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Call us psychic, but we'd bet that in a game of word association about San Francisco music history, the following progression would ensue: A mention of the Summer of Love would lead to the Grateful Dead, then to frontman Jerry Garcia. And, provided the name of a certain Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor doesn't slip in, Bob Weir's should pop up next. As a founding member of that '60s supergroup, the singer and guitarist—who started his blues band, RatDog, in 1995, the year the Grateful Dead stopped touring—has been at the forefront of Bay Area music for more than 40 years. This past April, the 60-year-old Weir, who lives in Marin, helped establish the new Grateful Dead archives at UC Santa Cruz—his contribution being, as he puts it, "emptying out storage spaces full of junk that I knew would be valuable to someone, someday." The materials, which range from life-size replica skeletons of band members to tapes of hotline messages announcing tour dates, are now being catalogued and will be available to the public over the next two years. Bob Weir and RatDog, however, will be on show long before that, at the Mountain Winery on July 9 and 10. For a taste of what it's like to talk to the Dead, look no further.
Your first band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, was a jug band. What's a jug band?
Jug-band music is basically country blues—it was the same music that the minstrel bands used to play on the showboats as they went up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. I played jug and washtub bass and a little guitar in a band I started with Jerry Garcia shortly after my 16th birthday. I met him in a back alley behind a music store [in Palo Alto] where he taught guitar lessons. It was New Year's Eve, and he was supposed to meet a few of his music students there, but they didn't show. He asked me, "Do you play?" I said, "Yeah." So he got a couple of guitars and we played all night. We decided that we had too much fun to just walk away, so that's how we started the jug band that became the Grateful Dead.
Fast-forward four decades—is the sound you started in the jug band still present in RatDog?
Well, some of the tunes I played then, I'm still playing: "New Minglewood Blues," for instance. That one goes way back. I wrote it when I was 18 and then rewrote it in my late 20s, and then I wrote it again just a few months back.
The Dead were associated with the psychedelic ballroom scene. Tell us about that.
The Fillmore and other spots were places where musicians would play ragtime and big-band [music] in San Francisco, so we were playing at these venues with gorgeous acoustics. Once, after we played the Fillmore, Count Basie played—he blew my mind. That place was built for that sound. The acoustics changed our style too: We realized we couldn't fill the space unless we pared down the music to its essentials. It made us more concise.
During those moments on stage when the energy really comes together—what's happening between the musicians and their fans?
Music isn't generated by the band or the audience; it's generated by the energy between them. I try not to be willful with the music; I think it's my job to let the music come through.
Are drugs still relevant to music?
Well, there's only one drug relevant to creating music, and that's LSD. Or it was back then; I don't know what the stuff is like now. LSD would take us to this edgy place—and then we had to get onstage and figure out how to play music together.
Sounds dangerous.
Yeah it was, but it was in that space where the art was made.
How did the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz come together?
We had all this stuff sitting in a warehouse and no idea what to do with it. It was clutter to us, but useful to other people. Basically, it was a grand exercise in feng shui. It was just all this junk—concert backdrops, legal documents, etc. What are people going to do with concert backdrops?
Some college kid is going to write a great term paper about those backdrops!
I hope so. I'll look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Can you help us write a verse of a song called "San Francisco Blues"?
Well, it would have to be about the rents, because musicians can't afford to live there anymore. Would this work? I wrote new lyrics for "New Minglewood Blues" about San Francisco: "I'm going to San Francisco / If I have to crawl / I'm going to San Francisco / If I have to crawl / 'Cuz the women in San Francisco / Sure know how to ball." We'll call it the "New, New Minglewood Blues."
Is that true? SF women know how to "ball"? What does that mean?
No comment. Let's just say that it's a blues tradition to sing the praises of your hometown and its women. We'll leave it at that.
Call us psychic, but we'd bet that in a game of word association about San Francisco music history, the following progression would ensue: A mention of the Summer of Love would lead to the Grateful Dead, then to frontman Jerry Garcia. And, provided the name of a certain Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor doesn't slip in, Bob Weir's should pop up next. As a founding member of that '60s supergroup, the singer and guitarist—who started his blues band, RatDog, in 1995, the year the Grateful Dead stopped touring—has been at the forefront of Bay Area music for more than 40 years. This past April, the 60-year-old Weir, who lives in Marin, helped establish the new Grateful Dead archives at UC Santa Cruz—his contribution being, as he puts it, "emptying out storage spaces full of junk that I knew would be valuable to someone, someday." The materials, which range from life-size replica skeletons of band members to tapes of hotline messages announcing tour dates, are now being catalogued and will be available to the public over the next two years. Bob Weir and RatDog, however, will be on show long before that, at the Mountain Winery on July 9 and 10. For a taste of what it's like to talk to the Dead, look no further.
Your first band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, was a jug band. What's a jug band?
Jug-band music is basically country blues—it was the same music that the minstrel bands used to play on the showboats as they went up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. I played jug and washtub bass and a little guitar in a band I started with Jerry Garcia shortly after my 16th birthday. I met him in a back alley behind a music store [in Palo Alto] where he taught guitar lessons. It was New Year's Eve, and he was supposed to meet a few of his music students there, but they didn't show. He asked me, "Do you play?" I said, "Yeah." So he got a couple of guitars and we played all night. We decided that we had too much fun to just walk away, so that's how we started the jug band that became the Grateful Dead.
Fast-forward four decades—is the sound you started in the jug band still present in RatDog?
Well, some of the tunes I played then, I'm still playing: "New Minglewood Blues," for instance. That one goes way back. I wrote it when I was 18 and then rewrote it in my late 20s, and then I wrote it again just a few months back.
The Dead were associated with the psychedelic ballroom scene. Tell us about that.
The Fillmore and other spots were places where musicians would play ragtime and big-band [music] in San Francisco, so we were playing at these venues with gorgeous acoustics. Once, after we played the Fillmore, Count Basie played—he blew my mind. That place was built for that sound. The acoustics changed our style too: We realized we couldn't fill the space unless we pared down the music to its essentials. It made us more concise.
During those moments on stage when the energy really comes together—what's happening between the musicians and their fans?
Music isn't generated by the band or the audience; it's generated by the energy between them. I try not to be willful with the music; I think it's my job to let the music come through.
Are drugs still relevant to music?
Well, there's only one drug relevant to creating music, and that's LSD. Or it was back then; I don't know what the stuff is like now. LSD would take us to this edgy place—and then we had to get onstage and figure out how to play music together.
Sounds dangerous.
Yeah it was, but it was in that space where the art was made.
How did the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz come together?
We had all this stuff sitting in a warehouse and no idea what to do with it. It was clutter to us, but useful to other people. Basically, it was a grand exercise in feng shui. It was just all this junk—concert backdrops, legal documents, etc. What are people going to do with concert backdrops?
Some college kid is going to write a great term paper about those backdrops!
I hope so. I'll look forward to seeing what they come up with.
Can you help us write a verse of a song called "San Francisco Blues"?
Well, it would have to be about the rents, because musicians can't afford to live there anymore. Would this work? I wrote new lyrics for "New Minglewood Blues" about San Francisco: "I'm going to San Francisco / If I have to crawl / I'm going to San Francisco / If I have to crawl / 'Cuz the women in San Francisco / Sure know how to ball." We'll call it the "New, New Minglewood Blues."
Is that true? SF women know how to "ball"? What does that mean?
No comment. Let's just say that it's a blues tradition to sing the praises of your hometown and its women. We'll leave it at that.
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