When it dissolved, Ratdog was still there and had evolved into something unique and interesting. Ratdog didn't seem to take notice and just kept on touring. At this point, another Ratdog tour isn't really a big deal, at least so far as news goes, just as the Dead had their own regular cycles of touring. Ratdog is musically weird -- pun recognized: like a building with a fundamentally irregular architectural principle at the center of it with everything built around that.

Now going into their sixth full year as a band, Weir's guitar playing is as angular as ever. In an almost paradoxical way, he has moved from his role in the Dead as a subtle movement-shaper to a full-on band leader, conducting the ensemble on-stage and off. Weir continues on as one of the most inventive rhythm guitar players in popular music, shaping improvisation in utterly mind-twisting ways. Now if they'd only turn him up in the mix...

JJ: What kind of changes do you notice in Ratdog from tour to tour?

BW: Well, the predictable stuff, really. The more we play the better we get, the more we learn each other's moves and how to work off of them.

JJ: How much have the personnel changes effected the form of the band musically?

BW: The personnel of the band is everything. Whereas, three or four years ago, we had Johnnie Johnson and Matthew Kelly, our strong suit was more or less blues-oriented stuff, and now with a bunch of guys who are basically coming from a jazz heritage, we tend to drift a little towards that direction.

JJ: Do you plan to do anything different before you go out on a new tour or does it just sort of evolve?

BW: What we plan to spend a few weeks rehearsing before we go out on tour, working up both new stuff and reaching back into the bag of chestnuts as well. That's about as complicated as our plans get. Like I said, the more we play, the better we get. What our experiences have taught us is the more we play, the more stuff comes.

JJ: How is a Ratdog rehearsal structured?

BW: We just get in and start playing. It depends. If somebody can't make it, we'll have some sort of sectional. If the bass player can't make it for one reason or another, then we'll do vocal rehearsals. Generally speaking, everybody is there and we just get started. We'll break up the day into three parts: going back over old stuff; going into whatever new stuff, "new old stuff" shall we say, that we're going to pull out; and just letting fly and seeing what we can bring out of the air.

JJ: How do you decide what old stuff needs working on?

BW: It's kind of a democratic process. Whoever has a strong notion about what they want to do, we'll generally follow that. That means that whoever that is is passionate about this or that, and we'll always follow that.

JJ: You've been playing these songs for quite a while now. What do you learn about a song like Playin' In The Band after playing it for a long a period as you have? What new things come out of it?

BW: Playin' In The Band is a particular challenge, having been there so much. It's the key of D. And what can you do with the key of D? Where is it gonna wanna go? That takes a lot of work, actually. We have to listen to each other acutely, and if somebody suggests something that sounds new, we have to understand what they're up to and we have to go there with them right away. That's the way you get a new occurrence, a new place to go visit. The possibilities having played the song God knows how many times, there are always gonna be more possibilities. But there's a huge backlog of places we've already been with it, and that just gets larger and larger as the years go by. We don't wanna go back to any of those old places, 'cause that's where you find the joy of discovery.

JJ: What kind of historical sense do you have while playing? Are you acutely conscious of those places?

BW: When we're playing - and I speak for myself, and I think I can speak for everybody - I go to an entirely other realm where the world and my life continuum is basically all the time I've spent onstage with these songs, and now with these guys. Like yesterday, for me, becomes very truly the last time I was onstage. Everything else just sort of falls away. Couched in that perspective, it's pretty easy to remember where you've been and what you've done. There's not a whole lot else to think about. For that reason, it becomes easy to remember where you've been, what you've done, and to, at least, have that there for reference?

JJ: When does that moment begin when you step outside your normal bounds?

BW: It's hard to exactly say when, but generally within the first couple of tunes. Sometimes, right off the bat, sometimes with the first note. Sometimes, it takes a little push and shove to get into that timeless space. We get there pretty regularly. But, like I say, it's hard to say when exactly that's gonna occur.

