Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 6, Episode 8 Bobby 75
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 6/1981.
JESSE: We don’t really understand how it happened either, but this month we wish Bobby Weir a happy, heady, and healthy 75th birthday. Like a lot of things in the Grateful Dead world, it came on pretty gradually. The Dead continued to change each and every time they stepped onto a stage, and we spent a few recent episodes of the Deadcast going into the subtle and not-subtle shadings of the Dead’s music between 1981, 1982, and 1983. And though the Grateful Dead officially disbanded in 1995, it was never in question that Bobby Weir would continue that mission, continuing to change every single year, and then change some more. Today, to honor Bobby Weir’s 75th, we’re not so much going to offer a career overview but go deeply into what Bobby Weir is doing, now, at 75 and how he got here.
AUDIO: “Mama Tried” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2] (0:08-0:33) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from the brand new album Live In Colorado, Vol. 2, by Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, the second of three new releases from Bobby & co. featuring his expanded Wolfpack — that is, counting the live disc of Ace 50 coming in January, but not counting the concerto that Weir just debuted with the National Symphony Orchestra this October, and which will perhaps be coming to a classical venue near you sometime soon, perhaps the most ambitious project of Weir’s entire career.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/6/22]
JESSE: All things told, it’s been pretty busy in Weir land even without discussing how dude got so ripped, so we’ve got a bunch of friends to catch us up. In addition to birthday boy Bob Weir, we have with us on this episode a few of his lycanthropic conspirators. Jeff Chimenti has been playing with Weir since 1997. Welcome to the Deadcast, Jeff.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Between the orchestral stuff and the new Wolf Bros with Wolfpack, the man’s been on a mission. He definitely doesn’t like to sit still.
JESSE: As we were putting this episode together, the band was getting ready for their Kennedy Center debut with the National Symphony Orchestra. Please also welcome to the Deadcast, Don Was.
DON WAS: We were practicing last week. We might have been doing “Playing in the Band.” I was just thinking: he never, when he was 20, could have imagined he’d be 75 and playing these things with the National Symphony Orchestra, and that it would work — that the songs would have the gravitas to endure for decades, and to be treated in such a different fashion and still resonate.
JESSE: The idea of combining Grateful Dead music with an orchestra has been around for a long time.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [American Beauty] (2:38-2:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Robert Hunter’s lyric “truckin’ up to Buffalo” refers to the first stop of the band’s spring tour in 1970, where Hunter joined the band on the road. There, the Dead performed with the Buffalo Philharmonic under the direction of influential composer Lukas Foss. Bobby Weir.
BOB WEIR: That was illuminating. I don't remember all that much of what we were doing with him, but we got these little Fender amplifiers, got ‘em special for the gig. There were little Fender Princeton reverbs. Basically they’re practice amps, and they're still way, way, way too loud for a symphony orchestra. If you turn it up to where you're actually getting some tone out of it, it’s way too loud.
JESSE: In part because Owsley Stanley had been busted with the Dead six weeks earlier in New Orleans and confined to California, there are no recordings of the Grateful Dead’s first and only attempt to play with an orchestra. Dead scholars have assembled a fair bit of coverage of the event. Though the event wasn’t successful enough to repeat, classical and orchestral music continued to hover around the Dead’s music for years. Classically trained bassist Phil Lesh often spoke of creating orchestral music around Dead motifs. The very first performance by surviving members of the Dead following Jerry Garcia’s death was at the San Francisco Symphony, performing “Space for Henry Cowell” with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
AUDIO: “Space for Henry Cowell” [Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Vince Welnick, Bob
Bralove, Michael Tilson Thomas, 6/16/96] (3:32-3:48)
JESSE: But when we spoke with Bobby and the Wolf Bros, it wasn’t just a one-off Kennedy Center gig that they were getting ready for.
DON WAS: He's looking to change music with this.
JESSE: And those ambitions are the theme of today’s episode. And though there’s absolutely a through-line between the Dead working with Lukas Foss in 1970, their surviving members working with Michael Tilson Thomas in 1996, and Weir working with the National Symphony Orchestra in 2022, you might be shocked to learn that it’s zagging and, once again, not completely linear. How did Bobby Weir go from being the 17-year-old fresh-faced guitarist in the Warlocks to headlining the Kennedy Center? In a way, it kind of starts with the Coasters.
AUDIO: “I’m a Hog for You” [The Coasters, “Poison Ivy” single] (0:00-0:23) - [Spotify]
JESSE: In September 1965, the young band the Warlocks was booked into the Inn Room in Belmont, just north of Menlo Park, playing five sets a night, six nights a week. Early in the run, for the first set every night, they served as backing band for Cornell Gunther, leading a version of the Coasters, who also brought a rhythm guitarist named Terry. According to Dennis McNally’s Long Strange Trip, Weir watched “Terry so closely that he not only learned the chords but absorbed unconsciously how to cue a band with the neck of his guitar as a baton.” It was an important vocabulary lesson of sorts, the first piece of a language Weir is now speaking with the National Symphony Orchestra.
AUDIO: “I’m a Hog for You” [The Coasters, “Poison Ivy” single] (0:24-0:44) - [Spotify]
JESSE: By the time Weir recorded his solo debut Ace in February 1972—which we discussed at length in our last episode—he had enough of his own songs to alternate with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen. When Pigpen stopped touring with the band that year, the Dead’s shows became structured around Garcia and Weir alternating song picks. Ace was also the first time Weir directed a session, which included not only his bandmates in the Dead, who acted as backing musicians, but horns on a few tunes, and a string section on “Looks Like Rain,” to repeat a short bit from last time.
AUDIO: “Looks Like Rain” [Ace] (5:12-5:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
BOB WEIR: I remember the guy who did the string arrangement. I brought him in and he got a little too busy for me, so I had to lose some of the stuff he did. Really, listening back to it, I think I just had it in my head that this song needs strings. If I had really bothered to take the time to listen to what Jerry was doing on the pedal steel, it didn't need strings because he was doing that — he was covering the sustain. But I was young and brash and I wanted strings and, by god, I was going to have strings.
JESSE: Weir would muse about playing more with strings and brass for years. But it would take a while to get back there. As we’ve said, Weir does things gradually. Seen—or heard—in time lapse, it took a little bit of time for Weir’s ambitions to emerge and find shape. During the Dead’s road hiatus in 1975, he took up with Kingfish, who released a self-titled album on Round Records the next year.
AUDIO: “Home to Dixie” [Kingfish, s/t] (0:16-0:46) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Heaven Help the Fool, Weir’s next proper solo album was recorded with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen in summer 1977, a half-decade after Ace, and released in early 1978.
