The Deadcast welcomes Bobby Weir to honor the 50th anniversary of his 1972 solo debut “Ace” (& its forthcoming reissue), made with an all-star backing band that happened to be the Grateful Dead, featuring archival audio with “Ace” lyricists John Perry Barlow & Robert Hunter.
Ace 50 supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
Bobby Weir’s 1972 solo debut Ace was a long time coming, as is the new 50th anniversary reissue.
The song “Cassidy” took nearly a year-and-a-half from its original conception to its final completion during the last sessions recorded for Ace in February 1972. Written during the birth of Eileen Law’s daughter Cassidy in the summer of 1970, it was the death of John Perry Barlow’s father that finally received the spark that connected Cassidy Law to Weir and Barlow’s late associate Neal Cassady, who’d died in early 1968. In 1994, Barlow wrote “Cassidy’s Tale,” a poetic reminiscence of how the “Cassidy” lyric came to be.
In 1990, Weir brought “Black Throated Wind” onto the stage with the Dead for the first time since 1974, but with heavily rewritten lyrics. The revised version wouldn’t last long, but Alex Allan’s great site WhiteGum provides a transcription.
Weir’s lyrical collaborators on Ace, John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter, are no longer with us. But thanks to the magic of radio, and more specifically radio host David Gans, we are able to include their voices on their partnerships with Weir drawn from several interviews over the years. The interviews are featured in David’s major interview book, Conversations With the Dead.