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RatDog’s Return: Bob Weir and Life After Dead (Relix Revisited)

But when Weir found him, Lane was playing hard bop in hipster dives with a group called Alphabet Soup that became something of the farm team for Weir and RatDog.

Before the first Furthur Festival tour the summer after Garcia’s death, a repertory company that included Dead drummer Mickey Hart, Hot Tuna and others intended to appeal to the Dead’s audience, Weir added historic pianist Johnnie Johnson, the 72-year-old pianist who played on all the old Chuck Berry records. The band concentrated on ballads and blues and was hardly an audience favorite on the tour.

Slowly RatDog evolved. Lane introduced to the band young Berkeley jazz saxophone phenom Dave Ellis, who worked with Lane in the original Charlie Hunter Trio. Kelly mustered out. So did the aged Johnson (who died last year at the age of 80). Keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, who played in Ellis’ group and had worked with Lane, too, at local jazz clubs, joined in 1997.

Guitarist Mark Karan, a longtime Marin County guitarist who had moved to Los Angeles and was working with Dave Mason when he got the call, hooked up as second guitarist with The Other Ones, the 1998 Dead substitute that featured Weir, Lesh and Hart from the original band. He joined RatDog, after the jazz-rooted Dave McNabb proved an ill fit, playing only nine shows. “Bob has a real affinity for jazz, whether it’s what he plays, it’s what he’s fascinated by,” says Karan. “So initially, I think he was fascinated by the fact that he could have a jazzish guitar player in his thing. But what worked out happening was that he needed somebody who was a little bit more rock-based, if not Grateful Deadbased, at least having a little bit more handle on Americana and some of the musical forms that the Grateful Dead stemmed from.”

Saxophonist Kenny Brooks of Alphabet Soup replaced Ellis, who quit the band in 2000 to spend time with his wife and young family. The final piece fell into place three years ago, when British rock bassist Robin Sylvester, a fixture on the Marin County club scene for many years, took over from the virtuoso Wasserman. “Rob was great in small ensembles,” said Weir, “three or four pieces. Any more and he just gets in the way. He’s a very busy fellow.”

While the living Dead managed to somehow put some of the band’s former members in various configurations on the road—including Weir in every different grouping—playing amphitheaters almost every summer since Garcia’s death, RatDog has toured incessantly in between, playing clubs and theaters in the spring and winter.

RatDog was slow to pick up speed. It took a number of years before the band found its groove. But the intent was never to create a Grateful Dead cover band with Weir as vocalist, but to explore the actual core of the Grateful Dead experience, the ensemble improvisations where each musician is an axis on which the geometric sound of the band shifts. After Sylvester joined the band, RatDog began to fulfill that unique, elusive vision.

“All of a sudden, we had somebody who was laying down the bass like a bass player, and we began jelling into a rock and roll band,” says Karan. “I think that we still have a whole lot of jazz influences, it’s impossible to get away from that with Jeff and Kenny in the band… But with Robin, Bob and myself, half the band is coming from a more traditional place. And now it’s really become, I think, the hybrid that Bob was looking for all along. It’s an improvisational rock ensemble with a whole lot of jazz underpinning.”

Since its inception, the band’s modus operandi has been to sort of figure things out in the moment, and to not overthink, or rather, over-rehearse. So, of course it took some time for the band to get good, says drummer Lane, but finally they’ve gotten it right.

“Anybody can get a band together with some happening players and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse,” he says. “But to get a band together with guys who have to kind of figure it out on their own, you end up creating something more like the Grateful Dead…I feel like RatDog has gotten to the point, what we’ve figured out on our own, we’re using that to communicate with each other and take more risks… We’ve been a band for so long, we’re doing the stuff that bands do, all unexpected dynamic drops, and real off the-cuff things. It’s like a well-worn baseball glove. It feels real comfortable.”