AUDIO: “Salt Lake City” [Bob Weir, Heaven Help the Fool] (0:21-0:43)
JESSE: To promote it, he assembled the Bob Weir Band, featuring a new keyboardist, formerly of the band Silver, named Brent Mydland, who was shortly drafted into the Dead. In 1980, with the addition of drummer Billy Cobham, they became Bobby & the Midnites, who recorded a pair of albums in the early ‘80s.
AUDIO: “Festival” [Bobby and the Midnites, s/t] (1:19-1:47)
JESSE: From 1984 through 1987, Weir occasionally played with a revived lineup of Kingfish, and in 1987 with Brent Mydland and Bill Kreutzmann in Go Ahead. But it was during the 1980s that Weir really started to branch from his immediate Dead family, playing in a variety of situations with a broad variety of partners. The heads at JerryBase have done an extraordinary job mapping the varied world around Jerry Garcia, but I hope that a group of Weir scholars endeavor to someday do the same with the junior Dead guitarist. And it was in 1988 that Bobby Weir found his longest term musical relationship outside the Dead.
AUDIO: “Victim or the Crime” [Bob Weir and Rob Wasserman, Live] (1:54-2:26)
JESSE: In 1988, Weir began to tour with bassist Rob Wasserman. That was from their archival album, just called Live, recorded mostly during their first tours together. Wasserman would pass away in 2016, but would provide a cosmic bridge to the topics of today’s episode. In this era, Weir’s musical world blossomed. If you’re drawing maps of the Bobbyverse and how it connects to the other musicians, consider this 1989 performance on the NBC television show Night Music, where eclectic music producer Hal Willner paired Weir and Wasserman with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and underground New York art weirdos Bongwater, featuring original Yo La Tengo member Dave Rick plus the vocal group the Pussywillows to perform, naturally, “You Don’t Love Me Yet” by the 13th Floor Elevators.
AUDIO: “You Don’t Love Me Yet” [Bongwater feat. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, The Pussywillows, and Bob Weir & Rob Wasserman, Night Music, 1989] (1:57-2:15)
JESSE: Not that this random late-night appearance is indicative of Weir’s musical direction so much as his increased willingness to throw himself into one new adventure after another far away from his Grateful Dead comfort zone. By 1995, Weir and Wasserman expanded into a filled-out band with drummer Jay Lane and Weir’s old Kingfish friend Matt Kelly. They launched their first tour as the Ratdog Revue on August 6th, 1995, just three days before Jerry Garcia’s death. Shortened to Ratdog, the band continued for the next 15 years, taking a break while Weir focused on Furthur, before resuming for a final run from 2012 to 2014. They recorded one studio album, Evening Moods, in 2000. This is “Two Djinn.”
AUDIO: “Two Djinn” [Ratdog, Evening Moods] (0:20-0:45)
Lycanthropy
JESSE: It was through Rob Wasserman that Weir met another bassist. In the early ‘80s, Don Was came into the national ear as bassist in the Detroit band Was (Not Was). This is their 1988 hit, “Walk the Dinosaur.”
AUDIO: “Walk the Dinosaur” [Was (Not Was), What Up, Dog?] (0:50-1:14) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But that blossomed into a career as an in-demand Grammy-winning producer, working with Bonnie Raitt, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Lucinda Williams, and a pretty bow-tie-spinning discography of others.
DON WAS: Early in 1990, Rob Wasserman introduced us. Rob invited me to breakfast with him and Bobby when they were playing in Pasadena as Rob and Bob. Then, later that year, we all jammed together at an event in Mill Valley during the film festival, which was a tribute to Hal Willner, which is a really eclectic night. Man, it was…. I don't remember a lot of it. What I remember comes mostly from [Jay] Blakesberg’s pictures of it. It was like Marianne Faithfull and Syd Straw and Todd Rundgren, [Father] Guido Sarducci and Garth Hudson, Bobby and Wasserman and Michelle Shocked. I don't remember everybody who was on the gig, but we played in different combinations. And then jump ahead 25 years, when I started working at Blue Note, Bobby called me up about releasing some of the TRI stuff, some of his solo things. And he and Mickey came to see me about both of their solo things. The Blue Note offices are at Capitol [Records] Tower [in Los Angeles].
JESSE: Oh right, and in 2012, he became the head of Blue Note Records. Don Was’s first gig with Weir is what used to be called A&R: he put a band together. But in true Dead fashion, it was completely accidental and it wasn’t for the label he works for.
DON WAS: And downstairs in Capitol Studios, John Mayer was working. And from having made a couple of albums with him already at that point, I knew that he was a huge Dead Head. I mean, he was a Dead Head to the extent that every time we got in his car, the Grateful Dead Sirius channel was on. He could identify not just the year, but maybe even the tour just by listening to the music — he really knew the shit. So I called him up in the studio and said, “You’ve got to get in the elevator and come up here, you won’t believe who’s in the office.” And that's how they met. And in the office, the plan for Dead and Company was kind of hatched. John and I drove up a month or two later, and that was the birth of Dead and Company.
JESSE: But it’s one thing for a producer to put a band together, it’s another to actually hit the road.
DON WAS: Then we just stayed in touch. He called me in 2018, and he said he had a dream that Rob Wasserman came to him in this dream from the other world, from the other side. He said [to Bobby], “The reason I introduced you to Don in 1990 was because, when I’m gone, he’s supposed to be a bass player.” So Bobby called me out of nowhere and said… he even had the name of the band, it was all from this one dream. It’s supposed to be called Wolf Bros and it was supposed to be a trio with him and me and Jay [Lane]. He said, “So, do you want to do it?” I was like, “Fuck yeah.” So I asked him for six songs, and then I went and checked into the Bowery Hotel in New York and just wood-shedded the six songs for a week. Nothing, man: I closed everything off. All I did was sit in a hotel room and play. Then I went to San Francisco, and we didn’t do any of the six songs of course. [laughs] We just started jamming on like an A minor chord, and in the first minute-and-a-half, I could tell that Jay and I felt the groove in the same place — which doesn’t happen very often, that you get that kind of a lock with somebody. It was the kind of groove that allowed Bobby… it propelled Bobby and his playing, but it also allowed him to phrase things, and didn’t get in his way. So we played for about 20 minutes, and he called up the managers and he just said: “Book a tour.” [laughs] That was it.
JESSE: We’ll be dotting this part of the conversation with some music from the Wolf Bros trio, recorded over a few shows in February 2020 at Sweetwater in Mill Valley.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/14/20] (0:33-1:07)
DON WAS: The one thing you can go to a show and expect that you will get for sure is that whatever happened the time before it will not happen again. To me, that's at the core, musically, of what the Dead are doing, which is what makes it so similar to jazz in its intention — that you have you start with beginner's mind every time you play the fucking song. I can be sure that Jay is going to change the bass drum beat. He's gonna play where he's feeling that night from any number of influences, not the least of which is what Bobby's playing. So that's why we kind of just… we ease into songs. We don't go blasting into anything, because you don't know where it's gonna land. You wait till it lands on something and then: alright, we can build off of this foundation. And then you start.
