Miami Herald
February 4, 2010
by Michael Hamersly
The undying spirit of the Grateful Dead alights Friday night in downtown Miami when Furthur, with founding Dead members Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, kicks off the latest leg of its tour at Bayfront Park.
Since Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, Weir -- who wrote the classics Sugar Magnolia, One More Saturday Night and I Need a Miracle -- has thrilled Deadheads with various incarnations of the legendary jam band. He talked to The Miami Herald about to expect.
Q: Furthur ended the year in San Francisco with two epic shows featuring Dead classics such as Truckin', Uncle John's Band, Shakedown Street, St. Stephen, Fire on the Mountain, Playin' in the Band and Sugar Magnolia. Will we see something as spectacular in Miami?
A: Well, we're not gonna have a New Year's parade or anything like that [laughs] . . . but musically, it'll be pretty much on par. . . . Whatever we play, we're gonna kick it around just like we did up there, and it'll be energetic because everybody's gonna be pretty fresh.
Q: Why Miami to kick off this leg of the tour?
A: For routing purposes, it made sense. Three of us are coming from Jamaica, where I'm playing this week, and for the rest of us, you have to start somewhere. It made sense to start further south as the weather dictates. When the winter starts to wither, we advance north.
Q: What do you think of Miami?
A: I've never actually gotten a chance to hang there. . . . I got kind of a taste of it in the late '60s; we spent a little time there. But that was a long time ago.
Q: Do you prefer performing at an outdoor venue?
A: If the weather's good, you can't beat it. . . . And the sound is good where we're playing, from what I understand, so I'm looking forward to it.
Q: What inspired the name Furthur, and the odd spelling of it?
A: I think it was a misspell. But it was the name of the [Merry Pranksters'] bus back in the mid '60s that I left home on. I was 17 when I hopped on that bus, and the Grateful Dead first hit the road on it. And it fits so prominently in our world, our mythology. When I go to Oregon, I often make a special trip to see the old girl. It's parked out in a field now.
Q: What ties together all the groups you've been a part of, post-Grateful Dead, including RatDog, the Other Ones and now Furthur?
A: Adventure in music. All my groups have approached music with an adventurous bent.
Q: You've said that listening to The Beatles inspired you to turn your band toward rock 'n' roll. What, if anything, from The Beatles' sound and style did you bring to the Grateful Dead?
A: Just the joy, more than anything else. I could go into numerous specifics, about how they handle a melody, or harmonic progression, or stuff like that. . . . But just the joy that they had in making music really turned my head.
Q: Was the Dead heavily improvisational from the beginning?
A: We started drifting that way pretty early on, and about five months into playing together, we were already at that point where we were extending our songs. And then it became the all-consuming thing, what we were all about. In the late '60s and early '70s, when we started concentrating on songwriting, we actually became somewhat more conservative in our approach, for a little while.
Q: It's been said that no two concerts by the Grateful Dead were the same. Do you plan your sets in advance these days?
A: Yeah, we do. We always did to some degree -- we at least figured out what we were gonna start and end the set with. But oftentimes it didn't work out like we had planned. These days, while the new players are getting up to speed on the new tunes and the new arrangements and stuff like that, it's handy to be able to tell the guys what we're gonna be playing to give them a little time so they can brush up on the tunes. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future, we'll be able to go back to the whatever-feels-right-at-the-moment mode of song selection.
Q: Do you ever feel Jerry's presence onstage?
A: Always. Always. He's always over my shoulder somewhere. I can hear his sense of harmonic direction, if you will, and I can feel him saying, ``Yeah, go there, don't go there.'' And I listen, or I don't, depending on how I'm feeling at the time, just like always. But I'll take this opportunity to say this: For me, he's not gone.