_Photo by Jay Blakesberg_

Bob Weir and Trey Anastasio discussed their preparations for this summer’s Fare Thee Well shows in a new piece in The New Yorker. The guitarists revealed that they have met up on four different occasions to rehearse for the shows, including one instance with Phil Lesh.

The pair shared a few details on the meetings, which have apparently taken place at Weir’s cottage in Stinson Beach in Northern California, somewhere on the West Coast and at a studio in New York City. Weir told the publication, “We holed up for three days in early March, out in Stinson, where I have a cottage on the beach” before Anastasio then “came out to the Coast for a day to work with Phil and me. Then we put in another three days. He’s also hired this kid named Jeff Tanski, who’s a kind of wunderkind of the Broadway world, a keyboard player, who’s written charts to seventy of our songs. He’s really bearing down on this.”

Anastasio then joked about that process, adding, “Ninety! And by the time we’re done I bet it’s a hundred… I’m doing this because I don’t want to be the problem. Bob and I joked that the first song I sing ought to be ‘Dire Wolf,’ which has the chorus ‘Don’t murder me.’”

Weir told The New Yorker that the band will probably play eighteen songs per show, noting, “Most nights, the stadiums are giving us five hours, but I’m not sure we’re going to last for five hours…Even back in the late sixties and early seventies, we didn’t play for five hours on many nights, despite being famous for doing that. You do it one time, and you get famous for it.”

Weir also said, “We’re going to take as many tunes for a stroll as we can…I know basically what I’m up to, but whatever I’m playing is going to be subtly altered by what Trey plays. If Jerry was developing a solo, I could intuit where he was headed, and as long as I played coy and like I didn’t really get what he was getting at, then, when he arrived at that place, I could be there with a strong leading tone that would necessarily take where he was going somewhere else. Most often, it delighted him. Sometimes it enraged him.”