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In remembrance of Bob Weir (1947–2026), the guitarist, singer, and co-founder of the Grateful Dead, we are republishing this interview and lesson that originally appeared as the cover story of our August 2008 issue. Here, Weir reflects on the evolution of his singular guitar approach, his songwriting, and a lifetime on the road that helped shape the sound and spirit of rock and roots-based music.
Bob Weir, rhythm ace of the Grateful Dead and RatDog, shares the secrets of his unclassifiable rhythm guitar style.
BY JEFFREY PEPPER RODGERS
In the pantheon of rock guitar, Bob Weir may be the most mystifying and original player. He hasn’t exactly been hiding—during more than 30 years with the Grateful Dead, Weir performed thousands of marathon shows, and he’s kept rolling ever since with his own bands. And yet several generations of guitarists have watched and listened to him chime out chords for hours onstage and thought, what is he playing?
Rhythm guitarists tend to labor in the shadows, but Weir is a rare musician who discovered his own planet of chords and groove, based as much on jazz piano and classical composition as rock and blues. He joined Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, the folky precursor to the Dead, in 1963 at age 16 and essentially learned to play in the band. So, Weir’s style evolved to fit precisely the sonic slot between Jerry Garcia’s dancing lead lines, the intrepid bass lines of Phil Lesh, and the chord jabs of the Dead’s various keyboard players. In Weir’s hands, rhythm guitar is all about adapting to your band mates and finding your own space, and never about knocking out standard chords. He is the ultimate listening guitarist.
Though Garcia and Robert Hunter were the Dead’s most prolific songwriting team, Weir (often collaborating with his childhood pal John Perry Barlow) also used his unusual harmonic and rhythmic sense to contribute more than a few gems to the Dead repertoire, including “Cassidy,” “Playing in the Band,” “Estimated Prophet,” “The Music Never Stopped,” and “Feel Like a Stranger.” The recent retrospective Weir Here (Hybrid Recordings), with one studio and one live disc, provides a good overview of Weir as a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist who brought a welcome fire and focus to the Dead’s sometimes shambling sound.
In his musical life away from the Grateful Dead, Weir, now 60, has sometimes sounded like a fish out of water. But the current lineup of his band RatDog, with Mark Karan on lead guitar, has found a great groove performing not only Weir songs but Garcia/Hunter classics like “Terrapin Station” and “Uncle John’s Band.”
During RatDog’s spring tour, I met up with Weir on a day off in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Over several hours of talking and playing an Alvarez-Yairi jumbo originally built for Garcia, Weir proved himself to be a deep thinker about the guitar and the dynamics of a band.
When you look at the guitar fingerboard you seem to see something different than what everyone else sees. I’m hoping to shed some light on that point of view.
I’ve always viewed writing and playing as being a storyteller. You state a theme and then bring in subthemes or counter themes around it. You’re telling a story with your fingers as well as your voice.
When I’m thinking about a song, whether I’m writing it or performing it, I’m trying to bring to bear all the stuff that I’ve listened to and find what would be appropriate. Particularly in writing, I’m thinking about Count Basie, the voicings that he used, or Louis Armstrong—the way that he unraveled a story.
How is your playing today shaped by your early days in the California folk scene?
When I was first playing, I was doing Kingston Trio stuff, strumming without a pick. And then I heard Joan Baez, so I started to fingerpick. It took me hours and hours of just sitting and working it like a mantra, but I developed some facility so that I could play relatively freely in various keys. Then I heard Reverend Gary Davis; he played fingerstyle, but he was a lot freer on the fretboard, and he abandoned the open strings when he went up the neck.
That was where I was, playing with my fingers, when I met Jerry and we started a jug band that turned into a rock ’n’ roll band. It became apparent to me that I wasn’t going to be playing with my fingers for the rest of my life. And to facilitate bringing my fingerstyle into my new life as an electric guitarist, I learned to play with a pick, using the other fingers that I have left to play fingerstyle.
Parenthetically, a good friend of mine, Taj Mahal, has some theories about the mystical involvement between the fingers and the plucked instrument, where the skin and your nails necessarily have to touch the string to complete the circuit. And I buy it.
Did you have to unlearn your acoustic style in order to find your voice as an electric guitarist?
I didn’t have to unlearn so much as relearn. On the electric guitar you don’t have the luxury of open strings so much. If you do use them, you have to use a really light hand or they’re just going to obliterate the rest of what you’re trying to do. I struggled back and forth between using open strings on electric guitar and just trying to leave them behind.
