As you went out and toured with this material, I’m curious if any of these songs revealed themselves to you in new ways in the live setting?
Yes there were a few of them. “Only A River” took on a new aspect when we started playing it live. I can’t really describe it very well but it showed itself in a new light once I started playing it—a few of them did. “Gallop on the Run,” to my surprise, became a something of a lovesick ballad, a heartbroken lovesick ballad that I wasn’t expecting. Those two got different on the road. Then musically some of them also expanded as well.
Do you anticipate that you’ll do additional shows with the live unit that you toured with in October? Or that perhaps you’ll head into the studio with those particular players?
It was fun and we were just starting to get good toward the end of tour, predictably enough. We were having too much fun to just walk away from it so we’ll get back to that in a little bit. We’ll have some live shows coming up early-ish next year.
Did going out with those players lead you down the path to writing more songs in that vein?
I’ve been kicking stuff around since I got back but I don’t know exactly where it’s going yet.
The cattle ranch that inspired much of the material on Blue Mountain was owned by the family of John Perry Barlow [who would go on to become Weir’s songwriting collaborator and later co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation]. Last month you performed a benefit for him at Sweetwater [to help defray medical costs from a series of recent ailments].
It was a great show. Unfortunately we couldn’t do all that many of the tunes that I wrote with him because they tend to be real complicated and require a fair bit of study and rehearsal and all that kind of stuff. My hope, which proved to be kind of unreasonable, was that we could do an evening of Barlow’s tunes but then I backed off. I looked at the tunes and that’s a matter of breaking out charts and a few days in rehearsal to get that to happen and none of the folks who were coming to play had that to give so we did the best we could. There were a number of Barlow tunes and fortunately the guys from Dark Star [Orchestra] knew some of the complicated ones, so we got quite a few Barlow tunes in there which was good.
What was his reaction to the evening?
Well of course he wishes he could’ve been there but that would’ve been a bad idea. He needs to rest, he needs to recuperate. He’s on the upswing but he’s got a long row to hoe.
I just saw a picture of you rehearsing for the Los Muertos con Queso event at the end of January. Can you talk a little bit about what that process was like? I think some people might be surprised that it’s over two months out and you’re already working on it.
We thought we’d get a jump on it. Tommy Hamilton was in town here and he’s part of the band. Dave Schools, lives a bit north of here but not far and Jeff [Chimenti] is in the San Francisco area so we’re all fairly local and with Tommy in town we took it as an opportunity to get in some rehearsal. We got a couple days in and had a lot of fun.
Did you have an idea of what you wanted it to be going into that?
We know a bit about what folks are going to want to hear but we don’t know until we all get together and start kicking stuff around what the band is going to be really good at. We know that folks are going to want to hear some chestnuts, so we worked up a bunch of chestnuts. We did a lot of choral vocal rehearsals, so that we have a good vocal blend and everybody knows the parts—the vocal parts are fairly complicated in many cases. We figured we ought to get a jump on that so we have plenty of that to offer and then as far as straight up playing is concerned we’ll just see where that takes us. Everybody’s a good player.
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