Don Was about it, he is silent for several seconds.
“I've spent hundred of hours focused on him in the past few months, and he's still absolutely enigmatic to me,” Was says. “He's part Segovia and part John Lee Hooker, and he does both simultaneously—this exotic blend of the raw and the cerebral. He obliterates the lines between rhythm guitar and lead guitar. He doesn't just bash out chords—his rhythm parts are really melodic, so they also serve as lead parts. Sometimes I think there's a second guitarist sitting in, because he can also play separate lead lines and rhythm parts at the same time.”
This is reminiscent of Weir's description of his lifelong dyslexia, how words on the page, as he tells it, refuse to hold their shape and meaning, threatening always to go off in some new direction. “I let my brain run, I guess. I let it go and have more freedom than some folks do,” he says. “So if I'm reading a word, there are innumerable considerations to take into account about what I just read.”
According to Mickey Hart, “He became totally unique because he was in a band that was totally unique! Remember that Bobby had to play under the shadow of Jerry. It was a benevolent shadow, but that was challenging. Once Jerry got cranked up, he could really take a band away. So Bob had to learn a new way of playing. He had to re-invent himself as this partner, this other side to Jerry. He started playing strange.”
“I derived a lot of what I do on guitar from listening to piano players,” Weir says, citing McCoy Tyner's work with John Coltrane in particular. “He would constantly nudge and coax amazing stuff out of Coltrane.”
He says Garcia is still present when he plays. “I can hear him: ‘Don't go there. Don't go there,’ or ‘Go here. Go here.’ And either I listen or I don't, depending on how I'm feeling. But it's always ‘How's old Jerry going to feel about this riff?’ Sometimes I know he'd hate it. But he'd adjust.”
by Brett Martin, GQ | Read more:
Image: Adrian Boot
[ed. A greatly underrated guitarist.]
[ed. A greatly underrated guitarist.]
