Alpaca in chopper hat tik tok12/7/2023 After a while he didn't like that anymore, but he needed it. (Nearly everything Hart says, he says with an implied exclamation point.) “Jerry felt protective of him. “We were all kids, but he was really the Kid!” says Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. When the band that would become the Grateful Dead started providing sound accompaniment to Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, Weir's nickname was literally the Kid. Weir was 16 years old when he wandered down the right alley in Palo Alto on New Year's Eve 1963 and heard the sound of a banjo that turned out to be played by 21-year-old Jerry Garcia. If that seems like too much attention to pay to a bit of facial hair, consider: The man was youth itself! First, that blissed-out, androgynous, beautiful open face-a stand-in for all the teenage boys and girls who had run away from home and headed for the Haight. It's hard not to be struck once more by the almost vaudevillian vision of agedness into which Weir has transformed himself. Tonight the band moves into a song from Weir's 2016 album, Blue Mountain, recorded with members of the National, and “Peggy-O,” a traditional ballad oft-played by the Grateful Dead. “But maybe I'm just trying to feel less pressure.” “I try to tell myself that it's how they play, not what they play, that matters,” Busch says. On closer inspection, he's just charging his phone. Near the bathrooms, I catch the familiar sight of a guy crouched and leaning against the wall, head cradled in his hands. There seems to be one representative of each crowd subgroup I remember from Dead shows in the late 1980s: one perpetually spinning guy, one hand-dancing guy, a gaggle of baseball-cap-wearing dudes playing air guitar, another of girls tripping their faces off. Dead & Company may be filling arenas and festival crowds with fans born long after the Grateful Dead disbanded, but this audience is decidedly older. Wolf Bros plays stripped-down versions of Grateful Dead and Dead-adjacent songs. “This is the greatest thing I've ever been involved in. Backstage, before the New Orleans show, he puts it flatly: 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. On account of all the beard.ĭreams figure in a lot of Weir's stories. 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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