Rocky Mountain News
March 15, 2004
by Mark Brown
This is how quickly music comes together for Ratdog leader/Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir.
A compilation of his work, Weir Here, arrives in stores on March 23. The final song is an unreleased version of Bob Dylan's Masters of War, with Weir's seething vocal playing off Jeff Chimenti's swirling keyboards.
"It was about this time last year. America had just invaded Iraq and I was kinda pissed about the whole deal. Ratdog was in rehearsal, about to go on the road. The night before, I was drifting off to sleep and that song came back to me. The next day I taught it to them, and we put it down," Weir says.
End of story. It's the last song on the second disc of his career retrospective that also includes unreleased live cuts from the Grateful Dead, as well as milestones of his career. (Ratdog is at the Boulder Theater tonight and Tuesday).
"The compilation came as something of a surprise to me. One of the guys in my management came up with the idea and was kinda down the road with it before word ever got to me," Weir says by phone from the back of a tour bus in Seattle. "I was kinda taken aback."
He quickly warmed to the idea, however, seeing it as an opportunity to do a career summary and rescue some tunes from oblivion.
"You have to put on some of the obvious, real popular tunes," he says. "But any artist is going to have his own favorites - tunes he doesn't think got the attention they deserved . . . We came up with a meaningful compromise."
Compromise is something Weir usually doesn't have to do. One of his biggest challenges, he says, was waiting for technology to catch up with the things he has wanted to do.
And that time has finally come, as far as live recordings go. Two major projects are in the works to release more of Ratdog's music, as well as that of the Grateful Dead.
While lots of artists and venues have kicked around the idea of having CDs of the show ready to sell by the time the audience leaves, Weir has put the effort into actually getting it done. At every Ratdog show, fans can buy a copy of what they just heard as they leave.
"Within a few minutes of the closing chord of the show, the last disc of the package is finished off," he says. "We've got machines that'll burn discs that fast now. It's a simple matter that the technology has finally arrived."
Many bands, including the Who and the Dead, have sold downloads or sound-board recordings by mail after the fact. Not only can you get the Ratdog discs in hand moments after the show ends, but sound quality doesn't suffer. Unlike other bands who did just straight sound-board mixes - The Who's series had the vocals mixed notoriously low - Weir has people in place to avoid problems.
"We have a little team that does that," he says. One engineer concentrates only on the mix for the CDs. He can make a perfect mix from the stage, and also can add audience ambience from a stereo microphone placed out in the crowd.
"What you get is a pretty awesome-sounding live recording," Weir says. "We're selling a lot of these. People still come in and record the show with their own equipment, and they're welcome to. But we're putting out some really good quality stuff."
The Grateful Dead is still putting its own archive out. Besides standard CD releases, the Dead is finalizing a deal with Apple's I-Tunes to make every live note they've ever recorded available for download.
"Everything, sooner or later, will end up being released on the Web," Weir says. "What we wanna do is digitize our entire catalog, our entire collection of tapes . . . and make that stuff available. I think I-Tunes is up to that."
The band has recorded all of its live shows since the late '60s, at first "just so we could listen back, see what it sounded like and make any changes.
"Or if, for instance, we were jamming and something fell together, some little plum came through the sky and landed onstage, it didn't get lost. We could go back and maybe make a song out of it," Weir says.
And compared to most music at I-Tunes, the Dead's jams are a bargain, he says with a laugh.
"At 99 cents a tune, it's a pretty decent price, because most of our tunes are pretty long."