"This is how it goes." "I bought this house in 1972." "I'd just signed my first solo record contract." "So I decided, "Okay, I'm gonna build a little studio for myself to play around in."" "I've done a lot of work in here." "We made Blues for Allah in here." "Both of my kids were born in our living room in front of our fireplace." "I've probably got around 100 guitars." "Gonna have to do." "This one, I bought in 1970." "350 bucks was all the money I could think about at the time." "It's a 1959 Gibson 335." "Like, the Holy Grail of thin body guitars." "I played it for four or five years with the Grateful Dead." "I'd prefer not to travel with it, but..." "I can't seem to not do it." "This is a Grammy here." "Lifetime Achievement award." "And, uh... wow." "We managed to put over a million people into Meadowlands Arena." "They, uh, awarded us for that." "This one is supposed to have a record on it... a big gold record and it's the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame." "That was in 1994." "Jerry just one day handed me this." "Said, "Here, you need this."" "I play it every now and again." "Just for fun." "We had a very strong bond and a shared sense of purpose." "Jerry was my older brother, basically." "Here's my Jerry bobblehead." "I guess it's you and me, bub." "Uh, Bob." "Yeah." "I've led kind of an unusual life." "I was young for the experience of leaving home... and going out and seeing the world." "But I was ready for it." "It was such an amazing adventure." "The music was an adventure." "The people I was doing it with were an adventurous group." "I've seen stuff that no one's seen." "♪ Spanish lady, come to me She lays on me this rose ♪" "♪ Rainbows spiral round and round They tremble and explode ♪" "♪ Left a smoking crater of my mind I like to blow away ♪" "♪ Heat come round and busted me For smiling' on a cloudy day ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin' around in a circle ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin' around in a circle ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "Mine has been a long, strange trip." "Well, I was born in San Francisco in 1947." "I was adopted at birth." "My adoptive father was an engineer." "I'll just pull up here." "My mom was something of a socialite." "They couldn't have any kids." "And so they decided, "Okay, well, let's adopt some."" "This wall didn't used to be here." "They adopted my older brother and then they adopted me." "And then a couple of years later, to their surprise, my mom became pregnant and my sister came along." "Wow." "Well, there's nothing here." "Our old house is gone." "We had a very quiet, peaceful household." "We had a beautiful home." "But our family was not really emotional." "Our father came from the East Coast." "It was more puritan and quiet." "Bob certainly was the exception in the family." "I was pretty wild." "I guess it's just in my blood." "I'm pathologically anti-authoritarian." "I've never been actually checked out on that, but..." "I'm right." "He was the guy who never met a school that he could stay in for more than two or three months." "Come to think of it, I was kicked out of play school." "I dropped a hammer out of a treehouse on a kid's head." "And I'm not entirely sure why I did it." "I think I just wanted to see if it'd hit him." "Teachers knew that he had a problem reading, he had a problem learning how to write, and they figured he was stupid." "In retrospect, my academic career would never have gone very far, 'cause I'm dyslexic." "It's just not gonna happen." "Um..." "You know, I read a lot." "But it takes so long that I would never have been able to study and make the grade." "The first time I ever met Weir, we were both freshmen at Fountain Valley School that specialized in bright but unmanageable kids." "And I'd turned around and there's this really dorky kid with really thick horn rims and his leg is going..." "For some reason, just immediately liked him." "My older brother, John, taught me how to tune a radio right at the height of rock and roll hitting the airwaves." "The guys who caught my ear were" "Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers," "Roy Orbison." "What they had going was cool." "I could hear that, I could feel it." "I could feel the excitement." "Then I got my first guitar, which is a pivot point in my life." "At some point, he got a new guitar and stood there as proud as anybody can be and said, "What more could a boy want?"" "I'm not sure I'd ever discovered I had any talent or anything like that." "It was just dogged persistence." "I had to have the music and so I went after it." "There was a little music store in Palo Alto, Dana Morgan Music." "This is the first time I've been back here in decades." "I used to work in the back there teaching lessons." "Now it's a bed store." "I'll tell you what, we'll go around the back." "I think we might be able to get through over here." "So back here somewhere was the back door to Dana Morgan Music." "And this is where, uh..." "It was right here where this wall is, I guess, now." "This has been built out." "This is where, uh..." "This is where on New Year's Eve of 1963 going into '64..." "Uh..." "You know, knocked on the door and met Jerry." "Jerry was sort of a famous musician around the Palo Alto area." "He was a banjo player primarily." "All the kids that I was hanging with had great reverence for him." "I'd been backstage with him a time or two when we were playing the open mic nights at the Tangent, but... never actually formally met him." "I was walking this way, heard some banjo music coming from this area over in here... and figured it was Jerry." "Knocked on the door to see if he was into hanging, and he was, 'cause his students weren't showing up because it was New Year's Eve and he was unmindful of that." "I don't think he had thought that through." "So we got to talking and then he asked me," ""Want to grab some instruments from the front of the shop?"" "And so we played all night." "He was also a great guy to hang with." "He was a lot of fun, and we hit it off." "We kept each other laughing and all that kind of stuff." "Soon, we were a jug band and not long thereafter we were a rock and roll band." "We were out of Palo Alto and into the city and... off to the world." "So, we started a band called the Warlocks." "I remember the first time I met Bob very well." "I'm standing there talking to Jerry and I ask him, "Well, where's the weed, man?"" "And he says, "Oh, my guitar player's coming with some weed right now."" "You know, any minute now."" "So we go outside and we get in the car and there's Bob." "Apparently, he had just scored from Neal Cassady." "We sat in the car and rolled up, and we all got good and high, you know." "And it was killer weed." "You know, Bob had that beautiful manner about him that made everyone really love him from the get-go." "He was sort of like the magic