”I look forward to dying,” Bob Weir told Rolling Stone‘s Angie Martoccio early last year. “I tend to think of death as the last and best reward for a life well lived. That said, I’ve still got a lot on my plate and I won’t be ready to go for a while.”
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, we play clips from that interview — which turned out to be his final encounter with Rolling Stone — in the wake of Weir’s death earlier this month. The episode also includes a a guide to some of the highlights of Weir’s career, and a new interview with Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes, who toured with the post-Jerry Garcia incarnation of the Dead in 2004 and 2009. To hear the podcast episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above — some highlights from Haynes’ interview follow.
Haynes’ last real conversation with Weir was about forming an acoustic trio with Dave Matthews — a project that never came to be. “Dave Matthews and myself and Bob played at a private event at Brooklyn Bowl,” he recalls. “We wound up on stage playing together, and we had a conversation afterward about how unique that blend was, and even talked about maybe taking it on the road. We all felt that there was something unique about it and there were several conversations about trying to make room for it at some point, which never happened.”
Haynes explains the mechanics of Weir’s rhythm-guitar approach. “He wasn’t necessarily coming up with a repeating pattern that worked as one of the gears of the song. He was kind of comping moment by moment behind whatever was going on. The second verse was different than the first verse. And the third verse was different from the second verse. He was just, moment by moment, making it up as he went along.”
Haynes says he didn’t mind when Weir moved on to Dead and Company, with John Mayer taking on Jerry Garcia’s vocal and guitar duties instead of Haynes. “I never had any hard feelings about it,” says Haynes. “I never looked at it as a parting of ways. I looked at 2004 and 2009 as an opportunity for me to do something really cool with those guys. But I didn’t think of it as something that was gonna keep going into the future.” He adds that he’s a fan of Mayer’s work with the band: “I think I was skeptical in the beginning like a lot of people were, but he really poured himself into it and did a great job. I think a lot of people were just not convinced that was gonna be the case, and he proved everybody wrong.”
The Dead’s dedication to improvisation meant that rehearsals were often pointless. “I remember there would be songs when we had spent like an hour working on some background vocal part,” Haynes says. “And then the song came up in the set list, and I would look up and no one was at their microphone. Everybody was just jamming and forgot all about the rehearsal. And hey, that’s part of it too.”
When Weir joined Haynes for a symphonic Dead tribute, his guitar volume offended the orchestra. “We had added another electric guitar and another keyboard to the mix,” Haynes recalls. “So the symphony was not too happy about it. A bunch of the string players walked out at the end and refused to play because they said the volume was too loud. And of course, Bob was like, ‘Well, fuck ’em.’”
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