2000 Bob Weir: I guess *I* named the festival. We were kickin' stuff around and I tossed up the idea of "Furthur." Now, I left home when I was like 17, 16 or 17, on a bus called Furthur, and this is a bus tour, so -- it seemed like, uh, why not call it the Furthur Tour? David Gans: Are you working up new material for this? BW: Uh-huh. DG: Are you bringing in any of your Grateful Dead material? BW: A little bit. I mean, you know, people are gonna want to hear some Grate- ful Dead stuff. We're not -- we can't live in the past, but we can kinda visit it every now and again. DG: Well, now, I wouldn't consider that living in the past. Some of that material is still very much alive. BW: Oh, yeah. What we're gonna be bringing around is the stuff that I really can't feature, you know, spending the rest of my days not playing. But like I say, we're not gonna base our set -- we're not a Dead cover band, you know. DG: BW: For what it's worth, there are bands out there who *do* that, and who've got a few years on us, and are probably better at it than we're ever gonna be, so we'll leave that to them. DG: I thought I heard a rumor somewhere that you might have even been doing a couple of Jerry's tunes in this new configuration. BW: There is a possibility that'll happen. DG: Really. BW: Yeah, we're kicking some of that stuff around. DG: Great. Do you have any brand new material for this? BW: Yeah. There will be plenty. DG: So what's the lineup for Ratdog now? BW: The way it looks right now, Ratdog proper is gonna be myself, and Rob Wasserman on upright bass, and Matthew Kelly on harmonica and a little guitar, and Jay Lane on drums, and Johnny Johnson on piano. DG: Talk to me about hooking up with Johnny Johnson. BW: It just happened, you know. DG: Tell the audience who Johnny Johnson is. BW: Johnny Johnson's an old blues piano player, blues and rock'n'roll piano player. We've got a guy who's 72 years old in our band now. And that ain't gonna slow us down, either, because he -- every time you try to call him, he's on a different continent. Anyway, he was Chuck Berry's bandmate way back when, and as legend has it he was the guy that "Johnny B. Goode" was written about. He was the piano player. If you listen to all those old Chuck Berry recordings, the piano kinda made the band, the piano stuff that was going on behind what Chuck Berry was doing, and he was involved in writing all that stuff. That's Johnny Johnson. He's alive and well and playing in Ratdog now. DG: How'd you meet him? BW: Matthew Kelly, our harp player, is the guy who first got us in touch with him. I don't know how *he* met him. But we talked a little over the phone, and kicked things around, and he was -- give it a try and came out and played with us in February. We had some rehearsals and one gig and had a lot of fun, particularly in the rehearsals. In the gig we had a lot of people sitting in and it got a little chaotic, but at the rehearsals we had quite a bit of fun, so we decided, well, we'll see if we can make a living doing this. DG: Let's talk about David Murray a little bit. He also played with you on Mardi Gras, and he's now putting out an album of Grateful Dead material -- BW: Uh-huh. DG: -- It is a fantastic record. BW: You've heard it. I haven't -- DG: I've heard it. BW: Yeah, it's pretty -- I don't know if I've heard the finished record. I've heard stuff that's on it, and maybe stuff that's not on it. He recorded a lot of stuff, and he sent me a tape a few months back of what he had so far, and it was pretty cool. The guy's an incredible player. I confidently predict there will be 10, 20, at least 10 or 20 thousand kids who never really got into jazz, and they'll get into this record -- "Hey, this stuff's not so bad, man!" And, uh -- DG: And then they'll go buy the David Murray Big Band record -- BW: Right. DG: -- or the Octofunk record, or -- BW: And their lives are gonna be much richer for it. DG: Grateful Dead have opened vast stylistic vistas to people, you know. Young, middle-class white people got turned on to a lot of music by *you* guys, so maybe it's time to have the favor returned, in a way. BW: Mm-hm. DG: Okay, quickly, let's go back to the Furthur Festival. How did the lineup get decided? You got Ratdog, you got Mystery Box, you got Bruce Hornsby, who's a natural for this, and then you got Los Lobos and Hot Tuna. That's a pretty terrific bill. BW: It should be a lot of fun. I mean, we all know each other. We've all played with each other, in bunches of different situations and combinations. I thought it would have been nice to put a couple of younger bands on the bill, but everybody else was -- we got started late. Everybody else was spoken for. They were either doing the H.O.R.D.E. tour or the Lollapalooza tour. I don't know who we'd kick off the tour anyway, but if we'd gotten a couple of younger bands at that point we'd be looking at a tour that started probably around 10 in the morning and ran until 10 the next morning or some- thing. DG: Will there be rotating headliners, or is it gonna be the same running order every night, or. . . BW: What I heard was rotating headliners. I don't know exactly how we're gonna approach that yet, because there are some technical problems with that. 