Open strings hamstring you a little bit, because you can’t go into any of the sharp or flat keys—which is where horns live, for instance. We’ve got a horn player in our band [Kenny Brooks]. He’s gotten awful good at playing in E, A, and D, but it’s nice to give him a break and go into Bb or whatever—he has a great time in the key of F.
Every now and then I use a capo, even on the electric guitar. But usually it’s just too much hassle, and I also don’t like to be pinned down. In the style of music we play, sometimes we drift from key to key when we’re jamming. The guitar is marvelously well laid out. If you can play without open strings, you should do it. You should be good at it.
With the Dead, you seemed so free compared to most rhythm guitarists, because of how Jerry and Phil played.
I stayed away from heavy root-and-five stuff, for instance, or root-five-three, because I figured within the band that’s all going to get stated. The chords I was looking for, they may have the same notes, but it was a matter of finding the right voicing—maybe with the third on the bottom or a leading tone on
the bottom, stretching it out a little bit so
I’m playing, say, sixths, and then something on top of the sixths.
You usually stay in the middle of the fingerboard and on the middle strings.
When I’m playing with a band I try and find a register that’s not full. Let’s say I’m working up a song in the key of E [Example 1]. If I tighten it up a little bit [Example 2], it speaks differently. Or I could play [Example 3]. You just find out where it’s going to poke through. And your voicings restate the harmonic carpet, if you will, that the song is standing on. It depends in particular where the keyboard player is playing, and the other guitarist. I don’t like to instruct people to do this or do that; I like them to find where they’re happy, and then I work around that.
If you’re playing with the same guys for years, you get an intuitive sense of where they’re headed in any given situation, and they get an intuitive sense of where you’re headed. And we try to be there with a little surprise for each other. So I might have a Chinese note here or there—he’s going to bounce off of that. Or he might be there with a Chinese note, and that’ll set me off.
What do you mean by a Chinese note?
You know, a flat or sharp—it just colors the scale a little bit. Our sax player, who’s got the most facility with that kind of stuff, will just go crazy on that, and he can also introduce that Chinese note.
Say you establish a pattern over eight bars [Example 4]. There’s the Chinese note [C on the fourth string, tenth fret]. You sweeten it up at the end, and then go back. The first time you introduce the Chinese note, there may be a little clash, but the next time everybody in the band is going to jump on that. Of course, in my bands everyone’s listening for that kind of stuff. It’s a fun approach to music, because everyone works on entertaining each other. Yes, we’re trying to entertain the gentle listener out there, but really the way to do that, most aptly for us, is to entertain each other, surprise each other, excite each other, and that comes across to the audience better than any other approach I can imagine.
Even when you play a simple, rootsy chord progression—a song like “Bertha”—you seem to minimize your part and move up the neck.
If I’m playing “Bertha,” I could play it like this [Example 5]. But if I can get the other guys to fill in, it’s going to be more powerful because it’ll be stratified. I’ll have maybe the piano player’s left hand doing this [Example 6], I’m up here [Example 7], and then somebody else will probably be up here [Example 8]. When we’re working up the tune, we’ll just stay in that vamp for a while until everyone gets the hang of it.
You often play these really wide voicings, with a bell sound.
If you’re going to play an electric guitar with any distortion whatsoever, you want to use as spare a voicing as you can to get the harmonic content of the chord out. This is a great voicing—let’s do it in E [Example 9]. And then go up to A—there’s always a seventh you can grab [Example 10]. That’s voiced on top of the seventh, the G, and you can hear all kinds of harmonic interaction. There’s a little pulse. For that to come out, I can’t use a bunch of other notes. Three voices in a chord will be enough; if I try to put in more it obscures the chord.
When you’re writing a song, do you find chord changes by hearing them and then figuring them out on guitar or by exploring with your fingers?
It’s a little of both. There’s a great deal of intuition involved. Sometimes I just imagine what it is I want to hear, and sometimes I’ll let my fingers do the walking. I wrote the tune “Shade of Grey” on the acoustic guitar and then moved it to the electric guitar pretty much note for note. I’m walking one voice, maybe two at a time, trying to mirror the descending motion [Example 11]. I’m listening to each individual voice in the chord, and each one is telling its own little story.
Most of your songs are co-written. What have you sought in collaborators?
It can go several ways. As a lyricist, I can generally get the job done, but I’m glacially slow. So I like to work with people who have a little more facility with that—you know, John Barlow, Gerrit Graham, Robert Hunter. Or I may have a general notion of the color of the rhythm and the harmonic or melodic development, and I’ll sit with a guy and we’ll just fire blank verse at each other until we start to corner that color—often the song will fall right out of the sky. Other times, I may have no notion of where the song wants to go, in which case I’ll let whoever I’m working with surprise me.
