By the end of the first set at The Grand, the band reached critical mass. With Weir stoking the engine with his angular, immediately identifiable if sometimes downright weird rhythm guitar playing, guitarist Karan cast dancing silvery lines over the burbling, driving sound. The capacity crowd writhed and shook, half not old enough to have seen the Grateful Dead play and remember it. A four-year-old girl chased a balloon in the back, running underfoot of the dancers.

“He has a carefully crafted style of rhythm that was like the missing puzzle piece in Jerry and Phil,” Lane says of Weir. “It’s almost like if you take one part out of it, probably any part, and it’s kind of weird. So when it was just him without the lead guitar in there… I came from a very strict funk/R&B background, and this – not knowing the Grateful Dead – it was like jamming along with one little piece of it.”

Among the three guitars Weir played at The Grand was the Parber Telecaster, an instrument with a back-story worthy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. A few years ago, Weir, who was raised by adopted parents, met his birth father, a retired Air Force colonel who never knew he fathered the child who had been put up for adoption and had raised four sons of his own. All of Jack Parber’s boys were musical, but the oldest, James Parber, actually played professionally, working local clubs as lead guitarist with Lawrence Hammond and the Whiplash Band and a group led by former Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen vocalist Billy C. Farlow.

In 1979, James came down with spinal cancer and spent the next 12 years going through an agonizing, slow death under his parents’ care. After he died, his family divided instruments among themselves. After Weir made contact with his father and struck up a warm, endearing friendship, he and his wife used to take the kids up to spend the night at the Parber’s house. Every time he did, he foundhimself having to step over or push aside a beat up guitar case containing a mangled electric guitar, pickups off the moorings, strings all broken. He finally asked the Parbers if he could take the guitar to have his tech crew look it over and they replied something to the effect of “What took you so long?”

Rehearsing with the group that had decided to reclaim the band’s original name and go out as the Dead in 2003, Weir took the guitar to its Novato headquarters. His roadie returned in a few minutes with the guitar
cleaned up, the pickups properly mounted and a new set of strings. Weir, who had been having problems pulling the band’s sound together, tried on the guitar.

“The Telecaster has a thin, reedy sound,” Weir said. “It was instantly perfect. It cleared out a lot of clutter and made the whole band sound gel.”

Noticing a small five-figure serial number on the back, Weir asked the roadie to inquire at the Fender factory. Yes, indeed, they reported back, that is an original first-year, 1956 production model Fender Telecaster,
worth as much as $75,000. Weir has played the guitar on every show since. James Louis Parber never made the big time, but his guitar did. His brother Christopher Parber – Weir’s newly discovered half-brother – was backstage at The Grand now that he’s family.

The 90 dates RatDog played last year represents a schedule as heavy as the Dead’s at that band’s peak. Sears and his management partner, New Jersey-based impresario John Scher, have already booked three nights at New York’s Beacon Theater in April and Sears was on the bus before the Grand show talking to Weir about doing an acoustic solo appearance at the annual Merlefest at Doc Watson’s farm. Weir apparently likes to work just about as much as he can.

“I keep getting better at it, too,” he said.

The adopted child of a kindly, privileged couple, Weir was raised in stately Atherton, an exclusive suburb outside San Francisco. He played football and track in high school, but he was never successful at school and quit entirely after joining the band that became the Grateful Dead. He quite literally grew up in the Grateful Dead.

Weir was the baby of the group and his movie star good looks and shy, inarticulate manner made him a heart pang to many of the ladies in his audience. As one of the band’s two main vocalists, Weir sculpted the front end of the Dead’s sound both as lead vocalist and harmonizing with Garcia. He sang lead on many of the band’s most well-known pieces, specializing in rave ups such as “Samson and Delilah,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and “Truckin.’”

Through virtually the entire 30-year career of the Grateful Dead, Weir also worked as a solo artist. With the long, slow evolution of RatDog, he is comfortably ensconced in a creative environment where he is entirely supported by his associates and doesn’t have to exercise any leadership. He is the rare example of a hands-off bandleader. At rehearsal, he shows up and drummer Lane has picked songs from the Dead songbook for Weir to sing. RatDog rehearsal is a distinctly low-key affair; no roadies running around setting up equipment and doing errands, no girlfriends or anybody hanging out. Weir operates the band’s sound system himself. He is an entirely low-maintenance rock star.

On the Dead’s last summer tour, for example, the band booked medium-price hotels in an effort to save money. As the bus rolled out of Boston for New York, one of the other members decided he wanted to stay behind and catch a symphony matinee. He had his family with him, so he had checked into a four-star hotel suite, which he kept for his stayover, as well as renting another one for his family, who went ahead to New York without him. While his bandmate was renting two expensive hotel suites in two major cities, Weir was asleep on the bus. When the band arrived at the medium-priced hotel in Manhattan, he declined to wake up and check-in. Instead he went with the bus to the New Jersey motel where the crew would be staying and continued sleeping on the bus in the Holiday Inn parking lot.

At The Grand, RatDog swings into a mighty version of “He’s Gone,” a song originally written about a dishonest business associate ( “he’ll steal your face right off your head” ) that now inevitably recalls Garcia. Friends say it took Weir years to even begin to process the loss of the extraordinary figure who loomed over his band and their lives for so long. He went for three years without a lead guitarist in RatDog. Dave Ellis has joined the fray at The Grand, taking the stage with his old comrades in the second set for the first time since he left the band five years earlier. He and Brooks give a honking horn section to “That’s It for the Other One,” to their own great, obvious delight.

Weir leaves the stage and the band slowly drifts into some authentic hard bop, Ellis and Brooks screeching and belching, Chimenti clanging underneath. Off the road with RatDog, these guys can often be found playing jazz in their old haunts like Bruno’s in the Mission district. RatDog has suddenly, seamlessly transformed into Alphabet Soup. It was never far from the surface with these guys, but now they were swimming in it, blowing molten jazz. The kelp dancers in the back drooped. Ellis and Brooks tossed fiery lines back and forth. The music made an intense glow and went somewhere else. It was a fabulous tangent, the sort of exciting, spur-of-the-moment sidetrip that originally made the Dead famous, a step outside the rest of the evening’s fare and the only real musical surprise all night.

The band brought the concert to a rousing finale, with a two-song encore of The Beatles’ “Revolution” and the Dead’s anthemic “Touch of Grey.” The audience filed out sated. The huge basement dressing room filled with old friends and family. Weir’s wife, Natascha, busied herself, while Weir bummed a cigarette and tossed back a bottle of Guinness. The crew started loading out the gear and finished producing the three-CD recording of the evening’s performance, a hundred copies of which are sold to the crowd at every show and delivered within 15 minutes of the conclusion. The buzz and hum that attend a happy backstage after a good gig is easy to bathe in. Weir, however, has something on his mind.

He is annoyed at the reception accorded the band’s jazz diversion, especially the Deadheads who went limp ( “I hate those guys,” he said, “they only like it when it’s an old Dead song.” ). Weir is not going to stifle his creativity – or his band’s – on the whims of an audience. If they don’t come along on the ride with him and the band, what’s the point of them being there? He is not in the entertainment business; he’s a musician.

“Jazz deserves to live,” he said. “Jazz musicians play with open ears. On a good night, the Dead listened to each other. The jambands today, they listen to each other as hard as they can. But they’re young and they don’t have the vocabulary to take it downtown and drive it around.”

It wasn’t long after midnight that the coach pulled out of the alley behind The Grand for the four-hour drive to Reno and the next night’s show.