Charleston Press and Courier
April 10, 2008
by Keith Ryan Cartwright
By all accounts, Bob Weir is what you would consider a blue-collar working musician.
The San Francisco native is 60 and steadily has been performing live for more than 40 years. More importantly, there's no reason to think he'll stop anytime soon.
Though he's something of a road dog, Weir returns to the Lowcountry this week with RatDog, a band he originally formed more than a decade ago with one-time member Rob Wasserman. The two first collaborated back in 1995, forming what then was called Ratdog Revue shortly before Jerry Garcia's death.
Since Garcia's passing, Weir, a founding member of the Grateful Dead, also has participated in a trio of re-formations — 1998, 2000 and 2002 — of the Grateful Dead known as The Other Ones and a two-year stint called simply The Dead.
Originally called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, Weir — then only 16 — met Garcia on New Year's Eve 1963 in Palo Alto, Calif. Weir already had befriended John Perry Barlow and Robert Hunter while living for a short time in Colorado.
The band later would change its name to The Warlocks before evolving into and settling on the name Grateful Dead.
It was then that Weir secured his place in rock 'n' roll history as the Grateful Dead's co-vocalist and, as quoted in his biography by English journalist Andrew Clarke, the genre's "greatest, if most eccentric rhythm guitarist."
Eccentric may well be the key to that
description. Although he has remained a working-class musician, he also very much has shunned any sort of media exposure, choosing instead to let his career accomplishments speak for themselves. Much like Weir, the Grateful Dead was known for its eclectic soundscape, which fused an amalgamation of rock, folk, bluegrass, reggae, country, jazz, gospel and a then-newly coined genre of pyschedelia and space music with a penchant for live performances of long musical improvisation and what later would become described as a wall of sound.
As Lenny Kaye — who played guitar with Patti Smith and later became a three-time Grammy nominated journalist for "Best Album Notes" — later wrote, "Their music touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists."
Weir also has released a series of solo albums as well as other various projects, including Kingfish and Bobby and the Midnites.
That said, since 1995, Weir has, for the most part, focused the majority of his attention on RatDog. In fact, the 2001 release of "Live at the Roseland," a double-CD recorded in Portland, Ore., is a favorite among his Deadhead fans.
Known for covering everything from The Beatles and Bob Dylan to Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon along with many Grateful Dead classics, the band also performs a handful of original material.
In any case, Weir is as viable and widely regarded today, if not more so, as an iconic figure than at any other point during his musically rich and diverse career.