Minneapolis Star Tribune
October 13, 2006
by Paul Levy
SAN FRANCISCO -- For much of a long, strange trip lasting more than four decades, Grateful Dead founding member Bob Weir has sung this opening verse to the Johnny Cash song "Big River":
"I met her accidentally in St. Paul, Minnesota."
Amazingly, he really did.
Weir, who brings his current band RatDog to St. Paul next Sunday, met his future bride, Natascha Muenter, 25 years ago at a Dead concert at the old St. Paul Civic Center.
Muenter is living proof that anything could happen when the Dead hit river junction.
"My first Grateful Dead show was a chaperoned date in my ninth-grade class, at the Civic Center in 1981," recalled Muenter, 39, who grew up in Rochester. "I was going with this cute boy from my German class. It was more about the date than the Dead."
Muenter, whose dad was a Mayo Clinic neurologist and mother a Mayo Clinic nurse, knew little about the Grateful Dead at that point. But the following year, when a girlfriend and her older sister invited Muenter to join them at another Civic Center show by the band, she decided to take a crash course in the Dead.
She purchased their most recent studio album, "Go to Heaven," and nearly wore out each side. She soon became familiar with other Dead staples, including "Truckin' " and "Sugar Magnolia," written and sung by rhythm guitarist Weir.
"I didn't know anything about them," she said. "And it was the first time I was going to go out to anything like this without a parent."
If you ever went to a Dead show, you were likely to see some ticketless wonder holding a sign that read, "I need a miracle." Well, Muenter got one. On the sidewalk outside the arena, she found a front-row ticket.
"Talk about fate," she said. "How significant a tiny little thing like finding a ticket can be. It changed our lives."
But not immediately. Her friend Lynn grabbed the ticket, insisting that Muenter and the other girls use the tickets they already had, just a few rows back.
They weren't there long, Muenter recalled. Her friend, who looked older than she actually was, began flirting with a security guard and sweet-talked him into letting the other girls squeeze into the front row. By the end of the show, the friend had persuaded the guard to allow the girls backstage.
"She said to me, 'I'm going backstage and you're coming with me,' " Muenter recalled. "She asked, 'Who's the cutest guy in the band?' I said, 'Bob Weir.'
"The backstage door opened and Lynn said, 'We're here to meet Bob Weir.' "
Not only were the girls allowed to enter, but they wound up taking Weir back to Muenter's house, where her mother was running an all-night clinic of sorts. Her mother glared at "all the people who looked like Deadheads" and told Muenter she was lucky that her mother was incredibly busy at the moment.
Trouble ahead? Hardly. "Bobby slept on the floor," Muenter said. "It was all very innocent. We became friends. But he began dating my friend, the aggressive one."
The friend faded from the scene, but Muenter and Weir remained distant pals.
"But there was the time that I saw him. ... I was definitely over 21 ... and we had some wine together and ended up being more than friends," she said. "He waited. He was a gentleman."
They began a long-distance relationship. After spending five years at Macalester College, Muenter taught grade school for a couple of years in Minneapolis, first at Wilder School, then Richard Greene Central. Weir asked her to join him on a West Coast tour. And the music never stopped.
Weir last played in Minnesota more than a year ago, in Minneapolis. But occasionally he'll drop into Minnesota for his in-laws' family reunions. When Muenter took Weir to northern Minnesota for the first time, he told her, "Now I understand what Dylan meant."
Weir, who turns 59 on Monday, is still ever the merry prankster after all these years. When asked for a story about Minnesota, he chuckled. "None that you can print," he replied. "But I sure do like the people."
He's still performing plenty of Dead songs with RatDog. Ten days ago, at the legendary Fillmore auditorium, he walked on stage unannounced and sat in for the entire second set of the Dark Star Orchestra, a band that re-creates, note for note, a particular Grateful Dead concert, jams and all.
Muenter's mom might have enjoyed that. Doris Bauer apparently has gotten on the Grateful Dead bus. Last year, when she visited Minnetonka High School to assist in a blood drive by students, she encountered a student named Sarah who was wearing a shirt with dancing bears and the words, "Have a Grateful day."Are you a fan of that group?" Bauer asked.
"I like them," Sarah said, "but my dad is really into them."
Bauer told her: "My son-in-law used to play in that group."
