\n\tThis story was originally published in the May 4, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor Rolling Stone\u2019s 40th anniversary, the editors interviewed 20 artists and leaders who helped shape our time. In this Q&A, David Fricke talks with the Grateful Dead<\/a>\u2018s Bob Weir<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tDo you see any signs of the energy and magic of 1966 and \u201967 in San Francisco today? \n\tOne thing about San Francisco: Politically, we\u2019re still out there. We elected a mayor [Gavin Newsom] who pisses off a lot of the old guard. We still have that forward thrust. People that come here get steeped in that: \u201cWhy shouldn\u2019t gay people get married? And a little poetry with your coffee?\u201d That\u2019s not a bad idea.<\/p>\n \n\tYou were a teenager when you first met Jerry Garcia and started playing music in the Bay Area. What was it like to be in San Francisco at that age, at the dawn of psychedelia? \n\tYou were much younger than the rest of the Grateful Dead when the band started. Were they protective of you? \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tIn a way, you were one of the original teenage hippie runaways. How hard was it for your parents to accept that? \n\tDespite the anti-establishment aura of the Dead, the band actually lived and worked together like a traditional family, especially at your famed house at 710 Ashbury. \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tLater, the Dead applied those family values to running your own label, touring business and management. What were the best and worst things about being a corporation? \n\tWere the Dead\u2019s ideals and corporate reality simply incompatible? \n\tIn its first issue, Rolling Stone published a now-famous photo of the Dead on the front steps of 710 Ashbury after police raided the house. [Weir and organist Ron \u201cPigpen\u201d McKernan were among eleven people arrested on drug charges.] How important was the magazine to the community in 1967 and \u201968? In a sense, it was a local paper then. \n\tDid the Dead \u2014 and San Francisco at large \u2014 feel betrayed when Rolling Stone moved to New York in 1977? \n\tThe Dead\u2019s audiences in the Sixties and early Seventies were united against the Vietnam War. Are you disappointed that the crowds you play for now, when you tour with Ratdog, have not protested the Iraq War with the same energy? \n\tWhy did the Dead never write or play topical or protest songs in the Sixties? Even when you covered Dylan, it was his emotional broadsides, like \u201cIt\u2019s All Over Now, Baby Blue.\u201d \n\tHow would you describe your own politics today? \n\tl was surprised to see recent photos of you backstage with Donald Trump and the conservative writer Ann Coulter. Don\u2019t you find it strange that either of them would go anywhere near the Dead zone? \n\tWhat did the Sixties ultimately accom\u00adplish? What kind of world has been left by your generation to its children? \n\tThen there\u2019s the environment, on ac\u00adcount of that big snooze. Yeah, we started Earth Day way back when. [The first official Earth Day was proclaimed in San Francisco in 1970.] But what has it bought us? Look at global warming. That could be curtains. I was trying to bring deforestation to the fore in the Seventies and Eighties. And even people of my own ilk \u2014 they\u2019d come to the benefit con\u00adcerts to see the artists and hear the music. They might cut a check. But they had their jobs to do, their families to care for. Nobody was looking down the road. Nobody was looking at their grandkids. So it\u2019s gotten way bad, way worse.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat\u2019s the upside of the Sixties? \n\tHow have you changed \u2014 personally, emo\u00adtionally \u2014since your glorious hippie youth? \n\tWhat\u2019s changed? \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n \n\tHas becoming a father made you more aware of what you put your parents through when you took off to join the Dead? \n\tDo you think you will be more open and trusting when your daughters reach that age of discovery? We\u2019ve got our best guys on it [laughs]. I held off for a long time before I had kids. My ardent hope is that I\u2019ll be too old to care.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story was originally published in the May 4, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone. 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The foliage and shrubbery in the Panhandle \u2014 that brings me back a bit. What\u2019s gone is all the craziness, the hysteria. San Francisco now is a service-industry city. The people are young, upwardly mobile professionals of one sort or another. You get a more creative set of those folks here than in most places. But the times are completely, different. Young people in San Fran\u00adcisco or anywhere else are connected with New York, Mumbai and their folks back home in Iowa. They talk to everybody on that circuit daily. Back then, when you made a long-distance call, it cost some change. You picked and chose your occasions. Now, information exchanges happen so fast and furious \u2014 it\u2019s as if there were no locations anymore.<\/p>\n
This was always a mythic city for me, growing up down in the penin\u00adsula. Then when I got old enough to dive in, it was way beyond just being a kid in a candy store \u2014 to the point where, at seventeen, I realized I\u2019ve got to take a deep breath and step back, that there was too much going on for any human to handle. The interaction in the city was furious. I had to mature immediately.<\/p>\n
In some ways, I think they envied me, because I had so little in the way of preconceptions. They figured, \u201cThis guy is going to turn up some stuff we wouldn\u2019t.\u201d And they had faith in my toughness, I could roll with a punch. I was the guy who got beat up by the cops the most. The band would bring me back to the house and say, \u201cWhat was it like?\u201d And I\u2019d tell them, \u201cThis is what you don\u2019t want to say to a cop.\u201d We all had our place on the team. We weren\u2019t so much looking out for each other as watching and learning from each other.<\/p>\n
They saw the train coming, and they tried to stop it. They were straight-ahead, rock-ribbed Republi\u00adcans. They tried to keep me in school. And I got a great education. I can talk circles around a lot of people with four years in college, and I ran away in the middle of junior year in high school. I loved my folks. They were my adoptive parents, but I loved them, and they did their very best by me. What they did manage to impart to me was to be kind, to be considerate. My dad taught me to be a gentleman. And my parents instilled in me the importance of applying myself. That all stuck. A couple of years later, I started bringing home gold records.<\/p>\n
