Eternally Grateful: Dead's Lesh and Weir
bury the hatchet and hit the road together
by Dean Johnson - Boston Herald
Friday, July 20, 2001

When Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia died in 1995, the other members of the seminal San Francisco band split up musically and, in some cases, personally. But a simple e-mail has changed all that. Bassist Phil Lesh was so upset by the way the rest of the group conducted its post-Garcia business that he had little contact with anyone linked to his old band . . . until this year. When Lesh decided to tour this summer, he e-mailed ex-Grateful Dead guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir and suggested Weir's band, Ratdog, join him.

"It just seemed like the thing to do in so many ways,'' Lesh said. "I was trying to put together a tour, and when I was looking at the list of bands available, I couldn't ignore Bobby and Ratdog at the top." Besides, I've loved Bobby for a long time,'' he added, "and I didn't want our relationship to be purely on a business level, which had pretty much destroyed it. I wanted to put it back on the level where we first got to know each other, by making music together. So, those two ideas converged, I e-mailed Bobby, and we'll be playing seven gigs together.'' One of those gigs is tonight's show at the Tweeter Center.

Ratdog will open; Lesh's band will close. And fans can expect a long, long night of music punctuated with plenty of freewheeling jams and, yes, a batch of old Grateful Dead tunes. "We're up to basically the same thing, but we do it very differently,'' Weir said. "We both play highly improvisational music and a number of chestnuts from the Grateful Dead songbook. We both have had our bands together for a while now and work like bands as opposed to a collection of all-star outfits.'' Ratdog - Weir (guitar and vocals), Rob Wasserman (bass), Mark Karan (guitar), Jeff Chimenti (keyboards), Jay Layne (drums) and Kenny Brooks (saxophone) - tends to be a little lighter and jazzier than Lesh's Friends.

Lesh's bandmates are former Allman Brothers guitarists Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring along with drummer John Molo and keyboardist Rob Barraco. Lesh and Weir have patched up their friendship to the point that Weir even pops up onstage with Lesh's group to perform a couple of Dead tunes. "Since he's on the same bill,'' Lesh said, "it would be weird if we didn't play together.''

Lesh and Weir insist the tour isn't even close to a reunion of their old group. "If I am going to be a living, breathing musician, I have to be moving forward. I can't be looking back,'' Weir said. "I realize there is some value to looking back, but I want people to come to hear us for what we are now. "I think Phil said it's important for people to realize the Grateful Dead is over,'' he added. "What more need be said? If we're not the Grateful Dead and some people are disappointed by that, they're in trouble, because I don't know where they're gonna go.''

Asked if he feels like a godfather of the jam band culture because of his work with the Dead and now Ratdog, Weir said, "We kept the lamp lit, I guess. But jam bands . . . it's an old tradition in American music.'' He didn't have much good to say about new traditions in American music. "There's not a whole lot of musical or lyrical exploration that goes on because the whole idea is to give the kids what they want,'' he said. "The focus isn't on music or exploration or even on the edification of the spirit, nuthin' . . . It's a sad state of affairs.''

Lesh is of the same frame of mind. Rather than trying to score a hit song, it's all about "trying to make music in the moment,'' he said." The basic idea is always to be part of the flow of the eternal current of music always going on in some dimension,'' Lesh said. "So when our group mind is tuned properly, we can open a door or pipeline to that dimension, and that music comes through us. We don't make up that music, it is dictated, in a sense. "Everybody gets a different piece of it,'' he said, "but it all fits together, so the idea is to surf that flow or stream like a solar wind or an ocean current and take people through many different twists and turns and realms of activity." To me,'' Lesh added, "Transition is the essence of music. That fluidity, being able to move between three to four realms in 16 bars of music by playing with different keys and textures and melodic ideas, is an example of that. And it requires listening harder than you play.''

Lesh and Weir intend to do plenty of listening and playing in the next few years. Both are recording new music with their bands, touring and looking to release live works. Weir is working on a musical he hopes to bring to Broadway. It's based on the life of Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige. "It's not really about baseball,'' Weir said, "but about the life and times of Paige, and the music of his life and times was one of the grandest, if not the grandest era of music this planet has ever seen.''Weir added that work is being done to make the Grateful Dead's entire concert archive available for on-line downloading.

As for Lesh, he's begun writing new songs with longtime Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. He hopes to write orchestral music and an opera and also pen and perform "a 90-minute one-story song cycle'' with his band and even more friends."I've been able to let go of the Dead,'' he said, though he admits when he hears some of the phenomenal improvisational work his old band did in the late '60s, "it without a doubt sets the standard and inspiration for what I'm doing with my band now. I'm always pleased when I feel we've come close to that. "Yeah, I've been able to let go . . . except for the good part, and the important part (of the Dead) to me is the music and the spirit that informed that music, and that's alive and thriving not only around me and Bobby but also around other groups these days.''

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