object in the middle of the band." "If you look back there, you can see a swimming pool." "To the right of that, there was a big lawn area." "We played a lawn party there one time." "A little after dark, the neighbors started complaining, and the party got shut down." "My folks were trying to get cozy with my new career as a rock and roller." "I was a 16-year-old kid when I started playing with Jerry." "And that's kind of where the ride began for me." "You know, I wanted to play music," "I wanted to have a little adventure in my life." "And here it was, big as hell." "I took LSD every Saturday, without fail, for about a year." "First time I took acid was on Jerry's birthday," "August 1st, 1965." "I remember ending up on a hilltop with Sue Swanson." "She did manage to coax out of me if I'd had any insights." "I told her, "Yeah." "You know, music." "That's what I'm here for." "Music."" "I guess I was officially done with school when I ran off with the Pranksters." "It was the night of my second Beatles concert." "I was high on acid at the time." "Out in the parking lot after the show, there was the bus, with all the Pranksters in full drag hanging off it, swinging off it like monkeys." "Yes, the Merry Band of Pranksters are everywhere." "Everywhere." "I just, you know, I followed my bliss right onto the bus." "I have the whole thing all grooved out." "And there was Kesey." "Mr. Kesey, do you feel that you have the right to do what you want, whatever you want?" "I feel a man has the right to be as big as he feels it in him to be." "And then there was this other guy on the bus who seemed to be his grand vizier, who just chattered and spoke..." "quite often in rhymes." "Fourth dimension." "We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world." "That was Neal Cassady." "We are an Intrepid Trips production." "But the Intrepid Trips production, at the moment, is the Acid Test." "Acid Test." "So Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters come along and they want to spread the word about this amazing new drug, LSD." "And so they start having these parties called the Acid Test." "The Acid Tests were permissive bedlam." "They were large rooms in which numbers of stoned people were singing, fucking, chirping, imitating animals." "Anything that you could possibly imagine was going on at the Acid Test." "I think they charged a buck at the door." "There was LSD in the Kool-Aid and everybody got a cup of Kool-Aid for a buck and got to go into the party." "It was a big success." "It was a big, monster party, but there wasn't any music." "We brought our equipment and took LSD, and we plugged in and we played." "We all had Prankster names like, Phil was Reddy Kilowatt." "Billy was Bill the Drummer." "Jerry's was Captain Trips." "I was the Kid." "It was impossibly fun." "When you take LSD, your awareness is greatly expanded." "At the same time, you're profoundly disoriented." "Yeah, you've got your hands and you know how to play a few chords and you know how to play rhythmically, but when the guitar's turned into some snake-like critter, and you're watching notes in lines..." "in color go by..." "You know, it's hard to relate to all this stuff." ""What is the deal here?"" "And still you got a gig, you got to play." "There were a few times when we'd take acid and we'd walk out and try to play and couldn't make sense of anything." "We'd just throw up our hands and flee." "But then we'd come back together and we'd play like demons." "We'd take a song and at the end, we'd just, rather than ending it, let's just stretch it out." "Play with the rhythm, play with the texture." "That's kind of how we learned to extend and improvise." ""I'm gonna work this chord change for a while." "I've heard the jazz guys do it, and I'm gonna try my hand at it."" "There was a lot of extrasensory communication going on." "And, you know, I don't want to call it "telepathy,"" "'cause there was that, too, but there was more than that." "You could see through other people's eyes, you could hear through other people's ears." "That was the kind of stuff that we were exploring back then." "The pressure wasn't on us." "So when we did play, we played with a certain kind of freedom that you rarely get as a musician." "Not only did we not have to fulfill expectations about us, but we didn't have to fulfill expectations about music either." "We played the topless places after the Acid Test, while we were still sort of drifting around, and we were already starting to stretch out our tunes." "And the girls hated us 'cause they were used to a two minute, 30-second tune, and then another girl would come up." "And we'd go out, we'd play for like 15 minutes and they'd just run out of gas." "So they didn't dig it that much." "So we're playing really long and this poor chick turns around, her tits are flying, sweat's flying off her tits going," ""Please, can't you play a little shorter?"" "So we found out the meaning of jam band right then." "But that was, you know, just early stuff." "And then Bobby took her home probably after the show." "And that was the start of what became, for all intents and purposes, the Grateful Dead." "It's legendarily hard to make a living being a musician anyway." "You know, my folks couldn't see much future in it." "I'll never forget the time his mom showed up at Jerry's and she made us swear mighty oaths that Bob went to school every day." "And if we did that, she would let him stay in the band." "Well, you can imagine how that turned out." "Bob would wake up for dinner, and then go out and perform all night, and then he'd come home for breakfast." "My mother kept saying, "Can't you have a normal life?"" "So when Bob turned 18, our mother finally said, "Enough!" "I can't deal with any more."" "So she asked Bob to move out of the house." "Bob looked so young." "And back in the day, he looked like a baby." "But there was something about their looseness in terms of life and in terms of their music that was picked up by the crowds." "There was that great time when we put the flatbed trucks together in front of the Straight Theater." "We filled all of Haight Street with people." "As far as you could see, there was people." "It was like, it was coming..." "It was so fast and there was so much good energy that you couldn't really take any one part of it." "It was like this beautiful picture, you know?" "And that was just amazing times." "Then they actually started doing free concerts in Golden Gate Park." "You know, when I left home, I was, you know, following my bliss." "And my folks had no answer for that." "They couldn't say I was wrong because they could see that I was really doing what I wanted to do and I was making something of it." "The whole experience, it bonded the band, it made us tighter than brothers." "They say that blood is thicker than water." "What we had was thicker than blood." "Bob didn't maintain much contact