Bobby Weir & The Wolf Bros
The Royal Albert Hall, London, June 21, 2025
In 1963, a couple of years before he joined the band that would become the Grateful Dead, Phil Lesh was an aspiring composer, working on a piece called Foci that required four orchestras – 123 players and four conductors – to be performed. Foci never actually got played, perhaps unsurprisingly, but a few years later Lesh discussed it, and how his classical bona fides fed into the Dead, with interviewer Hank Harrison (Courtney Love’s father, incidentally).
“I don’t try to bring any kind of classical ‘tricks’ into the Grateful Dead,” Lesh told Harrison. “All the data is there, and I draw on it subconsciously all the time, no doubt… But it’s all very subliminal at this time. It’s all like melted together into non-categories of stuff. I mean, like there aren’t any direct Beethoven influences or that sort of thing.”
How to compute, then, this sweltering night at the Royal Albert Hall in London, which begins with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra playing A Grateful Overture, ten-plus minutes of full-bore Beethovian bombast arranged by a Stanford professor, Giancarlo Aquilanti, out of various Dead melodies (a surging extract from The Other One particularly prominent)?
Over the 60 years since the Dead formed, their music has taken on countless new shapes, often driven by the questing, improvisatory spirit at the heart of the group. An infinitely malleable songbook, with the capacity for radical reinvention baked in. Still, in 1965, the band’s pranksterish teenage rhythm guitarist Bob – now formally billing himself as Bobby – Weir would not have been the most obvious candidate to parlay symphonic capital out of all those jams.
When the Grateful Overture ends, however, it is Weir who diffidently materialises at the heart of the Philharmonic, wearing a sort of black academic cape, even though the night is ideal for his trademark uniform of cut-offs and Birkenstocks. He is accompanied by the Wolf Bros; super-producer Don Was on double bass, and two longtime fellow travellers in the Dead extended universe, pianist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane, both of whom figure in Weir’s main project these days, the stadium-filling Dead & Co.
The Wolf Bros’ M.O. is generally a more pared-back, sinewy take on a Dead repertoire that has continued to evolve since Jerry Garcia’s death, and the formal closure of the band, in 1995. Tonight, though, is not one for minimalism. As Lane and Was settle into a loping, jazzy rhythm, they’re rapidly swamped by the orchestra. It’s only when Weir starts singing – hesitantly and perhaps a little nervously at first – that the song crystallises: Truckin’.
Lesh might have identified covert echoes of classical music in the Dead’s musical DNA, but songs like the eccentric choogle of Truckin’, or the momentously swinging blues of Black Peter which follows it, are far more rooted in American folk traditions, and it can feel like the orchestral treatments – however rich and imaginative – are also a bit too much. But then they flip into one of the Dead’s most sacred one-twos, China Cat Sunflower into I Know You Rider, and it starts making more sense.
Weir is not a natural lead guitarist, and part of what makes Wolf Bros so fascinating is hearing these Dead songs reworked with his inventive, impressionistic, sometimes janky and clanging rhythm guitar flecks to the fore. But China Cat Sunflower works beautifully in a different way. Rather than replacing Garcia with another guitarist – John Mayer in Dead & Co, say, or Trey Anastasio for the 2015 50th anniversary shows – he is replaced by 50 musicians, so that his see-sawing melodic lead in China Cat is carried by the orchestra, flutes to the fore.
China >>> Sunflower’s place in the live Dead canon, though, is mostly predicated on the seamless flow between the two songs – on how the band found a new freeform path between one and the other at each show. Fully unanchored improv is perhaps a bit too much of an ask for a full symphony orchestra to attempt, but there are holes left in the arrangements where Weir and the exceptional Chimenti can freeform a little, and the transition is handled with real elegance. It’s not exactly Wembley Empire Pool, 4/7/1972, but it’ll do just fine: UK Deadheads are grateful for anything at this point, so starved are they of visits from the band alumni – Weir hasn’t played here with any configuration since a Ratdog tour in 2003.
A good few traditional aspects of Dead-aligned shows still hold true, of course. The crowd’s unmediated joy, and their ability to transcend the concert’s formality, is a wonder; it seems unlikely the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra have ever played a show where much of the audience dances for nearly all of the two and a half hours.
And, also in keeping with Dead tradition, the second set is where the really good stuff lies. It’s here that the Dead song where orchestrations were a critical part of the original version – 1977’s Terrapin Station Suite – gets an airing (though not all the band were impressed at the time by the strings added by producer Keith Olsen: “I remember thinking, Well, that's not what I would have done there. But it's nice,” Weir told MOJO earlier this year).
The ornate pomp of the suite’s third section, Terrapin, is more or less faithfully and awe-inspiringly rendered, while the Terrapin Flyer phase provides an opportunity for Jay Lane to roll out the polyrhythms in a kind of face-off with the orchestra. It’s a magnificent performance, and ample justification on its own for the evening’s whole conceit.
It's trumped, though, by what comes next. Much of the gig has seen Weir focus on the songs written and originally sung by Jerry Garcia (Sugar Magnolia/Sunshine Daydream, Hell In A Bucket, the closing One More Saturday Night and She Says rave-ups without orchestra being the exceptions). But it’s still startling to see him alone on the stage with the orchestra, the Wolf Bros having departed, singing Days Between.
Days Between has a special place in Dead lore, as the last song written by Garcia with the band’s chief lyricist, Robert Hunter; a song that memorialises the past, “When all we ever wanted/ Was to learn and love and grow.” It is not, clearly, a song that’s got any less poignant over time, and Weir’s version carries all the experience and gravitas that it deserves. He sings it beautifully, too, his voice powerful where it was a little unsteady at the start of the show, so that the closest comparison, weirdly, might be the baroque drama of late ’60s Scott Walker.
Not a reference point you’d expect in relation to the Grateful Dead, perhaps. But it’s a measure of how the Dead imperative – to find endless new possibilities in this astonishing catalogue – continues to evolve. “I'm an eyes-forward guy. It's how we've always done things,” Weir told David Fricke in MOJO 380. And then, with the sort of emotional clarity that makes this show so special, too, “I don't have all that much time left here. I'm not a spring chicken anymore. I have to address myself to the stuff I haven't gotten to yet.”
Set List: Bob Weir & The Wolf Bros, The Royal Albert Hall, London, Saturday June 21, 2025
SET 1
1 A Grateful Overture
2 Truckin’
3 Black Peter
4 China Cat Sunflower >>>
5 >>> I Know You Rider
6 Brokedown Palace
SET 2
7 Sugar Magnolia
8 Terrapin Station
9 Days Between
10 Jack Straw
11 Hell In A Bucket
12 Sugar Magnolia (Sunshine Daydream coda)
13 She Says
14 One More Saturday Night
Photo: Bob Weir onstage at the 2025 MusiCares Person Of The Year, Los Angeles Convention Center, January 31, 2025 (credit by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic)