It’s been a slow transformation (and a decade of beard-growing) for former Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who hasn’t released a studio album since Ratdog’s Evening Moods in 2000. As co-creator of a jam-friendly musical language with the Dead, the 68-year-old Weir has never entirely been able to escape that musical flavor during his collaborations with numerous lyricists and producers, almost all geared towards live performances in front of dancing audiences.
However, on what is unquestionably his best solo release since 1972’s Ace, Blue Mountain finds Weir in territory that is both new and intimately familiar. Produced by longtime auxiliary National member Josh Kaufman, and working with songwriter Josh Ritter, a gaggle of National members, jammers, and others, Blue Mountain returns Weir to the American west of the Dead’s youth, populated by rivers and trains and cloud-scapes, all flickering at the edge of magic.
Pitched as Weir’s “cowboy album”—and the songs are largely about that—Mountain is both a collection of contemporary Americana and something more. While some of the material would likely sound at home in the Dead’s repertoire, like the good-natured gallop of “Gonesville,” it’s hard to imagine the latter lineups of the band treating the music quite so elegantly as Kaufman and company. Most often, the album lands Weir in thick-aired spaces not dissimilar to Daniel Lanois’ work with Bob Dylan, like the humming spaghetti western chorale of “Ghost Towns” and the misty alt-folk stomp of “Lay My Lilly Down.”
As Weir’s sixth studio full-length outside the Grateful Dead, Blue Mountain functionally serves as a reboot for the guitarist, whose solo sensibility long ago veered far from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s cosmic Americana and into the AOR waters of 1978’s Heaven Help the Fool (made with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen), the pastel fusion of Bobby and the Midnites in the ’80s, and the dense jam-jazz of Ratdog in the ’90s. With an ambient C&W production that often subsumes lead guitar into the reverb swirl (and occasionally swallows Weir), Blue Mountain will likewise probably prove inseparable from the historical period in which it was recorded. But, unlike Weir’s previous albums, Blue Mountain also finally seems like the right album at the right time for Weir. Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.
Filled with deep folk allusions and cowpoke asides about Mormon girls and Red River Valleys, Blue Mountain is very much a Josh Ritter album, too, who guides Weir back to the emotional turf of 1970’s American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. But Ritter's lyrics sometimes teeter between timeless imagery and folksy platitudes, with the chorus of “Only A River” and other moments sounding a bit more like a musical about folk music.
But one of the nicest surprises of Weir's recent tours with his former bandmates—and what really sells Blue Mountain—is the vocal gravitas developed during Weir’s two decades of life and music after the Dead. In many ways, Blue Mountain is merely a vehicle for it, which itself is quietly miraculous. “Bobby Fans Are People Too” asserted a bumper sticker sold on Grateful Dead tour, neatly summarizing the junior Dead guitarist’s spot in the band’s canon. Long acting as an overblown short-short-wearing counterbalance to Jerry Garcia’s stoned (and sometimes somnambulant) cool, on Blue Mountain, Weir finally achieves some of the grace that Garcia possessed so easily from a young age.
Perhaps Blue Mountain’s most striking track is the totally solo “Ki-Yi Bossie,” one of a half-dozen songs in Weir’s 50-year career credited to him alone. A wide-eyed C&W strum set in “a 12-step meeting under harsh fluorescent light,” it’s the only moment of Blue Mountain that takes place in the unaffected present, and not coincidentally, the only place where Weir seems to express something of himself. Never mind the song as an account of sobriety, Weir’s grizzled hippie verse tags (“Well, alright, right on…”) and wry lyrics about searching for meaning and saving whales make it a 21st century Marin County cowboy lullaby. Minus producers or songwriters or bandmates, it’s a place for Weir's steps alone, suggesting a wide open territory still waiting to be explored.