with his family." "So the band was his family." "The Grateful Dead weren't a birth family, they weren't an adopted family, these were his family." "And he was very close to them, they were close to one another." "The relationship between Jerry and Bob, I think most of the time, it was that kind of big brother, little brother thing." "You know, we all know that Weir joined the band when he was, like, 17." "I think the guys in the band were his family." "And same with Jerry, you know?" "He didn't have a strong family at home." "You know, he..." "That was his family." "And the experiences that they went through together made them closer." "You know, Jerry and I didn't need to talk to know what each other was thinking or how each other was feeling." "Most of the stuff we talked about was horseshit, uh... just to keep each other amused." "We were bros." "And we were on a huge adventure, and we were loving it." " Thanks, Murray." " Hey, no problem." "Thank you." " Love you, Bobby." " Hello." "Hey, Bobby, have a good show." "Love you, Bobby." " See you in a bit." " You bet, thanks." "♪ Compass card is spinning ♪" "♪ Helm is swinging to and fro ♪" "♪ Ooh ♪" "♪ Where's the dog star?" "♪" "♪ Ooh ♪" "♪ Where's the moon?" "♪" "♪ You're a lost sailor ♪" "♪ Been too long at sea ♪" "♪ Now the shorelines beckon ♪" "♪ Yeah, there's a price for being ♪" "♪ Free ♪" "Okay, now here it is." "A long time ago, I lived here." "We used to hang on the steps a lot." "This tree wasn't nearly as big, so there was a lot of sun on the steps." "Was it the same color?" "No, this neighborhood has been sort of..." " Repainted?" " It's been repainted and rebuffed." " Wait, who lived here with you?" " Uh, the whole band." "This is the house of a popular local band which plays hard rock music." "They call themselves the Grateful Dead." "They live together comfortably in what could be called "affluence."" "710 Ashbury, it was like that famous Bob song," ""We can share the women, we can share the wine."" "But we weren't doing so much wine, but mostly pot." "We were a family living in a house." "We were a business, we were a band." "I was a city boy suddenly for the first time." "This was Pigpen's room in here." " And then this was your room." " Yeah." "I had a big brass bed against that wall." "It was my chore to answer the door." "I was the only guy in the band with any manners." "I think this might have been where Phil lived." "I'm a little hazy on who was where." "This might have been where Jerry lived." "Jerry used to practice a lot in that room." "The Grateful Dead's concept of a new style of life is, in most cases, drawn from the drug experience." "The people that live in the community and, you know, play around with dope and stuff like that, they don't have wars, you know?" "And they don't have a lot of problems that the larger society has." "You know, we were, sort of, relatively famous around here." "My roommate was Neal Cassady." "He lived there with us." "Now, Neal Cassady is a guy... um, that I'll tell you girls about when you're a little older, 'cause it's hard to understand." "The guy lived in a lot of places, a lot of different dimensions." "He could hold a conversation with a table full of people." "It would be one-on-one conversations with the whole table." "One line that he would voice would be part of a totally different conversation with everybody else." "He was an amazing man." "Neal was like our speed freak uncle." "And he was good friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and what he really liked to do was to help us fill in the gaps in our educations, about Beat literature, about the multidimensional universe that we live in," "and 1,000 other themes that had to do with driving fast cars on a nice day." "He taught me to drive." "I try not to practice this method of driving too much these days, 'cause I don't want my kids to try to learn it." "But he could drive through rush hour traffic in San Francisco at 50, 55 miles an hour." "Never stopping for a stop sign, never a stop light." "Somehow he never hit anything." "He just knew where everything was and what was coming and knew how to be in the right place at the right time." "But he lived wherever he wanted to live." "His body was here, but his spirit, his soul, his..." "Whatever it is that we are, it could be wherever he wanted to be." "You just had to see it to... see it." "Neal influenced me greatly." "He embodied the American Zen." "I got to watch this enough, so that..." "I like to think that I kind of picked up some of that." "The first song I ever wrote was "The Other One"." "And Neal Cassady helped me sort it out." "This was my first real adventure with songwriting." "It was a story that was trying to be told." "I was just being the character that I saw in the movie... and the character in the movie was kind of a cartoon version of me." "♪ Spanish lady, come to me She lays on me this rose ♪" "♪ It rainbows spiral round and round It trembles and explodes ♪" "♪ It left a smoking crater of my mind I like to blow away ♪" "♪ But the heat come round and busted me For smiling' on a cloudy day ♪" "The first verse ends in," ""The heat came round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day."" "That was autobiographical." "I threw a water balloon in the vicinity of a cop, and, of course, went to jail for that." "♪ Escapin' through the lily fields I came across an empty space ♪" "♪ It trembled and exploded Left a bus stop in its place ♪" "♪ The bus come by and I got on That's when it all began ♪" "I was going back to the good ship, Furthur, the bus that I left home on." ""And there was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land."" "♪ There was cowboy Neal at the wheel Of a bus to never-ever land ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "And I knew I had the verse and I had the song, and we played it the next night." "And that was the last night on the tour and then we came home." "And when we came home, we came home to the news that Neal Cassady had died." "He'd checked out that night while I was writing the song." "He died walking the railroad tracks somewhere near San Miguel de Allende in Mexico." "And so it didn't take me long to figure out that" "Neal was there with me that night." "He was also, at that point, free of the bonds of space, so he could be there with me, though he was busy dying, or dead, in Mexico." "That verse is a little bit of him alive, I think, whenever I sing it." "Wait, where are you?" "I don't think you're there, honey." " Mmm-mmm." " Who is that?" "It's Jerry and Pigpen." "He's not there." " Oh, it's because he's not dead." " Oh, yeah, hello..." "Right." "♪ Truckin' Got my chips cashed in ♪" "♪ Keep truckin' Like the do-dah man ♪" "♪ Together More or less in line ♪" "♪ Just keep truckin' Oh, oh, oh ♪" "In 1970, the Grateful Dead put out the two seminal albums of their career, really." "The ones that defined