Bobby Weir, Part 1

Step into the sunshine with the latest collab from Dogfish Head and the Grateful Dead, Citrus Daydream Lager. This refreshing American Lager is brewed with sustainable phonyograin and kissed with citrus and floral notes. It's easy drinking, refreshing and brewed for good vibes only. It joins their fan favorite Juicy Pale Ale for a duo that hits all the right notes. Find these brews near you at dogfish.com. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, the official podcast for the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mayhan with Jesse Jarno, exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to Season 13 of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co-host, Rich Mayhan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we pay tribute to the one and only Bobby Weir, where the two-part look back at the life and career of this true original. Only fitting, don't you think? There are some recent releases worth noting first and foremost. Check out the recently released Hi-Fi vinyl pressing of Working Man's Dead, as well as the very cool Real to Real version. Yes, you heard that right, Real to Real. Both of these high-fidelity versions of Working Man's Dead are available exclusively at Rhino.com, so hurry over there before they disappear. Also new on the release front is the new high-res streaming subscription service Play Dead. What you get with your subscription is 422 unique Grateful Dead dates, including 20 previously unreleased shows with new vault releases every Tuesday, all curated by David Lemieux and mastered by David Glasser, so you know they sound fantastic. Check out Play Dead at Dead.net. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 12, and you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where, and when you like to listen. Please help the good ol' Grateful Deadcast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button, and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Very kind of you, thank you very much. We do have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to Dead.net slash Deadcast, dash index, and check them out. Bobby Weir. Man, what a gut punch to hear the news that he passed this past January. Every time I sit and re-realize he's gone it still stops me for a minute and ultimately in my head I work around how grateful I am for the music he made and the incredible creativity he blessed us with. I'm sure it comes as no surprise that we're kicking off this new Deadcast season by paying tribute to the other one, the uniquely original and inventive Bobby Weir. Here's Jesse Jarna. If my math is correct, 2026 will mark the first summer since 1977 without some kind of tour or live residency by Bobby Weir, and I honestly probably haven't processed the fact that there aren't new date announcements to come. There have been countless varieties of guitar heroes and cowboy singers over the past century, but only one Bobby Weir, and we'll be telling as much of his story as we can fit into two episodes. But before we dive too deep, we'll point to the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions archival release and let 16-year-old Bobby Weir introduce himself, with a few assists by Jerry Garcia and some future Weirs. My name is Bob Weir and I was originally from San Francisco and now live in Atherton and I have nothing to say. What are you doing? You won't get anything from me with my names. Oh, what am I doing? What do you do? What's your function? Well I play a whole mess of instruments. Guitar. Watch to a bass, jug, kazoo. I sing, I dance. You tell funny stories. You tell funny stories. Yeah, I think I'll take advantage of this opportunity to tell you all a story. Our story over the next two episodes is how Bobby Weir got from this. My name is Bob Weir. To this. A Campbell labeled me a conjurer one night. You know, he was watching us playing. He said, what you are is a conjurer and I thought about it for a couple months and decided, yeah, you're right. Yeah, Joe. Whenever he said anything, he was always right. Right. So I sort of see myself in that role these days. Magic is what we do. Music is the way we do it. That was from Timothy White's Rockstars in 1989. A conversation we'll be hearing a bit from. But our arc today is only slightly shorter. They're no less inspiring. How to get from this. To this. That was Weir's isolated guitar from the August 27th, 1972 version of playing in the band. Would you can jam with it dead.net slash playing in the band? We'll be using that track to punctuate some of our storytelling today. Grateful to that archivist and legacy manager, David Lemieux. But one thing I always felt with the dead before I even saw them live is that it wasn't anyone's band. What I always saw it as this unique summation of these players and Bobby was clearly exactly one portion of that. And when I've heard grateful that music without Bobby, which is to say when we've been in the studio and we've muted Bobby's guitar track, it is no longer grateful that music. I don't think a day has gone by in the last 42, 41 or 42 years that I haven't listened to him. I mean, here we're recording this at 9 a.m. my time. I've been listening to him for two and a half hours this morning and probably after this, I'll do it again. Our buddy David Gann spoke with Weir and other colleagues in the dead countless times over the years. And we are, as ever, next level grateful for his work in conversations with the dead and other books, which we've linked to at dead.net slash deadcast. Here's an interview with Bobby Weir's superfan, Jerry Garcia, describing Weir's guitar playing to David and Blair Jackson in April 1981. There are ideas that Weir has that I would never have had. And in fact, maybe only he has. And that's like 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 is really a stylist. It's totally unique as far as I know. I don't know anybody else that plays the guitar the way he does, with the kind of approach that he has to it. And that in itself is, I think, really a score considering how derivative almost all electric guitar playing is. I hear my influences, to some extent, in myself. Because Weir, I have a real hard time recognizing any influences in his playing. I mean, that I could put my finger on it and say, well, that's something that Weir got from X and such, even though I've been there a long for almost all of his musical development. I haven't played with him since he was 16 or so. Is he hiding it well? I just don't know where he gets it. Bob Weir's birth name wasn't Bob Weir. He was born Stephen Lee Sternia on October 16, 