2000 Bob Weir Interview with David Gans Grateful Dead Hour programs 631 and 632 Transcribed by Jill Goodman David Gans: Bob Weir, I'm listening to Evening Moods, the new cd by Ratdog, and I am knocked out! Bob Weir: Well, thanks. DG: The songs are great, the singing is great, the guitar playing is great, the production is great, I mean, I'm like really, thrilled. BW: We didn't miss a lick. DG: What took you so long? BW: Well, you know, the deal was for the first four years of the band we were going through personnel changes. Every time you get a new guitar player, keyboard player, or whatever, you've got to put a whole lot of time into teaching them the old book -- all the old tunes. After the personnel stabilized for a year or so, we turned our attention to writing. The next logical thing was to make a record and put it out. DG: You have songs from a whole bunch of different lyricists here, and yet it all hangs together really, really well. BW: Well, I was working with the lyricists all the time, so a lot of those lyrics are me for that matter -- so it's going to have an integrity about it that's more or less my own, for better or worse. DG: I don't know why I'm so surprised, but it hangs together so well. There's a lot the themes we've come to expect from you -- that environmentalist kind of stuff, and sort of sexy stuff in here -- a lot of things we've been hearing from you over the years -- but there's a maturity to it BW: [laughs] DG: Somehow I knew that line was going to get a reaction from you. BW: [laughs] DG: There's great lines in there everywhere; the playing, the production... The sound of your guitar -- you've got yourself a nice muscular guitar sound in there -- and the licks are good -- BW: I'm loving it. I've discovered archtop guitars, finally. Well I guess the [Gibson ES-] 335 was an archtop of sorts. On this one I was playing an Ibanez George Benson model -- the only guitar I ever stole. DG: Who did you steal it from? BW: I was doing some design work with Ibanez back in the mid-70's, and they were also working with George Benson. The guy I was working with, Jeff Hasselberger, was taking me for a tour of the facility they had in Philadelphia, and he said, "Come on over here, look what's just coming in off the boat from Japan." There was a run of six of them they had made for George Benson, and he pulled one out and said, "Play this." I started playing it and I, you know, fell head over heels in love with it. We were with some of the guys from the Japanese side of the business there, and after a couple of minutes I was still playing it. "You like that guitar there? It's George Benson's," and I said, "No, it's not." DG: [laughs] BW: He said, "What?" I said, "You can call the police, you can do what you're gonna do, but I'm taking this." There were five more of them so, he's not going to miss this one, I figured. DG: The statute of limitations has run out. BW: [laughs] Right! DG: Let's go through this song by song, or at least pick a few songs that you want to comment on. Do you have particular favorites or things that you're extra proud of on this record? BW: No, you pull them out. We'll get there DG: I mean even the stuff that's sort of like -- "Oh, it's a another one of those songs about a woman" -- BW: [laughs] DG: You've got new twists on those things. "October Queen" has a great guitar lick... BW: Thanks, that lick Matthew Kelly and I came up with in a sound check, in the heart of America somewhere. And we were sorta going for a Dixieland flavor on that, but it sorta turned a corner and went a little into the Louie Jordan space. But that's ok, it's close enough to Dixieland. The story there -- I'm kinda proud of that one, actually. It kept changing and kept changing and kept changing. There were a couple of new things, you know -- different aspects of the story kept introducing themselves to me late at night, but I didn't really, realize who this guy was who's singing this song until we got it into the studio and at sorta the last minute it occurred to me who this guy actually was. It's in the song, I'm not gonna spell it out, you sorta have to just listen for it. DG: So that little revelation toward the end was one of the last things that got written? BW: Right . DG: Who is Andre Pessis? I know that name from -- is he connected with Huey Lewis? BW: He's worked with Huey, he's worked with Bonnie [Raitt]. He's a local guy. He's a real good lyricist -- more than competent, he's inspiring from time to time DG: And the other he did with you on here is "Ashes and Glass"? BW: Right. And that's I guess a sorta of a revisit to the -- well, you know, that song is addressed to my daughter -- though it could be addressed to a lover or whatever. Went back and revisited the place where I was when I was writing "Throwing Stones." This is sort a post-apocalyptic vision of that place: What if it all goes to hell -- what then? The B section of that tune -- when my kid was you know like 5 or 6 months old, I was bouncing her on my knee or whatever, and singing her the old "Mockingbird" tune. I