Albany Times Union
November 1, 2007
by Greg Haymes
Bob Weir had just turned 17 when he first began playing music with Jerry Garcia in a loose, funky ensemble called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, which, of course, eventually morphed into the Grateful Dead.
Garcia died a dozen years ago, but Weir is still out on the road, plugging away with his band Ratdog, who steps into the spotlight Saturday evening at the Palace Theatre.
Weir -- who celebrated his 60th birthday last month -- admits he certainly never thought he'd still be at it this late in life.
"No, I don't think anyone does, but here I am," he says. "It's come to pass."
Weir says, though, that the years on the road have taught him what to do -- and what not to do. "You sort of try to keep an even keel, because you've learned what you can and can't get away with out there. At the same time, it takes a little longer to chew through the straps and get up in the morning."
This year, Ratdog faced one of the biggest challenges of its 12-year career, as guitarist Mark Karan announced in June he was taking a hiatus after being diagnosed with throat cancer.
Weir is upbeat regarding Karan's eventual return to the Ratdog fold, however. "Mark is responding to treatment way better than anyone anticipated. That isn't to say that it isn't whacking him a bit, but it seems to be working. And that's certainly encouraging," says Weir.
"He won't be out with us on any of the fall tour dates. That's out of the question. But it's looking fairly positive right now that he may come out with us in the spring."
In the meantime, Weir and the rest of Ratdog powered forward for their summer tour with a new recruit in the guitar chair.
"Fortunately, we're joined by Steve Kimock, who's the greatest thing since canned beer, so we could have fared way worse."
And Kimock is also doing Ratdog's fall tour.
"We've been rehearsing during this break, too," says Weir, "adding some more songs to our catalog for the fall tour."
Ratdog has released only one studio album, 2000's "Evening Moods," but Weir says that may change soon. How the album might be distributed is the big question Weir faces.
"We've been building our own recording studio, and it's almost completed now. But we're going to have to put some thought into what we're going to do with a new album, though.
Weir says he is anxious to see how Radiohead's recent digital release of its latest album, "In Rainbows," goes without the involvement of a record company.
"We're at ground zero of the file-sharing demographic, but Radiohead is in the second or third ring themselves, and I really want to see what becomes of that. They may have come up with a new paradigm.
"People really do have to learn to honor what they love -- and support it," Weir insists. "File-sharing has already taken a huge toll on music. If you like music but you won't support it, it's going to go away. There are clubs closing right and left because there aren't musicians to play them. And that's because people aren't going into music as a career because you can't make a living there these days."
It might seem to some fans that the Grateful Dead's taping policy -- allowing fans to freely record their concerts and trade them -- was the start of a kind of homegrown file-sharing, but Weir doesn't see it that way.
"Tape is totally different from digital, though. First of all, there's the quality, which degenerates from copy to copy with tape. And that's not the case with digital recording, in which every copy is just as high a quality as the original.
"Secondly, most tape trading was done hand-to-hand, and the people who were trading knew each other by name, they knew the color of their eyes, the sound of their voice and all that kind of stuff. They had relationships, and the tape-trading phenomenon fostered community.
"File-sharing is completely impersonal."