1947, in San Francisco, and given up for adoption. Sternia wasn't the name of his biological parents, either. Part of a more complicated family saga, which Weir would only uncover much later. He was adopted by a family in Atherton, California, outside Palo Alto, and given the new name Robert Hall Weir by his parents. Weir spoke a bit about his upbringing with the late great billboard editor Timothy White on the syndicated radio show Rockstars in 1989. Eleanor and Frederick, he designed heating and cooling systems for big buildings, hotels, factories, whatever. Frederick Weir's middle name was Utter, making him an Utter Weir. A trait he passed to his son. Eleanor, my mom was born in Switzerland, but I was adopted. It was a great family to be adopted into, I'll say that. On the weirdest side of the family, it goes back to the Mayflower, believe it or not. Actually, it wasn't the Mayflower, it was the third ship after the Mayflower, and I'm related to a guy named Benedict Arnold, not THE Benedict Arnold, but a guy who was governor of Rhode Island. The five founding members of the Warlocks all spent portions of their childhoods and teen years around Palo Alto at large. But Atherton was a pretty different part of the Palo Alto area than where Pigpen grew up, or the Menlo Park Proto-Communes where Jerry Garcia was crashing. It was considerably more bucolic. It's like the billboard of Northern California, essentially. I played ball, I was a jock, all that kind of stuff. I wasn't much into baseball, except for I really liked Willie Mears. I was into football, I loved football, and I ran track and stuff like that. From early on, Bobby Mears struggled in school. I'm dyslexic in the extreme and pretty nearly functionally illiterate. I can read the sports section. They never really heard of dyslexia, they just figured I was lazy, which I was. But this is the kind of stuff that you really can't get over. As Jerry Garcia pointed out, though, Weir may have been dyslexic, but was also smart enough to come up with some workarounds. You develop a good memory, you pay attention to what you hear, and you learn stuff that way. So I managed to stay awake for at least half my classes and got A's and stuff like that. I got to be fairly roundly, hated for it, because I didn't take books home or anything, because there was no point. I was good at English and literature and history. Weir's exasperated parent shipped him off to boarding school in Colorado, where he soon came into contact with fellow teenage miscreant John Perry Barlow, the son of a state senator. They became first partners in Mayhem and later artistic collaborators. This is from David Gans' 1982 interview with John Perry Barlow, conducted under battlefield conditions at the Jamaica World Music Festival. We both went to a prep school and we were about 14, which specialized in fairly bright but temperamental types. I mean, basically a lot of intelligent miscreants and he'd been kicked out of a couple of schools already, and I just managed to make such trouble in Wyoming as a 14-year-old and my father, who was a politician, was told that if he didn't want to get shit-canned in the next election, he was going to have to get me out of sight. I was a state senator. Fountain Valley School in Colorado, Spring, in Colorado. He was weird and I was weird and, I mean, even for that place. So we got sort of thrown in together and have been real close friends over since. This is from our 2020 Dead Cast conversation with Weir. Barlow and I were schoolmates a long time ago. We went to a boarding school in Colorado and what I meant to me was the water boy on the football team, and I was on the football team and we sort of hit it off, ended up being roommates for a while and all that kind of stuff and got into a lot of trouble. At the end of that year, they sat us down together and said, listen, one of you guys could come back, but not both. You guys figure it out. And I was the one who didn't come back. He went on and had an illustrious career there at Fountain Valley School for art barks. This is from David Gantz's 1983 conversation with Weir. I used to fantasize about being a cowboy and one of the guys who made the music that I heard on the radio, though I had no idea what that was all about. I just liked the whole idea of it. It sounded good to me. I saddled up and away I did go, riding alone in the dark. Maybe tomorrow a bullet may find me, tonight nothing's worse than this pain in my heart. As it happened, Weir's new BFF, John Perry Barlow, had grown up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. After Weir returned to Atherton at the end of the school year, he made for the Barcross Ranch in the summer of 1963. You know, I ran away to be a cowboy once when I was 15 and that was interesting. I had gone to school with a guy whose parents owned a ranch and they offered me a job. And so I just sort of skipped town and my folks found me and then they became fast friends with my buddy's folks. The buddy is Barlow. Right. I thought I'd bring that up for you listeners. Oh, hey, Jer. Oh, he's helpful. Bobby Weir's teenage summer on the Barcross Ranch in Cora, Wyoming became part of his mythology, though there have been some fairly comic assessments of his skills as a ranch hand that involved tractors ending up in ditches. Yeah, I lived in a bunkhouse, got up way too early, did work that was unpleasant and hard. You know, and I did the unpleasant stuff that the cowboys wouldn't do. Like I shoveled lots of stalls. In later years, Weir would find musical meaning in his cowboy summer. This is from our 2020 deadcast conversation. You know, when I was a kid, I spent my summer in bunkhouses with old cowpokes who were storytellers. They'd grown up before the era of radio. And so their notion of how to spend an evening was storytelling. I wasn't carrying that around like it was a big deal or anything like that, but I have a feeling that that was really influencing how I liked for things to roll off the tongue. Weir would say that the title track of his wonderful final 2016 studio album, Blue Mountain, was written from a fragment he remembered from the bunkhouse during his cowboy summer. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. John Perry Barlow. I almost went to the next school that he went to, which was a real interesting place called Pacific High School in Palo Alto, where the students would do projects like build a submarine in a pond. I almost did that, but I decided it's the last minute, not two. And then we didn't see each other for a while. Back in the Palo Alto area, Bobby Weir got serious, though not necessarily about his formal education. By then, music had firmly taken hold of him. He spoke with David Gant in November 1981 about his earliest influences. One of his first big favorites was the Great Everly Brothers. Wake up, this is the wake up. Wake up, this is the wake up. Probably not a huge surprise that he loved Chuck Berry, too. They say the joint was rocking, going round and round. Yeah, reeling and rocking, what a crazy sound. Will it never stop rocking, till it moves down? But his real gateway into the world of folk music was the Kingston Trio. As he told Gans, here were three guys who could make a lot of music all by themselves. That seemed like great fun. Wish I was a headlight on a westbound train. I'd shine my light on a cool Colorado rain. I'll wear them chilly winds of love. In fact, the Kingston Trio were local heroes, formed right there in Palo Alto, and one of the most massive pop acts of the late 1950s and early 60s. Weir got a $17 acoustic guitar and progressed to a classical model. It was probably around this time that Weir and formal education began to consciously uncouple. It wasn't instant, but it was a pretty direct cause and effect. Weir in school didn't exactly get along. He didn't get into fights, but was a self-described disciplinary problem. Even the legendarily progressive Pacific High School couldn't contain teenage Bobby Weir. But the region also offered some of the finest extracurricular musical education available to a young miscreant. Weir exchanged one set of local heroes for another. I will twine with my mingles of raven black hair With the roses so red and the lilies so fair The meadows so bright with its emerald hue And the pale and the leader and eyes look so blue Weir went through a few more schools including Menlo Atherton High and by the spring of 1964, finally Palo Alto High School, where Joan Baez herself was an alum and sometimes returned. John Perry Barlow's archive recently opened at Stanford and contains a few remarkable letters from Weir, written in 1963 and 1964, thanks to our Palo Alto correspondent Corey Arnold for the field work. These excerpts appear courtesy of the Department of Special Collections Stanford University Libraries and for future researchers, they're located in series six personal correspondence, males, Colorado, box 43, folder two. In a letter dated November 4th, 1963, Weir notes proudly, I'm on speaking terms with one Joan Baez. He also discovered the guitarist and singer Reverend Gary Davis. If I had my way, yeah, if I had my way If I had my way, oh, dead, it's so building down, it got in my toes, yeah. In the same November 1963 letter, Weir tells Barlow, I'm going pretty deep into folk music and it is looking increasingly as though I may make at least a semi-professional career out of it. Weir's first band, the uncalled four, that's four like the number four, played a few times in 1963, including an open mic at the top of the tangent in Palo Alto. There don't seem to be any tapes. As a newly minted folk enthusiast, Weir dove in deep, absorbing as much as he could. He upgraded to a harmony sovereign steel string and discovered bluegrass and jug band music. In a follow-up letter to Barlow on December 28, 1963, Weir wrote, You sound concerned that I was going to try to make a career at a folk singing. This is not true, but for a couple of summers and possibly years, I want to travel up and down the coast and make a circuit of the coffee houses, etc. Making not a pile of money, but enough to live on and save up to get my immediate material needs. A VW camper to live in, a Martin D-28 guitar, one of the ultimate folk instruments, and a good banjo, and a reasonable tape recorder. Just three days later, Weir would take a giant step towards achieving that dream, or at least something involving buses, guitars, and tape recorders. Here's Weir telling the story to David Gantz in 1983. Yeah, we fell together. New Year's Eve of 1960, 1964, I believe it was. A friend of mine named Rick McCallion and myself were wondering the back streets of Palo Alto. In some tellings, future dead engineer Bob Matthews was with them. We were way too young to get into any of the hot clubs or anything like that. We'd worked it out so that we could get into this one folk club, but there was nothing happening that night, or at least not yet. So we were just walking in the back streets of Palo Alto, just talking things over and walking around. And we walked by the back of this music store that we used to frequent, then a Morgan Music, and heard banjo music coming from within, from the place where they gave music lessons. And that seemed strange to us because it was New Year's Eve and all that kind of stuff, so we knocked on the door. BANG It was Garcia, and we recognized him from the numerous bluegrass bands that he was in at the time. He was the local hot banjo player. And he was in there playing banjo, waiting for his students to show up. And of course it was New Year's Eve, and absolutely none of them were coming. A jam session ensued. He'd been playing for a few hours, as far as I could tell, and he was hot to play with somebody. And so we talked him into... Well, he had the key to the rest of the shop. We were in the back, and it was locked off, but he had the key, and we knew it. And so we talked him into breaking into the front of the shop, and we grabbed a couple of the guitars. The one that we'd always wanted to play and all that kind of stuff. And just had a good time playing and singing and kicking stuff around all night. And by the end of the evening, I don't know what time it was, we just probably had enough second-rate talent there to throw together a jug band. Jug bands were popular in the south of the 1920s, especially in Memphis, home of Gus Cannon's jug stompers. I was born in the desert, raised in the lion's den. Then my regular occupation, taken women from the other men. A major influence was the Jim Cueskin jug band. In March 1964, as Mother McCreeze was getting up and running, an underage weir snuck into the cabal in Berkeley to see the amazing Cueskin. Jerry Garcia hit multiple nights as well, according to his then-wife, Sarah. Cueskin's jug band was the filter by which many songs came to both Mother McCreeze and future endeavors. Dig that jug tone. And God, Jim Senna, you must be nice, Bill Brown. If many folk revivalists took themselves seriously, jug band music was made for goofy good times. The perfect transitional spark between folk music and rock for goofy good timers like Jerry Garcia and Bobby Weir. It was also an incredible leveler, like punk rock was later, that