ran out of the verses that I knew and she was digging the tune, so I just started winging it. They got pretty silly as they went along, just picking something that rhymed and then just taking that where it'll go, and that just got her nuts. She really loved that, so I figured I'm gonna make a song out of this. The rest of that -- te somber part -- came when I was trying to think, ok, what am I gonna tack on here that's worth saying. And I'm thinking this is worth saying. DG: It's just great, it's just sweet and effective. BW: Right, thanks. DG: And then there's Odessa. BW: hahaha BW: "Ease up, Odessa." DG: We all know Odessa. BW: I can think of a couple people who are that person, but I'm not naming any names here. DG: Well again, it's a nice, sort of a classic motif of songwriting and yet you've got a nice new twist on it. BW: I think it's a 12-bar. It might be a 20-bar, but I think it's a 12-bar. It's just got some different kind of chord changes than your regular 12-bar pattern. The theme "ease up Odessa" was suggested to us by Russ Ellis, Dave Ellis's dad. "You guys need to write a blues tune, man. You know, one thing I haven't heard in like 30 years is somebody singing something like 'Ease up Odessa,'" and so he gave us the name, and then Gerrit [Graham] and me and the rest of guys ran with it. There's a little sonic joke in there -- I don't know if it comes out as loud;It was hard to get it to actually work beyond conceptualization -- in the instrumental. Now there's this one lick that Matthew Kelly is really fond of playing [on the harmonica]. He plays it a lot. It's a good thing he's fond of it because you know, he's happy a lot of the time 'cause he's playing that lick. It's that trill that he does. He does that a couple of times on the first couple of verses, and then in the first part of the instrumental he's doing that lick behind everything else that's happening. And then it comes time for his lead, and he pulls that lick out again, so what we did was -- we were listening to it in the studio when we were mixing it and it was getting us nuts, you know, he plays this lick all the time. Right as we were noticing that, the telephone rings and it's one these, you know, one of these warbled ringers -- and it was that lick! I think it was a couple of steps higher, but it was right in time, and everything like that, so what we did was -- um, well, here's the setup: You get Matthew playing that lick a couple times in the early verses, and then a couple of times in the verse before his solo comes up, and then we have the telephone ring and it plays that lick, and you hear the click and the telephone gets picked up, and then we sent Matthew's track out and back through the phone. We put a microphone on the phone, and here's 1dad Matthew's lick again over the phone. I don't know, it just seemed like the thing to do. DG: "Bury Me Standing" has that sort of classic deep blues feel to it, and yet there's some nice new twists in it. I just love the line, "Woman made me love her / now some dude tells me she ain't here." BW: The whole thing is sort of an ode to Robert Johnson. There are a couple of sections that I lifted from some Flamenco song somewhere, just cause it occurred to me that those kinds of music -- classic American blues and classic flamenco -- are so similar. They're guitar-oriented music, and barroom and whorehouse music.I'd never heard them together and I wanted to see if I could sort of paste them together in some sort of elegant or meaningful way. DG: I do want to ask you about "Two Djinn." That's got a great story, and it's got a classic Bob Weir theme. "You and I, we've got a date / I'll be here but you'll be late." Now, coming from the tardiest man in show business, that's a really great line. BW: That one sort of the white boy's take on Taoism. It's kind of a cool story , I think. That one, Gerrit pretty much delivered intact to me. I changed lines here and there -- I changed a lot of lines -- but really the story is Gerrit's. What did he want to call it? "Lao-Tzu's Blues." * DG: We didn't hear any new material out of you for years and years and years, and all of the sudden you have this raft of really great stuff. BW: And we're writing as we speak. I get hot, you know, and sometimes I stay hot for a while. I don't know. And sometimes I'm on the road too much to write. DG: It seems like life might be kind of good for you right now. You got your sweet little girl and a stable home life -- BW: I'm cruising. DG: -- a stable band. You're going out on tour with Ratdog. How was The Other Ones tour? BW: That was great. Some of it was most like work, but all of it was most like payoff. We put a lot of effort into the rehearsals, and you know, if we had more time it would have been more together at the beginning of the tour. But as the tour progressed, we got tighter and tighter and better and better. We got so that we could read each other pretty well. DG: Then there was the night the Hanson boys showed up. BW: [laughs] You know, those kids, I expect great things of them. They