Bob Weir

I was 15.

Yeah, when I was a little kid, my folks were sort of in the horsey community, and also we used to vacation up in Squaw Valley, which in the wintertime was, in California here, in the wintertime it was a ski resort, in the summertime it was a cattle ranch.

And during the summers when we were up there, there was a riding stable that we spent a lot of time at.

And the old cowboys who ran the riding stable, a couple of them took a shine to me and sort of taught me how to ride and some of the basic skills of cowboying, you know, how to cut cattle and stuff like that.

I never did really learn how to row very well.

But by the time I was 9 or 10, I had a pretty good grasp of the basics.

I've actually wondered that myself.

It occurs to me that I lived that lifestyle for a little bit, not just that summer, but I'd go back out there and work with Barlow.

Part of working with Barlow when I was...

doing that was we'd live on the ranch and we had the ranch to run.

And if I helped out, we'd have more time to write.

So I spent a lot of time doing that kind of stuff.

And I kind of got steeped in that tradition a little bit.

And also, for what it's worth, when I was a kid living there in the bunkhouse, there were, you know, in the evening, the old boys would, they'd pop a cork and they'd tell stories and sing songs.

And I was the kid with the guitar, so I was their accompaniment.

And so I learned a bunch of that stuff and, as I say, got steeped in that tradition.

And I just sort of carried it around in my hip pocket for the rest of my days.

But it's not so much the songs that stuck with me as the delivery and particularly the storytelling aspect of singing those songs, of putting them across.

Well, that's kind of my approach.

That's what I'm most comfortable with.