made equal space for experienced musicians like Garcia and newcomer strumbers like Weir. And not coincidentally, a lot of the ragtag parking lot jam sessions outside Dead Shows virtually carried the mood of the 60s jug bands. I know I got her too. Gracia knew several guys. And we all showed up at this rehearsal a few days following. And a few of us sort of struck a sort of a chord together. And I mean, I really couldn't play guitar at all. So I got really good at the jug and washed up bass, which I also couldn't play at all. But I figured if anybody's got to start from scratch, probably ought to be me. And the next day I got a wash tub and a broom handle and a piece of string and a bunch of different kinds of jugs. And showed up at the next rehearsal, which I don't know how. I guess it was the next night. The rehearsal was at David Nelson's Proto-Hippie Crash Pad on Hamilton Street in Palo Alto. After playing in countless bluegrass bands with Jerry Garcia in the early days, Nelson would go on to co-found the new riders of the Purple Sage in 1969. Here's what he told us in 2018. And here's where he's willing to play jug. Because that's one of the things, if you got to find a jug player and nobody wants to do that, it's like you get tired of it in about five notes. That was the Arlottone YouTube channel. If you'd like to try your own hand at playing jug. But where was I? Yep, I'll do it. I'll do it. He brought like a box of jugs. You know, listen to this one, you know, when he comes to you looking good. Yeah, it's very nice. What about that one? You know what? Like that. And he just, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. And then Préce got tired of it and he's going, no, no, no, you got to hear this one. It marked the beginning of Bobby Weir's Endless Quest for Tone. That's right. Endless Quest for Tone. Right? That's good. That is absolutely true. That was the beginning of the Endless Quest for Tone. God knows how, but I found the spot, figured out how to play them all. And I could make notes happen out of a washed up bass. I'm actually pretty good at it. A jug too. And we listened to a bunch of old jug band records that various guys had rounded up and then started working on the songs. In the last of the four surviving letters from Weir to Barlow, written during several sittings in early March 1964, Weir offers a scene report for his future songwriting partner. I sing blues duets with the girl, play with a bluegrass and old timey group called the new Redwood Canyon Ramblers, and by myself. Music is my major outlet of expression. But Weir saves his biggest excitement for the group rehearsing at Dana Morgan Music. The next group is the Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. These guys are just a panic to watch. They fumble around on the stage and they bicker, but eventually they come out with some pretty weird music. I think you're in for a treat and a real thrill. So let's bring them on Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. I had to go to an emergency jug band practice. Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. All those words are underlined. It involves the best banjo player on the coast, one of the best mandolinists, who's also an accomplished guitarist, a kazooist, a washboardist, and me on the jug and wash tub bass. Our sound rivals that of any jug band ever recorded. His March 1964 letter continues, I don't want to go to school, get good grades, go to college, graduate, and then into business, become rich, and die happy. I want to live. Money, as well as other material things, mean less to me each day. If I'm going to be a misfit, I might as well be a content happy one, who accomplishes things which have meaning to him. We're would later call this attitude misfit power. In the letter, we're expressed as a desire to attend Goddard College in Vermont, where most of fish would matriculate 20 years later. And well... We're told Gans in 1981, through hanging out with Garcia and that crowd, I learned a lot about the range of what was available in American folk music. I got fairly grounded in that by the time I got into rock and roll, so my roots are pretty much still all there, American folk music. Another thing that we are shared with Garcia is that he was already a taper. In fact, Weir followed his favorite guitarist around the peninsula and made recordings. A young East Coast born picker, then calling himself Jerry Cowkenan. That's from the recent release Wabash Avenue, a rediscovered tape of Yorma Cowkenan in 1965, though the tape wasn't made by Weir. We've posted a link at dead.net. According to a 1967 interview with Garcia, Weir's musical leader was Yorma. He used to go every time Yorma played when he played in coffee houses. Weir'd go there with his tape recorder, tape the whole show, and talk to Yorma extensively and watch him play the stuff, and study it all and go home with him. Weir's music was a great inspiration for him. He was a great musician, and he was a great musician. Weir was there with his tape recorder, tape the whole show, and talk to Yorma extensively and watch him play the stuff, and study it all and go home and work it out. Yorma is where he learned a lot of his technique. His whole approach to guitar playing was like Yorma's essentially. And in early 1965, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions win electric. I never really finished high school. I ran off at the circus. Who's responsible for getting all of this recorded? Just checking up on you. I hear you can talk to anybody. That was Bobby Weir as the action starts to heat up at the Watts acid test. Probably about two months after he finally dropped out of high school for good. But that's okay. He'd found his job. It was sometime in 1966 that Weir found his first direction as an electric guitarist. Here's how he described it to Dan Rather in 2015. But there were new directions lurking everywhere. Here's Weir speaking with David Gant in 1983 from Conversations with the Dead. A lot of it came from Phil. Back when we were the Warlocks, he turned me on to Coltrane, and a bunch of classical music had completely escaped me. Here's Weir speaking in 2015. My guitar style is derived from basically from listening to piano players to begin with. I listened to a lot of McCoy Tyner who was John Coltrane's piano player. And some Halcyon years. And the way he set things up for Coltrane to bounce off of. Music To explain what that means, please welcome from the Ohio State University and a Grateful Dead scholarly conference near you, the eminent musicologist, Bram Boone. John Coltrane had already had