JJ: Do you differentiate critically between spaces in that zone? Or is it completely unconscious once you're there?

BW: I try to keep it as free of contrivance as possible. That's not to say that I'm totally successful, but I try not to come up with a good idea and try to impose it on the moment but, rather, let the idea impose itself on me. I try not to decide where to take it. I try to be as open as I possibly can.

JJ: This obviously speaks a lot towards improvisation. How does it work towards a song? The singing of a specific lyric? Is it a similar kind of mental space?

BW: Absolutely. Every time we play a tune we're gonna focus on a slightly different aspect, a slightly different facet. It's like light shining through a prism or something. Coming from one angle it rainbows out in a certain way on the other side. But if light is coming from a different angle, it does a very different thing on a different side. For me, a song can do that, if I'm concentrating.

For example, on a given night, I'm having a particularly swell time with my consonants - my s's, my t's, stuff like that - maybe I can hear them well, they sound real distinct to me. At that point, I can use them percussively and emotively. That's gonna color my perception about the whole rest of the song and how I'm gonna deliver it. The whole rest of the song is gonna color my approach, or my touch, to my guitar playing. The lines that come out of me are gonna be really heavily influenced by just this one little thing. And then everybody else who is listening to me is gonna be influenced by this new perspective that I'm having on the song.

Now, you take that and multiply it by six - because everybody's going through those little anomalies on a nightly basis - and you can see where a song would be very different from performance to performance.

JJ: How do you relate to the content of a lyric while you're singing it?

BW: Ahhhh, I try to just let it reveal itself to me. Each song, every story, is multi-layered. That's pretty much the nature of a story. On a given evening, one layer of the story will just jump out of me, and I'm gonna live mostly there. I'm gonna be doing the story from that vantage point, from that point of view. Once again, that colors my perception.

JJ: You do tunes by a number of different lyricists, Barlow and Hunter and a fair amount of Dylan; do you differentiate between lyric styles while you're singing, or does it just matter what song you're singing at that particular moment?

BW: The lyric styles are most influenced by the guy that's singing the song. By that, I don't mean me. I mean the guy in the song, the character. They're character driven, for the most part. And, that character... I won't say on a nightly basis, but almost year to year, that character continues to grow and change and all that kinda stuff. That character has a different sort of mode of expression, a different personality. If you check in, let's see, what's a good example of this? Any of the tunes, actually, you'll hear that - generally speaking, in my tunes - the characters in the tunes, their delivery is softening over the years. Maybe that's because I'm getting older and some of that is leaking into these characters. They get different.

JJ: Do you have a similar historical sense with the lyrics as you do with the music where you're entering the same kind of space?

BW: Yeah, absolutely. I won't say it's a make believe realm, because I'm not entirely sure it's make believe. I think it's every bit as real as this realm we consider reality, but it's also every bit as fluid as this realm we consider reality.

JJ: How often do you find a lyric relating to your everyday routine?

BW: Rarely.

JJ: Really?

BW: Yeah. Well, until I go there and that's my everyday existence.

JJ: Huh. Do you consider yourself an actor, then, from time to time?

BW: Yeah. Joseph Campbell actually called me a "conjurer".

JJ: Different songs call for different kinds of treatments, in terms of improvisation and delivery. Some songs get short treatments, some get big open-ended things appended to them. How do you determine what gets what?

BW: Once again, I let the song dictate that to me. Let's say, a song like Good Morning Little School Girl: it hasn't opened up and exposed a whole new region, a whole new place to take it yet. Maybe it will someday. It seems that something like that is best delivered in a succinct manner, to me. We could jam on any tune endlessly, but some songs - for some reason - seem to lend themselves to that to others than other tunes. Like I said, I'm trying to be more open to the possibility to that almost any of the tunes that we're playing could open up. That's one of the things that we're going to be looking into in the near future. JJ: Still waiting for the 25-minute Mexicali Blues. (Both laugh.) You've integrated a number of Garcia/Hunter tunes into your catalogue over the past few years. How did you choose those specific tunes?

