Earlier today the Peach Festival announced that Gregg Allman, Santana and Billy and the Kids with special guest Bob Weir will headline this year’s event. Back in 2005, Weir sat down with Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally to discuss the history behind some of his most revered compositions…

“Brother Esau” is a song that I guess you ended up not liking and I’m not sure why because I think it’s a really good song. What was wrong it?

“My Brother Esau” the lyrics were opaque. I mean, at least for me, not so for other people, I don’t understand what it is I’m singing there. I worked and worked and worked on it, and I still couldn’t understand the point that I was fucking making.

I thought I knew.

I know vaguely, but… but the lyrics are too obtuse. I know it’s basically… it was an attempt to bring a biblical reference to an era where in American…

Cane and Abel.

It was Sons of Isaac, right? Esau and Jacob. And you know, they went in very different directions. One of them basically ran himself into a wall. And the reconciling of Esau and Jacob was the biblical precedent for what was happening in American society at the time. We tried to encapsulate that but I don’t think we quite got it. I know what we were going for but I didn’t feel like the lyric was exactly ringing that bell. It seemed to me like when I would sing the song, we could nail it. Musically, I loved playing it.

That’s what confused me. Since you put it away, there was something obviously something you didn’t like but you guys would play the hell out of it.

You know, I would consider, and I may do this working with Barlow in trying to refine the lyric a bit so it does say what… there’s more to be added to that story anyway because the story is happening again.

Precisely. The visions of Vietnam haven’t gone anywhere.

The visions of Vietnam haven’t gone anywhere and there’s that element coming back from the Gulf War and over the top of that there’s red versus blue America. So there’s that to be addressed and I wouldn’t mind bringing that back or reworking it or something… “Esau Revisited” or something like that and really refining that a bit so that it… It doesn’t have to be understandable as long as it rings the bell. Poetry doesn’t have to be understandable. In fact, it’s probably better when it’s not but who’s to say? But it does have to ring the bell.

When you’re onstage delivering this stuff, you go into another state, you really do. I’m not the guy you see onstage or the guy who shows up in pictures or in the mirror. I get into a sort of a hallucinatory… I won’t say hallucinatory. I get into a place where I see stuff from onstage that I don’t normally see. That’s where I live a great deal of my life. And in this case, and in other cases too, when the song is over I see stuff. I see neon question marks lighting up over peoples’ heads. (taking on voice of someone in the crowd) “What was it that I just heard?” People who were paying attention. I may be projecting that, it may be all in me or it may be actually happening, regardless rather than hearing the song in my head go “ding-click,” I know they got it, I never got there with “My Brother Esau.”

One of the things that’s really admirable in your aesthetic is that you’re perfectly willing to piss off the audience with stuff you know they won’t like. Which brings us to “Victim or the Crime.” It is grim and dark and difficult and not pretty. I remember Jerry saying, “Yeah, that’s what makes it so interesting and so fun to play and challenging.” But of course Deadheads were going, “Oooo, this isn’t hippiness and light.”

Yeah, it’s not about teddy bears dancing in the forest.

But what it revealed about your personality of course was that it got your juices flowing; that there was so much resistance to it.

A lot of the resistance was artificial. Let me first explain how that song happened. I came up with this chorus. I was looking at the fucking moon one night and feeling little shivers and stuff like that. I suspect I’m probably more wolf than human at least in some dimension and always have by the way. So I was just out there barking at the moon one night or getting ready to and this chorus came to me, “What fixation feeds this fever/ As the full moon pales and climbs/Am I living truth or rank deceiver/ Am I the victim or the crime?” I don’t where the fuck it came from. It came from the moon, I guess. But I heard the music and I heard the lyric at the same time and when that arrives, you don’t deny it. I have absolutely no business saying, “oh, well that’s nice.” When the music and a lyric occur to me at the one point it’s my solemn, sacred duty to pursue that. I’ll be fucked… I’ll be stir-fried if I’m going to be thwarted in that effort.
So I took it took Gerrit [Graham] because I think I was down in L.A. at the time that it occurred to me. That that much came to me. And he fleshed out. We went back and forth a little bit and he fleshed out the lyrics. At that point, I was listening to 20th century composers and I was really big into Bela Bartok. There’s a progression that Bartok uses variations on in a lot of his themes. It was just sort of running through my head, a good part of everyday. Not exactly, but the drift of it. And I just took the drift of that and started following that. I came up with a little map for the first couple of lines. At first, I think it started out Lydian which is one scale, a full step above the root scale, an overlay. That was working but a little too light for the lyric so I darkened it. It was just basically sort of a flat-5, the devil’s tri-tone for what it’s worth. That sounded dark enough for the lyric, so I stuck with that. And then when we got to the place of we got to get out of here, it’s time for some motion here, the line supported that, the lyrics supported that and so I started a very, at first, dissonant chordal assent. It was a chromatic chordal assent that was rife with dissonances all the way through. The contrapuntal lines finally merge to a resolve at the end of it on a leading tone that takes to another harmonic mode.

First off, the first time around for the first verse, it just drops us back down to the tonic. The second time around, we can’t do that again. The tension is too much. So it drops us down and it resolves into the subdominant. And then, at the end of the dominant, we go to the relative minor as an addendum to what’s transpired so far. And all of this fits the lyric just perfectly. I was really happy with how it came out. And I played for the individual guys in the band. Individually, they all loved it. Even Jerry, and Jerry was in one of his junkie phases. It wasn’t about fucking Jerry. And he knew that. But then I don’t know what it was. They worked it up but the jury was out still. Individually they loved it but whether the band can handle that kind of dissonance and all that kind of stuff, and make something presentable out of it, it took a little work. I think we debuted it in Berkley. People had heard us playing it during rehearsal. Let’s face it, there’s nothing about the tune that isn’t angular.