an illustrious career, but then he put this great quartet together with McCoy Tyner on piano. And so that's where things really started taking off with his famous 60s quartet with Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass eventually. Music So this is where we get into modal jazz, which is jazz that starts to reject the Broadway harmony and the old tradition of jazz with lots of chord changes and sharps and flats and go into just simple scales that relate to folk scales, you know. A lot of musicians in the turn of the 60s in jazz were getting into that. And that really sets the stage for rock and roll in a huge way in the 1960s. As a member of Miles Davis' band, Coltrane had been at the forefront of the development, playing on kind of blue. But by early 1960, Wint Solo for good and in 1961, released the era defining my favorite things. And McCoy Tyner plays this two-chord vamp for much of the song. And he does it insistently in a kind of a powerful, funky, earthy kind of way, changing the voicings, taking solos with it and playing under Coltrane. Music And it's just a beautiful performance by McCoy Tyner, which really opens up his horizon for the 60s. And I think that to my mind that would have been what Bob was probably listening to is specifically my favorite things. What I heard with McCoy Tyner is he was taking a lead in his own way. He was finding direction, new direction. Every time he sat down at the piano, finding new places to take the harmonic structure of the song that we're playing. And so I very quickly figured out that that's what I want to be up to. Graham Boone has pinpointed late 1966 as the moment that McCoy Tyner becomes evident in Weir's Plane. Specifically in versions of the blues song, The Same Thing, like this one from The Matrix on November 29th, 1966. Music You can actually hear him playing those sort of the same chords that McCoy's playing on My Favorite Thing, just a two chord vamp. And it's in the middle of really loud, loud music and strong playing by Phil and Jerry. And then here is Bob just trying these little chords. Music It's wonderful to hear him doing that because you can hear him, like, maybe I can do this, you know, maybe I can play with these vamp chords, these chordal pairings, and then take off from there. And that's what he does in that track. It's kind of fun to hear that. That's really early in the career of the band. It took some time for Weir to actually develop that voice and do something more than an occasional jam trick. But he was on his way. Around the time Weir started channeling McCoy Tyner, the band relocated to 710 Ashbury, where Bobby Weir met all kinds of curious characters, like the notorious Curly Jim Stollero, who taught him the song Me and My Uncle by F. and John Phillips, and may have had a hand in writing it. Probably Weir's first cowboy tune, first played by the dead in late 1966. A sketchy historical mystery, we explored in the Side C episode of our Skull and Rose's story. Me and My Uncle went riding down South Colorado, what's Texas bound? We stopped over, a Yings and a Faye, left in the poor, just about halfway, and you know it was the hardest part of the day. At 710, Weir took up residence on the second floor, where he slept on a couch and encountered another even more notorious character. His occasional roommate beat legend Neil Cassidy. That was Cassidy explaining the acid test to San Francisco KGO News. After reconnecting on the dead's first East Coast tour in 1967, John Perry Barlow visited the band in The Hate and recalled in Steve Silberman and David Schenck's Skeleton Key. The image that I have of that whole period is Bobby living on the second floor of 710 Ashbury Street, on the couch there, with all his worldly goods in a paper bag on the floor. The other person who was in the room all the time was Neil Cassidy, because that's where the stereo was. Cassidy would come in there about 11 o'clock at night, toss back a couple of bottles of Benzadrina, take off his shirt, juggle his hammer all night long, and shout bebop, just rave scat. Weir would be lying on the couch with eyes open, staring at the ceiling, and it was like he was dreaming Cassidy somehow. You could see that there was a relationship between this frenetic, powerful energy manifestation and Weir's utter stillness. It wasn't long after this that Bobby Weir co-wrote his first original for The Grateful Dead with drummer Billy Kreitzman. Though Neil Cassidy would be part of the song's legend, he wasn't the song's initial inspiration. This is Weir speaking with David Gans and Marty Martinez in 1995, assists from Phil Lesh. He was a guy who was a police officer in the Hedashburgs, and there was this cop who was illegally searching a car belonging to a friend of ours down on the street. The cops used to harass us every chance they got. They didn't care for the hippies back then. And so I had a water balloon, and what was I going to do with this water balloon? Come on. It just happened to have a water balloon in his head. And so I got him right square on the head. That was the first time you ever saw a fire shot you never saw. He couldn't tell where it was coming from, but then I had to go downstairs and walk across the street and just grin at him. At that point, he decided to hell with due process of law. This kid's going to jail. He didn't have a thing on me. It never got to court, but on the other hand, I did get thrown in jail and beat up a little bit. It's probably not the kind of incident that might leave paperwork, but if any legal scholars have an idea on how to triangulate the date, get in touch. I'm going to assume it happened sometime in the summer of 1967, probably before the cops raided 710 Ashbury in early October. This is from the first recorded version of That's It for the Other One, from October 22, 1967 at Winterland. Now on the 50th anniversary expanded edition of the band's self-titled debut, with a verse more explicitly about the incident. Weeders former roommate Neil Cassidy died tragically in Mexico in February 1968, a story recently investigated by Mary Prankster, George Walker. We've posted a link at dead.net slash deadcast. Later on, Weeders would remember that the song's revised second verse came to him that same week, but the tapes don't quite bear that out, showing that the lyrics debuted a few months before Cowboy Neil's final trip. But what was maybe even more important in the lyrics was the groove. It took a few years to get there, but by 1971 and 1972, The Other One became a pure springboard, like the 100-year haul version from April 26, 1972. On the right, is the Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Abst Despite weird songwriting growth, things weren't exactly peachy in Deadland. He told David Gant in 1981, I didn't have all that great a vocabulary as a guitarist at that point. And my role, Ben is ever, was a fairly difficult one. Being in between the lead and the bass and intuiting where the hell they're gonna go and being there, it took a while to work up a touch for that. I'd get hot and find myself moving pretty fluently in that role and then I'd lose my momentum and fall out of it. It's a real difficult position to stay on top of. This is we're speaking to David Gant in 1983 and conversations with the dead. I have a guy like Phil who already had way back when a really good notion of what the music could amount to and has been waiting for, for instance, my musicianship to, and probably still is and probably has a good long wait in front of him, waiting for my musicianship to, to amount to, to his, his ideals of what the music could amount to. Plus, as John Barlow once put it, I don't want to say that we are fail the acid test, but he certainly got a different score than some folks. That is to say, by mid-1968, the dead's McCoy-Tiner loving rhythm guitarist wasn't always on the same planet as his bandmates, let alone musical page. And at the end of August 1968, just following the shows now known as Two from the Vault, the Grateful Dead fired Bob Weir and Pigpen. Or at least they tried to. A meeting recorded remarkably by Auslie Stanley and now in the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz. The gigs haven't been any fun. It hasn't been no good to play in and it's because we're all, we're at different levels of playing, that's where it's at. We're at different levels of music. We're thinking different thoughts and we're just not playing together. To read more about the conversation, check out Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip and A Grateful Dead guide post about the firing. And while this certainly can't be counted among the highlights of Bob Weir's long career, it was unquestionably an important spark point. It's one of the most contentious moments in the band's history, but nobody ever comes out and tells Weir and Pigpen they're fired. It's not a question of values of one sort or another, it's just that there are more of us that can play together. There are four of us that can play together. We pretty much agree on the kind of shit we're doing and pretty much understand where each other's at. And then there's you two guys who are not alike particularly. You're both on different trips and you play different music from each other and from us. And I mean, it's just, we can't do it, we just can't play that way. In the end, it was more a staring contest than a firing, and Weir and Pigpen simply never blinked, not missing a single gig, though Pigpen would take some time off later that fall to care for his ailing partner Veronica. And more importantly, for both Weir and Pigpen, it was something of a wake-up call, the beginning of musical redemption arcs, most especially for Weir. By all accounts, he started practicing and practicing hard. It's hard to imagine Live Dead recorded just six months later without Pigpen's side-long turn on your love-light or Weir's lush rhythm colors. Here, during Dark Star, Weir helps land the band into a quieter passage. But it was more than just Weir's guitar playing that was important to the Grateful Bed. Once he mostly returned to Earth, we remained arguably the band's most accessible member consistently over their next decades. It wasn't long after the inept in firing that Gary Lambert met Bobby Weir for the first time. Please welcome back from Tales from the Golden Road, Gary Lambert. My personal relationship with Bobby was the most continuous with anyone in the Grateful Bed, and it was easy early on if I was hanging out at the stage door at Fillmore East and just chatting up the band. They weren't just hopping into someone's VW bus and going to the Albert Hotel after the show. They had more of an entourage. If people looked at me as scant like you, who's that guy? Bobby was the guy to say, he's okay. He was so welcoming. He made me feel comfortable there in a scene that is not always intended to make you comfortable. The most guilelessly nice person you could imagine, especially in a situation like that where lots of people wanted a piece of him, lots of people wanted his time, and he was incredibly accommodating and had this lovely equanimity about him. As his music was coming together, Weir was very much drifted and dreamin'. After the bust on 710 Ashbury in October 1967, the band had gradually started migrating northwards to Marin County. Weir made the jump to Marin as a couch dweller. This is what Rony Stanley told us a few years ago. He would spend some time at Bear's house or at Alemba. He would sleep on the couch over there. Things weren't looking great for our hero in early 1969. He even dabbled in Scientology for a bit in an attempt to boost his self-confidence. But it wasn't his OT levels that needed adjusting. And something much, much better happened around that time too. That was when he met Frankie. Sugar Magnolia, possibly twinning, that's all they're dear and I don't care. So might be bit down by the river, who she'd have to come up soon for care. We talked about Frankie Weir in our Sugar Magnolia episode, but she was a legend, a one-time hullabaloo dancer. She had already been in the scene and then she'd gone to England to be with the Beatles. As one does. But on her return, coming back with Ken Keezy after his own Christmas with the Beatles in late 1968, she set her sights on the cute spaced case from Atherton who just turned 21 and was maybe something of a post-psychedelic fixer-upper. And she decided she was going to be with him. Look at how he changed after that. It's just amazing the change in Weir when Frankie became his partner. Frankie, who was so sophisticated and came from New York and she wore makeup and she danced and she knew how to dress. She knew how to drink. That's the other thing. She did not into psychedelics. She did not into smoking pot. And Bobby was similar. He was similar in that sense. He had had a psychedelic trip, but that was enough. And then they got house and things got better. That would be the Rocco Rocco Ranch in Nicosio, the thick of the dead's cowboy period. That was a great place. Bobby lived out there with Frankie and also Rhonda. Rhonda and Hagen. Here's what Weir told us when we spoke to him for our Ace 50 episode, which covers this period in greater depth. We