2000

Downloaded from http://jambands.com/mar01/features/feature1.html March 2001


                  Feature Article - March 2001

    [Image] Strange Houses - Bob Weir Drops Science [Image]

                        by Jesse Jarnow

 At first, Bob Weir's Ratdog seemed temporal. There was an air
 of side-projectedness around them, something to do - musically
 and socially - until the next big thing came around in
 Grateful Dead-land. In 1998, it seemed as if the Other Ones
 were it, the entity that would keep things moving and alive.
 After the strange splintering of the Dead into various
 factions, that wish for unity evaporated into a puff.

 When it dissolved, Ratdog was still there and had evolved into
 something unique and interesting. Ratdog didn't seem to take
 notice and just kept on touring. At this point, another Ratdog
 tour isn't really a big deal, at least so far as news goes,
 just as the Dead had their own regular cycles of touring.
 Ratdog is musically weird -- pun recognized: like a building
 with a fundamentally irregular architectural principle at the
 center of it with everything built around that.

 Now going into their sixth full year as a band, Weir's guitar
 playing is as angular as ever. In an almost paradoxical way,
 he has moved from his role in the Dead as a subtle
 movement-shaper to a full-on band leader, conducting the
 ensemble on-stage and off. Weir continues on as one of the
 most inventive rhythm guitar players in popular music, shaping
 improvisation in utterly mind-twisting ways. Now if they'd
 only turn him up in the mix...

 JJ: What kind of changes do you notice in Ratdog from tour to
 tour?

 BW: Well, the predictable stuff, really. The more we play the
 better we get, the more we learn each other's moves and how to
 work off of them.

 JJ: How much have the personnel changes effected the form of
 the band musically?

 BW: The personnel of the band is everything. Whereas, three or
 four years ago, we had Johnnie Johnson and Matthew Kelly, our
 strong suit was more or less blues-oriented stuff, and now
 with a bunch of guys who are basically coming from a jazz
 heritage, we tend to drift a little towards that direction.

 JJ: Do you plan to do anything different before you go out on
 a new tour or does it just sort of evolve?

 BW: What we plan to spend a few weeks rehearsing before we go
 out on tour, working up both new stuff and reaching back into
 the bag of chestnuts as well. That's about as complicated as
 our plans get. Like I said, the more we play, the better we
 get. What our experiences have taught us is the more we play,
 the more stuff comes.

 JJ: How is a Ratdog rehearsal structured?

 BW: We just get in and start playing. It depends. If somebody
 can't make it, we'll have some sort of sectional. If the bass
 player can't make it for one reason or another, then we'll do
 vocal rehearsals. Generally speaking, everybody is there and
 we just get started. We'll break up the day into three parts:
 going back over old stuff; going into whatever new stuff, "new
 old stuff" shall we say, that we're going to pull out; and
 just letting fly and seeing what we can bring out of the air.

 JJ: How do you decide what old stuff needs working on?

 BW: It's kind of a democratic process. Whoever has a strong
 notion about what they want to do, we'll generally follow
 that. That means that whoever that is is passionate about this
 or that, and we'll always follow that.

 JJ: You've been playing these songs for quite a while now.
 What do you learn about a song like Playin' In The Band after
 playing it for a long a period as you have? What new things
 come out of it?

 BW: Playin' In The Band is a particular challenge, having been
 there so much. It's the key of D. And what can you do with the
 key of D? Where is it gonna wanna go? That takes a lot of
 work, actually. We have to listen to each other acutely, and
 if somebody suggests something that sounds new, we have to
 understand what they're up to and we have to go there with
 them right away. That's the way you get a new occurrence, a
 new place to go visit. The possibilities having played the
 song God knows how many times, there are always gonna be more
 possibilities. But there's a huge backlog of places we've
 already been with it, and that just gets larger and larger as
 the years go by. We don't wanna go back to any of those old
 places, 'cause that's where you find the joy of discovery.

 JJ: What kind of historical sense do you have while playing?
 Are you acutely conscious of those places?

 BW: When we're playing - and I speak for myself, and I think I
 can speak for everybody - I go to an entirely other realm
 where the world and my life continuum is basically all the
 time I've spent onstage with these songs, and now with these
 guys. Like yesterday, for me, becomes very truly the last time
 I was onstage. Everything else just sort of falls away.
 Couched in that perspective, it's pretty easy to remember
 where you've been and what you've done. There's not a whole
 lot else to think about. For that reason, it becomes easy to
 remember where you've been, what you've done, and to, at
 least, have that there for reference?