them for most of the audience that would like them for the rest of their career." "Workingman's Dead and American Beauty." "And American Beauty had some interesting tunes that Bob was primarily responsible for." "One was "Truckin'," of course, which was their first hit single." "♪ Busted down on Bourbon Street ♪" "♪ Set up like a bowling' pin ♪" "♪ Knocked down It gets to wearing' thin ♪" "♪ They just won't let you be ♪" "People had heard of the Grateful Dead, and maybe heard some of our live recordings, but that stuff was rough." "We weren't as developed as recording artists." "When we actually got around to making some proper studio records, we started picking up fans in numbers." "♪ Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me ♪" "♪ Other times I can barely see ♪" "It was a big step for us because we got a sense of," ""This is what we're here to do."" "♪ What a long, strange trip it's been ♪" "We were being successful making music, and people are gonna pay us to do this." "And that was like Christmas for all of us." "♪ Truckin' I'm a-goin' home ♪" "♪ Whoa, whoa, baby Back where I belong ♪" "♪ Back home Down to patch my bones ♪" "♪ Get back truckin' on ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, oh ♪" "We weren't starving artists anymore." "We moved out of the saloon circuit and started playing theaters." "We hit the road." "We never looked back." "There was no point in looking back." "And also we got a gold record and I got to bring that home to my parents." "That made them feel a whole lot better about, uh... about my having run off with the circus, basically." "We're gonna take a short break, and we'll be back in just a few minutes, so don't go nowhere." "It's real hard for me to put into words what it is that I do with Garcia, but I try to provide counterpoint for what he does." "We had fairly defined roles." "I was the rhythm guitarist, Jerry was lead guitarist." "I was there to supply chords and rhythm for Jerry to play over the top of." "But the traditional role of a rock and roll rhythm guitarist is somewhat limited." "I got to where I was feeling kind of hemmed in with what I was doing." "At the same time, I was listening to a lot of jazz and stuff like that and I was listening to the piano players." "Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner." "And I listened to the way they chorded." "Particularly McCoy Tyner, the way he chorded underneath John Coltrane and supplying John Coltrane with all kinds of harmonic counterpoint to what he was doing." "That appealed to me greatly." "And so I started trying to learn to do that on the guitar for Jerry." "Garcia completely wove his stuff around the expectation of what Weir would weave in." "If Jerry had the line with the most energy, the most life to it, we'd fall in behind him." "If I was that guy, then they'd fall in behind me." "That was what the band was all about." "Supporting whoever is moving the story furthest, fastest." "An awful lot of attention went to Jerry." "And yet to me, it was more really the interplay between Bob and the band." "That is what I found the most exciting." "We developed a sort of an intertwined sense of intuition." "I could intuit where Jerry was going with a line for instance, on stage." "And try to hustle up, get the full drift of that and then be there when he got there with a little surprise for him." "With Weir, he's an extraordinarily original player, you know, in a world full of people who sound like each other, you know?" "I mean, really, he has really got a style that's totally unique as far as I know." "I don't know anybody else that plays the guitar the way he does." "That in itself is, I think, really a score, considering how derivative almost all electric guitar playing is." "Bob arguably has the most unique guitar style of anybody playing in music." "And I've loved it forever." "I spent a bunch of years trying to emulate the kind of way he would voice chords." "'Cause I just felt like it was so unusual." "He was super creative in this way that nobody else was doing." "First time I ever played with Bob, you know, we started playing straight up 12-bar blues." "And I'm noticing that in one key of E, he's played about 12 friggin' inversions of..." "He don't play just, E, E, E. He goes, E, E, E, E, E, E, E." "He knows so many inversions of a chord that it blew my mind." "You know, number two's as important as number one." "If you don't have an ego, you can be the best number two on the planet, and that's kind of what Bob became." "It makes him special." "Where does it want to go from there?" "Let me just listen in my head for a minute." "In writing songs, it's best if it all comes at once, but that rarely happens." "Most often, I think, what I probably end up doing is, uh... is just fumbling around on the guitar and just playing and finding something I like and then starting to string things together from there." "That one I've been playing with for a little while." "And I'm gonna find somewhere to take that." "Maybe even over the weekend." "There's no logic to it." "It comes through the window when it wants to come through the window." "There are countless nights that I'd rather have been sleeping, but I was up writing." "The first real writing for keeps that I ever did was when the Grateful Dead, when we were just writing stuff all together and I'd come up with a line here, a phrase here." "Being younger, I had difficulty being taken seriously." "I really had to be kind of forceful, otherwise I was gonna get overlooked." "♪ Lost now in the country miles in his Cadillac ♪" "♪ I can tell by the way you smile You're rolling back ♪" "♪ Come wash the nighttime clean ♪" "♪ Come grow this scorched ground green ♪" "There are hardly any more important musicians than the Grateful Dead and Bob Weir." "Yeah, he's just a super down to earth, genuine person, who happens to be this total icon." "♪ You and me, Cassidy ♪" "♪ Quick beats in an icy heart ♪" "♪ Catch-colt draws a coffin cart ♪" "♪ There he goes, and now here she starts Hear her cry ♪" "♪ Flight of the seabirds ♪" "♪ Scattered like lost words ♪" "♪ Wheel to the storm and fly ♪" "Yesterday, he was sort of breaking down "Cassidy" for us and kind of just, sort of, unlocking the magic of the parts as it happened." "And then as we started to play, like, "Oh, it sounds, you know..." "It's like, Without a Net, 1989." We're like..." "So we kind of, you know..." "It was pretty electric." "♪ Flight of the seabirds ♪" "♪ Scattered like lost words ♪" "♪ Wheel to the storm and fly ♪" "Did you think when you were starting that it would ever evolve into this mystique that has come to surround the group called the Grateful Dead?" " We didn't think when we were starting." " No, we didn't think." "Right." "We started to get the drift that our fans were a little bit different... when we started seeing the same faces in the front row every night on a tour." "It