went through a sort of an intense little cowboy phase early on. We were sort of listening to country music. A lot of us had little mini ranches that we were running. I had a ranch out in Nicosio and I was raising horses. It was basically a little self-inflicted dust bowl. My girlfriend at the time was big into raising horses and by God, that was what we were going to do. And the other guys were into... None of us were raising cattle. I'll put it that way. We were all raising horses. Billy had a ranch, Mickey had a ranch. We had horses and goats and stuff like that. Peacocks. The Rocco Rocco Ranch was where Weir met the brilliant tie-dye artist Courtney Pollock and started work on Cassidy in August of 1970 as Eileen Law was giving birth to her daughter Cassidy in the next room. But to Roni's point, as 1969 unfolded, Bobby Weir began to grow in confidence with an ever-widening stake in the band he'd helped co-found four years earlier. Discounting jam sessions at the Carousel Ballroom, the very first grateful lead spin-off group was Mickey Hard and the Heartbeats in late 1968, sometimes known as Jerry Garcia and Friends. But in mid-1969 came the debut of one of the band's lesser celebrated mutations, Bobby Ace and his cards off the bottom. I was just starting to sing and write and all that kind of stuff. I was young. I was in my early twenties, you know, 21 maybe. And I was just starting to sing and write and stuff like that. So guys, you know, came up with a nickname for me. I was Bobby Ace. It pretty much stuck. I don't know where it came from. I own a mountain, tell me what do you see? Bad tracks, bad tracks, looking back at me. Better get you wrapped up before it's too late. Best got a little bigger than this, and it's through the gate. There's no tape of the original Bobby Ace band, but that was from a few weeks later with almost exactly the same lineup. The Grateful Lead, led by Weir and supplanted by Pete Grant on pedal steel, plus David Nelson and John Dawson on guitars and vocals. In the annals of Dead Lore, Bobby Ace's debut is noted as being a benefit for… Scientology. According to Weir, it was the end of his brief dalliance and a way to get the proverbial fatins off his back. If that line of musicians sounded familiar, it's because they were in the process of becoming the new riders of the Purple Sage. Bobby Ace segments became a regular part of their shows. Is a famous Bobby Ace in the audience? Let him get it on up here if he can. The great dawn of the new riders box set from the Ausley Stanley Foundation captures the early Bobby Ace repertoire pretty well. A few of the songs stayed familiar parts of the Dead's book, but some didn't, like George Jones' Seasons of My Heart, which to my ears winks towards the weather report suite to come. The seasons go, we get a little sunshine, rain and snow, just the way that it was planned to be. But there's no seasons in my heart. While you play the leading part, there the flies will go eternally. It was probably some time near the dawn of the new riders. In the fall of 69, during the Dead's many trips to New York, Weir began to take occasional guitar lessons from one of his musical heroes. In the fall of 69, the Dead released their version of Death Don't Have No Mercy on Live Dead. At the time, its author, the Reverend Gary Davis was in his early 70s and living in Jamaica Queens, charging $5 an hour for lessons. He played outside usual blues structures more freely than many other players, which appealed to Weir. Gary Davis taught me how one guitar could be a whole band, Weir told Guitar World. When you read about old Samson, oh, from his grave, He was the strong and man that her head lived on. So one day, while Samson was walking along, He looked on the ground and saw an old jaw bone. As the 70s turned, Weir solidified his place in the Dead Firmament. We've lingered on a lot of these moments in turns during previous episodes and segments of the Deadcast, spread across our seasons on American Beauty, Skull and Roses, Europe Wake of the Flood, from the Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah, plus our Ace Bonus episode. So we're going to only touch on the biggest beats of Weir's story here with a few nods back. We've linked to all our other Weir-centric episodes at Dead.net slash Deadcast. One of his signature songs was the result of an unexpected collaboration between Garcia, Lash, Weir and Hunter. Sugar Magnolia though was and is truly a Bobby Weir tune. Though it became Weir and the band's slam bang set closer, it started in a different musical space. I was listening to a bunch of Doug Kershaw at the time, Cajun fiddle music, that kind of thing. What else was I listening to? Oh, you know, I was listening to a bunch of George Jones for that matter. So I don't know that either of those elements is readily apparent in what came out. And then, and also I was, I was listening to a bunch of Delinian Bonnie. I think it was sort of a mix of all those things and just a little love song to a girlfriend of mine. And if Frankie's still listening, this one's for you. That sweet dedication was from Luxembourg 72. Weir's growth can be measured by the constant subtle mutation of Sugar Magnolia. Here's how he described it to David Gans in 1977 in Conversations with the Dead. We took it into the studio and we recorded it and I wasn't real altogether pleased with what it came out like. You know, it didn't seem to me that it was everything that it should be, but I didn't know how to tell anybody that. But as soon as we took it out on the road, it immediately evolved into what a whole lot more than what we just put down on Wex, on the vinyl, it became at that point what I more or less envisioned it as being. Sugar Magnolia was the first song Weir had really worked on with Robert Hunter. And Weir's edition of that last lyric about comparing his love to a four-wheel drive caused a quick fissure, not fitting in with Hunter's more pastoral vision. They had a similar battle over another song they'd just finished in early 1971. And it was once again Weir who triumphed, possessing the microphone, amplifier, and a deal for his first solo record. We spoke extensively about Ace on its 50th anniversary a few years back, and got deeply into the pump song Origins of Greatest Story Ever Told. Created in San Francisco just before the dead departed for their Europe 72 tour, Ace featured the dead minus pig pen as his backing band. Weir and Hunter's squabble over whether it was more appropriate for Moses to be writing a quasar or a guitar resulted in Weir taking on a new lyricist, his old boarding school pal John