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The Storied Songs of Bob Weir

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.