Bob Weir and Trey Anastasio Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Bob Weir visited New York recently to prepare for the Fare Thee Well tour, the reunion, last performance, and pension plan of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, the others being the bass player Phil Lesh and the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. Weir was rehearsing with Trey Anastasio, the guitar player from Phish, who will occupy the role of the band’s lead guitarist, which, to use a theatre term, was created by Jerry Garcia. Weir and Anastasio met for a few days in a studio on an upper floor of a building in the far West Fifties, where the car dealers are.

It was their fourth set of meetings. “We holed up for three days in early March, out in Stinson, where I have a cottage on the beach,” Weir said, meaning Stinson Beach, in Northern California. “Me and Bob and two archtop guitars,” Anastasio said, a few days later. Weir said that 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.”

“Ninety! And by the time we’re done I bet it’s a hundred,” Anastasio said. “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 was waiting one evening for a taxi in front of his hotel. He was on his way to dinner. There was a line of hotel guests ahead of him, so, after politely answering questions from a reporter for TMZ, he walked to a nearby avenue to catch a cab downtown. “We’re going to take as many tunes for a stroll as we can,” he said in the cab. “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.”

On the tour, the band will probably play eighteen songs in a show, Weir said. “Most nights, the stadiums are giving us five hours, but I’m not sure we’re going to last for five hours,” he said. “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.”

The cab delivered Weir to an old private club in midtown. Only two other tables in the dining room were occupied, and no one paid any attention to him. He said that, while the Grateful Dead were known for their improvisations, “the playing was done in the service of the songs.” In the case of “Dark Star,” a chordal vamp, “the lyric suggested a landscape and topography that we then explored, often to our wonderment.” “The Other One,” built on a rampaging modal figure, “was an adventure movie. In ‘Wharf Rat’ ”—a story told by a vagrant, which Anastasio likens to “a piece of film noir”—“we poked around the desolate streets of Skid Row. We all inhabited the stories. If we weren’t singing, then we were telling the story with our hands. If I was singing, then I wasn’t even there. I stepped out of my body and let the character own it. There’s a lot of playing being done, but it was the drama of the event, the parade of characters that came out and told their stories, that held people’s attention.”

After dinner, at his hotel, Weir played for a friend a recording of himself singing a cowboy lament called “Blue Mountain.” At fifteen, Weir worked the summer at the Bar Cross Ranch, in Wyoming, which was owned by the parents of his friend John Perry Barlow, who became a Grateful Dead lyricist. The bunkhouse at the Bar Cross is where Weir first heard “Blue Mountain.” He would “play guitar, and the cowboys would sing, and I would try to figure out the chords,” he said. “Either I’d get it right or they’d say, ‘Nah, kid, that’s not the way it goes.’ ” After the song was finished, he excused himself, saying that he had to travel in the morning up the Hudson to Rhinebeck, to record in a studio there, and he had to be up early to catch a train. ♦