Slow Train

Thank You Argus West!
Rat dog break out from 10/28

Thanks to "LandofCocaCola" this (Ratdog breakout) Dark Hollow from last night's show is on YouTube.

Happy Birthday Harry!!

Ratdog Dire Wolf 10/26/07

From Tooboarder news.


Lovely review by Debess from DNC:

debess - Oct 27, 2007 10:07 am

oooweeeeeeeeeee - great opening show for the tour last night GREAT! Highlights for me, slippery Slipknot, Bury Me Standing, Foolish Heart (awesome awesome jamming). Sweet Ripple encore (after Quinn encore), both with full audience participation. I caught up with Julie and Rus at set break and saw the 2nd set with them. Asked Julie if west coast audiences sing along so much - "NO! not at all! but even -I- was singing", she said. yes, and even Kimock was singing some songs too (not mic'ed) His playing just touches my heart - so happy to have another guitarist that does that for me in my lifetime. dream come true to have him playing with ratdog - treasuring every moment. Jeff gets MVP - his playing was so excitedly ON last night - and featured in many of the songs. They were all having fun - could see it in their faces from our very close perspective. Bobby directs with subtle facial gestures and moving around the stage. I most loved it when he would move in close to Steve and play to eachother. They had some great locked-in jams last night. Ashes and Glass for San Diego? First Dire Wolf. nice job!

The Music Never Stops

Join us for a special evening to celebrate music and community
and benefit the Rex Foundation


The Music Never Stops

A Rex Foundation Black Tie-Dye Ball

Saturday, December 15, 2007,
Warfield Theatre, San Francisco


Featuring

Bob Weir & Ratdog

Little Feat
The Waybacks


6:00 - 7:30 - Pre-concert reception with the artists, dinner and beverages
7:00 - Doors Open for Concert
7:45 - Music Begins

Premium & Loge Ticket Order Form

Balcony tickets available week beginning October 29
STAY TUNED!

Sandy Sohcot
Rex Foundation
P.O. Box 29608
San Francisco, CA 94129-0608
Tel: (415) 561-3134
sandy@rexfoundation.org

A few Bobby birthday party nods around the blogosphere-
Here
and over here
and an interesting read regarding one fellow who made it in time to be honored at the RAN party here Micheal Brune had spiken tearfully to the folks at the benefit about his happiness that this fellow had left the hospital to get to the event....

Be sure and get to you tube to check out Betheroo's clip of everyone singing Happy Birthday to Bobby!

Happy Birthday Jeff!

Ever hear Bobby's Misty?
Here it is on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu5-qtcgmm8 Love it!

Check out this cool new interview with Bobby!
I could just listen to Bobby's stories endlessly...If he ever writes a book, I'm not going to read it but rather listen to the audio version. In the meanwhile, gotta hope for more podcasts like this one.
http://www.culturecatch.com/podcast/bob_weir




Oh Man! I LOVE it!
The new Ratdog dot com!

Oh what a night!
til I get my stuff together here's this from the RAN site:
http://ran.org/media_center/news_article/?uid=2425
And pictures atflickr


OMG, We had the best time at the Galleria!
The RAN event was part benefit, part musical event and ALL party!
After checking in we were directed to the 4th floor for pre dinner cocktails made with spirits donated by Veev, the organic spirits company,Adina World Beat Beverages and Guayaki Yerba Mate Rnergy drink. plus sustainable wines and brews by Beach Chalet..
Scott immediately went for the "Bob Weir Boch" beer and I had a juniper gin & tonic.
With drinkies and organic hor'doerves in hand we met up with some friends. As time went on and more people arrived we were part of nice sized group of folks. It was great to see everyone- especially the handful of tourbuds, all dressed up.
Upon entering we were each given a program which had our table numbers on them.

Dinner was announced and so we migrated to our tables. We were pleased to have been seated with some of our friends . There were a few bottles of organic wine ( donated by The Organic Wine company, Frey Vineyards, Brassfield Estates) served thru the meal. The 3 course meal was local, organic and created by Back to Earth Catering. It included a baby arugula salad with persimmons, candied walnuts, shaved paremesan with champagne viniagrette, a potato, celerac and gruyere tartine and for dessert- which rocked- was Dagoba organic chocolate and cardamom mousse. The coffee served was a fair trade organic house blend by Green Mountain Coffee Roasters.

During dinner the 2007 World Rainforest Award recipients Paul Hawken, Maria Gunnoe, Nina Simons, Kenny Ausubel and Stuart Townsend (It was a sweet surprise to recognize it was indeed the handsome actor-directer) were honored.

There were a handful of additional speeches including an announcement by Michael Klein about a special RAN fund being created in honor of our own Bob Weir!!!!!


more coming soon-

Happy Birthday Bobby!
May the Birthday Fairies bring you a bushel of songs & smiles today!
Joy & love forever!

rHANK Minkin!
A little Birthday Fever!

