Bob Weir and RatDog | RatDog.Org

With seemingly little left to prove, Grateful Dead founder Bob Weir hits the road again on an East Coast tour that will bring him back through Athens. When most young bands leave the road after a few weeks a year, Weir and his band Ratdog are true road dogs, logging up the tour bus hours and keeping a small army of roadies and minders busy for months at a time. With this mobile existence comes a turn-and-burn attitude leaving cities as anonymous skylines and backstage areas as bunker-type dining rooms. But Weir says he plans to connect with Athens. “Athens is a pretty rockin’town,” he says.

Although this will be Ratdog’s first local show in 10 years, the band was recently in Atlanta performing a gig widely regarded as leaving many in the audience limp and bored. With so many shows a year, Weir is bound to offer some duds, but when they do succeed - a majority of the time, in fact - they do so on a combination of song selection and delivery. Weir says he tries to address both components before and during a show. “The way I do a set list is, first off, I have a database of tunes and I bring up the last time we were in said town, and those songs are automatically out,” he says. “And then I look back at the last five to seven shows that we’ve done and those tunes are automatically out. Then we start from there. You have to have a big repertoire to be able to do that, but we do and that’s how we do it.”

Using the set list as a guide, Weir hopes for the best and sometimes, like in Atlanta last November, things fall flat. Adjusting from the stage will sometimes re-energize the scene. “We go off the pre-written set list all the time,” he says. “The set list is often known as a 'pack of lies' or 'wishful thinking.' That said, if the set is seeming slow, if I miscalculated when I was doing the set list, oftentimes we will inject something with a little more thump to it. In the middle of the set, if I get to thinking about it, sometimes we’ll change direction or evolve the jam into something that’s got a little more kick to it.”

At another recent show, Weir detected some sluggishness and dialed up some jazzy energy. “Like for instance, the other day we brought up a tune that this band had never played,” he says. “An old Miles Davis tune, ‘Milestones’. It wasn’t on our original set list. It occurred to me that in writing the set list, I had neglected to put enough upbeat stuff in there. I was scratching my head wondering what we could do and came up with that.”

For those old-school Deadheads in the audience, there may be a longing for older Weir tunes, and a feeling of overload when it comes to Jerry Garcia compositions. “Some of my old songs, I’ve sung enough for the time being,” says Weir. “As I get lonesome for [Garcia songs,] I bring them back around.”

Deadheads looking for Weir to share the stage with the remaining Grateful Dead members again (the last post-Garcia show under the name The Dead was in Atlanta in 2004) will have to keep waiting, as there have not been any recent discussions. Yet Weir remains open to the possibility. “I wouldn’t be surprised if happen[s] again at some point,” he says. “If the remaining members of the Grateful Dead do reconvene, I would like to do it as a quartet. That would be by far the most interesting and by far the most meaningful way to do it. I’d have to evolve some more [as a lead guitarist], but I’m up to the challenge.”

By the time Ratdog comes to town, the band will be well-oiled from three weeks on the road. Weir mentions that there’s talk of some fresh songs. “The new stuff we’re working on we’re going to try to get fluffed up by the time we get down to your neck of the woods,” he says. There's one easy way to find out.