came home a little more when we started seeing tents set up in the parking lot." "And realized, okay, we've got kind of a little gypsy entourage here." "We had this following of people who had dropped out of normal society and just followed us around and created their own little society." "That's kind of what I did." "I dropped out of normal society, left home, left school and ran off with this rock and roll band, chasing the muse, chasing the music." "They're the best fans any band has ever had." "I mean, there's never been a band that has attracted the same sort of devotion on so many different kinds of levels." "There are people who will... who can actually sit there and tell you the difference between the "Scarlet/Fire" at 5/8 '77 and the one they played three nights later at 5/11" "and the one two nights later at 5/13." " Gotta see what's happening." " There's never been two shows alike, ever." "Ever!" "The Deadheads have a certain sense of adventure." "And it's tough to come by adventure in America nowadays." "You know what I mean?" "It's a little uptight and everything like that." "They are people who are strong enough to seek adventure in this new, lame America." "♪ I need a woman 'bout twice my weight ♪" "♪ A ton of fun who packs a gun with all her other freight ♪" "♪ Find her in a sideshow Gonna leave her in LA ♪" "♪ Ride her like a surfer running on a tidal wave ♪" "When it was flowing and we were one with the music and one with the audience... ♪ And hell!" "♪" "♪ One more thing I just got to say ♪" "♪ I need a miracle every day ♪ ...it was undeniable." "♪ Went down to the mountain I was drinking some wine ♪" "♪ Looked up in the heavens Lord, I saw a mighty sign ♪" "♪ Written fire across the heaven Plain in black and white ♪" "♪ Get prepared There's gonna be a party tonight ♪" "♪ Uh-huh ♪" "Everybody had girlfriends." "Pigpen had a steady girlfriend, Phil had a steady girlfriend." "Bobby didn't really have steady girlfriends." "He had lots of girlfriends." "♪ Hey!" "It's Saturday night ♪" "He was the best looking guy in the band." "Come on, what are you gonna do?" "♪ Everybody's dancin' down the local armory ♪" "♪ With a basement full of dynamite and live artillery ♪" "Bob Weir was the handsomest guy in the Dead, okay?" "I've been that guy in other bands before." "I know what it's like." "♪ Hey!" "It's Saturday night ♪" "♪ Yeah, uh-huh ♪" "♪ One more Saturday night ♪" "♪ Ow!" "Saturday night ♪" "Jerry always said that they needed one good looking guy in the band to catch the ladies, and that's why they put up with Weir's shit." "The band loved him because A, he was really cute and drew the girls." "And then the biggest part, the most important part is he was game for it all." "Here's beautiful Bobby surrounded by the ugly brothers." "You know?" "I mean, if you're gonna go to bed with somebody from the band, is it gonna be Pigpen?" "Bob had the "party room" all wired." "He had a big boom box made." "Too big to get into the room." "So he had to split it in half to get it in there." "And then, after the show, you know, the quippies man the door, you know." ""No guys." "Just gals."" "And so we all used to take Bob's run off." "So I guess I got a reputation as being kind of the heartthrob of the Grateful Dead." "So after the show, if there were folks backstage, the girls were gonna come my way mostly." "And they did." "And..." "What, am I gonna complain about that?" "I got to shop around a bunch." "The first time I met Bob, I was in 10th grade." "My girlfriend at the end of the show, she said, "I'm gonna get us backstage," and I really didn't believe her, but I..." "She grabbed my hand and ran me through the crowd and then Lin said, "Hi, we're here to meet Bob Weir."" "And then, a minute later, he was walking over." "They were 15 at the time." "So, you know, "Okay, I'm..." "You know..."" "But they were a lot of fun." "We began a friendship and then we remained friends." "I used to see him on the road and I would sleep in the parlor, but then he would have, like, a woman in there or women." "I would wake up and then suddenly there's lingerie in the bathroom." "The only kind of plans we ever made were, like, going to Egypt and playing under the Pyramids." "Those are the only kind of plans we ever started out with." "And we actually got around to it." " Some of 'em." " It was in 1978." "Yeah." "Egypt was a hell of an adventure." "I felt the weight of the antiquity." "Time went away." "Future, past, all of it was right here." "We played at the Son Et Lumiere Theater, an ancient, ancient amphitheater." "When the pyramid was lined up with the Sphinx," "I would hear echoes in the sound that seemed to go far beyond this place and time." "At dusk, the mosquitoes come out." "And I looked at my arm, it was covered with mosquitoes, and I'm thinking, "Okay, welcome to hell."" "And then something flies by my face." "It was a bat." "I look across the stage, and the stage is swarmed with bats." "And they're taking out the mosquitoes." "They're saving our asses." "It was a rock and roll band on a thousands of year old stage at the foot of the Great Pyramid surrounded by a cloud of bats." "And I think to myself, "Take me now, Lord." "I want to remember it just like this."" "I can't believe that you both started together, because you look..." " Forgive me" " Well, I'm older than him." "Oh, oh!" "I thought, maybe you both started out the same age and somehow you'd progressed a little bit more rapidly than the rest of us." "I put more time in the years than he did." "Remember back in the '60s when all the parents were afraid that the kinds of music their children were listening to would somehow corrupt them and make them forevermore not worthy of living in the American society?" "What was going through those people's minds at the time?" "Hard to tell." "Phil and I had to make a long speech to Weir's mother back then because Bob was dropping out of high school to play rock and roll, you know." "We had to make sure" "We had to assure her that everything was gonna be okay, you know." "I knew something was fishy when I came over to his house for practice one day, and there were Phil and Garcia sitting there like the cat that ate the canary." ""Finish school, Bobby."" "What changes do you see in what you've done over the years?" "And how have you managed to be evolutionary and stay current?" " I don't think we've stayed current." " You don't?" "I don't think we ever were current." "Yeah, right." "That's probably closer to the truth." "Yeah, we never were current, I don't think..." "I think we've been sort of singular in our whole endeavor." "And probably stay that way." "I mean, all we try to do is just satisfy our own standards." " And they're pretty steep." " Mmm-hmm." "Get on out of here!" "Oh, the video simulcast." "It's a video simulcast." "Yes." "The video simulcast on Halloween." " It's gonna be very scary." " Right