Features

Move Me Brightly: An Interview With Bob Weir

Levitating Jerry on Letterman

How did you assemble the players?

That was done sort of organically, a couple of players from a couple of projects I’ve done earlier and some guys that they brought. There’s a generation below them of Deadhead musicians and that will probably be one of the next projects, is to get the real newbies.

There’s been a real resurgence of appreciation for Garcia and Dead music in general in the younger generation of music fans and players; do you have any sense for why the Dead’s music continues to grow as it does?

The thing about it is what we did was highly improvisational and a lot of fun, there was a lot of adventure in it, and that appeals to a certain kind of human. These are bright, adventurous kids. They don’t see a whole hell of a lot of that in current offerings in popular music so they drift our direction because it’s always been there. But they’re taking the ball now, it’s theirs to run with, and they do, I guess we sort of set a pattern and we more or less inherited that from the jazzbos, state a theme, take it for a little walk in the woods, but I guess we’re sort of famous for having electrified that and bringing in the Americana canon with it.

Why is TRI the place for this celebration?

Because it’s a real good facility built for the purpose of what we’re doing, broadcasting. I don’t think there’s another facility that has quite the quality that we can put out and we have some extras bells and whistles once you get here as well. I built it to be a really fun place to play, and aside from that we can also film and record and broadcast.

I read that you built this with studio with Garcia in mind, what did you mean by that?

Back in the old days when Jerry was still around I had a home studio and Jerry and I spent a lot of time together up there just messing around having fun. This is sort of an extension of that. I started over here, and I have much better equipment than I had back in my little home studio, but just bearing in mind the experiences; we made Blues for Allah there and Jerry got sort of used to coming up there. Jerry would get thrown out of the house he’d come straight up there, or he’d have an idea and he’d come up and he’d want to put it down, we’d trade ideas, all that kind of stuff. With that in mind, the kind of fun we were having there, we built this place. And in building this place I used a bunch of Jerry’s old friends, engineers and stuff, so they all intuitively knew what I was looking for.

Favorite Garcia memory?

It’s not my ultimate favorite, but the time we levitated old Jer on David Letterman, that was a lot of fun.

Obviously you wanted to celebrate and honor Jerry, but was there anything else behind this event?

No, that’s it. It’s a great excuse to have a celebration, there’s great music to hang on that celebration and the idea is just to have some fun with it.