
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, November 18, 1995                   TAG: 9511200075
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOHN ROGERS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BOB WEIR PONDERS FUTURE OF GRATEFUL DEAD

Bob Weir recalls it as though it were yesterday, how he and Jerry Garcia crossed paths and, in the time it took to knock on a door, began a musical odyssey that would take two eerily aligned words, Grateful Dead, and turn them into a household name.

``It was New Year's Eve of 1964,'' Weir says, his voice warming to the memory. ``He was waiting for his students to show up and I walked by the back alley behind this music store he was teaching in.

``I apprised him that it being New Year's Eve, his students probably weren't going to show up,'' Weir recalls, chuckling. ``We waited awhile and they didn't, so we broke into the front of the store where they kept the instruments and we jammed all night long.

``Within a week we had thrown together a jug band,'' Weir continued. ``About a year later that turned into a rock 'n' roll band.''

The band soon changed its name from the Warlocks. Thirty years slipped by and the Grateful Dead became an institution.

To the public it has been an institution in flux since Garcia died of a heart attack on Aug. 9 at age 53.

Although Garcia sometimes had talked of the band surviving him, that seemed unlikely amid the shock that followed his death. Now, Weir says, it might be so.

``I more or less expect that everybody's going to want to get together and play again,'' he said during a recent phone conversation from the San Francisco Bay area. ``I'd be really surprised if we didn't come up with something by next summer.''

The first step, he said, is figuring out just how the band can go back on the road without the man who was one of its two lead singers, its lead guitarist and one of its principal songwriters.

``There have been all kinds of suggestions, but I don't want to wade into any of that,'' Weir answers.

In the meantime, band members are pursuing various individual projects they had planned months in advance.

``But we'll have some time in the next couple of months, and we'll just chase it around then and see what happens,'' Weir said.

For Weir, the solo projects had been piling up for some time, among them his new side band, ``Ratdog,'' and its expanded version, ``Ratdog Revue,'' featuring bassist Rob Wasserman, Grateful Dead keyboard player Vince Welnick and others.

Meanwhile, two Grateful Dead recording projects wrapped up in the weeks before Garcia's death also have just been released. The first, ``Hundred Year Hall,'' is a two-CD recording that captures the band on a particularly good night during its 1972 tour of Europe.

``We were really cooking then,'' says Weir. ``I don't like to listen to it that much because it's us and I've heard it, but yeah, it was a good night.''

The other is ``The Music Never Stopped,'' a collection of folk, blues, bluegrass and early rock by artists Weir and Garcia grew up listening to.

Garcia had grown up in the Bay Area listening to everything from early rock 'n' roll to pop standards to the Grand Ole Opry.

As for Weir: ``I used to listen to Lightnin' Hopkins, the Rev. Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, all the seminal blues players,'' he said. ``Also the Everly Brothers and a little bit of Elvis, although I was never a huge Elvis fan. Of course Chuck Berry and the Beatles were a monster influence on me. And I also listened to a fair bit of country music ... a lot of George Jones, for instance.''

With such a varied background, it was never unusual to hear the Grateful Dead, amid its original material and its spacey musical jams, break into an old Merle Haggard or Marty Robbins cowboy song, a Chuck Berry rocker, a Howlin' Wolf blues screamer.

Which got a couple of the Grateful Dead's friends to thinking: Wasn't it time more of the people the Grateful Dead had influenced heard from the people who had influenced them? In compiling ``The Music Never Stopped,'' five CDs worth of material was narrowed down to one collection of works by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Haggard, Davis and others.

Looking back over 30-plus years of friendship, Weir recalls a mercurial Garcia.

``He was an incredibly talented person, and he was getting even more so as he got older,'' he says. ``But it was always day to day with him, his mood would always change.''

In those last days, Weir added, Garcia was indeed the picture of that big, enthusiastic kid the public so often saw.

``I think it's important to realize that he died smiling,'' he said. ``He was on an upswing when it happened.''

by CNB