Photo by Danny ClinchWith the new studio album from Keller & The Keels set for a May 25 release, we’ve decided to offer up this expanded version of Keller’s conversation with Bob Weir from 2009, which has not yet appeared here on the new site.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Bob’s and all of the members of The Dead.

I’ve had lots of conversations with Bobby since we first toured together in 2001. But interviewing him would of course be different. I’ve personally been on the answering side of interviews for the past decade. So preparing for this conversation, I was given a new respect for the work that journalists do.

In preparing for the interview, I realized that there are lots of questions I would like to ask Bobby but never would. I wonder if every journalist feels that way. Rather than getting too personal, I stuck to the questions that were close to me and that I thought would be interesting to Relix readers. Needless to say, I’m truly excited about this upcoming Dead tour and honestly hope that my wife will be okay with me going to every single show.

Ahhh… Dead Tour. Those were the days. Bobby was often the middle little spec onstage, as I was always in the back of the arena, stadium or lawn (wherever all the freaks dance). Bobby could make a ponytail look stylish and made it perfectly acceptable to wear shorts onstage. My excuse was, “Well, Bobby does it.” He was the Grateful sex symbol.

He would always adjust his guitar tone to be completely different from Jerry’s so that both tones would stand out. I definitely studied his guitar parts, which were never normal. Variations of chords and voicings were played in such a rhythmic pattern that to me, those intricate, interesting guitar parts were a large part of the overall sound and vibe to the Grateful Dead. From my recent State College Dead/Allman Brothers experience, it was Bobby’s voice that was that old familiar friend; that, to me, was the new distinctive sound of The Dead.

I was up at the State College benefit for Obama show. It was a real blast to see you guys having fun onstage. With no shows before or after that particular one, what was the setlist creation process like for that particular show?

I don’t want to say that we went for the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that everybody remembers ‘cause we figured we had a couple of days for a rehearsal. I sort of plan it out so that we’re doing stuff that’s not too much of a reach but at the same time it’s sort of challenging so that we feel like we’re actually doing something.

Right.

When we got into rehearsal, it got a little more ambitious. We started playing and stuff would come up and we started working on them and that would take us somewhere else and we’d start working on that. We might have gotten a little ahead of ourselves in terms of the event but for the most part we pulled off what we had in mind.

This is not typical of the way we’ve done things in the past where, back in the day, we used to just wing it. We’d get together three minutes before the show: “What do you feel like?… I think I wanna do this one…. didn’t we just do that?… Oh yeah, you’re right.” And it’d go like that. This is a little more premeditated.
Back when you were doing that, did you ever launch into a song that you might have played the night before by accident?

I’m sure it happened [laughs]. At least two nights before something like that. Our memories were good enough to keep us, I think, for the most part, from going straight back to the well. I think we’ll probably be a little more fastidious, if you will, about that kind of stuff this time around.

Are there going be some more rehearsals for the tour? Or is it going to be like a soundcheck kind of rehearsal?

I think we’re gonna put in a couple weeks at least, getting up for the tour.

What is the appeal this time around? What are you hoping for, expecting?

I think what we’re gonna do is focus at least preliminarily on our existing songbook. For instance, I’m probably not going bring a lot of RatDog material, I don’t think Bill is going bring a lot of new material, or Mickey.

So there’s not going to be a new Dead album with a single that you’ll play every night?

Not this time around. I won’t rule that out [laughs], but that’s a bit ambitious [more laughter].

Do you have a favorite venue?

No. Wherever inspiration strikes, wherever we hit the lock going, “That’s a good night,” doesn’t matter where we are. That’s where we wanna be.

After the famed Deer Creeek amphitheater gate-crashing incident, there was weirdness that plagued the rest of that summer tour in 1995 that led up to what would be the final show at Soldier Field. Did you have any sense going into that it would be the last Grateful Dead show?

I think we were all pretty much entered into the fact, to the notion, that it was going be the last one for a while. The crowd-control problems were getting to the point where we were just gonna have to shut down operations for a while. Let everything go on chill for a bit.

Do you ever get to Europe anymore?

RatDog was over in Europe, I think, about four or five years ago. And we may go again. It’s actually starting to look kind of attractive, given the exchange rate. It hasn’t come up with regard to The Dead. If this tour works well, it’s not unthinkable. We might try to do a summer tour maybe – not this coming year but the next one or something of that nature.

Is there any new project for you on the horizon? Any kind of new touring ideas that you’re thinking about?

Well, there’s no end to new ideas that I think about. I just did a gig last night with [drummer] Jay [Lane] and [bassist] Rob [Wasserman]. That’s a fun little outfit for me. There’s so much space in the trio format that it’s really attractive to me.

Any chance of seeing you and Rob do the acoustic duo again?