“The Music Never Stopped” is a song that [Barlow and I] wrote over the telephone. I played this [Example 12] over the phone to John, and he just started spitting stuff at me. The first line came out, “There’s mosquitoes on the river / Fish are rising up like birds.” He was living in Wyoming at the time on a ranch, and he started describing a situation that I’d seen with him, where it was late summer in a dry year and things were hot and kind of dull and dead.
So where are we going to take this? First I thought the verse is going to have to be twice as long as I originally figured, because if you’re starting with an image that thick, you have to get into some detail about it. “It’s been hot for seven weeks now / Too hot to even speak now / Did you hear what I just heard?” That last line came after some deliberation. It’s a pregnant line, sort of like a leading tone in a harmonic development.
Rather than move to a B section, I figured, “OK, let’s develop this a bit more.” To do that, I’m going to have to break out of the [original guitar pattern]. Let me see if I can do that some other way [Example 13]. Then after a little thought I decided, OK, I want to start with that [Example 13] and then skinny up my statement [to Example 12] as the lyrical image gets a little stronger, a little tighter.
Then it’s time for a B section. You can go anywhere, but the IV chord is a great place [Example 14]. I did that with fuller chords at the time, but they wouldn’t make it in the traffic mess that a band can get to be.
Is that process of finding the chords the same as finding the words?
The success of the endeavor, if you’re working with a lyricist, depends on how closely the lyric marries the music. With Barlow or Gerrit Graham, there’s a lot of back and forth. I get to be the decider, because the words are going to come from my lips. So I have to be able to tell the story. I have to be that character, because my job is to get the hell out of the way and let the character tell the story, musically and lyrically. When I’m standing in front of the microphone, I may look like me, but I’m not. If the character arrives with a really defined face and features, it’s easy for me to do my job.
With the Dead, did you push yourself as a songwriter to supply something different than what Jerry was writing?
When I started writing, I was 18 or so. Jerry was writing a bunch, and he was pretty accomplished by the time I got started. So I figured, OK, I’ll try to complement his style. I never took a song he had written with Hunter and targeted that as something to provide a counter theme to—nothing that formal. I was just trying to write songs that the guys would have fun playing. I found out later that you get paid for it, so that was great.
In concert, you and Jerry alternated songs. In RatDog you’re doing the same thing, but singing Jerry’s songs yourself.
I don’t want to do too many of my songs in a row or too many of Jerry’s songs in a row because you fall into a rut. We used to trade the lead on a song just to spare our throats, which is a luxury I don’t have these days. My throat takes kind of a beating, but I’ve learned to work with it. When I was working with Jerry, I had all the song that Jerry was singing to figure out what I would sing next. I’ve got 40, 50, 60 songs I could be drawing from, that the band’s got worked up. What would follow nicely what Jerry is doing? Should it be up-tempo or down, should it be a bright story or a dark story?
What does it feel like to sing Jerry’s songs?
I love singing and playing them mostly because they’re great songs. I also feel something of a duty to keep them alive and growing. I was there when they were born, watched them grow, and had a hand in their development. I think I know where they live. Every time we play one, it grows, evolves a bit—shows us a new facet. Needless to say, that can be pretty rewarding.
The music we played was of an intimacy that perhaps can only occur in a long, heavily improvisational relationship. We learned to intuit where each was headed, and then tried to be there with some kind of meaningful counterpoint. That required a lot of careful listening and feeling. After Jerry checked out, he didn’t exactly leave: when I’m playing, I can still feel him—“Nah, nah, don’t go there . . . yeah, there, go there.” I can still hear the harmonics of what he’s up to and react as I always would. I can still feel his sense of character development as the song tells its story. Maybe I should be telling someone this in a quiet room while lying on a couch, but it’s real for me.
Breathing in Odd Time Signatures
In his songwriting, Bob Weir loves to bust out of 4/4 time and play with uncommon and often longer metrical patterns. “Lazy Lightnin’” and “Estimated Prophet,” for instance, are in 7, and “Playing in the Band” is in 10. Weir got into this years ago by practicing with a box called a trinome that could play two rhythms overlaid with each other: for instance, 4 against 7. “As soon as you learn to breathe in 7, then you’ve got the best of 3 and the best of 4 at your disposal,” he says. “You can state mini themes that will exist in 3 or exist in 4, and you can play stuff that comes around on the 1 in the most unlikely of ways. It doesn’t take that much work. What you don’t want to do when you’re playing in 7/4 is to wrap up things neatly in 7. You’ve got to state things in at least 14-beat patterns.”
