A Long, Strange Trip That Wasn’t Long Enough
How a Long Island Deadhead kid made a record with Bob Weir
He put the cowboy-hippie in rock ‘n’ roll
Photos of a middle-aged Jerry Garcia were propped up behind the bowl in a worn leather frame
Through a series of dreams realized, I produced, played on, and cowrote Blue Mountain — Bob Weir’s third and final solo album. The record was released in the fall of 2016 by Columbia/Legacy, and I got the chance to be the music director for the tours that followed. We were billed as Bob Weir and the Campfire Band. Quite the hoot. Feels like a hazy dream now, or perhaps just part of a long and strange trip.
Bob and I became close for a time. I felt we were at the very least collaborators, and at the very most burgeoning friends? Who can say. I can tell you this: He was a great listener and an easy hang. We had an amazing and productive time working together. I mostly followed his lead, but he was never above following mine, too, which always made me feel welcome in his vast and storied circles.
He was bright and wise, funny and warm, and a true follower of the …
Harlan County, USA
50 years later, a hot report from the American abyss
Oh, to recapture the power of those old documentaries, made with Nagra tape recorders and 16mm stock and filled with life-stuff
Barbara Kopple’s tough Kentuckians put us to shame
Golden anniversaries are often irresistible, if only because that big fat round 50, as a measure of years, represents a chunk of life we can’t easily dismiss as transient or trivial. Once you get to 50, you know things have changed. Documents that old, like films, can generate conflicted responses — usually a wrestling match between startlement (oh, the unalloyed righteousness of our old ideals) and shameful nostalgia. (Who among us of a certain age doesn’t blush when recalling the naïveté that in 1976 made us love Rocky or A Star Is Born?) Movies were already changing in 1976, edging away from New Wavism and toward Spielbergology and Reaganite solipsism, but it was still the ’70s, and of all the tissue samples we could take from that year, the most salient is Barbara Kopple’s landmark documentary, Harlan County, USA.
We supposedly now live in a Golden Age of …
Magnolias
The thickness of the shade they offered was like a stone cellar cut deep into the earth
Their peculiarity was undiminished by familiarity
They stood for something, while making boyhood tolerable
“In the pines, in the pines,” the song insisted, but for us it was always “in the magnolias.” There were five on the hill in Nashville where my grandparents lived. The Southern kind, Magnolia grandiflora, bull bays. Elegant and unruly, they stayed green come June or January. Their squat trunks were ten, twelve feet apart, but their branches had fanned out, drooped low, and intertwined. For the squirrels and the barn bats, as for my cousins and my brother and me, they made one wide emerald crown.
Lord, I loved those trees that did not love me back. They gave good cover. You could stand beneath them in a downpour and not get wet. Like a tin roof, they turned the rain’s pummeling into ambient percussion. The trade winds hardly rattled them. Snow and ice — even the sleet storm of ’94 that collapsed powerlines all over Davidson County and kept us out of school for weeks — only burnished their …