 JJ: When does that moment begin when you step outside your
 normal bounds?

 BW: It's hard to exactly say when, but generally within the
 first couple of tunes. Sometimes, right off the bat, sometimes
 with the first note. Sometimes, it takes a little push and
 shove to get into that timeless space. We get there pretty
 regularly. But, like I say, it's hard to say when exactly
 that's gonna occur.

 JJ: Do you differentiate critically between spaces in that
 zone? Or is it completely unconscious once you're there?

 BW: I try to keep it as free of contrivance as possible.
 That's not to say that I'm totally successful, but I try not
 to come up with a good idea and try to impose it on the moment
 but, rather, let the idea impose itself on me. I try not to
 decide where to take it. I try to be as open as I possibly
 can.

 JJ: This obviously speaks a lot towards improvisation. How
 does it work towards a song? The singing of a specific lyric?
 Is it a similar kind of mental space?

 BW: Absolutely. Every time we play a tune we're gonna focus on
 a slightly different aspect, a slightly different facet. It's
 like light shining through a prism or something. Coming from
 one angle it rainbows out in a certain way on the other side.
 But if light is coming from a different angle, it does a very
 different thing on a different side. For me, a song can do
 that, if I'm concentrating.

 For example, on a given night, I'm having a particularly swell
 time with my consonants - my s's, my t's, stuff like that -
 maybe I can hear them well, they sound real distinct to me. At
 that point, I can use them percussively and emotively. That's
 gonna color my perception about the whole rest of the song and
 how I'm gonna deliver it. The whole rest of the song is gonna
 color my approach, or my touch, to my guitar playing. The
 lines that come out of me are gonna be really heavily
 influenced by just this one little thing. And then everybody
 else who is listening to me is gonna be influenced by this new
 perspective that I'm having on the song.

 Now, you take that and multiply it by six - because
 everybody's going through those little anomalies on a nightly
 basis - and you can see where a song would be very different
 from performance to performance.

 JJ: How do you relate to the content of a lyric while you're
 singing it?

 BW: Ahhhh, I try to just let it reveal itself to me. Each
 song, every story, is multi-layered. That's pretty much the
 nature of a story. On a given evening, one layer of the story
 will just jump out of me, and I'm gonna live mostly there. I'm
 gonna be doing the story from that vantage point, from that
 point of view. Once again, that colors my perception.

 JJ: You do tunes by a number of different lyricists, Barlow
 and Hunter and a fair
2000
 amount of Dylan; do you differentiate
 between lyric styles while you're singing, or does it just
 matter what song you're singing at that particular moment?

 BW: The lyric styles are most influenced by the guy that's
 singing the song. By that, I don't mean me. I mean the guy in
 the song, the character. They're character driven, for the
 most part. And, that character... I won't say on a nightly
 basis, but almost year to year, that character continues to
 grow and change and all that kinda stuff. That character has a
 different sort of mode of expression, a different personality.
 If you check in, let's see, what's a good example of this? Any
 of the tunes, actually, you'll hear that - generally speaking,
 in my tunes - the characters in the tunes, their delivery is
 softening over the years. Maybe that's because I'm getting
 older and some of that is leaking into these characters. They
 get different.

 JJ: Do you have a similar historical sense with the lyrics as
 you do with the music where you're entering the same kind of
 space?

 BW: Yeah, absolutely. I won't say it's a make believe realm,
 because I'm not entirely sure it's make believe. I think it's
 every bit as real as this realm we consider reality, but it's
 also every bit as fluid as this realm we consider reality.

 JJ: How often do you find a lyric relating to your everyday
 routine?

 BW: Rarely.

 JJ: Really?

 BW: Yeah. Well, until I go there and that's my everyday
 existence.

 JJ: Huh. Do you consider yourself an actor, then, from time to
 time?

 BW: Yeah. Joseph Campbell actually called me a "conjurer".

 JJ: Different songs call for different kinds of treatments, in
 terms of improvisation and delivery. Some songs get short
 treatments, some get big open-ended things appended to them.
 How do you determine what gets what?

 BW: Once again, I let the song dictate that to me. Let's say,
 a song like Good Morning Little School Girl: it hasn't opened
 up and exposed a whole new region, a whole new place to take
 it yet. Maybe it will someday. It seems that something like
 that is best delivered in a succinct manner, to me. We could
 jam on any tune endlessly, but some songs - for some reason -
 seem to lend themselves to that to others than other tunes.
 Like I said, I'm trying to be more open to the possibility to
 that almost any of the tunes that we're playing could open up.
 That's one of the things that we're going to be looking into
 in the near future. JJ: Still waiting for the 25-minute
 Mexicali Blues. (Both laugh.) You've integrated a number of
 Garcia/Hunter tunes into your catalogue over the past few
 years. How did you choose those specific tunes?

