Bob Weir had already written Sugar Magnolia, Playin’ in the Band, and Cassidy, among other great Dead tunes. But Weather Report Suite would be Bobby’s most ambitious compositional project to date.
The vision had been there since the sixties. The Prelude originated as a few fingerpicked notes and blossomed on stage in ’72 and ’73. And by January 1973, Bobby had the music, though not the lyrics, for Part One nailed down, introducing it to the rest of the Dead at a rehearsal. However, as the band learned Bob’s Tune, what they came to call Part One, the final movement of the suite was still just an idea. And it took until the Dead were in the studio recording Wake of the Flood before the suite all came together.
Weir’s foray into songwriting dated back to Born Cross-Eyed from the Dead’s 1968 album, Anthem of the Sun. There, Bobby is credited with both the lyrics and the music. But most of his other early songs were either collaborations with the band – The Other One and Truckin’ – or written with Robert Hunter.
Hunter and Weir had jointly crafted Sugar Magnolia and Playin’ in the Band, which quickly became well-loved staples for the Dead. But their songwriting partnership was never as easy as the one that Hunter enjoyed with Jerry. And in 1971, after Bobby changed lyrics to Sugar Magnolia and/or rewrote some of Hunter’s words to One More Saturday Night, it ruptured.
Into the breach stepped John Perry Barlow, Bobby’s old boarding school friend. In fact, as Barlow tells it, Hunter foisted the responsibility onto him backstage at Port Chester in February ’71 after Hunter had been arguing about lyrics with Bobby. “All of a sudden, Hunter whirled on me and said, ‘Why don’t you write with him? At least you like him.” Over the next year, Barlow and Bobby worked together on Mexicali Blues, Black-Throated Wind, Cassidy, Looks Like Rain and Walk in the Sunshine for Bobby’s first solo album, Ace.
In late February 1973, the pair again met for a songwriting session at Barlow’s mom’s apartment in Salt Lake City while the Dead were in town for a show. In “one of the few times Barlow and I sat and wrote words and music simultaneously,” the pair knocked out Let It Grow together in a single evening.
It was a heroic effort. The song is a masterful reflection on the natural world or, as David Dodd has said, “the divinity of the planet itself.” The lyrics cycle “round and round” evoking the Earth’s rhythms, the “seasons round, creatures great and small, up and down, as we rise and fall.”
In Barlow’s poetry, humanity is intimately woven into these natural cycles. And, taken together with Bobby’s soaring music, the song revels in our connection and communion with the natural world.
She’s brown as the bank where she kneels down to gather her water
And she bears it away with a love that the river has taught her
Let it flow, greatly flow, wide and clear
The earth is also a wellspring of life: “Broken ground, open and beckoning to the spring; black dirt live again.” But it is more than just fertile; the earth and all its life is divine. With the song, the pair is reckoning with Gaia herself.
And the name is on the earth that takes it in
We will not speak but stand inside the rain
And listen to the thunder shout
I am, I am, I am, I am
Six months later, as the Wake of the Flood sessions started, Bobby went into the studio and recorded a solo acoustic version of the entire Weather Report Suite (you can hear it on disc one, track 9 of Beyond Description). He would use that to introduce the rest of the band to his complete vision and begin orchestrating the recording. The only issue was that Part One still lacked any lyrics. Barlow – and likely Hunter as well – had failed to put words to Bob’s Song.
Fortunately, Eric Andersen had just moved down the street from Bobby in Mill Valley. Eric had first got his start in the New York City folk scene and met the Dead on the 1970 Festival Express tour. By the time he sat down in Bobby’s kitchen to collaborate, Eric was signed to Columbia and just coming off his most successful album to date, Blue River. As Andersen explained on the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, “I just lived in the neighborhood, and I came over and tried to help the cause.”
Arriving at the house after dark, Bobby answered the door and seemed to be the only one around. And while Weir provided a bottle of whiskey, he did not explain the significance of the piece of music they were working on, Part One of Weather Report Suite. So, Eric didn’t have a sense of the scale or depth of the project. Despite that – or maybe because of it – the two managed to hammer out the lyrics in a few hours.
Part One’s structure shares some of the same cyclical, seasonal progression and environmental sensibility as Let It Grow.
Circle songs and sands of time
And seasons will end in tumbled rhyme
And little change
The wind and rain
And both lyrically and musically, Part One serves as a tremendous counterpart to the latter tune, making Weather Report Suite into a magisterial contemplation of nature and humanity, an offering to our kinship with the earth. It would only be years later that Eric really listened to Weather Report Suite and appreciated just how bold of a project it was for Bobby.
But before we could enjoy Weather Report Suite – or Bobby could tear it apart because he “hated what we [Eric and him] had done” – he first had to orchestrate it into existence in the studio, which we will cover, along with the suite’s life on stage, in the next installment.
This is the second in a four-part series of Weather Report Suite. If you missed it, catch up with the first installment: Becoming Weather Report Suite: The Evolution of the Prelude in 1972-73. And the third is available here.
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