AUDIO: “Cassidy” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/10/20] (0:28-1:12)
DON WAS: Bobby in his heart believes that people are there to hear the songs, and he wants to inhabit those songs honestly every night. He's a storyteller, and he becomes the protagonist of every song. Not necessarily the protagonist, but the speaker or the narrator of every song — he becomes that. And like any great artist, that means you do differently every time. So he's got to have the freedom to phrase a line the way he wants to.
AUDIO: “The Music Never Stopped” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/15/20] (0:42-1:02)
JESSE: That was February 15th, 2020, a night Jeff Chimenti sat in.
DON WAS: Other singers — my favorite singers are people like Willie Nelson or Bonnie Raitt or Frank Sinatra. Did you ever try to sing along with a Frank Sinatra record? No matter what… next time you’re driving, sing along to “That's Life” and you will find no matter how far back you try to pull the phrasing, he's behind you, man. And you just think it's impossible: he's so far back [that] he's gonna fall off of the song. Or like with Willie Nelson, man… playing live with him is such an exciting thing. Because if you just go with where you think he is rhythmically in the song, you're fucked. You have to have really strong internal time, because he pulls that phrase so far back—like Little Jimmy Scott or something like that—that it lands into the next line. He'll run two lines together, but it's super expressive. Bobby's the same thing: if you just isolated Bobby's vocals, and if you can really hear him, he's totally in there every night, man. But sometimes, things get in the way. And if the musicians are laying down too strong a grid, it sounds like you’re fighting Bobby’s phrasing, then it means Bobby doesn’t sound good. Because the grid is the beat: Why can’t he sing in rhythm? Nah, man: don’t play so fucking much, and give him room to phrase. That’s the general directive.
AUDIO: “Big River” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/13/20] (4:23-5:02)
JESSE: The job also set up Don for a pretty incredible music-related pun.
DON WAS: I would say for the first year and a half I was haunted but what I call the Phil Specter, which is the specter of Phil Lesh. He’s just… he’s a total bass genius, man. Nobody plays like him. And I don't know how he came up with those parts, but it's not the way my mind works. Which I think is why Bobby hired me for Wolf Bros, because what I'm doing is a little more prosaic. I'm not weaving guitar lines against Bobby’s guitar lines; I'm holding down… it’s not even necessarily the tonic, but I'm holding down a note, and it's about tone too. It's about having a round, warm sound that surrounds his voice. I’m not playing like Phil, but I felt I had to. I really came out to… I’m a stranger to this audience, and I’m not playing the same stuff they’re used to hearing. I was haunted by that, and it made me play too much.
JESSE: Don’s not making a Wall of Sound of either the Lesh or Spector varieties, but holding open a space for Weir to Weir. We spoke with pedal steel player Barry Sless from the expanded Wolfpack, and Don’s intent rumbled through warm and clear.
BARRY SLESS: Don is just super solid and super supportive. He's not trying to do anything fancy. He's actually a lot of times seeming to me, and from hearing some of the things that he said, looking for just the simplest way to support the songs, support Bob's vocal and make the song come across. And a lot of times he finds that, he might go, “Hey, if I just play one quarter note over this, instead of playing a line there, I feel like it makes his vocal come out better, and make the song speak better.” And he's a record producer too, so I think he's coming from that space in the way that he plays and really making sure that the song speaks.
DON WAS: The trio, I viewed it like… it was so quiet and there was so much space in it, that I felt like: okay, this is like a folk concert at Carnegie Hall in 1960. If you were back hearing Judy Collins, or Harry Belafonte or someone like that at Carnegie Hall. There were bass players — there was a bass player with Peter, Paul and Mary, who played real simple stuff, but it was intimate. And I thought the trio… if you love Bobby, man, it was like being in the living room with him. It was really intimate, and you could really hear his guitar playing unencumbered, and hear how he's telling stories with the vocal. You could appreciate his storytelling. His guitar playing, it’s like… no one plays like that. It’s the most radical approach to rock and roll guitar that I know of, really. And it's super interesting — it’s brilliant, and it's inspiring.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/14/20] (10:32-10:59)
DON WAS: For people who aren't musicians, I would say that playing in a band is like being in a conversation. You listen and you say something, and people respond. Now, you can go to a party and there may be conversations that bore you. I used to have to go to a lot of parties. I’ve got three grown kids now, but I can’t tell you how many parties I was at where parents were saying, “Oh, you know, we just applied to USC…” [laughs] You want to slit your wrists at these parties. You get in some conversations that you just don’t want to be in. But then maybe at that same party, you get to the back of the room and Noam Chomsky is there, and he’s saying stuff that’ll blow your mind — that you never get to read in the newspaper, that you never read on CNN, that will change your whole approach to how you think. Bobby is the Noam Chomsky of the guitar. He’s that guy at the party who will blow your mind and say, “Whoa.” And it opens up so many new possibilities for playing, if you just listen to him.
JESSE: Jerry Garcia made some observations about Weir’s guitar playing that resonate pretty strongly with Don’s comments. These bits are from David Gans and Blair Jackson’s interviews from 1981, reprinted in Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David!
JERRY GARCIA [6/81]: On the guitar, he's copped to havin’ been influenced by people, but I can't hear it — I can't hear it in his playing. I know that he thinks it’s true, but I really swear to god, I can't hear it. He says he’s been influenced a lot by Pete Townshend.
DAVID GANS [6/81]: Weir? Really?
JERRY GARCIA [6/81]: Yeah, I can’t hear it.
DAVID GANS [6/81]: I can’t say as I do either.
JERRY GARCIA [6/81]: Yeah, and a couple of other people too. It’s one of those things that you’d have to be Weir to understand exactly what he meant, or to follow the evolutionary path that he’s followed.
JERRY GARCIA [4/81]:There are ideas that Weir has that I would never have had. And in fact, maybe only he has. And that’s his unique value — which is, he’s an extraordinarily original player, in a world full of people who sound like each other. I mean, really, he’s really got a style that is totally unique as far as I know. I don't know anybody else who plays the guitar the way he does, with the kind of approach that he has to it. That in itself is I think really a score, considering how derivative almost electric guitar playing is.
I hear my influences, to some extent, in myself. With Weir, I have a real hard time recognizing any influences in his playing that I could put my finger on and say, “Well, that’s something that Weir got from X and such,” even though I’ve been along for almost all of his musical development. I’ve been playing with him since he was 16 or 17.
DAVID GANS [4/81]: Does he hide it well?
JERRY GARCIA [4/81]: I just don’t know where he gets it. I have no idea where he gets it.
DAVID GANS [4/81]: He does listen to other things though?
