Interesting Weir interview (from 2011)

In the You Learn Something New Every Day category....I never knew Bob first dosed on Jerry's BDay!

This is a pretty good interview...covers the basic questions (and the majority here have read the answers dozens of times), but Weir provides some nice

commentary:

http://jasobrecht.com/bob-weir-psychedelic-san-francisco-birth-grateful-...

Some snippets:

"...We were heavily into hallucination and stuff like that. We got better and better at it as time wore on, so that we could take a pretty massive dose and hang in there after a while.

At what point did playing gigs become what Jerry described as “religious services of the new age”?

[Long pause.] There was that component to it from the start. The first time I dropped acid was on Jerry’s birthday in 1965. Even then, the inner-quest was what it was about for us. And we never dropped that notion, it’s just that we added on other notions of what the whole experience could amount to as we developed our relationship with the Kesey outfit, for instance.

Did you play the first time you dropped?

...Not the first time, no. Our instruments weren’t around...."

[Since Jorma and Bob are a current Zone topic...]

"Who were the most innovative players to some out of the first generation of San Francisco bands?

Well, certainly Jorma. Jorma was just a horse of a different color in every regard. His major influences on the guitar were mostly pianists [laughs], something that I guess I sort of inadvertently adopted from him, though they were different pianists, but nonetheless. He had such an interesting take on what guitar was all about.

Plus he had the influences of Blind Blake and Rev. Gary Davis.

Right. He was pretty much our guitarist scholar, as well as having a unique slant on what guitar amounted to as an interpretive instrument.

Were you edging toward psychedelic playing before Jorma Kaukonen?

Um, I don’t know what the chronology is there, because I lost track of Jorma as he was beginning to electrify. This was for about six months after he disappeared from the folk circuit. We had heard that he was playing up in the city with this band Jefferson something or other, but we didn’t get a chance to see him. It was a treat to check back in with him when we finally did and see what he was up to. If there was anyone that I was listening to or who was influencing me – or us – at that point, it was Jorma, because we all had a pretty heady respect for him."