Richmond Times-Dispatch
March 15, 2007
by Tom Netherland
Listen to the Grateful Dead circa 1966. Then listen to the Dead of the late 1980s or early'90s. The group's style changed as more sounds were added to the mix and went from good to great. Greatness takes time.
Bob Weir ought to know.
The longtime member of the Grateful Dead leads Ratdog nowadays. Fans can see Weir & Co. on Tuesday at the NorVa in Norfolk.
With Ratdog, and much as he and the Dead's Jerry Garcia learned, great bands don't become great bands overnight.
"It's been a slow process," Weir said by phone Monday afternoon from Concord, N.H. "It takes a long time to learn the telepathic way to learn the nuances of the components of a band. The last few years, we've been spitting fire."
Weir assembled Ratdog in the spring of 1995. Shows were scant at first as the band took tentative steps into the world of rock. Gradually, those steps turned to leaps.
Over time, Ratdog's members have learned an unspoken musical language that blooms onstage, Weir said. "Tiny movements or a flick of a finger between themselves can say much more than words can.
"You develop it over the years," he said. "I can play a lick on the guitar onstage, and they'll know what I'm talking about." That's exactly what Weir had with Garcia.
"It comes down to learning how to listen to your brothers onstage," Weir said. "You know how they say that blood is thicker than water? What's beginning to happen with Ratdog was what Jerry used to say we had with the Dead -- that the blood is thicker than the blood."
Perhaps that explains why Weir said that nary a day passes when he doesn't think about Garcia, his musical father. "I can still feel Jerry onstage with me sometimes," Weir said. "He's there. I can feel him in certain songs that we play."
Comparisons with the legendary Grateful Dead are inevitable. Both classify as jam bands. Each features sounds including and well beyond rock. And as with the Dead, Ratdog never plays the same show twice.
"I have a database of 10 years or so," Weir said.
He assembles the set list for each show. When Ratdog rolls into a city for a show, he summons the database.
"First I bring up the last few times I've played the town, and those songs are automatically out," he said. "Plus, like we did in the Dead, if we play more than one night in a town, we won't repeat songs. Our repertoire is about 200 songs."
Dead fans will instantly recognize many of those 200 songs as songs culled from the Dead's repertoire. On any given night, Ratdog may perform Dead classics such as "Sugar Magnolia" and "Uncle John's Band." Ratdog also covers some of the covers the Dead were known to feature, including Marty Robbins' "Big Iron" and Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."
And also as with the Dead, there are occasional shows and moments onstage that exceed greatness, Weir said.
"It does happen with some regularity. Over a period of time I'll feel weightless. It's like my mind has become elastic. At that point, I'm in a total hallucinogenic state. That happened a lot with the Dead, and it does now with Ratdog."
Ratdog's leader may look like an aging hippie with nary a care, but that's inaccurate.
"I've got a job to do, and I take it very seriously," Weir said. At 59, he has no desire to hang up his guitar anytime soon.
"I asked Johnnie Johnson one time had he ever thought about retiring or coming off the road. He said that'll only happen when his boots were pointed to high noon," Weir said.
"I feel the same way. I've got nothing else better to do. Playing music is all I've ever really wanted to do."