Found on You Tube from Weirever



SIRIUS Celebrates Weir at 60


Tuesday October 16th will mark the 60th birthday of Mr. Robert Hall Weir. SIRIUS Satellite Radio’s Grateful Dead Channel will mark the occasion with a day of programming devoted to Bobby, including a one hour program hosted by Weir himself. The action will kick off at 3 am ET as the channel will air the celebrated Grateful Dead performance that took place on Weir's 42nd birthday, the 10/16/89 Meadowlands show that featured the second "Dark Star" in five years after the band re-introduced it during its Hampton Coliseum Warlocks show on 10/9/89. Tuesday's Weircentric offerings also will include an interview with David Gans as well as music from RatDog, Kingfish, and Bobby & The Midnights.



Head's up New Englanders-


"Tonight on My radio program The Psychedelic Oyster, I will be playing 10.16.81 in Amsterdam in honor of Bobby's B-day Tomorrow. I will also be playing some of Rat Dog fom The Gathering Of The Vibes from this year. Daed Hour at 10:30. Show starts at 9pm eastern time on womr.org or 92.1 fm womr on Cape Cod. Hope you all can tune in."

Brad Moore (The Psychedelic Oyster)

Some fine Ratdog video may be viewes at
http://www.grunzychannel.net/




Festival tripped out before Summer of Love
By Paul Liberatore
MEDIANEWS STAFF
Article Launched: 10/13/2007 03:04:21 AM PDT

In hippie lore, the Trips Festival is regarded as nothing less than the launching pad of the psychedelic '60s. It was so revolutionary, so freeform and creative and communal that it still resonates in the popular culture 40 years later.
Before there was the Summer of Love, before there was the Haight Ashbury, long before there was Burning Man, there was the Trips Festival.
I would have liked to have been there, to have experienced such a seminal event first hand. No such luck. The closest I've come to getting what it must have been like, and to really understanding its countercultural significance, was through Eric Christensen's enlightening documentary, "The Trips Festival," which will have its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
As narrator Peter Coyote says in the documentary's opening lines: "It was the proverbial lightening bolt that hit the primordial soup. Just the right ingredients, just the right spark to create a new life form.
"This one event gave birth to a new idea, and all were invited to join. A mix of music, lights and entertainment, a happening both planned and unplanned that would evolve into the way entertainment would be presented from that time forward."
An offshoot of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, the Trips Festival took place on Jan. 21-23, 1966, at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco. The Grateful Dead were the house band (when they weren't too stoned to play).
It could be considered the West Coast's Woodstock, only it
was far ahead of that massive tribal gathering, preceding it by three years.
For the then-young people who were there, who may or may not have sampled a communal tub of LSD-laced ice cream, it was probably the first time they'd been to a psychedelic rock concert, the first time they'd seen a light show, the first time they'd realized that there were other long-haired freaks just like them that they were part of a movement.
"On the order of 10,000 hippies showed up and nobody, including the 10,000 hippies, knew that there were 10,000 hippies," Sausalito's Stewart Brand, the festival's mastermind, says in the film.
Christensen didn't have to rely entirely on the accounts of others in re-creating the festival. He's 58 now, but he was a wide-eyed 17-year-old rock fan when he slipped in a side door for two of the three nights, never imagining he'd be making a film about it all these years later.
"It was a breakthrough event in that it was the first time you paid as much attention to what was going on in the audience as you did on stage," he recalled the other day in his Mill Valley home -- a trove of rock records, posters, vintage photographs and all manner of hippie-era memorabilia.
From being a whiz kid rock radio program director, Christensen went on to a long career as an arts and entertainment and sports producer for KGO-TV in San Francisco. Along the way, he was in a position to interview the counterculture VIPs who organized the festival and who went on to play key roles in creating the various alternative movements and technologies that sprang from it.
In addition to Brand, who later published the Whole Earth Catalogs and co-founded the Well, Christensen spoke to festival organizers Ramon Sender and Roland Jacopetti, publicist Jerry Mander and Bill Graham, who went from the Trips Festival to producing concerts at the Fillmore on his way to becoming a major rock impresario.
"These are the architects, the seed planters of the whole thing," Christensen said. "I was younger than them, so I looked up to them, and I was lucky enough to get to know some of them."
He also spoke to other voices of the times -- the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Garcia, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Chet Helms, Sam Andrew and Peter Albin of Big Brother and the Holding Company, among others.
After his recent retirement from KGO, Christensen suddenly found himself with the time to rummage through his collections, uncovering a great deal of San Francisco rock history in the process.
"I started playing archaeologist in my own basement," he said. "At some point, I realized I had a project."
In his hour-long film, Christensen not only documents the Trips Festival but examines the connection between the counterculture and the cyberculture as well as the festival's impact on the movements and alternative and communal lifestyles that were inspired by it.
"I wanted to show the small picture and the big picture," he said.
In telling the Trips story, he assembled footage and photos from the Trips Festival, the Human Be-In, the Beat scene and other historic events, including sound recordings from the Acid Tests, one of which was staged in Muir Beach.
Deadheads will be disappointed to hear that, surprisingly, the festival didn't record the music by the Dead or Big Brother. On his tight budget, Christensen could afford to license a single Grateful Dead song for his soundtrack, but he got his money's worth with an eight-minute live version of Garcia's rarely heard "Creampuff War."
While most of us missed the Trips Festival, we're nevertheless part of it in a larger sense. it was the beginning, after all, of something that's still going on.
As Merry Prankster Ken Babbs says near the end of the film: "What we started has not reached its peak yet. It hasn't come to fruition. We're still working on it, and everyone everywhere else is still working on it. Love, peace and happiness -- that's the whole thing."
Paul Liberatore can be reached at liberatore@marinij.com.
Take a Trip
The first Mill Valley Film Festival screening of Eric Christensen's "The Trips Festival" sold out, so a second showing has been added at 8 p.m. Sunday at Sequoia 1 Theatre in Mill Valley.
The film fest ends Sunday. For more information on events and movie screenings going on today and Sunday or to buy tickets, go to http://www.mvff.com or call 877-874-6833.