 BW: I was just lonesome for them. And there are more coming
 for that matter.

 JJ: Are there different qualities that make you want to do a
 Garcia/Hunter tune rather than a tune by another artist? Or is
 a good song just a good song?

 BW: Well, there's a little bit of that, that it's a good song.
 But, with the Garcia/Hunter stuff, I know that stuff. I know
 where they live. I know where those tunes live. I grew up with
 them. They grew with me.

 JJ: How much planning do you do before a show?

 BW: For the time being, we're gonna be working off a setlist,
 I'm pretty sure. Maybe towards the end of this upcoming tour
 we won't be. I keep hoping that that's gonna be the case. As
 our show gets longer and longer and we keep working up more
 and more new material. For the most part, I know all these
 tunes, the guys in the band can use a little heads-up with
 regards to what tunes we're doing on a given night so they can
 brush up on them. I'll generally do a setlist in the morning
 when I get up and then we'll run over whatever anybody wants
 to run over in the soundcheck and see if we can stick to it in
 the evening.

 JJ: Do you plan out segues?

 BW: We plan out a lot of segues, and a lot of it doesn't
 happen exactly as we planned it. A lot of the segues just sort
 of emerge, or just sort of arrive, however they will. Yeah, we
 do plan segues and stuff like that, but a lot of the fun of it
 is... We can talk it down a little bit, but we very, very
 rarely try to play through a segue, 'cause that takes the
 sport out of it.

 JJ: Does the nature of having a setlist tend to squash
 creative tendencies?

 BW: No, 'cause as often as not the setlist ends up being a
 pack of lies, anyway.

 JJ: In that case, what goes into calling a song?

 BW: If I hear something, or somebody else hears something, and
 just starts laying in a line that's suggestive of that song,
 or that place to take it, and if everybody's astute and
 listening, if everybody's on his toes, we'll go there.

 JJ: How would you describe your style as a band leader?

 BW: Laissez-faire. I do not rule with an iron fist. It would
 take the joy out of it for me. I know that some guys like to
 have everything just exactly so. I like surprises. The more I
 dictate, the less I get by way of surprises.

 JJ: What do you find needs dictating? How much structure do
 you have to put in?

 BW: Precious little, at this point. These guys I'm playing
 with are pretty good, they can it. The stuff I tend to dictate
 is "okay, it's time to pick it up, it's time to slow it up,
 it's time to pick it up dynamically, it's time to bring it
 down dynamically, it's time to stretch it out" and then,
 towards the end of the show, "it's time to bring it in",
 'cause I'm the guy who's aware of the clock. That's my biggest
 job, to make sure we don't go overtime.

 JJ: What dictates the one set structure of the show, as
 opposed to the having the two set thing, which you did with
 the Dead for as long as you did?

 BW: What used to dictate was the fact that we had an opening
 act and it didn't seem to me that people came to our shows to
 not have music -- though I imagine that some people do come to
 mill about and see their pals and socialize. For most folks,
 the crux of the matter is music. If you have an opening act,
 then there's a break between the opening act and the
 headliner. In that case, one setbreak is enough, no matter
 who's there.

 In this upcoming tour, I don't think we're gonna have an
 opening act. We'll be playing three, three-and-a-half hours,
 in which case we will take a setbreak. It'll be a two set
 show. It'll be pretty much the same as the Grateful Dead
 format. I'm not entirely sure if we wanna go a lot more than
 three and a half hours. I know that, for me, more than that's
 just more than the human spirit can endure -- though I know
 that a lot of folks out there cranked on ecstasy wanna go all
 night. We're gonna do what we can do to the best of our
 ability. A three and a half hour show will be plenty, I think.

 JJ: How conscious are you of pacing the show in terms of song
 choices?

 BW: I take that into consideration a fair bit. A show has to
 breathe. You can't just keep slamming the audience all night.
 I once went to a Bruce Springsteen show, about three and a
 half hours, and it was one uptempo tune after another. I was
 way ready to get out of there about two-thirds of the way into
 the show. He's good. The music good: it was well-rendered,
 everything was excellent, it was just too much. That was, I'm
 told, a peculiar night for him and, in general, he paced it a
 little better than that. I was glad to hear that. You have to
 bring it up, you have to let it fall back down dynamically
 speaking, a fair bit to, in my estimation, to create a
 complete experience.