Life was extremely communal. The most important thing was keeping each other amused. That was job number one. We were on something of a gravy train. We made enough money from gigs to feed everybody and pay the rent. And everybody just took care of what they saw needed taking care of. I kept the kitchen clean, because I used to cook a fair bit. And we practiced a lot.<\/p>\n
At one point during the Seventies, we found ourselves carrying briefcases. We got over that in a big hurry. We had to invite in people who had a little better business sense. The roughest part about our corporate model was we were good to our employees, but to a fault. We would hire people that
would have been unemployable by other folks. But they became part of the family. Unfortunately, when Jerry checked out [the guitarist died in 1995] and the business had to substantially downsize, I felt bad because many of them had nowhere to go. And we couldn\u2019t support them.<\/p>\n
I just don\u2019t think we got it right. We were musicians. Mick Jagger came out of a business school [the London School of Economics]. What he was able to assemble around the Rolling Stones had more integrity, more functionality, than what we did. We did well enough financially, so it didn\u2019t matter if we weren\u2019t particu\u00adlarly efficient.<\/p>\n
It was the voice of us. It was done with journalistic integrity, and it legit\u00adimized what we were up to. There was opinion involved. We yukked it up over various writers\u2019 opinions of this and that. But it was gratifying to have some\u00adbody documenting what we were about \u2014 in a straightforward way but sympa\u00adthetic in their understanding, whereas someone from Look magazine would miss a great deal of the nuance.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t care for that much. We felt like it had been ripped out of us. We liked having it here. At the same time, there was every reason to go to New York. The pulse of San Francisco had been squashed underground. There was not much argument with that. And their move happened at the same time that we were all moving out of the city. It was time to duck for cover. There were nothing but toothless speed freaks on the streets.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a matter of media. When we moved into 710, we put a TV in the liv\u00ading room. We would watch the news and see the bodies coming back [from Vietnam]. We don\u2019t see bodies coming back these days. The carnage is the same. But we don\u2019t see it on TV. The politicians don\u2019t want the full visual im\u00adpact of the war, what it\u2019s costing this country in human lives, coming back here. So people aren\u2019t as galvanized. That was a very astute move \u2014 not in terms of wise, but in terms of conniving.<\/p>\n
We had a distaste for using the stage as a pulpit or a podium. If we had politics, that was our business. But the stage was sacred. We were artists, not megaphones. And we were human, given to mistakes.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m progressive. We need to see to our schools and infrastructure, in a big hurry. We need to be more generous abroad, be\u00adcause we\u2019re perceived by most of the world as hoarding. That\u2019s not the way I like to feel about myself: The Dead did our share of political benefits. If somebody had a basketful of good ideas and a focus we admired, we would play for them. I try to register voters now and get them pointed at the polls. If we do that amongst the jam-band audience, that will have great political consequences next year.<\/p>\n
Ann\u2019s a big fan. All I can say is, it takes all kinds [laughs]. They\u2019re welcome to my shows. Everybody\u2019s welcome. The night Ann Coulter was there, I had friends who were aghast \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019re going to let her in?\u201d C\u2019mon, don\u2019t you want to stand next to the person and see if you can feel anything, feel her humanity? I gotta at least see if she has any humanity about her. And she does.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get into the downside first. My generation almost let democracy disap\u00adpear in this country \u2014 by not voting, by getting lazy, by going to sleep. Every\u00adbody took a big snooze after that huge event in the Sixties. And very few people woke all the way back up. <\/p>\n
The upside is that we know that thing is there. Whatever that was, it\u2019s there. We know what it felt like. And some of the fresh faces I see in the front rows at Ratdog shows today \u2014 they feel that. It\u2019s not different \u2014 it\u2019s the same thing. What we had then was timeless. It comes and goes, ebbs and flows. But I think they can feel it. It doesn\u2019t have to be a huge deal. It just has to be there, to provide enough juice for enough people to coalesce around and work together, to bring about meaningful, fundamental change.<\/p>\n
[Long pause] I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s much that\u2019s different now I\u2019ve basically been a professional adolescent all my life. I couldn\u2019t have been more fortunate. What worked for me then \u2014 that outlook still works for me now It could come crashing down tomorrow. I may be un\u00adprepared for something that\u2019s right around the corner. But I haven\u2019t changed that much. I still keep my eyes as wide open as I can. And I have as much energy to get into as much different stuff as I did when I was in my teens and early twen\u00adties. I always took good care of my body.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a dad. That\u2019s fundamental. Watching your kids grow, you go back a bit. You can watch a bug crawling around for minutes at a time \u2014 just sit and marvel at its complexity, the utter bugness of it. I\u2019ve learned to do that again. So maybe I\u2019m not such a pro\u00adfessional \u2014 or perpetual \u2014 adolescent anymore. I\u2019m now a kid.<\/p>\n
Absolutely. But even at that point, I was aware that they wanted nothing but the best for me. My folks were trying to get it through my thick skull that music is wonderful, but you can\u2019t make a living do\u00ading that. They were telling me I can\u2019t be that lucky. They were wrong. But they knew I didn\u2019t hold it against them.<\/p>\n