JERRY GARCIA [4/81]: Sure, he listens to an awful lot of stuff. He really keeps up more than anybody in the band, probably.
DAVID GANS [4/81]: He seemed to have a ton of records at his house.
JERRY GARCIA [4/81]: Yeah, he does an awful lot of listening. But he doesn’t do much stealing. His ideas are—
BLAIR JACKSON [4/81]: He’s cagey.
JERRY GARCIA [4/81]: Yeah, he is cagey. He’s an interesting player to play with. He and I have discussed our guitaristic relationship together so much that there’s a lot of our playing together that ends up having an interesting complementary quality to it, because we’re both so different from each other. It’s neat — it makes it fun.
DON WAS: When he's backing Jerry or John or someone and they're doing something that's specifically a solo, it's almost like a hype man and a hip hop group. He's shouting things that encourage the guy to go forward, and he's feeding all kinds of… he’s very sophisticated, harmonically. He does know modes and scales and that kind of thing. He’s got knowledge of music theory, and he's feeding you stuff that you can play off of.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 2/11/20] (4:15-4:45)
JESSE: For Don, it was a wondrous new world in many ways.
DON WAS: I wasn't coming in with a lot of preconceived notions; I think that was refreshing for Bobby. And the whole thing really kind of blew my mind. I wasn't quite prepared for it. The most incredible thing is the exchange of energy with the audience.
AUDIO: “Ripple” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2] (1:08-1:44) - [Spotify]
DON WAS: The audience is really unique. The audience… I can see the faces, man. I can see what they respond to, I see them reacting to songs. For me, the nights that we get to play “Ripple” as an encore, which is like every four or five nights — when I see the audience, I see people hugging each other and crying and all singing along. And still, after all this time, I still get choked up every single time about how much that means to people. You can see it a little bit with the Rolling Stones. I don't even know how many Rolling Stones shows I've been to, but you experience that. But not on that level as a Grateful Dead audience.
AUDIO: “Ripple” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2] (1:43-2:19) - [Spotify]
Getting the Pack Together
JESSE: But then the pandemic hit, and the road closed itself to what was essentially still a new band. A lot of people who were able to stay home during the lockdown took on new projects. Some people learned to bake bread, or knit. We started a podcast. Bobby Weir worked on his long game to change music.
DON WAS: During COVID, we couldn't get out and play. But we were going nuts, so I used to drive up there like every other weekend, we’d just jam — just to play, just to keep our fingers moving. We’d go to TRI. And at some point, it was like, “Well, let's invite Jeff [Chimenti] to come play. Let’s do something a little different.” And it felt great — really, really great. The conversation between Bobby and Jeff and Jay has got some deep history to it, and they really go in real deep together, the three of them. That elevated the game considerably.
JESSE: Jeff Chimenti jumped from the Bay Area jazz scene into Ratdog in 1997 and has played with Weir in numerous projects since, including Furthur, The Dead, and the 50th anniversary Fare Thee Well shows. His musical papers surely contain a deep meta-history of Weir’s career.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Getting into Ratdog and so forth, moving on into The Dead and all through the years, I'm just constantly writing charts as the repertoire expanded. I’ve got a couple of healthy-sized books of charts that I just keep with me just in case. Sometimes, if you haven't played something for a long time, you take a little look at this again real quick. But obviously, you internalize pretty much all of it, so that frees it up even more for improvising or whatever; you can kind of forget about having your face buried into music and let the ears take over. I was definitely going over recordings and stuff. A lot of times I had to figure out — okay, which recording do I reference? Things always change too, or it could be a combination. If I’m listening to one song, I’d try to find four different versions of it and see what’s going on: pull that stuff out, pull that stuff out. “Are we still livin’ here, or not?” Stuff had changed.
JESSE: Coming back to play with Weir, he discovered Bobby had some new moves.
JEFF CHIMENTI: It was just him, Don and Jay — he had to cover a lot of ground. So I think it really expanded… he's just got this whole new vocabulary going on, and it's really cool to watch happen and hear happen. Bob likes to view this as… he wants to be like an old R&B soul band.
JESSE: An old R&B soul band with a pedal steel guitar player.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Yeah. He's got to have a twist…
DON WAS: We were trying to think of another instrument — didn't want to do the regular formula. But pedal steel seemed cool. We called Greg Leisz and he started coming up and jam, but just to jam. Then we thought, “Man, this is really good. Why don't we do some live streams from here?” So, we did a series of live streams.
JESSE: Pedal steel player Greg Leisz is one of those names that shows up everywhere once you start looking at album credits. I recommend his work with jazz titan Bill Frisell. I’m an enormous fan of the pedal steel guitar, and think it’s a brilliant decision to have a pedal steel be the only other guitar in a band with Weir, carrying a flavor of Jerry Garcia’s playing, while rarely locked into signature parts.
DON WAS: Especially in this 10-piece configuration, there's a lot going on. So, much of the time, there is no soloist per se, even though people, if you listen to their isolated tracks, you'd say, “Oh, that's a pedal steel solo; oh, wait, Jeff’s playing a solo on a piano.” But it's just lively conversation. So it becomes a little more… the lines become blurred.
JESSE: When the band hit the road in summer 2021, resulting in the two Live in Colorado albums, Leisz was replaced by Barry Sless, who’s been playing on and off for years with David Nelson, Phil Lesh, and many others. He took up the pedal steel in the mid-’90s. These bits are from the Live in Colorado albums.
AUDIO: “My Brother Esau” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (0:03-0:31) - [Spotify]
BARRY SLESS: I started playing with David Nelson Band around that time, which would have been like 1994. There were some guys that were using effects — Sneaky Pete used to use some phase shifting and phasing on his pedal steel, some distortion. I had heard some of his outside-of-the-box playing. So maybe that might have given me a little idea: hey, there's potential here to get outside of the box.
AUDIO: “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (5:00-5:40) [Spotify]
JESSE: Jeff Chimenti.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Barry has been killing it, and Greg as well prior [to that]. I was blessed to be able to play with those two guys on pedal steel. Even if they are playing similar parts, it’s gonna have a little different twist to it — just the nature of the instrument. It could be solo-oriented, or rhythmic-oriented, or it could be like this giant puffy cloud pad that you can’t really achieve on any other instrument.
BARRY SLESS: A lot of times I'm trying to not make it obviously sound like a pedal steel, like you might expect in a country song or something like that — trying to play it in different ways that fit the song. Every now and then, Jeff or Jay will say, “Hey, can you cop this Jerry part on the pedal steel? Kind of the line that he plays in this song.” So there’s some of that also, where I’ll listen and try to figure out some of those signature underlying parts for some of the songs that nobody else is playing. We’d be out on tour and we’d be doing a soundcheck on a song, and one of ‘em would be like, “Hey can you cop this Jerry line here?” “The Music Never Stopped” might have been one of them.
