A SIDE from touring America later this year with Dead & Company – the Grateful Dead offshoot that includes Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart – Bob Weir tells Uncut that he’s also readying a special, longin-the-works project. “It’s a concerto grosso in classical terms,” he says. “This will be a live performance. I’ve been working on this for the last 10 years or so. We’re booked early next spring with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, DC and it’s going to take four nights to play the whole thing. There’s a possibility we may record it before we even get there. Structurewise, we’ve fully orchestrated over 20 songs and there’ll be sections where we’re going to try to get the symphony orchestra to improvise. The other thing that’s new is that once we’ve played what we’ve got at the Kennedy Centre in DC, we’re never going to assemble the songs in the same order again. It’ll be pretty much like a Dead concert in that respect, as we’ve got enough songs orchestrated to make it an endless project. So each time we put them together they’ll be different, on account of the improv sections and the order. The idea is that one song will lead to a different one the next time around, and so on. We’re kind of following the rules the Grateful Dead established.”
