Bob Weir and RatDog | RatDog.Org

For a time after Ratdog became a full-fledged band around 1994, guitarist-singer Bob Weir worried that the group was becoming known as a Grateful Dead cover band.

Certainly, Ratdog had every right to claim a piece of the Grateful Dead legacy. After all, Weir had been an integral member of the band from its inception in 1965 until the 1995 death of bandleader Jerry Garcia ended the group's long strange trip.

"We started doing (Grateful Dead tunes) with Ratdog before the Other Ones, now the Dead, got together," Weir said, noting that the Other Ones (the group that features the surviving members of the Grateful Dead --now renamed the Dead) didn't form until 1998. "I started doing (Dead material) because I missed doing the tunes. By the time the Other Ones reformed, Ratdog had worked up their own individual renditions of the tunes, so even if I'm doing them with both bands, we're doing them differently enough that I'm getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing them both ways.

"That said, it's not helping us dispel the notion that Ratdog is a Dead cover band."

Even so, Weir and his bandmates -- keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, guitarist Mark Karan, drummer Jay Lane, sax player Kenny Brooks and bassist Robin Sylvester -- have done a lot over the past three years to establish Ratdog's own entity.

A big step in that direction was taken in 2000 when the group released its debut CD, "Evening Moods."

With the exception of one Grateful Dead cover (a reworked rendition of the Weir-Robert Hunter composition "Corrina"), "Evening Moods" was made up of songs written entirely by the members of Ratdog (with an occasional assist from producer Mike McGinn and Weir's frequent lyrical collaborator Andre Pessis).

"Evening Moods" showed that Ratdog had a distinctly different groove from the Grateful Dead.

Now Weir is setting his sights on further solidifying Ratdog's own identity by introducing into the live show several new songs targeted for the band's next CD.

Weir has a pretty clear idea for how Ratdog might approach the recording of the next CD. Where "Evening Moods" was a traditional studio project, he intends to take a novel approach to the next CD.

"I think our next quote studio album ... at least what we call the basic tracks, will probably be recorded live (in concert)," Weir revealed.

To Weir, there's a logic of doing this sort of hybrid live-studio CD.

"On stage we sort of get a head of steam going that is just hard to duplicate in the studio," he said. "Then when it comes to layering or sweetening or whatever we want to do we can take it into the studio.

"I think we'll probably come up with a pretty good record that way."