BOB WEIR: It gives me a little more room, because pedal steel is more of a sustained instrument — which means that there are [fewer] notes being played. More are just being held out, as opposed to new notes and more of them. It just gives me more room to work on the guitar, which is kind of what I’m looking for there. I’ve developed a sort of slow hand approach to guitar playing; I like to hang notes and let ‘em change color, just watch as they change color. If there’s another guitarist playing on top of that, you minimize that effect greatly. At the same time, I’ve always wanted to play with a pedal steel — so, I finally got one.
BARRY SLESS: I don't know anybody that plays like him, unless they're somebody in a cover band that's trying to sound like him. Very rhythmical, just really creative, really open to the muse. Fun to work around and play around. He gets very unique tones, and a tonal range that none of the other guitarists or instruments have. Well, in Wolf Bros, there aren’t any other guitars other than pedal steel. But it’s just a very unique sound and a unique approach: a lot of melodic moving chords and innovative single note lines.
JESSE: I love the way Weir keeps the groove turning inside-out on “New Speedway Boogie.”
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (2:17-2:37) [Spotify]
JEFF CHIMENTI: My upbringing is more from the jazz world. My understanding of harmony and theory and stuff like that was a big benefit for me moving into this. But just seeing some of the ways that he connected certain chords together, I remember early on going, “That’s kind of interesting.”
BARRY SLESS: When I was playing with Phil, we didn't do a whole lot of Bobby songs. So there's a whole lot of new material that I had never played before — that I'd heard before, but had never sat down to play. And some of the tunes are pretty complex.
AUDIO: “Lost Sailor” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (0:34-1:07) - [Spotify]
BARRY SLESS: “Lost Sailor” / “Saint of Circumstance” — might be a few chords in there. “Victim or the Crime.” There’s some other ones where some chords just don’t fall naturally on my pedal steel. There’s been some challenging chord inversions where I’ll have to go, “Okay, how can I comfortably play this without contorting my body with this pedal and this lever?” There have been a few moments where it's like: how can I play this chord on the pedal steel? I know how to play it on guitar, but where can it fit comfortably on the pedal steel? The pedal steel can kind of be a beast.
AUDIO: “Lost Sailor” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (8:36-9:04) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It’s almost as if “Lost Sailor” and “Saint of Circumstance” are rites of passage in Weir’s band.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Especially charting out some of the first stuff. I think “Sailor” / “Saint” might have been one of the first things I had to chart out in Ratdog. It was just like, “Whoa, this is beautiful.” This is very... I don’t want to say “adult,” but it was adult.
AUDIO: “Saint of Circumstance” (tracked with “Lost Sailor”) [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (10:16-10:51) - [Spotify]
DON WAS: He said, “Yeah, learn ‘Lost Sailor’ / ‘Saint of Circumstance’ — we’ll try it tomorrow night.” Tomorrow night? Those songs are really fuckin’ hard, man. [laughs] I know when I got to “Saint of Circumstance,” while I was trying to learn it, I’d write it out in this primitive kind of chart that I’d make. Just a chart where at least I could keep track of odd bars, or when there’s an odd time signature change. I remember when I was trying to break the code of “Saint of Circumstance” that I was actually mad: like, why did he have to put all this shit in it? But once you learn it, man, once you internalize it… it’s genius, man. It’s all there for a reason. These songs, they kind of roll off your fingers like melted butter. It’s just so easy to play. There are so many ideas you can have — it’s just an infinite mound of approaches. I remember after the first tour that I did with Bobby, with Wolf Bros, when we got together the second time. I remember the first time we played “Lost Sailor,” I had the same feeling I have when I see an old friend: man, it’s really good to see that song and play those changes again. I really missed it. I’ve never experienced a friendship with a song.
AUDIO: “Saint of Circumstance” (tracked with “Lost Sailor”) [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado] (14:40-15:17) - [Spotify]
BARRY SLESS: You never know what he's gonna do. He's spontaneous in the moment, and it could always change. That could be his guitar playing or where he sings a vocal line. Or he might not come in singing a line where you always heard it and you expect it; he might let the music breathe for a couple of measures before he comes in. That can be different every night, and the same goes for his guitar playing. He's soloing more in this band than I've heard him solo before, and it's really cool because he has a really unique approach that's just distinctly by Bobby — nobody else solos like that. And some of the rhythmical stuff borders on soloing, too; it could kind of be chordal soloing with single-note lines thrown in, but can work against somebody else that’s soloing at the same time.
JEFF CHIMENTI: We're all trying to give each other space, and especially, Bob has been soloing a lot more, which has been great. He's been killing it. And just watching him, he's growing all the time, still. Coming out with new stuff, and when he's playing it’s like, “Whoa, where'd that come from?” I just like to trust in everybody as a musician, I think. The learning aspect of it never ends if you let it, and so you're constantly searching.
JESSE: There are Weir solos all over the Live in Colorado albums.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2] (2:37-3:07) [Spotify]
JESSE: In early 2022, the band hit the road with a destination: Radio City Music Hall and a pair of shows celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ace. One of those nights will be released as a bonus disc on the upcoming Ace 50 release, which we talked about extensively last time, but it wasn’t all that happened that week.
BARRY SLESS: We had a really fun tour, all the shows leading up to Radio City and including Radio City. We were already in a pretty high space, so adding that to it was just a little cherry on the top.
AUDIO: “Black-Throated Wind” [Ace 50, 4/3/22] (3:26-3:58) - [dead.net] [YouTube]
BARRY SLESS: Really the only preparation we did [was] a rehearsal in New York at a soundstage before we set up at Radio City. And we had some of the guests come in.
JESSE: Two of those guests, Tyler Childers and Brittney Spencer, can be heard singing on Ace 50. But the music they made with another guest isn’t out just yet — the towering jazz bassist Ron Carter, who played with Miles Davis from 1963 to 1968, which alone is enough to make him an all-timer.
BARRY SLESS: Don is the president of Blue Note Records, and maybe his relationship with Ron was just artist and label president in the past. I think it was cool for him to meet in the space of both of them being players. Don was super stoked to have him there.
JEFF CHIMENTI: When it first came up, I was like, “Seriously?” Because, obviously, I've been hearing him and most of my life, and I was wondering — how did this happen? Is he really going to come? And then to get confirmation that he's coming not only to the gig, he's coming to the sort of rehearsal? I was really excited. He was such a nice gentleman, and you can't say enough about his playing. It was the epitome of what you thought he would be — everything you thought he would be, and more.
