Nevertheless he was convinced enough to pick up his bass and hit the road. (He introduced Weir and Mayer, leading to the latest and biggest post-Dead iteration, Dead & Company.) He also happens to be the president of Blue Note Records. At 66, Was, one of the great musical Zeligs of the past three decades, is not an unbusy man, having produced for everybody from Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones to Ziggy Marley and John Mayer. Afraid he would lose his nerve, he called Was immediately to pitch the idea. Wolf Bros arrived that way: “I dreamed that Don was playing upright and that Jay was playing drums and we were called Wolf Bros.” Not a lot of interpretive heavy lifting required there. Leni Sinclair / Getty Imagesĭreams figure in a lot of Weir's stories. The Grateful Dead-including Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir (age 19)-perform in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in August 1967.

I'm just the guy to bring it back.’ ” It is possible that Weir's tongue is in his cheek, but it is hard to tell. I said to myself, ‘That's a look that's fallen from favor for the past 150 years or so. Sometime later, he saw a photo of an ancestor. Add in bushy eyebrows and a luminous crown of white hair and other metaphors suggest themselves: Lorax, gold-mad Western sidekick, holy guru, homemade Albert Einstein costume… Weir prefers “Civil War cavalry colonel” to describe what he saw in the mirror one morning after not shaving for a few weeks on tour. Cross-legged and barefoot, he looks top-of-the-mountain wise, largely on account of the profusion of whiskers that has taken over his face, from neck to cheekbone, like rosebushes gone wild on the side of an abandoned house. Weir sits in one of the bus's leather armchairs, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and an Apple Watch with two silver skull-and-crossbones studs on the black band.

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