Producing Bob Weir’s documentary, I got to know the man behind the le…

As someone who made his bones writing about rock stars for a living, I have always warily approached any new encounter with famous musicians. Producing a documentary about the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir in 2014 was a special case, though. He was ensconced in my pantheon of the 20th century’s greatest rock musicians. I had trepidations that my bubble would burst. So, I was greatly relieved to find that my expectations were exceeded.

Like so many postboomer music fans, for me the Grateful Dead were far more than just another band. The Dead represented an ethos and a value system that I held dear. They nurtured a community around them, a travelling circus of loyalists. They gave away their music for free at their shows. They never sold out for radio airplay.

The Dead were the great American band, but my producing partner Mike Fleiss and I felt that Weir had never really gotten his due, given he had shared the stage for 30 years with Jerry Garcia, a secular saint whose aura only grew after his death in 1995. Weir had co-written so many key songs in the canon: Cassidy, (That’s it for) The Other One, Jack Straw. His melodically inventive rhythm guitar playing remains sui generis, a perfect counterpoint to Garcia’s exploratory solos. And he was, of course, centre stage for all 2,500 Dead shows.

Despite our love of Weir and the Dead, we were determined not to make a hagiographic puff piece. On our maiden voyage to meet Weir in Mill Valley, Calif., we sharpened our tactics, figuring out how to ease into touchy subjects, especially his relationship with Garcia. In his youth, Weir could be a scold to interlocutors, shrugging off questions with a glib joke. We needed the unvarnished truth, but only if he was willing.

Our first meeting took place at TRI Studios, Weir’s recording complex. That first day, we put Weir in a chair and tossed him softballs about sharing the bill with Otis Redding at the Fillmore West and his love of the Meter’s drummer Ziggy Modeliste.

Weir was expansive and affable, but his studio, we felt, was too sterile an environment; we needed to get him on his native ground, and we asked to shoot at his house, where no other camera crew had ever been permitted to enter.

Weir’s house, which he shared with his wife Natascha and his two daughters, was a modest hippie abode tucked in the hills of Mount Tamalpais.

It was the same house Weir had lived in since the early seventies, when he got his first big cheque for his solo album Ace. There were no gold records on the walls, no dayglow concert posters. In his office, Weir kept about 50 guitars on a high shelf, as well as some mementos from his storied career, including his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame statuette, which was missing its tiny gold disc. On one wall was a framed photo of Garcia, standing in a field with a guitar in his hands.

There was nothing that screamed “rock icon” here. Despite his powerful legacy, Weir was not a man who dwelled in the past. It had been decades since the first iteration of the Dead had disbanded, and he had played hundreds of shows since then. “The past is past,” he told us off-camera. “What’s the point of living there?”

It was clear that Weir had big love and respect for Garcia, but that Garcia’s addictions had been a burden on the Dead enterprise for years. At one point in the eighties, Garcia had asked Weir to hold his drug stash so his bandmate could titrate his intake. “I had become Jerry’s bag man,” he told us.

As a musician, Weir told us that Garcia “embodied all the great traditions of American music.” At one point during the afternoon, Weir pulled out an acoustic guitar and, unbidden, began to play a Bob Wills song, then segued into a delta blues shouter from Blind Willie Johnson, then on to Howlin’ Wolf.

It was an eye-opener for us as fanboys. Weir’s musical knowledge dug just as deep into the tributaries of American music as Garcia, and had also alchemized the Dead’s blend of country, folk, blues and rock.

After our house visit, we hit the road with Weir, taking him to the house at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco where the band lived during the late sixties, when it became the counterculture’s artistic salon. It was the first time Weir had visited the house since then, and it evoked powerful memories for him.

Weir walked us to the bedroom that he shared with Neal Cassady, the Beat exile whom Jack Kerouac had immortalized in his 1957 novel On The Road. Cassady became a kind of mentor to Weir. “Neal knew no limits, because he didn’t see where the horizon line was,” Weir told me once. “I wanted to live my life like that, without fear or boundaries. Kind of a challenging roommate, however. He never slept.”

Weir was something of a stoic, even when discussing the tragedies of his life. He had seen band members and girlfriends die young, had witnessed ugly scenes at Dead shows that had devolved into violent riots in the 90s. It was only when we transitioned into Garcia’s death that he betrayed any outward hint of melancholy, mainly because he hasn’t had formal closure with his bandmate in the end.

Their last words to each other were exchanged after the Dead’s last show at Soldier Field in 1995. As they were walking offstage, Garcia slapped Weir on the back and said, “Always a hoot.” Shortly thereafter, a chasm has opened up for Weir, one he filled by doing the only thing he knew: playing shows, which he did right up until his cancer diagnosis this past summer.

Our documentary, which we called The Other One, wrapped in 2013. Since then, I had only sporadic contact with Weir. A few years back, he invited me to see him at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. After the show, he told me he was pleased with the documentary, and credited the film with stoking renewed interest in his music, which eventually led to the triumphant series of shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas with Dead and Company.

I’m not sure he needed us to engender that final act of his career, but it felt good to have been some small part of that renaissance. When we parted ways that night, he told me he would see down the line at some point. We never did, but it didn’t matter. Weir had given us so much of himself, as he had given so much to the millions of fans that witnessed him across a 60-year career. We won’t see his like again.