Bob Weir Holds Court at the Mother Church

As The Spin weaved our way through a giddy crowd dotted with graybeards in tie-dye and dreadlocked youngsters to take our pew at the Ryman on Wednesday, we noticed the stage setup for Bob Weir and his band. You’d never mistake the homey arrangement of small amplifiers and instrument stands for the Wall of Sound, the gargantuan P.A. that the Grateful Dead used to blast their ramshackle cosmic American dream music across fields and stadiums in the 1970s.

But while Weir and the Dead's legacy of rituals and grand spectacle are intimately related, he's got Dead & Co. to tend to that (and they're doing it pretty well — compare this summer's inspired Bonnaroo performance to their lukewarm Bridgestone appearance last fall). Weir's visit to the Mother Church was primarily about gathering in the faithful for a close look at the blues and Appalachian folk that started the Dead on their long, strange trip more than 50 years ago — not that it stopped him and his choice band from conjuring up some of that old consciousness-expanding magic.

Right at 8 p.m., Bobby strode across the stage and into the spotlight, his wild halo of gray hair giving a little wave of its own as he took a bow. Taking up his acoustic guitar, he dove headfirst into a solo rendition of “Loose Lucy,” strumming with the gusto and Cheshire cat grin of a teenager who’s just learned to play his favorite song and can’t wait to show his buddies. The audience was primed and ready to sing along, belting the "yeah-yeah" responses and "Thank you / For a real good time" right on cue.

The needle stayed buried through Little Feat's "Easy to Slip," and then Weir cooled the scene down as he introduced "Blue Mountain," the gentle title track from his new album. As he recalled how he spent a summer in the early '60s on a ranch in Wyoming, shoveling manure by day and learning songs from the cowboys by night — "I had to figure out what the next chord was, or I was gonna hear about it," he said, cracking up at the memory of some long-ago upbraiding — he kept strumming gently, almost absent-mindedly, unable to overcome the habit of five decades spent mostly going from one stage to another.

To kick off the full-band segment, The National's Bryan and Scott Devendorf, their sometime-bandmate Josh Kaufman (who co-produced Blue Mountain), Shakey Graves sideman Jon Shaw and Weir's longtime associate Steve Kimock materialized from the shadows. They've only been touring together for a week, but they played like old friends, lending a rich, unfussy resonance to Blue Mountain cuts like the melancholy "Only a River," the Scots-Irish stomper "Lay My Lily Down" and the mournful "Gallop on the Run."

The sports-centric aspects of Dead fandom were alive and well, as we heard the couple behind us debating which song would come next. The smart money was on a turn towards upbeat, but not too quickly — the loping but eerie "Ghost Towns" preceded the hopeful "Rosalee McFall," and the rockabilly singalong "Gonesville" led into the set break.

After we re-beered, Weir and band opened the second set with a one-two punch of a tribute to Music City, leading off with Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobby McGee" and a perfectly loose "Tennessee Jed." Kimock's lead runs evoked the late, great Jerry Garcia, who was present in the form of a jack o'lantern that adorned the bass rig, but also in spirit. It was clearly Bobby's show, but it wouldn't have been right — or maybe even possible — to ignore the man whose presence played a defining role in the first 30 years of Weir's career and whose absence has more or less shaped the last 20.

Next came a laid-back version of "West L.A. Fadeaway" that felt more like it came from a moonlit desert landscape in Nevada than any place inhabited by people, which morphed into a "Cassidy" that rolled and swelled like the mighty Pacific, which became a version of "Looks Like Rain" that Weir sang with the wry wisdom of someone fingering an old scar. This band excelled at playing luminous and chill, but had no problem ramping up into a raucous set-closing "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" that elicited cheers and whistles the likes of which we hadn't heard ... well, since Tuesday night when Bobby sat in with Phish.

As if we could ask for more, Weir began the encore with a solo turn on "Ki-Yi Bossie," a subtle first-person tale of a frustrated idealist turned alcoholic ranch hand. Then, he took us back through centuries of English folk music tradition with "Peggy O," which had been a Dead staple but which he made his own with help from the band, who filed back in from the wings halfway through. Before being deposited into the blinking neons and blaring cover bands that mark our city's particular, peculiar daydream, we got the kind of miraculous send-off that every Dead fan hopes for: a sing-along to "Ripple," in which the 2,300-odd-person choir remembered any words that Bobby might have forgotten.

Set List

Bob Weir at the Ryman, Oct. 19, 2016

Set 1