'Cause I, you know, I don't much really care where we play. I'd prefer to play after it gets dark so I don't fry. I think everybody would prefer that. DG: And there's no *new* kid on the bill that you can force to be the first one, so -- BW: Right. But we do have a problem with monitor boards and stuff like that. Whatever monitor board you're using, you want to use the same one night after night. You don't wanna be switching back and forth between monitor boards. Um, don't try this at home, kids, it *never* works. But -- we'll figure it out, we'll work this out. It would be nice to be able to rotate the head- liners. DG: Will there be cross-pollination between the bands? Will you sit in with Hot Tuna, will -- BW: That's the plan. DG: -- David Hidalgo play with Ratdog? BW: That's the plan. I haven't talked to everybody yet, but I've talked fairly extensively with Bruce. That's about the only person I've talked to, really, but I expect you're gonna be seeing a lot of everybody in everybody else's act. DG: Let's talk briefly about your visit with Bruce at the Fillmore [April 12]. BW: Well, I thought I'd show up and you know, just sorta sit in and see if I could embarrass everybody, for a tune or two, and it turned out to be sort of a mini-set, I guess. DG: Who did you succeed in embarrassing? BW: Well, you know, I was just -- like I say, I was just trying to go there and have a little fun at everybody else's expense. But, it worked out to be a lot more fun than that, even. DG: Well, I hate to say it, but the, uh, appearance of Phil Lesh sort of overshadowed the appearance. I mean , everybody was happy to see you, but everybody was incredibly mindblown to see Phil, who sorta didn't have -- had indicated that he wasn't planning to appear anywhere for the next few years, so. . . BW: Right, I was talking to Bruce and he had a friend who had come to visit him, a guy who works for the Warriors, the Golden State Warriors. And you know, he's not much into the music. Bruce has a lot of jock friends, you know, a lot of friends in the "athletic industries." And this guy didn't know much about music, didn't know dick about the Grateful Dead or anything like that. I mean, he was asking Bruce, you know, "I don't know what the deal is here, I don't know who these guys are, but this guy walked on stage and then the guy next to me started cryin'." DG: What are you gonna do with the San Francisco Symphony? BW: Uh, we got some projects, well some works t 1f8a hat we're working on with them. Twentieth-century American composers. And some older stuff, some stuff from like the 18th century that's also American, we're gonna use as overlays. I'm a little behind on that, 'cause I've been kinda out of town for a couple meetings. But it should be pretty fun. DG: I have to ask you about the marigolds. BW: The marigolds. DG: I have to ask you about the marigolds. BW: It's sort of a traditional thing to do. A lot of people have thrown a lot* of marigolds into the Ganges, the river over there. Yeah, you know, so it seemed like the thing to do. Tossed a buncha marigolds into the river, and then, uh, followed it up with some ashes. DG: It must have been quite a thing. The controversy that followed it home must have been kind of hard to deal with, too, huh? BW: Well, the controversy was not so much about that as about other stuff. And I really understand that. And I think the controversy -- what happened was some folks found it impossible to contain their frustration anymore. And -- I don't have much more to say about that. I don't wanna get involved. It's not my business. What I'm *trying* to do is be sort of a peacekeeper here. Anyway, things worked out. DG: How'd you hook up with David Murray? BW: I first heard about him from Phil. I don't remember exactly who it was who got him to show up at the show we played at Madison Square Garden, a few years back. I think that was the first place I met him, then after the show -- we had a lot of fun during the show, believe me -- DG: Was that the night he came in and played? BW: He showed up the night before, and then the next night he came with his ax. And we played and we had a great deal of fun. And then afterwards we went back and partied all night, basically. And, uh, I became aware of the fact that he was pretty scholarly in regards [to] jazz music. And I was work- ing on this -- and still am working on this theater piece, this musical theater piece, and jazz is a cornerstone of what we're working with here, and so I thought I'd include him in the project, and he was up for it and we've been having a lot of fun with that, ever since. . . What else is there to say about David Murray? He's the Jonas Salk of the saxophone. DG: Can you explain that? BW: Ah, he just comes up with all kinds of new stuff, new ways of playing it, new ways of thinking about music, you know, the music that comes out of it. He's just an amazing player. Amazing writer, amazing conductor. DG: When you're jammin' with