on." " So, you know what I mean?" " I mean, it's Halloween." "I mean, if you have the guts to come to the video simulcast, come on to the simulcast." "But I really don't think you can do it." "♪ Friend come by Say he's looking for his hat ♪" "♪ Yes ♪" "♪ Wants to know where your husband's at ♪ ♪ Buddy ♪" "♪ I don't know He's on his way to the pen ♪" "♪ But come on, pretty mama Let's get on the road again ♪" "♪ On the road again Sure as you're born ♪" "♪ Natural born easement on the road again ♪" "♪ On the road again Sure as you're born ♪" "♪ I went to my house My front door was locked ♪" "♪ Yeah ♪" "♪ Went 'round to my window But my window was locked ♪" "♪ Jumped right back I shook my head ♪" "♪ Big old rounder in my folding bed ♪" "♪ Shot near the window Broke the glass ♪" "♪ Never seen that little rounder run so fast ♪" "♪ He's on the road again Sure as you're born ♪" "♪ Natural born easement on the road again ♪" "♪ On the road again Sure as you're born ♪" "The late '80s, the whole situation changed a lot." "The "Touch of Grey" album came out, they got really big." "And I think the dynamic changed." "In the late '80s, Grateful Dead shows became a destination." ""Touch of Grey" was their first hit single and this assault on the mainstream that was unthinkable in the Grateful Dead world." "♪ Must be getting early ♪" "♪ Clocks are running late ♪" "♪ Faint light of the morning sky ♪" "♪ Looks so phony ♪" "♪ Dawn is breaking everywhere ♪" "♪ Light a candle Curse the glare ♪" "♪ Draw the curtains I don't care 'cause ♪" "♪ It's all right ♪" "♪ I will get by ♪" "♪ I will get by ♪" "♪ I will get by ♪" "♪ I will survive ♪" "The crushing part of fame is just boring." "Being famous is boring, and it's confining." "We were kind of hoping to be successful on our own terms and maybe sidestep fame." "♪ Whistle through your teeth and spit 'cause it's all right ♪" "We hit a peak of popularity in the late '80s." "It had gotten to the point where it was hard to walk down the street without getting just mobbed, basically." "We had a hit single and a video that was played a lot." "Jerry was singing the song, and he was good on camera, and he was evocative on camera." "That brought a focus to Jerry that we hadn't seen before." " Yeah, Jerry's God, man." " Yeah!" "It gives you something to look forward to, you know." "There was a cult of people and they deified Jerry." "The temptation, I guess, or the tendency was there to equate it with religion or something like that, which it isn't." "It's just music." "It's just art." "We weren't high priests or anything like that." "And to have that thrust on Jerry, for instance, it was unsettling to him." "It's a weird thing to try and understand what it must be like for someone like Jerry to be in the position to have all these people deify him." "He was a great, mellow, you know, humble guy." "The stress of being someone so idolized like Jerry..." "It's a big burden for anyone to have to be that person, I think." "We had a gig, as I remember, at RFK Stadium." "We played with Dylan and it was hot." "108 degrees or something, and humid." "And Jerry wasn't real good with hot weather to begin with." "We went home and, uh..." "a couple of days later, he was in a coma." "You know, Jerry once told me that heroin takes all your troubles, all your concerns, all your worries, and ties them neatly together into one little, tiny little package." ""Where's my next hit?"" "You don't think about diet, you don't think about exercise." "He was grossly overweight, and I'm just gonna go ahead and assume that he had a cholesterol situation that you wouldn't wish on a mad dog." "While he was in the coma, he couldn't be taking drugs and they didn't give them to him." "And so by the time he came out, he was cleaned up, and he stayed that way for a couple of years." "And he was a lot of fun when he was straight." "Those were the funnest times we had together since we were much, much younger." " It's your verse, man." " No, it's your verse." " You didn't do "She never stumbles."" " You come in after." " Oh, that's true." " No, you didn't do "She never stumbles."" "It's true, you didn't do "She never stumbles."" "We only did two verses before the instrumental." "Yeah, you did two verses." "I did the second one" " and then you did the instrumental." " Oh, right." "You used to do the third verse, then we did the instrumental." " We'll have to do this perhaps again." " Okay." "Keep rolling." "Keep on rolling." "Yeah, well, here we go." "Let's see." "Bob." "Bob." "What are you looking at, man?" "What are you looking at?" "The chances are" "I spent more time standing on stage playing guitar and singing than any human that ever lived." "How many shows did the Grateful Dead play?" "Something like 3,000, and then you at least double that." "It's a lot of time singing and playing guitar." "♪ We can share the women We can share the wine ♪" "♪ We can share what we got of yours ♪" "♪ 'Cause we done shared all of mine ♪" "Night after night on stage," "I spent a lot of time thinking about my life and my adoptive parents." "They were proud of me by the time they wrapped it up." "And they were real happy." "And I loved them and they loved me, and I knew that." "But for adopted kids, you're always gonna wanna know where you come from." "So I finally hired a private eye to look into my birth." "But the private eye guy could get nowhere with it." "And so I didn't think I was gonna get anywhere." "♪ Jack Straw from Whichita ♪" "♪ Cut his buddy down ♪" "♪ Dug for him a shallow grave And lay his body down ♪" "♪ A half a mile from Tucson By the morning light ♪" "♪ There's one man gone and another to go ♪" "♪ My old buddy You're moving much too slow ♪" "♪ We can share the women We can share the wine ♪" "On Sunday in Indianapolis, a Grateful Dead concert had to be canceled." "As many as 4,000 people stormed gates behind the stage and later threw rocks and bottles at police." "Hundreds of Grateful Dead fans tried to push their way into a concert in Orlando last night." "Police lobbed tear gas and pepper gas." "In the early '90s, there was so much crowd control difficulty at our gigs." "People crashing gates and there were so many people getting hurt, and that kind of thing." "It got to be a bit much." "Big problems with the Grateful Dead." "Two deaths from apparent drug overdoses." "It's dirtier." "People are grosser and they're much younger than I ever remember." "And much higher." "People weren't going to the shows for music, they were going to the shows as..." "just to party down and to get as wasted as they could." "And this was not exactly what we were all about." "But be that as it may, that's what we kind of got pegged with." "Most of the real true Deadheads weren't that way." "They went for the music." "The Dead, well, their music is a form of communication of the highest of the ideals of the '60s, which is peace, joy, bringing people together." "But