Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir revealed that he's prepping his autobiography. During a chat with Relix, Weir explained that the book won't be the typical type of memoir — but rather a full on multimedia project: “I have some friends in the city here in San Francisco who run an outfit called Prezi. It’s really well thought out presentation software. It became apparent to me that one also could present a book in that format and then leave it open to the addition of video clips, musical clips and audio clips. You could also have related chat rooms, discussions and stuff like that. The book could be constantly evolving, and if something occurred to me that I wanted to insert into the book, then I could also do that.”
So, I’ve got two notions of what it is I’m working on right now. I’m working on what I call the tome, the thing that you go to a bookstore and buy, bring home and leaf through. . . I’m not done thinking through it yet but there’s no reason that I can’t tell the story both in a tome and in a more expanded format.
Weir went on to say that he actually allowing the process of creating the new work guide him on an entirely other level: “The tome, the classical presentation, is what I’m focusing on now. The words and how they fall together — the lyricism — is going to be important in telling the story. Whoever the character is — and I’m talking about me now, the guy that I probably don’t understand and probably never will — he’s nonetheless fighting to get out through my fingers. So I’ve got to let him do that first and then look at the multimedia presentation and let him guide me.”
Bob Weir, who for years acted as Jerry Garcia's deputy in the Grateful Dead, talked to us about living a lifetime in the band: “This is the only life I've ever known, so it's all I've ever wanted to do, as well. It all seems real natural to me; ringing those lofty bells onstage — I live for that. In the mid-'70s, we decided we were going to start our own record company. In retrospect, we lost a lot of money, we found ourselves carrying briefcases and stuff like that and it was (laughs) — like I say, it was not something I would do again.”
