After nearly four years together, Wolf Bros — the group fronted by Grateful Dead co-founder Bobby Weir — is finally putting out an album. And, appropriately, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado, which drops on Feb. 18 via Third Man Records, is a concert set from an improvisation-oriented group.
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“We have fun, and we haven’t had time to get into the studio and actually get serious about making a record,” acknowledges Weir, who formed the group with bassist and Blue Note Records chief Don Was and drummer Jay Lane, who previously worked with Weir in RatDog, Furthur and his outings with Rob Wasserman. “Making records is kind of what Don does, so we figured, ‘OK, let’s do this…’”
Weir adds, however, that he has every intention of making original music with Wolf Bros, as well as with Dead & Company. “We’re working on that, yeah,” he says. “I do writing sessions for that. I think there might be some (songs) lying around, I think there are some (Robert) Hunter lyrics I might take a peek at. I think somebody has discovered some (John Perry) Barlow lyrics that I might take a peek at.
“Some stuff I work on is gonna be better with the thunderous band (Dead & Company) and some stuff is gonna be better with the light-on-its-feet band (Wolf Bros). You sniff a song and it’ll tell you where it wants to go, and some stuff I’ll do with both bands.”
The eight-track Live in Colorado — recorded during June 2021 and featuring Weir solo tracks (“Looks Like Rain”) and covers of the Dead (“New Speedway Boogie,” “My Brother Esau,” “Lost Sailor”/”Saint of Circumstance”), Bob Dylan (“Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”) and Johnny Cash (“Big River”) — is something of a showcase of how Wolf Bros has evolved since forming during 2018. The core group is augmented by keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, pedal steel player Greg Leisz and the Wolfpack, a string-and-brass quintet Weir has been working with on a concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. But the other players only enhance what he, Was and Lane are doing.
“The whole idea is that it should be…I want to say mutable, but we can just kick the whole idea around,” says Weir. “We can bring these other people in and take anything, any song, for a little walk in the woods.” And, he adds, Live in Colorado offers an earful of the different slant Wolf Bros takes toward the material.
“Don is a fairly singular bass player,” Weir says of the Grammy Award-winning producer. “He likes to play without a lot of embellishment. It’s more traditional, fundamental. It simplifies the songs, and it simplifies my approach to the song. The songs, I think, are benefiting from it. There’s a lot of power in simplicity.”
Wolf Bros will be back on the road in March (with Barry Sless on pedal steel), and Weir says Dead & Company are planning a summer tour — in addition to a full plate of other projects he has in motion. With his musical about trailblazing baseball player Satchel Paige currently on ice, he’s working on an opera with collaborators in Nashville; The story still has to be finished, Weir says, but he’s also been working on the songs and may even put them out as an album before taking the piece to the stage. He has a memoir in his sights as well, which may make use of technology to be a living, updating work. “It’s on the back burner, but as soon as I’m done with the concerto I’ll dig back into that. I might get back around to it this summer,” says Weir, who’s not read the autobiographies published by his various bandmates.
“I’ve read no memoirs; I don’t want to be affected by them,” he notes. “I understand there are good ones out, but I don’t want to see how anyone does it until I’m done with mine.”
The concerto, meanwhile, has been bumped back to October at the Kennedy Center. Weir is in the process of orchestrating about 20 Grateful Dead songs and adds “we might do a Dylan tune or two.” But rather than traditional orchestral pieces, he’s arranging with sections that will be open for the entire orchestra to improvise along with the band.
“It’s long been a thought that I’ve had in my head, it’d be nice if we could actually get a symphony orchestra to improvise,” Weir says. “We have numerous pieces where we have an indeterminate length of verses, or repeats of a given pattern, and we’re going to have the various sections improvise over them. That way a song will never be the same way twice.” The Wolfpack members will serve as section leaders, and Weir says the method for improvising is still being determined.
“It’s a little out there on the daring side, shall we say, but that’s where we go to find the fun,” Weir says. “And it may be that once the orchestra develops that ability and sees that they have the ability to take (music) to other places, who knows what might happen. This type of technique would work with Beethoven or with Mahler as well. I’m just trying to make the stuff I do meaningful.”
