Quick Stats: Bob Weir, founding member of the Grateful Dead
Daily Driver: 2007 Lexus GS 450h (Bob's rating: 8 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other car: 1963 Corvette Stingray roadster (rating: wants to be buried in it)
Favorite road trip: San Francisco streets with Beat legend Neal Cassady
Car he learned to drive in: A tractor
First new car bought: 1969 BMW 2002
Bob Weir may be the folksy vegetarian-Birkenstock-wearing founding member of the Grateful Dead, but he is all about new technology when it comes to transportation choices.
It seems a paradox for someone who is indelibly part of the ultimate jam band that helped define the Hippie movement. But it makes sense for Weir, whose concern for the environment has made him go hybrid with a 2007 Lexus GS 450h.
Because the hybrid doesn't come with a manual tranny, this is Weir's first automatic. It's somewhat surprising, since Weir lives on the slopes of Marin County's Mt. Tamalpais, where even a small errand involves a trek up and down the mountain.
"The drivetrain is such that you can't really put a shift in it -- it doesn't shift, it's a hybrid -- it's an electric motor, and the electric motors do what they do," Weir says of his car. "Their torque curve is immense. The torque is just there."
It took Weir a year to get used to the automatic. "I felt distracted all the time -- is there something I should be doing here? It rendered me a dangerous driver for about a year. I'd come to the point where you'd expect to have to shift and there was nothing to do."
Weir gives his car an 8 of 10 rating and not a perfect 10 because of the gas mileage it gets. "It handles very well, I've been driving Beemers for most of my life, and it's not far shy of that, it really isn't, but it doesn't get the gas mileage I was hoping for," he says.
Weir notes he gets about 20 mpg. "I live on a mountain, so the hybrids don't start really happening till the engine is warmed up. So I get up in the morning and I head out, and the engine isn't warmed up until the time I get down into town. That's a couple miles of downhill without the benefit of a warm engine. So it doesn't get the gas mileage going down the hill and coming up the hill. It's a big heavy car."
But the sound system in the luxury sedan gets high marks from this musician. "It's got all the creature comforts," Weir says, underscoring the word. "It's got a great sound system," he continues. "It's tomb-silent inside when you're driving, so if you're listening to music, you can get all the way into it."
Corvette Stingray Roadster
The car Weir absolutely loves doesn't get out of the garage much these days. "The car I'll probably be buried in is the '63 Corvette Stingray Roadster," Weir says dryly.
"I'm an environmentalist, which is why I don't drive my Corvette all that much. I wish I could, but my heart's not in it anymore, though I do expect to be buried in it. The funeral I imagine would be on a beach, with me in the car on a barge carrying a couple hundred gallon pounds of gasoline and a small case of dynamite and the barge sets out."
"And I want bare-breasted virgins firing flaming arrows at the barge," Weir chuckles. I play along -- you really want to blow up that beauty of a car? "Yeah, I want a fireball and that'll be that. But I have to rethink this because of environmental consequences. I don't want to kill a bunch of fish."
The old Stingray was showcased in an exhibit of rock stars' wheels at the Petersen Automotive Museum seven years ago. "There were all these cars that you can actually shave looking at yourself in one of them -- and then there was mine," Weir says.
"They perched it right at the entrance. When they picked up the car, I told them if they washed it I'd have their asses in court. Because that's not the way the car is supposed to look, as far as I'm concerned. It's a number of shades of primer gray on top of the old -- I don't know what color it used to be -- but it's dark and dusty, and I kind of like it like that. It was the only car that had a picture in all the articles. I love the car, it's a great car."
Weir bought his resplendent Stingray during his Grateful Dead days, paying $3500 for it at an auction in 1976. "I saw one with one headlight, punched out in several shades of primer gray, and I decided I needed a sturdy, dependable American-built second car. I started looking and I found this one. Then I had the engine and running gear balanced and blueprinted. It's fuel-injected, a rocket-powered slingshot."
But in view of Weir's environmental concerns, he won't take it out much. "It burns a whole lot of gas, and I've got to be conscious of that." But when he does take it out, his two daughters love it because it sounds like a tractor.
Weir has fond memories of times in the Stingray back during the Dead days. He used to drive to rehearsals in nearby San Rafael with his dog Otis (named after Otis Redding) in tow.
"I had a dog at the time, a Norwegian buhund -- he was a big, tan, fluffy German shepherd, and we had antagonistic relationship," he laughs. "I'd be driving and he'd be sitting shotgun, and we'd be in traffic and he'd bark at me. And we'd go back and forth nittering and nattering and a van full of stewardesses -- back in those days a lot of stewardesses lived in Marin County -- would be looking out the window down at us, looking at me and him going back and forth. We had a wonderful relationship, we were the best of buddies. He came to rehearsal and we'd mess with him."
Car he learned to drive in
Weir grew up in the Bay Area but left home early and wound up in Wyoming. "I learned to drive on a tractor on a ranch out in Wyoming," Weir says. "When I was 15 years old, I thought it would be a terribly romantic thing to do -- to run away and be a cowboy. I don't know how romantic it was, but I did it. The only honest work I've ever done was cowboying. Most of what I did was drive a tractor and rig hay for haying season."
It was easy to transfer his tractor driving skills to a car. "It had a clutch, it had a gearshift, it was gasoline-powered," Weir says. "Then I graduated from that to a Ford Bronco. I guess what you'd call an SUV now."
