Bob Weir Talks to Dan Rather About the Origins of the Grateful Dead

The great Bob Weir sat down with veteran reporter Dan Rather of The Big Interview to talk about the origins of the Grateful Dead, specifically how the band first got together at the Palo Alto music store where Jerry Garcia taught guitar and banjo. He and some friends heard Garcia playing guitar and joined in. Weir mentioned that they played so well together that they decided to keep it going.

Bob Weir talks about how he met enigmatic musician Jerry Garcia and formed the legendary band Grateful on The Big Interview!

The original iteration of the band was a band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. After one album, they expanded the band and called it the Grateful Dead, a band that really knew how to put on a show.

We were real good at relating to a live audience and that wasn’t there in the studio. It was hard for for us to find a point of focus in the studio, playing for a machine playing, for a for a board like this. We never got all that good at it. We made a couple of pretty good records or a few good records, actually, but what …we were good at was stating a theme, then taking it for a little walk in the woods before a live audience.