all remind me of nothing so much as me when I was that age, except they're already successful. But they're asking all the right questions. They came to a gig one night -- we were doing "Samson and Delilah." They were all over that tune. They wanted to know who wrote that, you know, what's that? I told them about Reverend Gary Davis, and they wanted to know everything there is to know about Reverend Gary Davis. They have a deep respect for American musical traditions. And that's great, because that's where they're going to get their writing chops from. And when they get past writing bubblegum stuff -- when they get to writing cogent material, they've got everything else going. They can play. They can play together. They can sing like angels together, because they've got a sibling vocal blend. They've got the same formula as the Bee Gees, basically, only better because they can play. The Bee Gees just more or less sung together, but these kids can play, too -- and relatively well considering that the oldest one is 18, maybe 19, now. DG: How did they get hooked up with you? BW: I think their manager is a fan of ours. He contacted me one time when Rob [Wasserman] and I and Jay [Lane] were in New York, and he said they wanted to come down. I said, "Come on down." And when they got there, they wanted to sit in. That evening the Monogolian Throat Singers were opening up for us, and we were doing a little trio thing, and I figured, "Okay, well, without variety you can't have no horse race. How about we work up a couple of tunes, and that'll be a little something that the kids that come tonight weren't expecting to see." And it was big fun. * DG: In addition to having a whole bunch of great new material, it seems like you've made peace with your older catalogue as well? BW: Sooner or later you're gonna get lonesome for these songs, and that's what happened to me. At first I didn't want to play them, because I wanted Ratdog to establish itself as something other than a Grateful Dead cover band. Now, I don't care so much, especially with this new record out. I mean, we do what we do. We're actually pretty good at it, I think we're here to attest to that, so now I don't feel constrained to push for the band in any one direction. If we want to expand and take on some of the old Grateful Dead book, that's fine. Most of the tunes we cover, the Grateful Dead cover tunes that we're incorporating -- it's not my idea. It's coming from the guys in the band. They want to do this tune or that tune. DG: For those of us who lamented the departure of "Lost Sailor" and wished to hear a full-blown "Weather Report Suite" again, it's nice to see those back in rotation. I always wondered why those things disappeared from the Grateful Dead repertoire. BW: You know, inter-band dynamics and stuff like that. Trying to get the rhythm section to play the song remotely like I had it envisioned became impossible, you know. They want to play six times as many notes in the ballad and make the ballad into an Afro-Cuban War Dance. I tried it, it didn't work for me, so rather than fight with everybody, I just dropped it. I won't go into the specifics of which tunes were like that, but nonetheless, it was tough for me to get a ballad out sometimes. DG: So now you've got a band that will do them more like you hear them? BW: These guys will take direction a lot easier than [laughs] some other guys that I've worked with. DG: I'm also really thrilled that you're taking the Persuasions out on this tour. BW: They're wonderful. It's both entertaining and edifying to hear those guys, 'cause that's American musical heritage. Those guys are awful good at what they do, and they showcase a whole genre of American music that kids, if they don't catch it when these guys come around, they may never get it. And it will be an enriching experience for them, I think. They're gonna love it and they're gonna come back with an understanding, I think, of some of the stuff that we used to do -- like what we used to do on the end of "He's Gone," or whatever, comes from that vein of American musical heritage. DG: And how do you feel about what they did with the Grateful Dead songs? BW: It's great. You know, to hear somebody do -- it's not really doo-wop -- it's more like gospel quartet style. I've heard them referred to as a doo-wop group, and that's really not what they are. They're every bit as good at what they do as, say, the Golden Gate Quartet or Swan Silvertones, only it's secular music is the deal. DG: Is there a chance that maybe we'll hear some cross -ollination between Ratdog and the Persuasions on the road? BW: I'd kind of be surprised if it doesn't happen. I don't know how we're going to set them up or how we're going to put them on the stage, but we'll figure something out. DG: Oh, boy! BW: It might not happen early on the tour, but by the time the tour wears on we'll get around to all that stuff, I'm pretty sure. DG: Bob, always great to talk with you, and I'm just so delighted with this record. BW: Well, thanks. Grateful Dead Hour homepage . 0