The first thing I want to talk to Bob Weir about is the dead.
Not the Dead, but the departed. The deceased. The ex-Dead, of which there are now as many as there once were Grateful Dead members—an entire shadow band, albeit made up entirely of keyboardists, plus one notable guitar. Pigpen. Keith. Brent. Vince. And, of course, Jerry. This is not to mention all the other compatriots and family members lost along the way. Death surrounded this band, and death suffused its music—a mournful leitmotif that's inescapable once you release whatever preconceptions you might have about peace, love, and dancing bears.
“You reach a certain age and you're going to have lost some friends,” Weir says. Perhaps so, but for him that age was around 20.
We're sitting on his tour bus, a shiny black monolithic slab, which is parked on the street in New Orleans. Outside is the Fillmore theater, a venue named for the San Francisco concert hall synonymous with the psychedelic explosion of the Grateful Dead's earliest days, now a chain owned by Live Nation, with this branch located in Harrah's casino. In a few hours, he'd be going onstage with the band he's calling Bob Weir & Wolf Bros, a trio that includes the legendary producer Don Was on stand-up bass and Jay Lane—a veteran of several post-Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead variations, as well as Primus—on drums. The band played in Austin the day before and then drove through the night, Weir sleeping in a comfy-looking bunk in back as Texas and western Louisiana rolled by a few feet beneath.
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