Perry Barlow, who spoke about it with David Gans in 1982. And at that point, Bobby had just started writing songs really, and he and Hunter had worked together on a few of us, but very few. And their relationship as pro conspirators was a bit flawed as are all of them. But, you know, they didn't quite have the same rapport. So Bobby said, well, you know, you write pop, you might try your hand at writing song lyrics. I wasn't doing anything else, so I did try my hand at it. I sort of made up some things that sounded like song lyrics. The first one was Mexicali Blues. And I was just stricken and I heard what kind of a setting he'd chosen for it. No, because it was a whole different thing what I had in mind, but it turned out to be OK. As relatively new songwriters, each song opened up into new territories for them. And playing in the band featured what many considered the dead's finest officially released studio jam and another one of Weir's signatures. With his 1968 near firing was a nader for Bobby Weir, 1971 and 1972, or when he achieved something like parody inside the Grateful Dead. He and Frankie moved into the A-frame in Mill Valley where he lived for the rest of his life, and he began to get equal time in the band's shows. The band almost never used a set list, but in late 1971, with the introduction of the ace material into the dead's live repertoire, their song selection began to alternate between their three main singers, Garcia, Pigpan and Weir. And when Pigpan could no longer play with them in 1972, at least in terms of song selection, it became the Garcia and Weir show. We've spent literally the past half decade extolling the virtues of Bobby Weir in the early 1970s. And we know that it's not quite fair to spend the first part of our tribute running down Weir's life from 1947 through the early 70s and spend the second part going from the early 70s through another half century. But it's only a testament to his career, and I'm hoping our Weir casting days are far from over. But there's no getting around that Bobby Weir came into himself as a musician in the early 70s, and wasn't yet 25. It was between 1972 and 1974, I'd argue, that Bobby Weir reached his first level of musical maturity. Here's how Weir described the band's jamming approach to the BBC near the end of the band's Europe 72 tour. Graham Boone loves the place Weir found for himself in Scarlet Begonia's. It was wonderful jamming on Scarlet Begonia's, where he just so much is able to just create poetry and create his own place in that band. It's beautiful. And with everybody else jamming full tilt, Phil and Jerry going in the Keith beautiful stuff happening on the keyboard. And then Bob is right there, undaunted, wonderful sense of syncopation, wonderful sense of copying of chords, but then also riffing, playing with riffs. This is from August 6, 1974 at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, now on Dix Picks 31. And he has this Westmont-Gumry thing that he does, you know, where he plays octaves? It's classic Westmont-Gumry. And Bob really loved that stuff. So he on that tune and others will play these octave riffs, right? And he puts that in there too. What's amazing about it is that it doesn't detract from the music. It adds another layer so that when you listen to the dead in the early 70s, you hear this wonderful voice sometimes coming to the front, often sort of laying back, sometimes almost inaudible. It's quite a chore sometimes. It takes a lot of concentration. Sometimes it just rolls out just really easily. And sometimes you get a combination of people just guessing that comes up with some inspirational new idea, which is worth living for. Larry Lambert began work on a profile for Guitar Player Magazine that never saw the light of day and the tapes are long lost. But as a musician, Weir had achieved clarity. I guess he was like 27, 26 maybe, around then. And he had this beautifully articulated sense of who he was and what his job was. Rhythm Guitar is not an adequate descriptor if you've listened to all the other rhythm guitar that had been played up to that point. Bobby liked to define his role as second chair guitar. He was more like the string section or the horn section. I always looked at his guitar parts as compositions unto themselves. Now, if you listen to the second guitar part on Morning Do, it's just a staggering little composition that he's playing that perfectly compliments what the rest of the band is doing. It wasn't McCoy-Tiner he was trying to be at all. It was just Bobby Weir all along. That was the Grateful Dead movie version of Morning Do. Recorded October 18, 1974 at Winterland, two days after Weir's 27th birthday, and two days before the Grateful Dead's impending retirement. Rack, I wanted me to talk about my future and my plans for my career. Really, I've been consciously trying to avoid making any plans. Figuring that I'm going to fall into whatever is natural. I mean, I have a studio, I have all the tools at my disposal now. And I'll be finding people to play with by assuming that you'll be finding songs in the back of my head somewhere. A few days after that, Weir started showing up for gigs by his old friend Matt Kelly's new band Kingfish and would join them almost immediately, a story running behind the entirety of the last season of the Deadcast. They'd record at Aces, Weir's new home studio, nearly as soon as the dead cleared out. Music Started out as a good rockin' party band from San Francisco. Trips led to trips people started taking seriously. Now we got an album out on round records and tapes. Dig it. Kingfish's self-titled debut came out in early 1976 and we'll be talking a little bit more about it in the not too distant future. But that's where we're going to pause our story about Weir. Barely a decade into a career that would last another half century. We'll get there. So the guy with the big black slick mean looking dog said to the guy with the short pants, quite a little yellow dog said, Yeah, well, you were right. He sure could fight. But I've never seen that kind of dog before. And what kind of dog is that anyway? He said, Yeah, well, he used to be an alligator for our cut his tail off and painted him yellow. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Deadcast friends. We'd like to thank our special guests in this episode, Bobby Weir, David Lemieux, David Nelson, Gary Lambert, Rony Stanley and Graham Boone. Extra special thanks to friend of the dead cast David Gans for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Deadcast, Mark Pinkes, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.