Moe:
I know you always talk about music “scenes…” Let’s talk about music itself..
Bobby:
Music what?
Moe:
Music itself as a subject.
Bobby:
Uh huh!
Moe:
More importantly than a band… Of course you were in The Grateful Dead… You helped to form music itself.
Bobby:
(Smiles) Yeah, so I’m told!
Moe:
(Laughs)
Bobby:
You know, I’m told that The Grateful Dead were the “Godfathers of the Jam Band Scene,” though I don’t see it that way. You know, I think what we do goes back at least to Buddy Boland, the legendary New Orleans trumpet player back around the turn of the last century. I think that basically jam music in Western culture comes from at least that far back. We… The Grateful Dead managed to bring rock and roll, or what they call rock and roll sort of in that direction. That may have been our crowning achievement, perhaps. And in that regard, I guess we have contributed a bit. I think that people have found inspiration in what we did and I think you can hear at Bonnaroo a lot of bands who, like I said, found inspiration in what we did and are sort of carrying that torch.
Moe:
Absolutely.
Bobby:
So… you know, I think that’s good ’cause the more adventure there is in music, the more I think the rewards are.
Moe:
So it started back in the late 20’s and 30’s with Jazz… With Louis Armstrong or earlier than that…
Bobby:
Yeah… Louis Armstrong… Those guys. You know, particularly Louis Armstrong.
Moe:
Right… So you think it really progressed when The Beatles brought electric to the scene… They made it mainstream, do you think?
Bobby:
The Beatles were more mainstream. Their arrangements were tight, but there wasn’t a lot of room for improvisation in what they did. They were awfully good at what they did, but I wouldn’t have called them a “jam band” by any means or a jazz band or anything like that.
“You know, I think what we do goes back at least to Buddy Boland, the legendary New Orleans trumpet player back around the turn of the last century.”
Bob Weir
Moe:
Duke Ellington mentioned about jazz having no rules… no form… it can be held down to no laws. How do you feel that it applies to your music?
Bobby:
Well, you know, it’s 100 percent applicable to what we do, though that’s an awfully high standard to set.
Moe:
Of course.
Bobby:
No rules… no form… It’s almost impossible to live up to that on a “good night,” and we have “good nights” pretty regularly in my band these days! We go to places where we’re really starting from go. We don’t even know what tempo we’re going to start with. Tempo is a rule. A key is a rule. A tonality is a rule. Then a melody is another rule. Rhythm is another rule… And all that kind of stuff… And to make music that people can actually enjoy listening to, you have to conform to a lot of those rules.
Moe:
Right.
Bobby:
Though like I say, on some evenings, we can throw all that stuff out the window and be really free, and still make music that people can get into. We’re trying to do that nightly.
Moe:
You have a setlist of almost 200 songs, correct? Or is it more than that?
Bobby:
Something like that.
Moe:
How decide how to go from song to song? Are moving more to setlists now, or are you still doing improvisation? What is your approach these days?
Bobby:
I usually do a setlist for this band. It’s real hard… We like to keep playing. We like to keep a meter going. See, if we start a show at 100 beats per minute. We like to keep that meter going for a while and change up the rhythms… Change up the keys… Change up the songs. Given that, it’s real helpful to, you know, to consult a list of the songs that we do that are in that meter, and pick from there. I’m working on making a software program that will allow me to do that on the fly.
“Though like I say, on some evenings, we can throw all that stuff out the window and be really free, and still make music that people can get into.”
Bob Weir
Moe:
Oh, very nice!
Bobby:
But for the time being, I still write a setlist. And when I do that… I have a database of all the setlists that we’ve done for the past decade or so, and I’ll go back and look at… If we’re playing in Memphis, I’ll go back and look at the last two or three times that we’ve played Memphis, and all those songs that we did are automatically out. And then I’ll look at the last week or two that we’ve been playing on this tour, and all those songs are automatically out. And then I start from there.
Moe:
Even when you were with The Grateful Dead or Ratdog, you still have a different show every night, don’t you? Do you keep switching? People follow you around from city to city..
Bobby:
Yep.
Moe:
And they’re getting a unique experience almost every single time, unless… I mean, of course, you can duplicate it every once in a while, it happens, but…
Bobby:
You know, we’ll play a given tune two or three times on a tour, and that’s about as often as we’ll play it. We have enough tunes so that we can keep the rotation going, and that way… You know, when a tune comes up in a show, you know that it’s gonna be your last crack at it for a while, so you’re gonna put a little more of yourself into it. Besides that, you haven’t played it for a while, so maybe you’ll have some new insights into how to interpret it.
Moe:
It keeps changing? Does it keep evolving?
Bobby:
Yeah. So you know, every show’s going to be different. I really doubt that there’s ever been a show that’s even been coincidentally the same as one that we did two or three or eight years ago.
“If we’re playing in Memphis, I’ll go back and look at the last two or three times that we’ve played Memphis, and all those songs that we did are automatically out.”
Bob Weir