Well, that’s fun, too. I mean, in this upcoming tour there is going to be a lot of opportunity to explore an acoustic portion of the set. We haven’t spoken about it yet but it’s there, and for instance Phil has an upright. I might be able to talk him into bringing it on the tour, in which case, we might get around to doing stuff like that.

Have you and John Perry Barlow collaborated at all recently?

We got together for an afternoon a few months back and nothing much came of it. We were real rusty. Also, you can’t schedule those kinds of events so much as allow them to happen.

Is that how it goes down? You guys will sit down for a little while and try to come up with something or send ideas back and forth?

Well, it can happen in any conceivable way. But I think Barlow is going to be living out here off and on in Marin in the fairly near future, so I expect I’ll be seeing more of him. In that case, we’ll just let nature take its course.

How do you feel about people playing Grateful Dead music, like cover bands, things like that?

I’m kind of tickled. It’s interesting for me to listen to their take on stuff. I don’t think much about it though, really.

Have you embraced the whole downloading movement?

There are a number of facets of that whole situation. There’s the online for-sale stuff and the file-sharing stuff. File-sharing has made it so that, for instance with RatDog, it’s economically unfeasible to put together the time and expense that it takes to make a record and then produce a record and then as soon as the first one’s sold everyone who wants it has it. We just can’t afford to do that. So we don’t make records anymore which is one reason why we don’t write as many tunes as we might. We’re steadily looking into that.

Do you think the album is a thing of the past and all music will one day be electronic?

For most people who buy music, I think that getting it online is probably going to be the way they’re going to be doing it unless some new medium comes up. Buying a piece of plastic—it’s going to be unnecessary and unnecessarily cumbersome.

Do you think there’s any next kind of big musical movement that’s coming? Any kind of shift that’s happening?

I’m thinking… [huge silence]. Well, I don’t listen to a whole lot of popular music so I don’t know what the current trends are. Given that this country and this culture have long been pretty influential in the world of music, and given that this country and culture are going to be going through some fairly major changes in the next little while, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that manifest in our musical culture. And let me go on to say that that could have worldwide repercussions or influence.

Do you think that’s going to come through in the music?

Well, we’ll just see. There’s always an element in the musical culture and artistic culture, in general, to get preachy. Those people are gonna be hopping on their bandwagon but those kind of offerings don’t generally stoke a real trend. We’ll see what develops if this culture starts, in the broader picture, finding its way into a new direction. That’s bound to be reflected in the artistic culture. But that’s not going to be consciously done, it just has to occur.

Out of all the nonprofit charity work you’ve been a part of, which one right now are you most passionate about?

It’s a project I’ve been trying to put together that’s pretty vast in its scope that I’ve been working on with some folks. It would take way too long for me to tell you about it, but it involves the internet and, eventually, basically anything environmentally oriented but it incorporates social justice and has a pretty large scope. We would try to involve as many, if not all, of the environmental outfits and social justice outfits that there are. It would be something of a clearing house and then at the same time we would be trying to encourage green industry with a particular focus on trying to get that to happen in economically deprived areas of the world and putting green industry into areas where they could bring local and national economies forward.

What’s the name of it?

We don’t have a real name yet; we have an operating name but I’m not at liberty to get that far into it.

You have two young daughters. I have two children as well, one is four and one is eight months. Do you have any parenting advice for me?

[laughs] Just enjoy the ride. That’s the best thing you can do.

Speaking of enjoying the ride, you take your children on the bus with you. Did you ever get into home schooling?

Yeah.

How’s that going?

It’s going well and I’ll be able to bring my family with me on this coming tour, I think.

Are your girls into music at all?

Yeah.

Do you have any idea of what they’re listening to?

Right now they’re real big on Taylor Swift. And you know, she’s a good writer.

No Jonas Brothers or Hannah Montana?

They’ve been through the Hannah Montana phase and they still talk about her but they don’t listen that much to her. They’ve moved on.

Are your daughters studying music at all, playing any instruments?

Not right now, but I think soon. I get the feeling. One of my daughters is starting to play the piano, she’s pretty much teaching herself and I’m not pushing. But she’s been able to find some stuff that she can do and actually both of them are doing a little of that.

If they want to play music professionally, do you think you’ll support that or do you think you’ll try to get them into something else?

One of them has actually been in a few productions locally and is doing pretty well with musical theater and she likes to sing and dance; that’s actually more what she’s into. She plays piano for her own amusement but as a sort of pursuit she’s more involved with musical theater stuff. I support that. I’m not going to try to stand in the way of that train. My parents actually did and they got nowhere with it.

That could have actually pushed you further into it.

Yeah. I don’t want to push them, ‘cause they’ll probably rebel against that but at the same time they seem to be drifting that way, so I’m not surprised.