somebody like that, that you've never played with before, and -- I mean, Grateful Dead music isn't exactly easy to com- prehend the first time through, a lot of it anyway. I mean, well, "Dark Star," you could pretty much invite anybody in to start playing, but then you throw "Estimated Prophet" at them. BW: David's got chops. I mean, he is really an advanced player. He can play in odd time signatures, no problem. He can play in odd or weird tonalities, no problem. Also, he can grasp chord changes and grab 'em pretty quick. He's a quick study, about as quick as I've ever run into. He's also got an amazing ear. He can hear chord changes or any sort of development as it occurs. He's right there with the music, at all times. He's, like I say, just an amazing player. Got a lotta heart, and he puts that into his music. DG: How did it compare with the night that Branford waltzed into your world, and conquered it? BW: Branford's also a wonderful player. You know, I don't want to compare them, because even though they play the same instrument, they're dif- ferent guys. They both have, um, shall we say, remarkable facility with their instruments, and it's not just the facility with their instruments. They both have a lot of heart, a lot of soul, and a lot of musical awareness, and they put a lot of music through those instruments that they play. GL: The thing I noticed about both Branford and David when they played with you is they'd hang back for a chorus or two -- BW: Right. GL: -- and you could just sort of see the tumblers turning, you know, like they say, "Okay, this goes from major 7th to minor 3rd, or whatever, and by the second chorus -- BW: Right. GL: It was like they'd been playing the tune their whole life. BW: They've heard it a couple times now, now they know how it goes, and then the dam breaks. Here it comes. DG: BW: True. DG: I'm writing liner notes for [David Murray's _Dark Star (The Music of the Grateful Dead)_]. BW: Who needs liner notes? Let me ask you that. I gotta say, I've been doing a lotta interviews in the last few days, and one of the things that I've never considered myself real good at is explaining myself. And liner notes are pretty much in that same ballpark, as far as I can see. It's, you know, here we are trying to explain what's on the record. Just play the record! I mean, doesn't it seem -- you play the record, you listen to the record, you get it or you don't. Has explaining what's on a record ever made it easier for you to access what's on a record? Never has worked for me. DG: I feel kind of the same way you do about it, and it's really, really funny you should mention it, because I've just been exchanging e-mail with Robert Hunter about that sort of thing. He busted me for something I wrote in an interview with him nearly 20 years ago, and I had to confess to him that I had come around to his way of thinking about that thing of, you know, if the music doesn't speak for itself, then what's the point. BW: Mm-hm. Gary Lambert: I would say the exception to that rule, and maybe because David [Murray] comes from the jazz tradition -- I always found liner notes by people like Ralph Gleason and Nat Hentoff really illuminating, because they didn't try to tell you what the music was, but they established context. And they gave some historical background, and -- BW: It's pleasant reading if it's good enough, and -- GL: I thought Gleason's and Hentoff's, you know -- BW: -- it's the atmospherics. GL: Yeah, Hentoff's, or LeRoi Jones -- Amiri Baraka now -- wrote amazing liner notes for Coltrane's "Live At Birdland" album, and I consider it great literature on its own. And it stands well with the album, too, so -- BW: Well, that's kind of in the pocket of having nice cover art, you know -- GL: Yeah, yeah. BW: -- if it makes a better package, that's fine. DG: I was going to bring up Blair Jackson's amazing liner notes to "The Music Never Stopped," which really provided some context for all of the material that the Grateful Dead took from those many, many different sources -- BW: Yeah. DG: -- and made into, you know, pretty original stuff. So not all liner notes are bad, necessarily -- BW: Not all liner notes are bunk. DG: I guess they're having a jazz-oriented guy [Howard Mandel] write notes for this thing, and I guess I'm to provide the [Grateful Dead] perspective -- or maybe what it really is -- I think it's a marketing thing. BW: Mm-hm. DG: They have the famous Deadhead radio host sign the back of it, and that gives it some credibility. I and you both agree that David Murray doesn't need any help from me to have credibility in this world, but perhaps he does in the realm of marketing the record. BW: Right. You know, the same thing is gonna happen. As many people who can appreciate that music are gonna love it, and people over whose heads it goes are just gonna walk around blissfully unaware that that kind of stuff is going on. DG: But if a whole bunch of Deadheads are turned on to jazz via Dead Murray covering Grateful Dead records -- BW: That'd be great. DG: -- is that not a cool thing? BW: Oh, that's wonderful. . 0