The last time I hung out with Bob Weir was several years ago, down in Nashville. It was the day of the solar eclipse and at the exact moment that my plane touched down on the runway, the sky faded to blackness. A dark star event. How proper. We hung out a bit, tried recording a little music, and then said, “So long. See you on down the trail.” Bob had perfected the art of saying goodbye without it meaning forever.
I met Weir through Josh Kaufman, my musical collaborator and great friend. Josh had gotten the opportunity to get to know Weir through a project they had just been working on. Bob told Josh about his desire to make a record of songs that reminded him of the Wyoming campfires of his youth. Kaufman and I were talking over the phone between separate flights to different gigs. When he told me about Weir’s dream, I had to put my bags down. I didn’t know all that much about the Grateful Dead, but I knew a lot about campfire songs, and I knew Weir’s craggy, beautiful, world-worn voice. I knew that it was me who was going to help write these songs. I just knew it.
I didn’t grow up with the Grateful Dead. For all the Deadheads out there, I will confess that the first tune I associated with them was ‘Touch of Grey.’ I know this excludes me from any inner sanctum within the the pantheon of Dead fans, but I grew up in northern Idaho, riding the school bus for an hour and a half, listening to a classic rock station coming in from Spokane on a pair of radio headphones that I got for my birthday. I was not positioned to delve into Dick’s Picks.
In addition, there was something frightening about the Dead. First off, the name. Secondly, there were unfounded rumors that the Grateful Dead were into drugs. Their art frequently included skeletons and, only mildly less alarming to an Idaho kid, dancing bears. Ok, so the bears were pretty cute, but the world of the Dead was sprawling, and where to begin? I had no experience with the alchemical musical explorations the band would embark on every night. I had no idea that their sojourn through America and American history had already profoundly shaped the world that I would soon step into. I was a kid who loved songs, but this was a universe of music that I had little experience with. Fortunately for me, none of that came into my mind at the moment Kaufman talked to me.
“Let me try,” I begged him. “Please please please.” I already knew a song I wanted to send. At the hotel that night, I recorded a version of “Only a River” on my phone and sent it off to Josh. I’d written it two decades before, — an early song. In it, an older man is telling his memories to a younger one, hallowing the permanence and impermanence of love and returning always to the memory of a river bed and times long-past. Going back over the song brought me back to my own childhood days on the Snake River, and when I finished recording “Only a River,” I quickly wrote another called “One More River to Cross.” Next morning, I sent them off to Kaufman, who brought them to Weir. From that moment on, we were truckin.’
I’d never written much with anyone else. A few verses here and there, a couple failed co-writing experiments, — these were proof enough to me that I was a lone-wolf when it came to composing songs. It wasn’t that I didn’t like other people’s ideas, it was just that I had always known what a song needed, and this tended to preclude the good ideas of others. See what I mean? But working with Bob turned out to be an education for me more than anyone else.
Bob didn’t just take my songs and sing them. Bob took them into that head of his and rolled them slowly together. I still get the image of stirring deep-blue paint into a bucket of white paint. The darker paint swirls and marbles the white, never fully combining, trailing its gossamer strands wherever it goes. That’s how Bob treated those songs.
After a few months, I got a recording from Josh. It was ‘Only a River,’ sung slow and noble, Bob’s voice full of pathos and warmth and wisdom-giving. It was much slower than I’d originally imagined it, and Bob had given the band room to run. It was a surreal experience. Here was Bob Weir, an older man, singing a song that I had written when I was nineteen or twenty. Here was a voice who had actually lived what the song was about, who actually sang the song like he was haunted by the very same memories I had only imagined.
I realized, at that moment, that I didn’t want to actually meet Bob yet. The voice that was coming through the speakers was the man I wanted to write about. This was not the Bob Weir that once slept in the Great Pyramid. Instead, I saw a man out on the trail, riding through the timothy grass and sagebrush, singing under his breath and mostly to himself. I could hear him wondering about what had happened to a lost love named Rose, hear him humming as he and his closest companion made their way through empty ghost towns. I could see him looking down on the herd from a nearby bluff, with the storm rolling in over the mesas. This wasn’t Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead that I was writing for. It was Bob Weir, the cowboy who had never found that other life. Here was a man, set up against a huge sky, thrown into relief by the elements, his voice a chalice full of joy, awe, regret, and hope. At times, the lightning behind him would strike and all that I could see was his rangy silhouette.
I sent a lot of songs to Bob and Josh. Writing them wasn’t an easy/hard operation. I wrote in a whirl, unlocking my own memories, imagining new ones, listening to all that good, old, cowboy music that I’d been storing up love for over the years. When I was done with a song, I’d record it quickly, understanding that Bob and Josh would take the track and do their amazing, swirly, work to turn my early versions into Bob’s vision. Rarely did the song I send come back the same. Bob adjusted the phrasings, changed some place names, invested the song with himself and his world-famous rhythms and patience. He gave the band room to develop the melodies, room to take ownership and joy in their own additions to each piece.
In the end, Bob recorded nine of the songs I sent him. It seemed almost absurd that he would do me such an honor. I kept wondering when the other shoe would drop, when some other, more suitable songwriter would take the helm. John Perry Barlow, maybe. Isbell or Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But I just kept getting recordings back, and even when the ideas perplexed me, they were beautiful and convincing and enveloping. When Weir sang, forgot that I’d written many of the lyrics, in the same way that one forgets an actor on a screen is acting. ‘How did he do it?,’ I marveled. How did this old guy keep his mind so open that he was willing to work with some random guys almost four decades younger than him? We weren’t famous, we weren’t old friends. We were just two Joshes.
Haley and I finally went to meet Bob when he was recording songs for the record in upstate New York with members of the National and some other acquaintances. I was nervous, obviously, but I didn’t have to be. Bob was just back from town, where he’d bought a sledge hammer that he was swinging around out in the yard. He wasn’t swinging it at anybody, I noted, but we’d never met, so I didn’t bother him until he was seemed done. The man was exactly as I’d imagined him to be, out there on his horse all those months I’d been working. He was quiet and his eyes and eyebrows were intense, but within them were great reserves of curiosity and empathy. He seemed like a man who was used to, but still uncomfortable with, being the brightest light in any room. He was also so cordial, in an old-fashioned way that made me think of a courtly knight.
Josh Kaufman once told me that he thought the Dead were important because they had taught a generation of people what it meant to be music lovers. He said that young kids just discovering their own independence got to see America by traveling to see the band. Listening back to Blue Mountain, as I have been doing this last week, I realize that Bob taught me a great deal as well. He taught me to keep my mind open to the joy of artistic creation, to the anticipation of beautiful music and new friends and experiences. He also taught me that a song can be anyone’s, can be turned into anyone’s prized possession and seer stone, no matter how it was written or who wrote it.
I didn’t spend much time physically with Bob Weir, but over the year that I was writing songs for Blue Mountain, I feel that I got to know a side of him very well. In that record, we travelled from Heaven to Wyoming and back, writing songs as we travelled the trail, driving a herd towards Laramie. We listened to coyotes and wolves and wild dogs. We heard the sky torn asunder by storms. We talked about old loves and wondered about new ones, still down the trail. It was a beautiful trip, and I’d do it all over again. Who knows, maybe someday we will.
Thank you, Bob. See you on down the trail.
‘Goodnight all you cowboys, you’re plain-spun and rough,
But the angels appeared one time to those such as us…’