DON WAS: The rehearsal, which is recorded, he also did “[The] Other One.” He came and rehearsed. He was mindblowin’, man. For me personally, it was a very big deal. This bass that I play with Bobby, it’s really huge, man — it’s a 6/4 size bass. Most people play either a 3/4s size, or a full size. So this is like a bass and a half. It’s old, it's 200 years old. It’s so big that when I bought it, I thought, “Man, I wonder what Ron Carter would say about this. Would he think this is the stupidest thing?” Because it’s so big, it hurts. It hurts my shoulder to reach around it. It’s a lot of weight to sport for a three-hour show, but it sounds really good.
JESSE: On the first night at Radio City, Carter took over Don’s bass for a beautiful version of “Dark Star” that found him weaving with Weir’s guitar, Chimenti’s piano, and Sless’s pedal steel.
JEFF CHIMENTI: When it came to the actual gig, all of a sudden he started doing some stuff before the tune had even started. We got into this little improvised conversation with each other, mostly just the two of us. It was a special moment for me: “Wow, this is really happening.”
AUDIO: “Dark Star” (feat. Ron Carter) [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 4/2/22] (1:21-1:39)
JEFF CHIMENTI: Then we got into the tune and of course he killed it. His whole approach of orchestration with the bass was really incredible.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” (feat. Ron Carter) [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 4/2/22] (3:16-3:42)
JEFF CHIMENTI: I think he knew what song he was gonna play, but I'm not sure how much he listened to it beforehand, because there was a lay out and all of a sudden he's looking at me. I'm like, “Okay…” So I started barking chord changes, and I wanted to pinch myself: “Look at me, I’m barking chord changes at Ron Carter?” Give me a break.
BARRY SLESS: We did “Dark Star,” so there’s a lot of room for improvisation there, something he’s well-acquainted with. So it was kind of a good fit in that there was plenty of room for us to stretch and go in any direction. Having his voicings there was really cool and great to play off of.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” (feat. Ron Carter) [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, 4/2/22] (15:50-16:20)
The Bobby Weir Arkestra
JESSE: Of course, this wouldn’t be a Weir-centric episode of the Deadcast without getting unstuck in time. Another part of Bobby Weir’s story in 2022 has a slightly different arc, rooting in a different project that began life a dozen years ago. In 2010, the Marin County Symphony approached Weir about playing a benefit, and they went looking for an arranger. Symphony board member and Dead Head Helen Baldovinos had heard the Stanford Marching Band’s arrangements of Dead songs, and called the Stanford Music Department. There she found Giancarlo Aquilanti, an Italian composer and professor who very much didn’t have anything to do with the Stanford Marching Band’s versions of Dead tunes, but took the meeting anyway.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: My first reaction [was that] it wasn't really… I wasn’t much interested. I'm a classical musician; I do my own things. Even though I knew about the Grateful Dead, I really didn't know much about their music. Another factor is that I'm originally from Italy. I moved here when I was an adult, and I didn't grow up with that kind of music.
JESSE: It was a country the Dead skipped entirely on their seven trips overseas.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: I was always in the classical world, so I didn't know them very well. My first reaction was: I'm not sure about this. Then the more I [thought] about it, I said, “Well, maybe this could be a different experience.” I said, Why not? So I started to work with Bob and do the First Fusion.
JESSE: Debuted on May 7th, 2011 at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Marin Center on May 7th, 2011, First Fusion was a two-part performance. In the first half, titled “Raising the Dead,” Weir and a selected crew of Ratdog musicians joined members of the Symphony and the Quartet San Francisco to play pieces including “Cassidy” and “Bird Song.” In the second half, “Reinventing the Classics,” Weir and the Symphony played a suite that moved through some of the Dead’s most expansive work, including portions of “Dark Star,” “Playing in the Band,” and “The Days Between.”
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: I suddenly discovered a new world. I discovered a new world of music, something that I hadn't… I didn't know much about rock and roll, much about Grateful Dead, much about that world, period. It's amazing how much material [there is] in the Grateful Dead songs; it's material to be translated into this amazing ensemble of the orchestra that I do not find in other songs from other groups. So, is this a coincidence that we're doing this, or is this something that they, in their subconscious, thought about it? Is that a coincidence? I don't know. It was really quite an amazing experience to work with Bob. He’s very knowledgeable about music in general, not just in his little world of rock and roll, the big world of rock and roll. He's very knowledgeable. I realized that there was so much for me to learn. The First Fusion was really an experiment; we saw that it’s possible. The First Fusion gave us confidence that it's possible — now, how can we improve that?
JESSE: Plenty of ambitious projects have declared themselves to be Volume One or the first part of a larger series. It took a few years, but Weir and Aquilanti were serious that it was only a first attempt. We’ll be listening to a few bits of the Kennedy Center performances from early October 2022 during the next segment of this episode.
AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
JESSE: Far more than First Fusion, Bobby and Giancarlo hope that this will lay the groundwork for a long-running project that can move from orchestra to orchestra.
GIANCARLO AQUILATI: Improvisation was not part of the First Fusion. Improvisation was a crucial aspect in classical music. In the Baroque time, I'm thinking about the basso continuo; I won’t go into the details, but the keyboard players were always improvising on what we call figured bass. They had some numbers, similar to [chord] symbols today — jazz players, they have Cm7 or a Dm6, and then they improvise over those symbols. In the Baroque time, there was something very similar to that. So improvisation is nothing new to classical musicians, and in particular to composers. Composers were trained to improvise on their instrument, mainly the keyboard, because improvisation is like brainstorming. So you sit at the piano, you can play, fool around. It could be structured or not, but it's a way to get ideas, basically. It's the equivalent of brainstorming. My first composition teacher, that was crucial training. So improvisation, for me, was nothing new. But I always did it in the classical world, which today is kind of unusual. It's unusual for classical musicians — that idea of improvisation is kind of lost, even among composers. But somehow I always had that in my tools.
JESSE: Certainly, it’s possible to argue that one of the main differences between classical music and jazz is racism. The tradition of improvisation has intersected with classical music for centuries, and in more recent centuries around jazz especially. Charlie Parker regularly played with string arrangements and large ensembles, for example, and composers from Duke Ellington and Count Basie to Charles Mingus and Sun Ra and countless others have used orchestral and arkestral forms. But each had to negotiate it for themselves. This is Charlie Parker performing the seasonal classic “Autumn in New York” with strings in 1952.
AUDIO: “Autumn in New York” [Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker with Strings] (2:37-3:03) [Spotify]
JESSE: That was more of a jazz rhythm section backing up strings than an orchestra, but something of how jazz and orchestras sometimes combine. But conversational music in the Grateful Dead tradition is something else.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: We've been struggling with how we preserve that idea of improvisation, since it is a crucial part of the Grateful Dead music — what makes them special in a way, what makes these songs be transformative and different and renewed every time they play. So, how do we translate that into an ensemble that notoriously does not improvise? Bob and I, we'd been banging our heads [together] on how we're doing [this]. He had some crazy ideas, and I said, “Bob, this is not possible.” I have some crazy idea, Bob said, “No, this is not part of the Grateful Dead. That’s not how we’re doing it.” So we needed to find a solution somehow. So I decided that most likely, among a symphony orchestra, there are going to be some musicians within the orchestra that are capable of improvising. Out of these musicians, I'm sure every single major symphony orchestra in this country [has] some musician that comes from a different background — they play in a classical orchestra, but they've been exposed to jazz and rock and roll so they have some knowledge about improvisation. So we're going to leave it to the conductors, to invite or to ask who's willing to take those sections to improvise.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
JESSE: But here’s what we meant when we said that Weir was working on his long game.