the whole thing, it's the concert, it's the party, it's the band." "I don't know." "And you can't really describe it." "It's just a feeling you get when you're with all these people." "What do I do once I'm in there?" "I dance." "We all dance." " Yeah!" " We all dance." "If they can make it work making falafels, or tie-dyes in the parking lot, so that they can get into the shows and squirrel enough away so that they can live between tours..." "You know, if it rings those lofty bells for them... uh, what's wrong with that?" "At the same time, if it takes your life down, then that's another story." "So that's a double-edged sword." "It's a pretty iffy thing to be doing." "If you're a kid and you wanna spend a summer on the road, that's one thing." "If you're gonna cast your lot there, I hope you have the talent to do it." "If you're selling drugs, I have limited sympathy." "And the rest of those folks... if they're making it work, my hat's off." "And throughout the '70s and the '80s, the Dead still played by their own rules in creating influential fusions of rock, and blues, and country on such classical albums as Workingman's Dead and American Beauty." "To induct the Grateful Dead, their sometime partner, their fulltime fan, Bruce Hornsby." " Yeah!" "Bruie!" "Yeah!" " Bru!" "Bru!" " Bruce!" " Bru!" "You know, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I don't know what to make of it." "I'm innocent." "You're hanging an innocent man." "You're hanging an innocent man!" "It's nice to be a Hall of Famer and all that, but still, you know, it wasn't a goal of mine or anything like that when I started playing." "As the bumper stickers have proclaimed for over 20 years, there is really nothing like a Grateful Dead concert." "And frankly, I don't understand why they didn't get into this thing last year." "Everybody but Jerry went to that event." "Jerry wasn't in great shape and he didn't like the idea of the cult of personality." "Ladies and gentlemen, here's to the Grateful Dead and another 28 years." "Thanks a lot." "I think he associated the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards with that." "He was having some..." "some issues with his health." "Somewhere in the early '90s, he got back into the heroin." "I do remember vaguely thinking to myself," ""Well, we've seen this before." "Well, maybe he'll snap out of it."" "But something told me, "Nah, we're in for another long row to hoe."" "For a while, actually, I was his bagman." "I carried his dope around for him, 'cause number one, he knew that I wasn't gonna get into it." "And then secondly, he knew that I was gonna be" "I wasn't gonna give him more than he had told me to." "And he trusted me to do that, so I was his bagman." "There were a couple of times when the guys in the band got together and said," ""Okay, we're gonna do an intervention with Jerry." "We're gonna go and tell him that he's got to clean up."" "We figured out very quickly that that wasn't gonna work." "We just sort of accepted him for who he was and what he amounted to on a given day." "As his friend, as his bro, I just tried to keep him happy." "If I could support him doing something that I thought was a healthier, a good kind of thing to do," "I'd support that." "We took a yoga instructor with us on the road for a couple of years, and Jerry took a couple of classes with him, but we never saw that." "He wasn't about to do that around any of us." "I think Bobby was probably the most influential right there, as in, helping Jerry to find a healthier lifestyle, because I think Bobby was already really into that kind of thing." "He was doing yoga and eating right, and spiritually sound, too." "And Bobby wanted Jerry to be happy and healthy." "It was important to him that that happened." "So he-- I know he tried really hard." "He was just so goddamn famous that he couldn't go out on the streets." "What are you gonna do?" "You gotta hide from it someway." "And drugs were a convenient way to do that." "He wasn't God." "He wasn't there to pontificate." "He was just there to play and chase the music, and chase the adventure, and be a kid." "That's all he wanted to do." "I remember a conversation with Garcia one time." "I said, "I'm not sure that Weir's well equipped to handle celebrity."" "And he said, "Nobody is."" ""Nobody."" "Jerry and I used to take vacations together." "We'd get a couple houses in Kauai and live it up." "In later years, Jerry took up diving and informed me I was signed up for scuba instruction." "I'll be forever in his debt for doing that." "Jerry was a big guy and deal was, when Jerry was underwater, he was weightless." "This one time, he goes up to this hole." "This big, broad, flat fish face comes out." "This is not a fish, this is a great big eel." "Fish comes a little further out and Jerry goes like this, and he starts stroking him under the chin." "We used a tank of air in, like, half the time, just laughing." "We had a lot of fun underwater." "I had a dream." "In the dream, I found a can of invisible paint." "So I painted myself with the invisible paint." "And then Jerry came into the dream." "And Jerry was looking pretty swell." "He was in Castilian splendor, he was tall." "His hair was all black and kind of combed back, and he had a velour cape on with a silver clasp on it." "And he looked me square in the eye, and I was saying," ""Hey, Jerry, check it out." "Invisible paint."" "And he wasn't interested." "He was intent on something." "He was searching for something." "And then he was gone." "Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist, who kept the counter-culture of the 1960s rocking and rolling right into the '90s, died today in California." "He was 53." "Garcia was found dead at a drug rehabilitation center, reportedly of natural causes." "♪ Fare you well, my honey ♪" "♪ Fare you well, my only true one ♪" "The last time I saw him, it was on the back of the stage at Soldier's Field in Chicago." "And we were hugging after the show." "He was going one way and I was going the other, and you know, he slapped me on the back and said, "Always a hoot." "Always a hoot."" "Those were his last words to me." "I owe Jerry an immense debt of gratitude for, you know, showing me how to live with joy, with mischief." "Take your heart, take your faith... and reflect back some of the joy that he gave you." "He filled this world full of clouds of joy." "Just take a little bit of that..." "and reflect it back up to him." "♪ Fare you well, fare you well ♪" "♪ I love you more than words can tell ♪" "♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul ♪" "♪ Listen to the river sing sweet songs to rock my soul ♪" "I think that when Jerry died, Bobby probably, um, felt..." "Bobby probably felt a lot like Jerry's kids did." "Like, I think that Bobby probably felt like he lost a brother." "Bob was very, very-- I mean, this was his closest friend." "This