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The Storied Songs of Bob Weir

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.