Bob Weir chasing his bliss with the Grateful Dead
You could probably get a good sense of what made the Grateful Dead the marching band for several generations by talking to any number of surviving band members or others closely associated with the extended Dead family. But when you talk to Bob Weir, you inevitably tap into what made American youth see a way out, or maybe a way in, through the richly textured music of a band that started out a half century ago, when the whole world was young and Bob Weir was younger than any of them.
“The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir,” available for streaming Friday on Netflix, is both the story of an adopted 16-year-old kid from white-bread Palo Alto, Calif., who went away to join a rock band, and the story of a generation. It becomes available as Deadheads around the world prepare for the band’s final concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago this summer.
“I led a kind of unusual life,” says the subject of the 83-minute film by Mike Fleiss. It’s an understatement, of course. The impossibly handsome kid who formed a lifelong bond with guitarist Jerry Garcia played more than 3000 shows with the Dead and another 3000 on his own or with other groups.
Weir’s sister Wendy says that in contrast to the rest of the family, Weir was the opposite of quiet. He’d been kicked out of pre-school for dropping a hammer on a kid’s head. Later, he’d drop out of high school because he was already smitten with music.
He grew up listening to Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison.He heard of a banjo player making a name for himself around town and made a point of looking him up on Dec. 31, 1963. Jerry Garcia was teaching music at the Dana Morgan Music Store. He didn’t know it was New Year’s Eve and was waiting alone for his students to show up when Weir and a friend found him. He ended up playing with Garcia that night and for many more to come. Until his death in 1995, Garcia was Weir’s closest friend.
Weir met Phil Lesh around that time when they got high on pot scored from Neal Cassady. The first song Weir ever wrote, “The Other One,” was written for Cassady, who taught the kid to drive.
“There was Cowboy Neal/ At the wheel/ of a bus to never-ever land,” the lyric goes, inspired by Weir’s time with Ken Kesey’s Pranksters on the Furthur bus.
Cowboy Neal, who somehow had the ability to drive 55 miles an hour through the thickest rush hour traffic in San Francisco, died the night Weir finished the song.
Garcia, Weir, Lesh and the others formed a band and used to play open mike nights at a place called the Tangent.
“We were a jug band and not that long after, we were a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Weir says.
In the early years, the band got some gigs playing for strippers in San Francisco’s North Beach, but they weren’t very popular with the dancers, Weir says. The strippers were used to dancing and disrobing for about five minutes at a time. The band, of course, would launch into labyrinthine musical journeys that would stretch on for 15 minutes. The strippers couldn’t keep up.
It was at this point in the band’s evolution, Weir says, that the Grateful Dead was born.
Weir dropped LSD for the first time on Garcia’s birthday, Aug. 1, 1965. Over the years, drugs have played a role in the band’s history. LSD was a significant synthesizing agent in the evolution of the band’s music, but drugs in general played a more complex role in the Dead’s history than may be generally perceived. Weir says he took LSD every Saturday for about a year and that the drug had much to do with how the band learned “to extend and improvise” its music.
“You could see through other people’s eyes,” he says. “You could hear through other people’s ears.”
In the late ’80’s, as the band reached new levels of popularity, its fans took the drug thing to new levels as well. Crowd control became an issue at Dead concerts and there were even deaths from overdoses.
For Weir, that represents a misunderstanding of what the Dead were and are all about.
“Getting wasted became the norm” for some fans, but “real Deadheads weren’t that way.” For them, it was and is about the music.
“Following bliss” is a phrase you’ll hear repeatedly in “The Other One.” You could say that Bob Weir has found his bliss, but as he’s gotten older, the object of his search as a man and an artist has inevitably evolved.
“Look for the timeless,” he says. “That’s what I’m chasing.”