Barlow had gotten wind of it and I don’t think he liked the whole idea of it to begin with. It could have been that Gerrit did the words or I don’t know what. But it was not soft enough for him or something. So he went on the radio and started this campaign on the radio to (taking on Barlow’s voice), “Stop Bobby from doing this song!” And if anybody, particularly Barlow, should know anything about music tell me I can’t do this and watch what fucking happens… (laughing). He couldn’t have made a wrong… If he had fully intended to put a wet blanket on the tune, he couldn’t have approached it more wrongly. Anyway, we recorded that but the recorded version on Built to Last didn’t really nail it. The song hadn’t matured just through performance by that time. After Jerry checked out, and actually even before Jerry checked out, when I was just playing with Rob Wasserman, we worked the tune up. And it was much tighter. Whereas when the Dead would play it, there’d be tepid response from the audience. When, on a given night when Rob and I would perform it, just acoustic guitar and acoustic bass, there was dead silence followed by thunderous applause which told me I hadn’t quite nailed it with the Dead yet. Now Ratdog does it. Our rendition grew out of me and Rob’s rendition so the germ was there.

Your esteemed producer and sound mixer, Michael McGinn, recently remarked to me that “Bury Me Standing” is the most you song. I don’t know exactly what he means, but I think I know what he was getting at. That it’s of what I think are a lot of very good songs on Evening Moods. It’s grown dramatically from sort of the original, neo-Robert Johnson…

(long silence and sigh). Christ, let’s see if I can remember. It started out as just a riff, that opening riff (hums it). Once again it was just an etude trying to learn to keep what the old blues guys used to do with their thumb, just keep a thump going and play over the top of it with their fingers. I decided what I was going to do, and I’ve been attempting this for years and years, to do that with a pick and just use my pick and first finger to supply that thump. Or this case, it was a 6-string to 4-string to 6-string, back-and-forth (hums it). To do that and play with my remaining fingers over the top of it. And I developed that… (laughs) that riff is not what I just described but the rest of the song is. That riff is… It’s sort of a blues riff only it’s not exactly a blues riff ‘cause of straight-minor and most of the blues riffs aren’t straight-minor. None of the Delta blues guys play straight-minor or straight-major. The third was always sort of indeterminate. It wasn’t pentatonic either. Blues scales are inexact. I was just playing with that… and I showed what I had to… it was a matter…

In order to just play it I had to just sit for hours and just play it, just sort of zone out and sort of use it as a meditation and just learn to play it. Jerry used to do that when he was… he did that with a lot of tunes when he was writing. He’d just come up with something on he was doing the guitar that was going to be the anchor for the song and he’d zone out. It’s kind of one technique of songwriting that you sometimes use. You develop something, “alright, this is it. This is a well here. There’s something to be found if we keep digging.” So you just keep digging on that one riff until stuff comes out of it. I just hammered away at it till harmonic and melodic direction started appearing to me.

Right about that time I was in New York, had a day off – needed a day off but didn’t get it because Gerrit was there – and Gerrit was chomping at the bit to…(taking on voice) “C’mon, we got to do something here. You have the day off!” And so I saw my day off with wings on it headed out the window. You know, I bucked up and sat down and we hammered on it for a while and this lyric, it developed all out of this old gypsy saying that we both knew: “Bury me standing. I’ve spent a lifetime on my knees.” And it occurred to me as I was writing, I wasn’t done with the music yet by any means, it being an old gypsy saying and a form of gypsy music is the deep, old folk-rooted six-string guitar kind of music that grew up in bars and whorehouses like the blues did, flamenco. And so that sort of rung my bell and I was going to try and marry blues and a flamenco mode or riff together. So that’s what we did, we worked both sides.

We worked the “Bury Me Standing” riff against the “Bury Me Standing” theme. We were juxtaposing the “Bury Me Standing” theme against, once again, the crossroads theme. We’re not singing about the crossroads for the first time. It’s once again the crossroads. We married those two themes together and as we were doing that the gypsy riff came to me. It was something I’d been playing with a little bit with Rob before that and just on my own. It was a riff in the key of B, the dominant mode of the key of E. I just sort of left… so at the end of the verse when it went to the dominant chord, I put the Spanish-Iberian mode that raises a couple of tones. It raises the root and the 5 of the B-chord so it’s identifiably Iberian (plays it on guitar). That kind of stuff. The song goes to (plays more). It does all the standard blues stuff. Then when it goes to the 5 chord, dominant chord, I just put an overlay over the top of it and it brought… it very neatly and very quickly brought the Iberian influence into the tune. And that married just perfectly with the lyric we were writing cause we were writing them simultaneously – the melody, chords and lyrics, all at the same time which is the best possible way to do it. And, well actually there’s one better way is when it all arrives in your head, in your head and your heart at the same time. Everything is already outlined and you just pick up your instrument and report it. That’s the best possible way. The second best way is when you’re working something out with somebody or by yourself and the stuff… you know, you find a trail, a thread, and you just follow it and they’ll tumble out at the same time and sometimes one will tumble out and the other lyric, then the music. But anyway, that all fell together very quickly as the best song to do.