 JJ: Towards the last 10 or 15 years, Dead shows definitely had
 their own language in terms of the way the sets were
 structured. Do you find the same thing happening to Ratdog?

 BW: We'll see. Well, our second sets...

 JJ: Or just the second half of the show...

 BW: We're getting there. We don't have as firm a handle on
 that as the Dead did, but then we haven't been playing for 30
 years. Nonetheless, we're getting there. We're getting a much
 better handle on how to do that than we had a 
1274
year ago, two
 years ago, for sure.

 JJ: Are you looking for that structure? Do you feel there is a
 perfect structure for a show? BW: I think the Dead moreless
 naturally stumbled on that format. I want to underscore the
 word "naturally". There's probably a slightly different way
 that Ratdog is going to end up doing it, just because Ratdog
 is a different outfit, but I think it'll be pretty close to
 that natural format that the Dead came up with.

 JJ: Your role as guitarist in the Dead evolved very
 organically over the years, just as a product of you being
 there, but Ratdog seems to be moreless sculpted around your
 playing. How has that effected your playing?

 BW: I know that I'm way more upfront with Ratdog, so I don't
 know. I don't change much of anything. It's just a matter of
 attitude or awareness. It's only a matter of percentages, but
 people are hanging a little bit more off of what I'm doing in
 this ensemble. That, I guess, would tend to frame what I'm
 doing a little more succinctly.

 JJ: How has your guitar playing changed in recent years? Do
 you perceive it changing?

 BW: Let me think about that. (Long pause.) I imagine it's
 changing a bit, but maybe I'm a little too close to the forest
 to be able to count the trees here. I do pretty much what I've
 always done, which is play architecturally. I try to paint
 with broad strokes, play big support lines for people to hang
 stuff off of. That has not changed. There are gonna be scales
 and modes that I play these days that I'm learning, say, from
 our sax player or whatever. But that's always gonna be in
 flux.

 JJ: Continuing the metaphor of architecture, how do you
 envision this overall building as something different from the
 Dead?

 BW: (Long pause.) Well, we got a sax, that's different. We got
 one drummer, rather than two. (Pause.) The biggest difference,
 I think, is that the Dead were - by and large - older
 musicians. I grew up with Jerry, I grew up with the tunes,
 with the influences that Jerry and I wordlessly could
 communicate about. "I'm going to a Bill Monroe kind of place
 here" as opposed to any of a number of other bluegrass kinds
 of places. Those kinds of differentiations. I'm never gonna
 share that with anybody else, so we don't have quite that
 library, that archive, of influences.

 Over the years, I've been trying to - and will continue to try
 to - turn the guys in the band onto some of my influences and
 learn what their influences are. Especially the guys in the
 jazz background go way deep into stuff that I was never
 particularly aware of. In years to come, we may come up with
 an archive of influences that in some ways rivals what we had
 going in the Grateful Dead. But it's gonna take some time to
 build that up.

 JJ: Do you tap into any degree of that comfort level when you
 play with the Other Ones?

 BW: Ah, not so much. It's a simple matter of how much time
 I've spent with them. I haven't spent that much time with the
 Other Ones, which is also a revolving personnel situation as
 well. We didn't really get a chance to camp out and learn to
 live with each other.

 JJ: Are there any plans for the Other Ones, for that project?

 BW: Not right now. It's back-burnered.

 JJ: A random question before tying up: how you do you feel
 about Dead cover bands, Dead tribute bands? Every town seems
 to have one now. BW: I'm kinda tickled about that. I expect
 they're having fun, 'cause we really had fun with that format,
 when we did that. If they're taking up where we left off,
 they've gotta be having fun as well, which is good: that's the
 whole point. There's a line of thought that holds that the
 Grateful Dead were the authors of the jamband aesthetic.
 Really, the jamband aesthetic is an outgrowth of American
 musical tradition: state a theme and work it. You find it in
 blues, you find it in jazz, you find it in the heart of
 American music. For the last couple of decades, that aestethic
 kind of disappeared into the background of general popular
 musical offerings. It's great to see that coming back out.

 JJ: Where do you see the form going?

 BW: I wish I could tell you. Actually, I'm not sure I wish I
 could tell you. I'm actually happy to let it just tell me.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------
 Jesse Jarnow has seen rain, and he's seen rain, but - WHOA -
 here come rain.


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