_Photo by Erik Kabik_

Bob Weir shared a few thoughts on the upcoming Fare Thee Well shows, Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio, the soon-to-be-released documentary on his life, LSD, tie-dye and more in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal.

On the subject of Anastasio’s participation in the core four’s final show’s together, Weir noted that he and the Phish guitarist had been practicing together, saying:

I’ve played a fair bit with him in the last couple months. We put in a few days at my little beach house in Stinson Beach [in California], then another day in San Rafael at Phil [Lesh]’s place, then a couple days holed up in New York with Trey in a studio. He studied Jerry’s approach all along. He’s a follower of Jerry’s musicality. That said, he’s a schooled and studied musician, and he’s going to have a lot to offer. He’s not going to be parroting Jerry, because there’s no point in that. At the same time he’s going to try and ring those lofty bells that Jerry was able to ring, and I’m sure he’s going to reach some of them.

Weir also shed some morel right on the preparations for the Fare Thee Well shows, adding:

We’ve had a group text going on where people were invited to say if there were songs that they absolutely had to play or absolutely wanted to not play. There hasn’t been any of the latter. We compiled a list of probably 120 or 130 tunes. There’s no way to get to them all. We’ll knock it back to 70 or 80. In rehearsal, if we pull up a tune and it seems like it’s going to take a lot of work, we’ll put it off and go with something that everyone has a better handle on. When we have enough tunes that we’re confident enough to trot out on stage, we’ll come back to the higher hanging fruit.

Weir also discussed The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, a documentary on his life that is set to premiere on Netflix later this month. When asked about his previous statements that he made the film in order to avoid writing a book, Weir said:

I came to the realization that there is something of a story there. There’s an arc to it, the end of which we haven’t seen yet. But working with [director] Mike Fleiss and his people sort of drew the stories out of me. You look at yourself in the mirror daily, and having done it all your life it’s impossible to tell what you look like. To have to sit down and tell a bunch of stories in a concentrated period of time, it drew a new focus for me, which will help when I do get around to writing the book.

Weir and WSJ talked about a number of other subjects, including the guitarists early experimentation with LSD, his distaste for tie-dye, the hero worship of Jerry Garcia, his prowess with the ladies and more. On the subject of acid, Weir explained:

First off, LSD could backfire at any minute or any night. I pretty much put a year into it, taking LSD about once a week. It put us all in a profound state of disorientation, let me tell you. If nothing else, finding our way through that disorientation was nothing less than an act of faith. We just had to find the thread and follow it, and we had to trust our intuitions. So after about a year of that, I found that I wasn’t going much in the way of new places, so it didn’t seem worth the trouble anymore. Every now and again, I would get dosed. Because not everybody else found themselves done with it as early as I did, and the rest of the guys could be, let’s say, evangelical about the use of LSD. So they would take it upon themselves to put me there anyway….That’s invariably when it happened. “Oh, this again. We’ll see what it has to offer this time.” Not like you can do anything about it. The show must go on. I think the last time I got dosed was probably in the early ’80s. If it wasn’t one of the guys in the band, it was one of the peripheral people who would recruit me, as you say.

Weir’s full interview with the Wall Street Journal can be found here.