Hey Now Donna Jean!

Thoughts on Hippies, dancing & DSO @ Fillmore found at http://crocktock.blogspot.com/


I don't know the details but I'll want to be watching!






Here's a sweet read!
Bobby & coffee in one blog post makes me smile




Mercy me!
I've been uber busy with stuff and am just settling down now!
I'll have info on the birthday Bobby project -maybe next week?

On Sunday night, Scott and I made it to Mill Valley for the afterparty for the movie "Dylan Interpreted".
We didnt see the movie but enjoyed the music presented at the Throcknorton Theatre event.
There is a setlist at Dot org.
No taping or photos were allowed but a few folks were able to get snaps (again go check it out at dot org).

We ran into a few & hung out a little bit with the few people we knew but mostly it was a film crowd who seemed pretty much into an actor/musician named John Doe.
Ben Fong Torres was the emcee. He was good and actually very funny! Scotto was stoked to be speaking with him after the show.
Another funny guy was there= Don Novello aka Father Guido Sarducci. A fellow involved with the film's music spoke.. He seemed familiar ...when someone said it was Radio's Jim Dunbar's kid-also named Jim, I laughed- I went thru High School on the Peninsula with Jim. Perhaps if I had looked into going to one of the reunions, I'd had an easier time recognizing him.
And of course, Bobby, Jay & Wass were there and looking happy.

Groovy!
I missed Bobby with DSO but at least we have pictures!
Check em out http://www.flickr.com/photos/clankennedy/

Ultimate Hippy Flashback!!!

I'm not sure the claim is true but decide for yourselves- read:
"we were the first rappers ever to rap with a member of the Grateful Dead..."

Attention New Yorkers

Great film- First step in understanding where GD music is coming from. We saw this over the Summer and it was great! Lots of Bobby commenting too.

INSPIRING JUG BAND DOCUMENTARY TO BE FEATURED AT WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL OCTOBER 13TH

Tickets Going Fast for Premiere Screening of "Chasin' Gus' Ghost"

Woodstock, New York has a deep connection with film and music. The area was featured in "Woodstock," a documentary about the best-known music festival of all time. Another famous film, "The Last Waltz," features The Band, which made Woodstock their home for many years, as did Bob Dylan, a featured performer in that Scorsese film.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Sebastian, another Woodstock resident and 1969 Woodstock festival performer, is featured in the new film "Chasin' Gus' Ghost," which will make its debut on October 13th at the Woodstock Film Festival.

In recent years, the Woodstock Film Festival has emerged as one of the country's premier festivals and has screened many music documentaries including "Standing in the Shadows of Motown" and "My Generation." The 2007 festival will feature "The Future Is Unwritten," "Living The Blues," the Bob Dylan-inspired "I'm Not There" and "Chasin' Gus' Ghost" - a film that takes us on a three-continent journey to explore the legacy of jug band music and the influence it has had on artists such as John Sebastian (Lovin' Spoonful), Bob Weir (Grateful Dead) and Geoff and Maria Muldaur.

What: "Chasin' Gus' Ghost" at the Woodstock Film Festival
When: October 13th at 10PM
Where: Bearsville Theater (291 Tinker Street)
More info: The box office is located at the Woodstock Playhouse (corner of route 212 & 375). Tickets are $10.

Film trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=S3kZK2EBTwE
www.chasinggusghost.com
www.woodstockfilmfestival.com

October!!!!!

Thanks out to everyone participating in the great birthday present for Bobby!
All books are done- just waiting on a few cover pictures and that's it- off to be printed up!


Got a song?
Bobby's a judge in the John Lennon songwriting contest!
For more details please check out http://theshadeswriter.wordpress.com/2007/10/01/john-lennon-songwriting-contest/
Good Luck!