Mazel Tov Bobby!

From MIJ-
Dead's Weir wins Mill Valley art award
Staff Report

The Grateful Dead's Bob Weir has been named one of the five recipients of this year's Milley Awards from the City of Mill Valley Art Commission.
....................................................
Nice show photos here!
and also Here!
Review off of Deadnet-
Debess - 07:52am Sep 3, 2005 PDT (#91 of 94)
walk into splintered sunlight

last night's show totally hit the spot for me.. loved it

the show was bookmarked with a couple of really specials - Jack Straw with Hornsby and Bobby trading verses.. nice! , and the closing Ripple with 5 part harmony.. 5Xnice!!

for Jack Straw, with binoculars, I could position so that Hornsby was on one end, Weir at the other, Kenny unfocused in the middle - great perspective on the song! - the 2 singers were having a BLAST singing this together. COuld see it in their faces.

Dark Star seemed Light rather than Dark, meaning the feelings invoked

Lazy River Road was the highlight for me - I tend to work through feelings and bring events with me in my mind to shows - whether it was meant or not by the musicians, from this point on I was thinking about New Orleans. Lazy River Road was done like a New Orleans funeral, starting off with the sad slow plodding down the street with the casket evolving into the raise the umbrellas up and down and spin around in delight joyful heaven-bound spirit feeling. All the solos done in the first part felt dirge-like in their approach - not saying that in a bad way at all - emotion-filled and inspired they were - starting off with Jeff's, then Kenny's then Mark's, Bobby's - all filled with deep feeling - then the tempo picked up and carried me upward.

I'm not sure what Chez means by Stuff 5 or Chasing Spooks, but somewhere in that Sugaree part of the show there were some veryvery stong hints of the Other One - like it was all played except for the words. I Loved It!

I had lawn tickets but never made it up to the lawn - was standing right outside the pavillion entrance with a GREAT view of the stage and GREAT sound. A good group of spinning dancers out there too. nice! From where I stood, the musicians facing my direction were Jeff, Kenny and Bobby - primo! - and the other 3 I looked at in profile.

through the transitive nightfall of diamonds had me leaning my head back and looking up into the dark sky filllllllled with stars - the constellation Cassiopia was directly overhead.

Chez mentions Hard Rain was on the setlist, replaced by FOTD - Hard Rain woulda been awesome, but so was FOTD.

I don't know why I waited till the last minute to decide to go - I guess I wanted a whole show of just RD - but this show fulFilled! I am SO glad that I went last night. I do so love to hear and dance to Bobby's playing. It was just wonderful last night.

....................................
New band Ratdog has wings, says Dead guitarist
WEEKEND
By RAY HOGAN
The Stamford (Conn.) Advocate


It has been 10 years since Jerry Garcia's death put an end to the Grateful Dead.

For Bob Weir, Garcia's fellow guitarist for more than 30 years, it's hard to think of the past decade in terms of time.

"One moment, it seems like yesterday, and in another, it seems like eons ago," he says.

The remaining members of the Grateful Dead have stayed musically active and occasionally team up together (they did last summer as The Dead), but none has shown Weir's dogged determination.

When Garcia died in August 1995, Weir's band, Ratdog, was starting to take form as a side project that, like the Jerry Garcia Band, would tour when the Dead wasn't on the road. Soon after, it became his focus and took several years and lineup changes to find its shape. In putting together a band, Weir wasn't looking for musicians who knew the Dead's repertoire inside out. Instead, he wanted players who would bring a new approach to his own and the Grateful Dead repertoires, in addition to the songs they would write as Ratdog. Ultimately, he found them.

"I tapped into a well of good musicians who were fun to play with, a lot of whom came from the jazz vein, there's a healthy one in San Francisco," he says. "That made sense to me. I knew I was going to get players with wings. I kept going to that well."

Ratdog's lineup is Weir, guitarist Mark Karan, saxophonist Kenny Brooks, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, bassist Robin Sylvester and drummer Jay Lane, an original member.

Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers play with Ratdog and aren't strangers to Deadheads. When Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland died in 1990, Hornsby joined the band to help the transition for new keyboardist Vince Welnick. He stayed until the summer of 1992 and would continue to sit in with the band and its various offshoots. (Hornsby performs Sept. 16 at the University of Notre Dame's DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts.)

When asked if he plans to collaborate with his old friend, Weir is emphatic.

"Hell yeah," Weir says. "I was going to give him a buzz today and see if he has any notions. ... I had the notion of just seamlessly flowing from his set to ours, removing one of his guys and putting one of our guys onstage. ... The band changes slightly over every few minutes. But that wouldn't give the audience the break it needs, but we might try it once or twice. The situation is rife for borrowing musicians."

A common misconception is that the Dead's albums were always afterthoughts to the concerts. With decades to rethink them, several of the studio albums -- particularly "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead," both from 1970 -- are considered classics.

Ratdog has toured consistently for a decade with only 2000's "Evening Moods" as its recorded output. Weir realizes the band is overdue for a new disc -- and batch of songs -- but says a two-year renovation of his home has kept him out of his home studio, where he normally writes.

In concert, Ratdog encompasses the span of Weir's career. Set lists include songs from the Grateful Dead, Weir's solo career ("Ace," "Heaven Help the Fool" and "Bobby & the Midnites") and Ratdog originals.

Weir was born Oct. 16, 1947. He began playing with Garcia and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan as Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions in 1963. As the jug band switched toward a more psychedelic sound that would incorporate many forms of American music, the group became the Warlocks and eventually the Grateful Dead.

Just as the band was forming its own sound by mixing elements of rock, rhythm and blues, bluegrass and country, Weir took a distinct approach to rhythm guitar. He drew his inspiration from classical composers including Stockhausen and Debussy and jazz pianist McCoy Tyner.

"I wanted to play music, and I'm sort of an iconoclast by nature," he says. "I want to squeeze all the music out of that instrument as I can. All that stuff that's been done as rock 'n' roll guitar has been done. It's not my job. I just want to try to expand the horizons a little bit for my own satisfaction."

Popular opinion has marked this year as the 40th anniversary of the Grateful Dead, but to the surprise of Deadheads, the living members of the band are doing nothing to commemorate it. According to Weir, he will play with his former band mates again sometime down the line.

Despite its absence from the stage this summer, the Grateful Dead organization seems omnipresent. Live recordings regularly are released through the "Dick's Picks" series and other ventures. The estate of Jerry Garcia also is catching up for lost time by releasing recordings and DVDs of his musical ventures outside of the Dead with the "Pure Jerry" series.

For the "Dick's Picks" series and archival material released on Rhino records, the band allows others to decide what is put out -- not surprising since the band allowed fans to record their concerts for years, letting people hear performances with peaks and flaws.

"I have veto power, but I don't ever expect to use it," Weir says. "I don't have time to do it, nor the interest. The benign neglect approach to that is the best one. We'd get too bogged down in the process."