BOB WEIR: We knew all along that we were going to do this, so I knew that I was shopping for like five guys who could cover string parts, could cover a wind part and then lead the charge in the orchestra when that time [came]. But first, I needed to tour with them and sort of get them and us all on the same page. So, that's what we've been doing.
DON WAS: Bobby booked the symphony dates, and this is something that he had been developing for 10 years. He is, primarily, a disrupter. So Bobby was thinking: Well, why can't the orchestra solo? And, of course, the answer is obviously not — that's not what they do, that's not what the people who are there are there for, because they blend. They’re anti-soloists, almost: they blend into an ensemble, and they can read the page well and blend so that it sounds like one unit. That’s their skill. So standing out is almost antithetical. It’s like having your backup singer… like, the Ikettes did not upstage Tina Turner. [laughs] But he thought, I get that, but why don’t we put some ringers in the sections? Let’s take a cello player who can solo; let’s take a violin player who can solo; let’s take a brass guy. So we auditioned five different categories for the symphony shows, so that the people in the orchestra could solo. We picked these five guys and it was kind of cool. They started doing these livestreams with us because it added some other elements. At times, it was chaotic and sounded more like Sun Ra than the National Symphony Orchestra — but we liked that, too. So then we started getting away from the written orchestrations that were planned for the symphonies, and they started arranging parts. It just kind of grew, it wasn't by design. And then we took it out on tour. It was pretty nice.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Live in Colorado, Vol. 2] (8:28-9:08) [Spotify]
JESSE: That’s “The Other One” from Live in Colorado, Vol. 2. It’s actually the members of the Wolfpack who’ve taken on the challenge of writing the charts for the band, rotating arrangement duties amongst themselves. But integrating Wolfpack is only one part of it.
BOB WEIR: One of the projects that we're working on is getting a symphony orchestra to improvise. That’s a pretty major challenge. We have a number of techniques that we're going to employ to do that, but they all involve having a little crew of people that we travel with who we can then seat into the orchestra, and they can sort of lead the charge in the improv sections. For the time being, they're going to be the guys who are going to be leading the charge on the improvisation. At some point, we've got some more advanced techniques that we'll get entire sections, improvising with one voice. But that's going to take a little doing, maybe some iPads and stuff like that. But for now, those guys, we'll seat them into the orchestra and they'll see what they can pull out during the extended sections of the concerto. We'll see what kind of magic they can make.
DON WAS: They're all players who have played in orchestras, but can also solo and have worked [in other contexts]. I think Mads [Tolling], the [violin] player, worked for Stanley Clarke. And they all do other things.
JESSE: One of the ringers they’re bringing along is Jeff Chimenti.
BOB WEIR: I'm a little concerned about having a piano involved. Jeff is a great player, but he's got two hands — that's a lot of notes. You have to think that kind of stuff through when you're working with 80, 90 pieces.
JEFF CHIMENTI: I've done symphony stuff before. But the unique thing about this approach is that, normally, it would be a symphony accompanying the band as the standard scenario. But, more or less, we’re actually accompanying the orchestra. So they're taking lots of spaces where it’s orchestra only, soloing and stuff and having their own solo sections. We may trade back and forth, or then it becomes us, we're improvising in there. We're gonna figure this out too — it's gonna be ever-evolving.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
JESSE: As you may have imagined, Jeff has internalized the music pretty well by now.
JEFF CHIMENTI: Even with the symphony stuff, I’m not actually looking at music per se. I’m looking at written roadmaps, but I’ve got my own notes on there, for cues or this and that. Otherwise, I’d be flipping pages of a score really fast, if I had to read it. I’ve got it down to where I’m only looking at one page per song. But I’ve made detailed notes.
BOB WEIR: We're bringing Jay, we were bringing Jay with two kits. One of them is a very, very quiet kit. I rode back from D.C. a number of years back, and the guy sitting next to me on my flight was Tony Bennett's drummer. I’d heard him the night before this benefit that we did there, a gig that we did there. And he was telling me all kinds of tricks that he uses to quiet down a kit. A rock and roll trap kit all by itself, unamplified, is twice as loud as an entire symphony orchestra. So we've had to go through hoops to quiet the band down and still have guys feel like they're leaning into the music. Like I say, a rock and roll drum kit is twice as loud as an entire symphony orchestra, unamplified. You’ve just got to do something about that, or the symphony players will just get up and leave. They all have dB meters on their music stands, and if it gets… they have to protect their ears. You don’t get a second chance: they’ll get up and leave if it gets too loud. So we have to quiet the band down, or there’s no point in even trying to play with an orchestra. And so we've done that, we put a lot of work into it. I’m not sure that you'll be able to hear from the audience, the fact that I'm playing through minimal amplification, but I'll be playing through minimal amplification. The piano will be acoustic; you'll be hearing it acoustically. I don't think there's going to be much… well, it depends on which kit Jay is playing, because if he plays his regular kit, it’s really really quiet. But that might still be too loud, in which case we’re also bringing electronic drums, which are pretty good these days.
JESSE: As arranger, Giancarlo Aquilanti is handling air traffic control.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: We reserved some sections in these orchestrations where [these] patterns are repeated, and every single instrument has one — we’ll call them the chords. I inserted the chords, like a jazz musician will have these charts with chords and symbols. Among the orchestra players, I’m sure there’s someone who understands exactly what that means. In the National Symphony, it might be the trumpet player and in some other orchestra, it might be the clarinet player. So the result will be completely different each time we play those songs.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: It's going to be a connection between the band—mainly Bob—and the conductors, that these sections are going to be repeated, as it is in the traditions of the Grateful Dead, until Bob says, “Time to move on.” Then the conductor will communicate that to the orchestra and they will say, “Time to move on.” So — will it work, not work? We’ll try. We’ll see.