was, like, you know, a father, a brother to him, and he was devastated." "I hadn't really thought about how he must have been feeling." "Still, it's tough." "After Jerry checked out, I went back out on tour with RatDog and I pretty much stayed there for a while." "I think that was probably my grieving process." "What am I gonna do?" "Stay home and snivel, and kick furniture, or feel bad about it, and not play?" "Jerry would have a fit." "Good music can make sad times better." "We've got our..." "We've got our work cut out for us this evening, so we'll just get started." "You know, I gotta go out and play." "I've gotta go out and make it better for people." "I'd stayed on the road for a while." "I had to do it for me, I had to do it for the folks," "I had to do it for Jerry." "You know, I had to do it because the music demanded it." "By the time I was edging towards 50, I was looking around and wondering now," ""Is it possible to be a rock and roll tomcat and do it gracefully?"" "And I looked around and I saw, like, Mick Jagger and guys like that, and I gotta say..." "didn't look promising." "We remained friends forever and we still are." "Except we're married now with kids." "I remember Bob out on the porch one day at his house saying," ""You know, I think I'm in love."" "You know, she was pretty, she was bright, she was a lot of fun." "This girl's a great catch, why don't we try this settling down thing?" "You know, he's really smart, fun." "I think he's brilliant." "Natascha's a very loving individual." "The love he was feeling from her is something that just probably filled a big void in him, too." "And then with the birth of Monet, it was just mind-boggling for him to have that experience." "He was present at the birth." "And that feeling of being a father and just the incredible miracle of creation." "Our lives changed dramatically after Monet and Chloe." "He did a 180." "Became dedicated father, family man." "And he has so much love for me." "He's dedicated to his family." "He's just so present when he's with you, and that's what I love about him." "I feel lucky to have the family that I have, and I feel lucky to have held off as long as I did, until I was ready for it." "I got a phone call one morning from my office and they said they had a lady on the phone by the name of Phyllis." "She had some information that I'd only seen on my birth certificate." "When I heard this, I realized that this has got to be my mother." "And then I went and met her the next day." "She had 12 other kids." "I didn't feel like I was a huge hole in her life that I needed to rush right in and fill." "But we maintained a relationship." "And she, at one point, gave me some information on my biological dad." "I didn't wanna blow up his life 'cause he probably didn't know that I existed." "My curiosity finally got to me." "I got the phone call and I said, "Who's calling, please?"" "And he said, "Robert Weir."" "And, uh..." "I said, "Okay." "Doesn't mean anything to me."" "So I said, "I've been doing some research"" "and I've come up with some information" ""that might be of considerable interest to you."" "I went back to my son, Anthony, and I said," ""Should I know somebody named Bob Weir?"" "He says, "I don't know."" "The only one I know plays guitar for the Grateful Dead."" "Then I asked him, "Did you know and were you, perhaps, romantically involved with a young lady by the name of Phyllis?"" "And there was a fairly long pause." "Actually, I think the blood left my head about that time." "And I said, "Well, sir, I don't know how many kids you have", but there is a fairly strong likelihood that you have one more than you know."" "And he said, "You're my father."" "I mean, I was stunned." "We chatted for a while and then we met the next day." "We sat for about two hours together and talked." "At first, we were just sort of sniffing around, but after a little bit, we got to like each other." "We didn't have to." "There was no onus." "But we did." "I went away very proud to be his dad." "We grew very close." "He's my confidant, he's my brother, and now he's my dad." "Natascha's become a good friend of mine and my wife's, and I'm very fond of the whole family." "We're very close." "He had an empty space inside him after Jerry died, and his dad came along." "Jack was the perfect guy to fill it." "Bobby has a great relationship with his dad and I feel like they have done so much living together and spending time together that, you know, they're really catching up on a lot." "I had a pretty complete existence." "Um, but it..." "My existence got added on to, substantially, I'll say that." "♪ There were days ♪" "♪ There were days ♪" "♪ There were days between ♪" "Jerry is an incredible legend, but Bob is as much of a legend and he's still alive." "♪ Polished like a golden bowl ♪" "♪ The brightest ever seen ♪" "Bob knows music is a passageway to some greater part of the universe." "Why else would someone play 6,000 gigs in their life and keep going?" "♪ Hearts of summer held in trust ♪" "♪ Still tender, young and green ♪" "♪ Left on shelves collecting dust ♪" "♪ Not knowing what they mean ♪" "♪ Valentines of flesh and blood ♪" "♪ Soft as velveteen ♪" "♪ Hoping love would not forsake ♪" "♪ The days that lie between ♪" "♪ Lie between ♪" "I haven't put a lot of thought into my legacy." "I'm not proud of anything." "If I'm proud of something," "I have to take a good look at myself for being proud." "I don't trust pride." "But when you realize that we are all one, you can be proud of being part of that gigantic entity that we all are." "Life has endless depth to it, endless resonances and reverberances throughout time and space." "And making sense of all that is something that I'm just sort of taking my time doing." "My life has been kind of instructing me to look for the timeless." "That's what I'm chasing." "♪ Spanish lady, come to me She lays on me this rose ♪" "♪ Your rainbow spiraling round and round ♪" "♪ It trembles then explodes ♪" "♪ You left a smoking crater of my mind I like to blow it away ♪" "♪ Well, the heat come round and busted me For smiling' on a cloudy day ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around y'all, now ♪" "♪ Comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ They're comin' ♪" "♪ Comin' around y'all, now ♪" "♪ Comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Escapin' through the lily fields I came across an empty space ♪" "♪ It rainbowed then exploded Left a bus stop in its place ♪" "♪ Bus come by and I got on That's when it all began ♪" "♪ There was cowboy Neal at the wheel Of a bus to never-ever land ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around y'all, now ♪" "♪ Comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin', comin', comin' around ♪ ♪ They're comin', comin' around ♪" "♪ Comin' around y'all, now ♪" "♪ Comin' around ♪ ♪ Comin' around ♪" "Well, okay, thank you all."