Rochester Democrat & Chronicle
July 6, 2006
by Jeff Spevak
(July 6, 2006) — Pardon the pun, but the grass doesn't grow under the feet of the Grateful Dead.
"Personally, I never left off," says Bob Weir. "The Dead did, for a while, but not for long. There's a certain kind of person who requires a little adventure in their lives, and in their music, whether listening or playing."
Weir's summer adventure is RatDog, a side project he was tinkering with even before Jerry Garcia's 1995 death brought the Dead to an unexpected, but not permanent, halt. A side effect of Garcia's death is that RatDog, which Weir brings here for a Monday show at the sparkling new Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center (the venue formerly known as Finger Lakes Performing Arts Center) is now the lead dog for many old Deadheads.
Curiously, there is no temptation to cast the 59-year-old Weir among other aging rockers touring this summer, such as Rare Earth, Mountain, the Lovin' Spoonful and Felix Cavaliere's Rascals of "HippieFest," which plays the C-MAC on Aug. 10.
"Those guys are kinda retired," Weir says. "It's kinda like breaking the old Harley out of the back of the garage, putting some oil in it and taking it for a ride. I hope they have a lot of fun.
"But I've just never taken a break, never, for more than a month. The fact is, I love what I do. I'd love to take six months or a year off, do some sabbatical work, come back a different musician. But you can lose your relevance in pop music. I don't mind living with a lash across my back."
Certainly Weir has been offered ample evidence for the need to stop and smell the hemp. Garcia's death, certainly. And the curious curse that has claimed four Dead keyboardists: Pigpen McKernan, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland and, last month, Vince Welnick, who also played with RatDog.
"He kept wanting me to put the Dead back together, and have him playing keyboards," Weir says of Welnick. "I just didn't have that ability. He was so obsessed, even if I wanted to put him on the piano bench, I don't think the other guys would have gone for it. Even when he was taking his medications, he was tough to be around."
Welnick's problems escalated, Weir says, when he abandoned his medication for depression. It was suicide to the coroner but, "In this case," Weir says, "suicide is a natural death. If that kind of thing happened to me, I'm pretty sure I'd take myself out."
Weir remains engaged with what he helped start. RatDog's summer tour partner, the Colorado bluegrass-groove outfit the String Cheese Incident, is among a wave of jam bands following the path set by the Dead in the '60s. "These guys might have turned out to be jazz musicians, or bluegrass," Weir says. "They have some of the same values — had it not been for the so-called jam-band scene. Before that, jazz was doing the same thing. You start a song, then take it for a walk in the woods."
He also remains engaged with the social issues of the day. Weir has moved among some amazing people. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, countless writers and thinkers. Particularly in San Francisco in those early days, where the guy in your living room turned out to be Ken Kesey. They had big dreams.
"Utopian ideas, those kind of things are hard to get off the ground, and we knew that at the time," Weir says. "There was a strong tinge of communism in the far left. I had a bad feeling about that, even thought I was basically a practicing communist. We all lived in the same house. When we did a gig, we shared the wealth evenly, each according to his needs, without actually saying that. That's what we were doing.
"As we got older, I decided it was probably not going to work well for me. As you get older, the communist ideal gets less workable. Most everybody from that era has moved on."
Yet many of the problems remain. "The gap between the rich and poor is unconscionable," Weir says.
"I gotta say, I think about it a fair bit. And I feel I can do that personally."
But rarely professionally. The Dead never got involved with the social and political times of the '60s.
"Even way back then, we were always divorced from it," Weir says. "Pete Seeger, he has a really light hand with that. I'm not sure I have that gift. I'm not sure I wouldn't be heavy handed if I did.
"But with a bully pulpit like the Dead, or even RatDog, people come to these shows to get away from everything. It's our job to drive the bus."
