Bob Weir

For years, I've held forth with the opinion that every artist of any stripe is first and foremost a storyteller.

And the story can be impressionistic or it can be linear in nature.

And I'm comfortable with either of them, though when I set pen to paper, more often than not,

It comes out more or less linear.

I see songs as little movies, short movies, and I try to let the characters as fully as possible express themselves and let the story develop so that there's intrigue and all that kind of stuff.

Christ, I don't know how to address that.

Well, I can't deny that I had a fair bit of either personal experience with drugs, alcohol, or whatever, or close friends of mine had intense experiences with them.

So I guess I know what I'm talking about to some degree when I'm helping a character flesh himself out in that regard.

I was ready for anything.

Come on.

Um, I was 17, 18, uh, and the hay to Ashboro was popping.

Now this was the, uh, this was the summer of 66 spring and summer of 66.

That was the real summer of love.

The 67, uh, the media made it into something that we didn't recognize, you know, called attention to it.

And every, everything that had rattled loose in, uh, in the rest of the country, uh,

Ended up in the Haight-Ashbury, and things went kind of sideways there by then.

But in 66, the Haight-Ashbury was a youth ghetto, but it was a joyful place.

Well, for instance, little things like I always go outdoors to clip my fingernails and toenails, and he did too.

There are little mannerisms that you would think that you'd pick up by watching, but they were there.

We walked, we carried ourselves the same way.