BW: I was just lonesome for them. And there are more coming for that matter.

JJ: Are there different qualities that make you want to do a Garcia/Hunter tune rather than a tune by another artist? Or is a good song just a good song?

BW: Well, there's a little bit of that, that it's a good song. But, with the Garcia/Hunter stuff, I know that stuff. I know where they live. I know where those tunes live. I grew up with them. They grew with me.

JJ: How much planning do you do before a show?

BW: For the time being, we're gonna be working off a setlist, I'm pretty sure. Maybe towards the end of this upcoming tour we won't be. I keep hoping that that's gonna be the case. As our show gets longer and longer and we keep working up more and more new material. For the most part, I know all these tunes, the guys in the band can use a little heads-up with regards to what tunes we're doing on a given night so they can brush up on them. I'll generally do a setlist in the morning when I get up and then we'll run over whatever anybody wants to run over in the soundcheck and see if we can stick to it in the evening.

JJ: Do you plan out segues?

BW: We plan out a lot of segues, and a lot of it doesn't happen exactly as we planned it. A lot of the segues just sort of emerge, or just sort of arrive, however they will. Yeah, we do plan segues and stuff like that, but a lot of the fun of it is... We can talk it down a little bit, but we very, very rarely try to play through a segue, 'cause that takes the sport out of it.

JJ: Does the nature of having a setlist tend to squash creative tendencies?

BW: No, 'cause as often as not the setlist ends up being a pack of lies, anyway.

JJ: In that case, what goes into calling a song?

BW: If I hear something, or somebody else hears something, and just starts laying in a line that's suggestive of that song, or that place to take it, and if everybody's astute and listening, if everybody's on his toes, we'll go there.

JJ: How would you describe your style as a band leader?

BW: Laissez-faire. I do not rule with an iron fist. It would take the joy out of it for me. I know that some guys like to have everything just exactly so. I like surprises. The more I dictate, the less I get by way of surprises.

JJ: What do you find needs dictating? How much structure do you have to put in?

BW: Precious little, at this point. These guys I'm playing with are pretty good, they can it. The stuff I tend to dictate is "okay, it's time to pick it up, it's time to slow it up, it's time to pick it up dynamically, it's time to bring it down dynamically, it's time to stretch it out" and then, towards the end of the show, "it's time to bring it in", 'cause I'm the guy who's aware of the clock. That's my biggest job, to make sure we don't go overtime.

JJ: What dictates the one set structure of the show, as opposed to the having the two set thing, which you did with the Dead for as long as you did?

BW: What used to dictate was the fact that we had an opening act and it didn't seem to me that people came to our shows to not have music -- though I imagine that some people do come to mill about and see their pals and socialize. For most folks, the crux of the matter is music. If you have an opening act, then there's a break between the opening act and the headliner. In that case, one setbreak is enough, no matter who's there.

In this upcoming tour, I don't think we're gonna have an opening act. We'll be playing three, three-and-a-half hours, in which case we will take a setbreak. It'll be a two set show. It'll be pretty much the same as the Grateful Dead format. I'm not entirely sure if we wanna go a lot more than three and a half hours. I know that, for me, more than that's just more than the human spirit can endure -- though I know that a lot of folks out there cranked on ecstasy wanna go all night. We're gonna do what we can do to the best of our ability. A three and a half hour show will be plenty, I think.

JJ: How conscious are you of pacing the show in terms of song choices?

BW: I take that into consideration a fair bit. A show has to breathe. You can't just keep slamming the audience all night. I once went to a Bruce Springsteen show, about three and a half hours, and it was one uptempo tune after another. I was way ready to get out of there about two-thirds of the way into the show. He's good. The music good: it was well-rendered, everything was excellent, it was just too much. That was, I'm told, a peculiar night for him and, in general, he paced it a little better than that. I was glad to hear that. You have to bring it up, you have to let it fall back down dynamically speaking, a fair bit to, in my estimation, to create a complete experience.

