The one album Bob Weir said was out of his league: “Will I ever be able to do somethig like that?”
The communal spirit of the Grateful Dead was never about Bob Weir playing the most impressive solos of all time.
There are plenty of beautiful pieces of music that he wrote for the band, but when listening to any of their jams from back in the day, they were always pushing themselves to make music that flowed out of them rather than use every single solo as a chance to show their skills. Regardless of how long the tunes could go, they were still musical thinkers, and Weir figured that he was on the right path if he kept going back to the finest albums he ever heard.
But that gets a little bit complicated when talking about how The Dead operated. There are plenty of songs in their catalogue that were indebted to rock and roll, but Jerry Garcia was never interested in sticking to one genre. They were a cornucopia of all their influences, and it wasn’t out of the question to hear pieces of everything from country to bluegrass to rock and roll to even a dose of free jazz in the way that they performed.
And you can hear all of that in the way that Weir played his guitar as well. There were pieces of his tone that were unconventional for the time, but whether he was playing some jazzy lick, he was always focused on what sounded right with the song. The audience would never be carried to a different place without every note being in the right place, but the biggest lesson that the band learned was that there were no bad notes. There are good ones and bad notes that could be made good after the fact.
Which explains why so many of the band’s greatest influences thought outside the box as well. Garcia may have been a bit bored listening to a band like The Rolling Stones playing the same blues-style tunes over and over again, so when listening to The Beatles’ catalogue, it was much more rewarding seeing them go from one tune to the next and have every single one of them sound different. Revolver sounded nothing like Sgt Pepper, but Bob Weir still marvelled at what the band did on Abbey Road.
If we’re talking about musical departures, The White Album definitely has a greater array of influences, but rarely will you find one album that pushes music forward as much as this. No one in rock would even think about making tunes like ‘Because’ or ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, and by the time that they reached the medley at the end of the album, Weir knew that he was completely outmatched.
Even with all of the chops that The Dead had, Weir thought there was no way anyone could reach the kind of heights The Beatles did, saying, “I actually preferred The Beatles as a lean, mean rock and roll quartet. But Abbey Road was the biggest exception to that. The songs are so strong and cool, the writing is so great, there’s just excellence on parade throughout the record. I remember wondering ‘Wow, will I ever be able to do something like that?’. It’s something I’m still working on. One day I’ll get there.”
It’s not like Weir didn’t try to create those same musical moments every time he made a record, but there’s truly no way of topping what the Fab Four did here. Especially for the time that it was recorded, they had made a record that could stand alongside the greatest classical pieces in Western music, and while Let It Be did undercut the finality of it, it was the perfect way for the band to wrap up their career.
Because, really, what could feasibly follow something like this? The band were already fracturing halfway through making the record, and even if they never made another record across their solo careers, people would still be talking about how much Abbey Road changed them when they first heard it.
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