DON WAS: We have a couple of key things. There are areas that are specifically designed for soloing that are going to rely on nods and gestures between Bobby and the conductor as to when that section is over. There are some things that will just keep going on until we say we're done. There are other things where you absolutely can't do that, and you have to play it as written.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: The First Fusion did not have these improvisation sections, but this time, they will have it. And also, we have many more songs — I’ve orchestrated about 20 songs so far. The 20 songs generated 650 pages of orchestral score. When it’s translated, when you generate the parts with a single instrument, we're talking 4 or 5,000 pages of music. At the same time, as in the Dead traditions, I tried to add something. Because these songs were transformed through the years, dramatically. So, the way we see it in these orchestrations is a forever transformation: it's a continuation of these songs to be transformed through the years. Helen or Bob, they will send me all kinds of different versions. All versions. “Oh, this is what this was in the ‘60s”; “this is what we did in the ‘70s”; “this was within the ‘80s.” So I would listen to all of them in order to formulate some ideas. It was not just a mere listening — I really needed to go inside the music, I needed to go into the mechanics of the music. How these chord progressions are set; how do they work; how are these improvisations based on that chord progression. Why is Jerry Garcia doing this, using this sort of pattern here? And then in the ‘70s, it was different, and then later on, that pattern kind of changed.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band (Reprise)” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: So with all due respect for any person knowing the music of the
Grateful Dead, I really was not just listening and saying, “Oh, this is a beautiful song, I really like it.” I really had to go inside the music. As a Stanford professor, I would say, I really need to analyze it, not just: “Oh, so beautiful, there are two verses,” and “listen, I really liked that, [and] that.” That doesn't do anything in music. I really needed to understand the mechanics: the chord progression, the melodic lines, and how they are connected. I would do the analysis that you’d do of a Mozart symphony or a Beethoven symphony. You’d go inside and say, “Why did he write these melodies? Why that, why is that?” So once you understand that, then I said, “How can I make it my own?” The introduction of “The Other One.” So, the main melody — I used the main melody to have an orchestral interlude at the beginning, and I created a fugue out of it. So it’s an old technique kind of lost within composing, of writing fugues. So I used some ideas from the Grateful Dead — I got those ideas, and I built a fugue around it for an orchestral part. Or I would take some ideas from Jerry Garcia's improvisations: I’d find some patterns that he might be using in different songs or something that is recurring. I figure he must have been attached to that, and I would use these, again, either to write a fugue or to write an interlude. That will be my main theme that will be transformed, modified, harmonized differently — you name it. Things we do in classical music.
AUDIO: “Uncle John’s Band (Reprise)” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
JESSE: How does the song go?
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: They've been trained that way. The band trained the audience in a certain way, and they follow it. Now, the song’s evolution into something else is expected — they don’t want to hear the song the same way. If they played three concerts, they want to hear them play the same song those three nights, and they want to hear it differently. That’s how the Dead Head audience has been trained. It’s a feature of the band.
DON WAS: We need a lot of rehearsal, and more than the orchestra can give us. We get two days with them in D.C. So the arranger made these MIDI files for us of synthesizers playing all the parts. But at least it enabled us to get concrete versions of the forms of the songs, because the one thing that's really different, certainly at this stage of the game, is the verse has to start at bar 72 — not 73, not 83, not 52. With us, when Bobby starts singing the second verse, that's when we start playing it. But we can't do that with an orchestra. So that required a lot of rehearsal, and I'm really impressed by Bobby's work ethic, learning these arrangements and being able to stick to ‘em. That required a tremendous amount of discipline and a whole lot of work, and he's worked really hard at it. Much harder than I have, because no one's going to notice if I miss.
GIANCARLO AQUILANTI: The way we rehearse is I have MIDI files. The computer generates MIDI files of these orchestrations, so that's what we have for now. We don't have a real orchestra to rehearse. So [Bob and the band] were playing over these melodies, and I had to stop them. I said, “Guys, here you really need to play softer, because there is the English horn and the bass clarinet using some ideas that I took from Jerry Garcia, and I used it here because I think it fits. And it’s ‘Dark Star,’ so I am using the bass clarinet and the English horn because it’s a dark sound. So you need to respect that: that needs to ring out, because it’s like bringing Jerry Garcia’s soul alive again.” That’s how I envisioned all of these orchestrations.
DON WAS: He really wants to disrupt some traditional aspects of the orchestra and introduce improvisational elements. It's not without precedent: hundreds of years ago, orchestras would play pieces that weren't necessarily finished, because the composers were still alive. And they would improvise — if the composer hadn't gotten to the end but they were trying out a piece, they just figured out a way to get out of it. So there's some historical precedence for it, but it's really not done in modern times. But Bobby’s got this whole thing involving iPads for the whole orchestra and color coding.
AUDIO: “Shakedown Street” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]
DON WAS: He's looking to change music with this. I think that's 50% of his interest in this; it’s to change things. And I think the other 50% is… well, look, I just turned 70 and Bobby is five years older than me. At this age, man, you understand the limitations of your active playing time. Optimistically, you’ve got 15 years, which flies by at this point in time. I think Bobby’s concerned about serving the songs, and making sure that the songs survive all of us, that they keep going. He’s very interested in finding ways to keep the music alive — to keep it fresh, and alive. And doing it with orchestras is one way of doing that. I think these shows at the Kennedy Center — I think they’ll be good, and it’s certainly a high adventure for us. I think it’s just a start.
BOB WEIR: I'd love to incorporate the pedal steel, but there are too damn many strings now. It’s just too busy. I’m thinking we may try to work the pedal steel in… we’re booked again in the winter, I guess, and we may try to work the pedal steel in at that point. But one foot at a time. We’ll keep it rolling — I’ve got a couple of MIDI guitars at this point, and I’m getting up to speed on ‘em so that I can actually write. Otherwise, I can’t actually write music. But now, if you play a line on a MIDI guitar, it will write that out for you. I’ll be working with Giancarlo I think, my orchestrator. The idea is we have 20 songs worked up now, and it’s gonna take four nights to play ‘em all. They’re all fairly lengthy pieces. By the time we get on stage again, we’ll have a bunch of new songs; my plan is we’ll have a bunch of new songs. So you’re never going to know what songs you’re getting until you get there — just like a Dead show. And there’s going to be a considerable amount of improvisation as well. We’re looking to really bring something to classical music that it’s not known for.
JESSE: Bobby Weir’s long game extended back a few years, building a band that accommodated classical players with deeper improv chops, but the game’s even longer than that. As we were preparing this episode, I read an obituary of Sue Mingus, who for decades tended to the legacy of her late husband, the genius composer and bassist Charles Mingus, keeping both the Mingus Big Band and the Mingus Orchestra running in tandem to showcase different parts of his musical world. Between Dead & Co., Wolf Bros, the Wolfpack, and unnamed orchestras to be named later, I have no interest in counting how many parallel threads of the Dead’s legacy Weir’s tending to, but suffice to say, lotta strands.
BOB WEIR: We're not really concerned about what people are saying about the next bunch of gigs. My major consideration when I'm trying to decide this or that with the music is: What are people going to be saying about it in 2 or 300 years?
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with National Symphony Orchestra, 10/22]