JJ: Towards the last 10 or 15 years, Dead shows definitely had their own language in terms of the way the sets were structured. Do you find the same thing happening to Ratdog?

BW: We'll see. Well, our second sets...

JJ: Or just the second half of the show...

BW: We're getting there. We don't have as firm a handle on that as the Dead did, but then we haven't been playing for 30 years. Nonetheless, we're getting there. We're getting a much better handle on how to do that than we had a year ago, two years ago, for sure.

JJ: Are you looking for that structure? Do you feel there is a perfect structure for a show? BW: I think the Dead moreless naturally stumbled on that format. I want to underscore the word "naturally". There's probably a slightly different way that Ratdog is going to end up doing it, just because Ratdog is a different outfit, but I think it'll be pretty close to that natural format that the Dead came up with.

JJ: Your role as guitarist in the Dead evolved very organically over the years, just as a product of you being there, but Ratdog seems to be moreless sculpted around your playing. How has that effected your playing?

BW: I know that I'm way more upfront with Ratdog, so I don't know. I don't change much of anything. It's just a matter of attitude or awareness. It's only a matter of percentages, but people are hanging a little bit more off of what I'm doing in this ensemble. That, I guess, would tend to frame what I'm doing a little more succinctly.

JJ: How has your guitar playing changed in recent years? Do you perceive it changing?

BW: Let me think about that. (Long pause.) I imagine it's changing a bit, but maybe I'm a little too close to the forest to be able to count the trees here. I do pretty much what I've always done, which is play architecturally. I try to paint with broad strokes, play big support lines for people to hang stuff off of. That has not changed. There are gonna be scales and modes that I play these days that I'm learning, say, from our sax player or whatever. But that's always gonna be in flux.

JJ: Continuing the metaphor of architecture, how do you envision this overall building as something different from the Dead?

BW: (Long pause.) Well, we got a sax, that's different. We got one drummer, rather than two. (Pause.) The biggest difference, I think, is that the Dead were - by and large - older musicians. I grew up with Jerry, I grew up with the tunes, with the influences that Jerry and I wordlessly could communicate about. "I'm going to a Bill Monroe kind of place here" as opposed to any of a number of other bluegrass kinds of places. Those kinds of differentiations. I'm never gonna share that with anybody else, so we don't have quite that library, that archive, of influences.

Over the years, I've been trying to - and will continue to try to - turn the guys in the band onto some of my influences and learn what their influences are. Especially the guys in the jazz background go way deep into stuff that I was never particularly aware of. In years to come, we may come up with an archive of influences that in some ways rivals what we had going in the Grateful Dead. But it's gonna take some time to build that up.

JJ: Do you tap into any degree of that comfort level when you play with the Other Ones?

BW: Ah, not so much. It's a simple matter of how much time I've spent with them. I haven't spent that much time with the Other Ones, which is also a revolving personnel situation as well. We didn't really get a chance to camp out and learn to live with each other.

JJ: Are there any plans for the Other Ones, for that project?

BW: Not right now. It's back-burnered.

JJ: A random question before tying up: how you do you feel about Dead cover bands, Dead tribute bands? Every town seems to have one now. BW: I'm kinda tickled about that. I expect they're having fun, 'cause we really had fun with that format, when we did that. If they're taking up where we left off, they've gotta be having fun as well, which is good: that's the whole point. There's a line of thought that holds that the Grateful Dead were the authors of the jamband aesthetic. Really, the jamband aesthetic is an outgrowth of American musical tradition: state a theme and work it. You find it in blues, you find it in jazz, you find it in the heart of American music. For the last couple of decades, that aestethic kind of disappeared into the background of general popular musical offerings. It's great to see that coming back out.

JJ: Where do you see the form going?

BW: I wish I could tell you. Actually, I'm not sure I wish I could tell you. I'm actually happy to let it just tell me.