Bob Weir
Blue Mountain

I happened to read this article a few months ago. Probably at the beginning of June. It was a report, a sort of review of the so-called 'Einstein Gala 2016', a special event organized in Toronto, Canada, by the Canadian Einstein Legacy Project and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to celebrate the centenary of what has been defined as 'A unique moment in the history of the world.' That is when Albert Einstein created his theory of relativity. 'Changing the world with the intellectual abilities and visions of one man.' All this obviously happened in 1916.

I won't venture into discussing theoretical physics because, unfortunately, despite being interested in all sciences, I have no expertise in the field and am certainly not capable of grasping the most complex issues. Consequently, I will talk about what really struck me about this event: the fact that one of the most important guests was Bob Weir!

I'm obviously talking about the founder (one of the founders) of the Grateful Dead, one of the most influential bands of all time and a true monument to the psychedelic rock culture of the sixties and a true icon, a symbol for the hippie civilization of San Francisco, as well as being practically, according to many, the soundtrack of LSD. Why Bob Weir? Because both he and Albert Einstein were driven by what is a true passion and which led them to achieve extraordinary works in the world of arts or sciences. Some might disagree with this, but on the other hand, it was Albert Einstein who repeatedly stated that his discoveries were not the result of logic or mathematics, but were practically true intuitions, a process that works pretty much the same way for many artists. Bob Weir, who is sixty-eight today, for the occasion, performed a unique acoustic solo performance, playing a setlist full of hits like 'Friend of the Devil' or 'Jack Straw' and even a Beatles cover: 'Dear Prudence'.

It should be noted, in this regard, that an acoustic solo performance by Bob Weir constitutes an almost unique event in his long career, and thus 'Blue Mountain' (released via Legacy Recordings last September 30) might appear as a kind of surprise. This is also considering that, even though Bobby never stopped making music and playing around the United States and the rest of the world, this album is practically his first solo album in ten years and the first of new songs in thirty years! Practically a real event for fans of Grateful Dead music and American music.

A lot of musicians took part in the album, including Scott Devendorf of The National and Walter Martin of The Walkmen. The production is by Josh Kaufman and Bob Weir himself, and both are authors of all the music, along with Josh Ritter, who also made a more than significant contribution to the entire work and regarding the writing of all the lyrics of the album. To the point that we could say of Josh Ritter (a singer-songwriter and musician born in '76 and well-known in the US for his 'Americana' style and his narrative skills regarding lyrics) that on this occasion he was like a 'ghostwriter' for Bob Weir, guiding and helping him to put order in his personal microcosm.

The album primarily draws inspiration from a precise phase of Bob Weir's life when he was fifteen and worked on a ranch in Wyoming. It follows that the contents of the album are very personal. The fundamental idea (born after a webcast with Josh Kaufman and The National) was to reconstruct this particular situation of his adolescence in Wyoming, where he lived on an old ranch working with a lot of other boys who were raised in an era before radio and who, when evening came, used to gather and tell stories and sing songs. Thus Bob became the boy with the guitar who accompanied them. Thus he learned a lot of songs and a lot of stories. 'Blue Mountain' is an album of 'cowboy songs', a personal collection of songs based on the stories and songs Bob heard sitting around the fire in his youth, and which he now wanted to tell us in this album that, besides being an important piece of his existence, like what Johnny Cash did with the 'American Recordings', contributes to the continuous renewal of the long and endless tradition of American music.

What can I say—this is Bob Weir today. Here he is. Regarding the Grateful Dead (with John Mayer and the other original members of the band are now touring as 'Dead & Company'), he says the project is currently on hold. Phil Lesh, the bassist, has serious health issues, and at the moment, touring is not being considered. But he says he and all the others are still standing and have no intention of giving up. 'Blue Mountain', after all, is far from being some kind of testament: Bob Weir wanted to show us his personal microcosm, something seemingly more concrete and far from the lysergic and acid jams of the Grateful Dead, but obviously, there's a thread that unites all things, and just listening to the album is enough to realize that. Bob Weir knows perfectly well that the great legacy of the Grateful Dead today is mostly in his hands. It's something immense and impossible to quantify. He has been looking at his face in the mirror every morning for years, trying to reconstruct everything he has done over the years, and although he admits that he doesn't always see the whole picture clearly and put all the pieces together, he is convinced that sooner or later he will figure it out. I know he will, because, you see, after all, it's a matter of energy and intuition, and he possesses both of these qualities. However, someone continues to ask him a lot of questions on the subject. Everyone asks him about the great legacy of the Grateful Dead, the psychedelic music of the sixties, and everything else. Everyone asks questions. They want to know. He simply smiles and replies, 'I will answer all your questions only at the end. When I'm dead.' Fuck. I'm afraid they'll have to wait quite a while.