Here we are, on a quiet Tuesday afternoon, slowly thawing out from a rare winter storm in Texas. There was a brief panic, pandemonium in the streets and in the aisles of our local and venerable HEBs, those bastions of Texan-American consumerism, as men and women, no doubt psychically scarred from the colossal ratfuck of the Great Snowpocalypse of 2021, scrambled to hoard packaged goods, pre-cooked meals, bottled water, and yes, toilet paper. Ted Cruz fled the state, as he tends to do when the weather threatens that a political leader might just have to provide actual leadership, almost certainly for the beach again. This time we were told it was to Laguna. Honestly, I can’t blame him. I wanted to flee, too, and would have, were I not dog-sitting for an amigo wise enough to plan a trip to Costa Rica before he started a new job.  

All of which is to say, it’s cold. And I hate the cold. But having a few days to sit around not doing much but pace the halls and listen to music, I did get deep into reflecting on the music and mythology of The Grateful Dead, as I attempted to synthesize Bob Weir moving on to the Great Jam in the Sky.

Back when I was dabbling in journalism I made a conscious decision to veer as far away from writing about music as I possibly could, mostly because it hurts my brain to try to put into words something which to me can only be heard and felt. Naturally, I joined the sporting press, where I didn’t have to think too hard to spit out 1500 words about how a game played out, the glory and failure, the bungled coaching decisions, etc and so forth. It was easy and carefree, just jot down a few thoughts about what happened to whom, where, why and how. Journalism 101, dammit! Pretty basic stuff. Having a sports column in a newspaper was fun, though, in that I could and quite often did piss people off with my opinions. Not a week went by without someone calling the publisher demanding my firing. Who the hell was I to write about how evil George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in the goddam sports section? Visceral outrage. Good, clean fun.

That was a long time ago and I’m not the angry idealistic kid I was back then. Now I’m an angry adult, but the idealism was gang raped out of me a long time ago, by a society and culture at war with itself. Talking about my own music is hard enough. Writing about it feels almost impossible, other than the purely technical stuff about what we did in the studio or the circumstances that led to a song being written. To talk about the Dead with any one not on the bus… hell, I might as well staple my balls to the carpet. I know, because I tried. Not to staple my balls to anything mind you… although one time I did drive a staple through my thumb. I was in 6th grade and my mom was talking to someone on the phone and saw me do it, right in front of her. Not that I was doing it intentionally. I didn’t think there was a chance in hell a staple would actually go thru my thumb meat and close but that’s what happened. My mom dropped the phone and drove me straight to my dad’s office, where he pulled a staple remover out of his desk and grabbed my hand. Up until the point he pulled the staple out, there had been no pain. Zero. Just a tremendous building pressure from the blood around the staple that had gone into the meat and closed. He gave it a good yank and it came right out, followed by a spray of blood like something from a horror movie, which I thought was pretty funny considering it was just two tiny holes in my thumb. Once that pressure was released and the blood started flowing, that’s when the pain came. At any rate, he made a phone call and sent me across the street to a doctor and I got a tetanus shot.

My point was that I’ve tried talking about the Dead to people who aren’t into the Dead and it’s a waste of time. Not everything is for everyone, and I get that. I actually like that. I can say, though, that for nearly 30 years, the vast majority of friendships in my life have a love of The Grateful Dead in common. No small thing. And now Bob Weir is gone, and one more link in a great cosmic chain is broken. The music will never stop though. Again, no small thing. He was a hell of a guitar player. My god. Go listen closely to the jam on Tennessee Jed from the run of shows they did in Europe in 1972. Jerry and Phil are going wild, of course, but the stuff Bob is doing underneath… hot damn it blows my mind. I’m glad he started to get some well-deserved praise in his later years, after all the years of jokes about the little shorts and summer shoes. And let no one forget his brief foray into the culinary arts, with the short-lived but no doubt tasty Weir’s Otherworld Snake Oil sauces. Bobby-Cue!

I really wanted to go see the Dead when they came to St Louis in 1995, as that’s as close as they got to Stillwater, OK but my mom wouldn’t let me. A month later, Jerry was gone. That’s the way it goes. Thank goodness they had the foresight to record the shows. Becoming a Deadhead and collecting and trading tapes, and then CDs… man, that’s something these kids today will never know. Pretty wild. Kinda sad. But the music is alive and that’s what matters. I sound like an old man. Sometimes I even feel like one.

If you get confused, listen to the music play…

Adios, Bob. Thanks for the tunes.