The Other One: The Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir Page #3

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weren't a birth family,

they weren't an adopted family,

these were his family.

And he was very close to them,

they were close to one another.

The relationship between

Jerry and Bob, I think most of the time,

it was that kind of big brother,

little brother thing.

You know, we all know that Weir joined

the band when he was, like, 17.

I think the guys in the band

were his family.

And same with Jerry, you know?

He didn't have a strong family at home.

You know, he...

That was his family.

And the experiences that they went

through together made them closer.

You know, Jerry and I

didn't need to talk

to know what each other was thinking

or how each other was feeling.

Most of the stuff we talked about

was horseshit, uh...

just to keep each other amused.

We were bros.

And we were on a huge adventure,

and we were loving it.

- Thanks, Murray.

- Hey, no problem. Thank you.

- Love you, Bobby.

- Hello.

Hey, Bobby, have a good show.

Love you, Bobby.

- See you in a bit.

- You bet, thanks.

Compass card is spinning

Helm is swinging to and fro

Ooh

Where's the dog star?

Ooh

Where's the moon?

You're a lost sailor

Been too long at sea

Now the shorelines beckon

Yeah, there's a price for being

Free

Okay, now here it is.

A long time ago, I lived here.

We used to hang on the steps a lot.

This tree wasn't nearly as big,

so there was a lot of sun on the steps.

Was it the same color?

No, this neighborhood has been sort of...

- Repainted?

- It's been repainted and rebuffed.

- Wait, who lived here with you?

- Uh, the whole band.

This is the house of a popular

local band which plays hard rock music.

They call themselves the Grateful Dead.

They live together comfortably

in what could be called "affluence."

710 Ashbury,

it was like that famous Bob song,

"We can share the women,

we can share the wine."

But we weren't doing so much wine,

but mostly pot.

We were a family living in a house.

We were a business,

we were a band.

I was a city boy suddenly

for the first time.

This was Pigpen's room in here.

- And then this was your room.

- Yeah.

I had a big brass bed

against that wall.

It was my chore to answer the door.

I was the only guy in the band

with any manners.

I think this might have been

where Phil lived.

I'm a little hazy

on who was where.

This might have been where Jerry lived.

Jerry used to practice a lot in that room.

The Grateful Dead's concept

of a new style of life is,

in most cases,

drawn from the drug experience.

The people that live in the community

and, you know,

play around with dope and stuff like that,

they don't have wars, you know?

And they don't have a lot of problems

that the larger society has.

You know, we were, sort of,

relatively famous around here.

My roommate was Neal Cassady.

He lived there with us.

Now, Neal Cassady is a guy...

um, that I'll tell you girls about

when you're a little older,

'cause it's hard to understand.

The guy lived in a lot of places,

a lot of different dimensions.

He could hold a conversation

with a table full of people.

It would be one-on-one conversations

with the whole table.

One line that he would voice

would be part of a totally different

conversation with everybody else.

He was an amazing man.

Neal was like our speed freak uncle.

And he was good friends with Jack Kerouac

and Allen Ginsberg,

and what he really liked to do

was to help us fill in the gaps

in our educations,

about Beat literature,

about the multidimensional universe

that we live in,

and 1,000 other themes that had to do

with driving fast cars on a nice day.

He taught me to drive.

I try not to practice this method

of driving too much these days,

'cause I don't want my kids

to try to learn it.

But he could drive through

rush hour traffic in San Francisco

at 50, 55 miles an hour.

Never stopping for a stop sign,

never a stop light.

Somehow he never hit anything.

He just knew where everything was

and what was coming

and knew how to be in the right place

at the right time.

But he lived wherever he wanted to live.

His body was here,

but his spirit, his soul, his...

Whatever it is that we are,

it could be wherever he wanted to be.

You just had to see it to...

see it.

Neal influenced me greatly.

He embodied the American Zen.

I got to watch this enough,

so that...

I like to think

that I kind of picked up some of that.

The first song I ever wrote

was "The Other One".

And Neal Cassady helped me sort it out.

This was my first real adventure

with songwriting.

It was a story that was trying to be told.

I was just being the character

that I saw in the movie...

and the character in the movie

was kind of a cartoon version of me.

Spanish lady, come to me

She lays on me this rose

It rainbows spiral round and round

It trembles and explodes

It left a smoking crater of my mind

I like to blow away

But the heat come round and busted me

For smilin' on a cloudy day

The first verse ends in,

"The heat came round and busted me

for smiling on a cloudy day."

That was autobiographical.

I threw a water balloon

in the vicinity of a cop,

and, of course, went to jail for that.

Escapin' through the lily fields

I came across an empty space

It trembled and exploded

Left a bus stop in its place

The bus come by and I got on

That's when it all began

I was going back

to the good ship, Furthur,

the bus that I left home on.

"And there was cowboy Neal at the

wheel of the bus to never-ever land."

There was cowboy Neal at the wheel

Of a bus to never-ever land

Comin', comin', comin' around

Comin' around

And I knew I had the verse

and I had the song,

and we played it the next night.

And that was the last night on the tour

and then we came home.

And when we came home,

we came home to the news

that Neal Cassady had died.

He'd checked out that night

while I was writing the song.

He died walking the railroad tracks

somewhere near San Miguel de Allende

in Mexico.

And so it didn't

take me long to figure out that

Neal was there with me that night.

He was also, at that point,

free of the bonds of space,

so he could be there with me,

though he was busy dying,

or dead, in Mexico.

That verse is a little bit of him alive,

I think, whenever I sing it.

Wait, where are you?

I don't think you're there, honey.

- Mmm-mmm.

- Who is that?

It's Jerry and Pigpen.

He's not there.

- Oh, it's because he's not dead.

- Oh, yeah, hello...

Right.

Truckin'

Got my chips cashed in

Keep truckin'

Like the do-dah man

Together

More or less in line

Just keep truckin'

Oh, oh, oh

In 1970, the Grateful Dead put out

the two seminal albums

of their career, really.

The ones that defined them

for most of the audience

that would like them

for the rest of their career.

Workingman's Dead

and American Beauty.

And American Beauty

had some interesting tunes

that Bob was primarily responsible for.

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