When Bob Weir nearly recorded a song about a dwarf
1972’s Ace is a Grateful Dead album in everything but name. Nominally a Bob Weir solo album, Ace features every then-current member of the Dead, minus keyboardist Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, whose ailments and general aversion to the recording studio kept him away from the sessions, contributing as Weir’s backing band. With main collaborator John Perry Barlow writing lyrics for the record, Ace was truly kept within the Grateful Dead family.
The close connection was confirmed when nearly every song from the LP eventually found its way into the Dead’s live sets. By the time the album was released in May, Weir had already begun singing ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’, ‘Black-Throated Wind’, ‘Playing in the Band’, ‘Mexicali Blues’ and ‘One More Saturday Night’ with the rest of the band, notably featuring those tracks prominently on the Europe ’72 tour. Other album cuts like ‘Cassidy’ and ‘Looks Like Rain’ became cornerstones of Weir’s repertoire with the Dead in later years, leaving only ‘Walk in the Sunshine’ as having never found its place in the Dead scene.
Weir wasn’t terribly keen on ‘Walk in the Sunshine’, something that Barlow recognised. Toward the end of the session, Weir asked Barlow to write him one more set of lyrics. Whether he was looking to change up Weir’s usual style or trying to sabotage the song purposefully, Barlow eventually returned with a set of words inspired by Swedish writer Pär Lagerkvist and his 1944 novel The Dwarf.
“I stayed up all night with Frankie Weir, who fed me Wild Turkey and cocaine and made me write the fairly dreadful ‘Walk In The Sunshine’,” Barlow wrote in his memoir Mother American Night. “I also wrote a song based on Pär Lagerkwist’s The Dwarf called ‘The Dwarf’ that included the lyrics ‘I’m not a tall man / I’m a small man.’ It was about a horrible little Renaissance court dwarf who had no one’s interests at heart. I gave it to Bobby, and so he was greatly relieved when I showed him the only slightly less terrible ‘Walk In The Sunshine’ and I was free to go.”
Weir recalled a similar set of circumstances while introducing ‘Walk in the Sunshine’ during the 50th anniversary Ace shows he played with his band The Wolf Bros in 2022. “When we were making the Ace record, it came down to, as it always does, it came down to the last night before the last day of sessions that I had at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco.”
“I had one day’s session left – we’d been in there for a week or so, maybe two – I don’t remember. But we had one day left and we had a bunch of vocals to do. And I still had to finish the lyrics on this tune we called the C Shuffle. But I also had to get a night’s sleep,” Weir recalled. “So I was working with my old pal John Barlow on the lyrics. And I said, ‘John, I gonna have to go to bed – I’ve got to be fresh in the morning: I’ve got to be able to sing.’ [He said] No problem, me and Frankie will stay up and we’ll finish those lyrics for you. No problem.”
“Now John had been reading a book, I think might have been written by Gunter Grass, it was a German book called The Dwarf. And he wrote a dark set of lyrics. I mean, we’re talking dark,” Weir claimed. “And he knew damn well there was no way – you know I was twenty-something, in my early twenties, and it was still sort of the flower child era, and I just wasn’t going to sing those lyrics, and he knew that, and he just wrote them because he wanted to.”
“And then he wrote another set of lyrics and he said we’ll go for these. And they’re sort of hippy-dippy and I think I sang them one time in the studio – just straight through,” Weir concluded. “And as I recall, you can actually hear on the studio recording that my voice is starting to go at the end of the song. And that was it. I’d done singing it for the day, for the project.”
‘The Dwarf’ never even made it to the recording stage, so Weir reluctantly agreed to cut ‘Walk in the Sunshine’ instead. You can check out the studio version of the track from Ace down below.
