Maine Today
August 7, 2008
by Ray Routhier
As a member of the Grateful Dead, the rock band most synonymous with the idea of bootlegged concert recordings, you'd figure Bob Weir would be all for folks sharing free music with each other.
Sort of.
"I have some ambivalence there. I love to get the music out and around, but the future of music depends on musicians getting paid for what they do full-time," said Weir, 60, who will perform with his current band, RatDog, this weekend at the Up North Music and Art Festival in Hiram.
"If musicians don't get paid, they'll have to work at a grocery store, and all the trust-fund kids who can afford to make music will be the ones doing it."
And for the record, Weir said he and other Dead members never encouraged fans to tape concerts and share the tapes with the world. But they never tried to stop it, either.
"When we became aware of the phenomenon, our lawyers said we should put a stop to it, but we didn't want to be cops, we didn't want to be that hard-nosed about it," Weir said from his home near San Francisco.
"But it was different then. People were sharing the music on cassette tapes, and after it was copied a few times it became unlistenable. Today, it's a lot easier for people to share music (on the Internet.)
Weir says he doesn't actively campaign against music sharing, but he does try to control his band's music a little. For one thing, he makes studio albums infrequently. But his band normally records its concerts, then sells the CDs to fans. Weir is "pretty sure" that will happen when RatDog plays Hiram Sunday night.
The festival includes more than two dozen bands, including Soulive, the Wailers, Umphrey's McGee, Assembly of Dust, the Trainwreks, American Babies, the Ryan Montbleau Band and Lettuce.
Weir greatly prefers playing live to spending time in a recording studio. The guitarist says he's "never been that great" in a studio anyway. And interacting with an audience is what keeps him going after more than 40 years of performing.
"I don't do well with no audience," he said. "When you light up that crowd, that lights you up."