First car bought
A year later, Weir moved back to the Bay Area and started playing with the late Jerry Garcia. Their band would become the Grateful Dead. "We started off as a jug band, a full blues outfit, and over the next year and half we morphed into a rock 'n' roll band -- it was an acoustic folk-blues band," Weir says.
Living in San Francisco during the early years of the Dead, Weir didn't need a car. He was so busy with the band, he didn't get around to getting a driver's license until he was 20. His first car was a used Mercedes-Benz 220.
Weir converted to BMW after buying his first new car, a 1969 BMW 2002, right before the band's "Working Man's Dead" album came out.
"We started having some success, and I could afford a new car. I bought a 2002," Weir says. "It was a good car -- it handled well, it had pretty close to 50/50 weight distribution, and I had it sideways a lot, but that was the fun of it. It was just nice to have a really good car. I live in central Marin, and the roads going out there are all mountain roads; and it just chewed them up and spat them out."
He had the BMW 2002 for only a few years. "I was way on the road, and a friend of mine borrowed it and wrecked it, so that was the end of that one. He couldn't handle it. It was a hot car."
Best car ever bought
Weir later bought a 1974 BMW 2002tii, which he considers the best car he ever bought. "It was built light and strong and had fuel injection, which was a big plus back in the day. I didn't have room in my driveway -- I'm still kicking myself for not having hung onto that car. I sold it in the late 1980s. I had it for 14 years. It was a rocket-powered roller skate."
Worst car ever bought
Around 1990, Weir bought a Saab and, although he doesn't remember what model it was, he knows it wasn't for him. He had it for a year and a half.
"The worst car I ever bought was a Saab, and it wasn't a bad car," he says. "It was a good car, but it was front drive, and I don't know why I ever went there -- I'm used to compression braking and you do that in front drive and you're sideways right now. It was a solid car, well built, but I can't get with front drive. I went to Beemers right away."
Before his hybrid, racing around the hills of the Bay Area in a sports car with a manual tranny never bothered him. "I love it, I love to drive," Weir says. "It's a different day now -- you have to think about gas consumption and all that stuff. And now I have a couple small children and I have to take safety into consideration, which I never really did back then."
Favorite road trip
Weir doesn't know if he has a favorite road trip, but during the Dead days he often drove to Pinedale, Wyoming, where his songwriting partner, John Perry Barlow, lived. The two wrote together for the Dead during the 1970s and 1980s. "I learned that Nevada looks best in the rearview mirror," Weir says of the drive.
On the road (or streets of San Francisco) with Neal Cassady
One memorable trip of a different sort occurred during the halcyon days of San Francisco's psychedelic era in the 1960s. Weir recalls with fondness some time he spent in a car with Neal Cassady, an icon of the Beat generation.
Cassady was friends with fellow Beat legend Jack Kerouac, who wrote the seminal American novel, "On the Road." The book, in Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness style, was based on their travels, with Cassady as the wild driver Dean Moriarty. In the 1960s, Cassady also drove the bus for author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
Beyond being the tale of a great American road trip, "On the Road" has become a bible for countless artists, poets, and musicians, including Weir. Cassady inspired Weir to write two Dead songs -- "Cassidy" and "The Other One" with his lyrics, "There was cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land."
"Truman Capote says of Kerouac's writing, 'That's not writing, that's typing,' Weir laughs as he mimics Capote's high-pitched voice. "But it rang my bells. It inspired me to leave home for good -- to pursue music. Cassady was quite a figure in American history. Jack Kerouac became enamored of Neal Cassady and rightly so. I won't call him a saint, but he was something."
While "On the Road" had a profound effect on Weir, when he met the book's hero, he wasn't so much starstruck as he was intent on taking it all in. "I got over it pretty quick because every moment was new and fresh," Weir says. "I wasn't busy thinking this was a big deal; I was busy just in wonderment of what was happening."
The depiction of Weir's drives with Cassady sounds familiar to Kerouac fans -- like a page ripped right from the book. Cassady drove a maroon 1964 Oldsmobile F-85 with a V-8 named George, while Weir rode shotgun, careening through the streets of San Francisco. The car belonged to Sue Swanson, a high-school classmate of Weir's, who became the first Deadhead and worked on and off for the band for 30 years.
There was a superhuman quality about Cassady when it came to driving through crowded city streets that amazes Weir to this day. "He defined the term synchronicity -- he was at all places at all times and right here at the same time. I used to ride around the city with him in San Francisco, and he could drive through rush hour traffic at 55-60 miles an hour, never stopping for a red light, never stopping for a stop sign, the wrong side of the street, on the sidewalk, all that kind of stuff. Never hit anything. And he could see around corners."
Long before "multitasking" became vogue, Cassady was king of multitasking in the car. "And all the time he was driving, he had one hand on the wheel, one hand feeling up his girlfriend in the middle seat, and one hand playing the buttons on the radio," Weir says. "What he would bring on the radio -- it was a dialogue with what was going on in my inner voice, and he was aware of all that."
It raises the question of whether he learned a thing or two during those drives with Cassady. "Yeah, I learned something from him," he replies. "The radio had a dialogue with my inner voice. He'd punch the buttons and stuff would come out and it was coherent. Deep stuff."
Automakers going green
Out of concern for the environment, Weir is eager to support automakers' eco-friendly efforts. The new hydrogen-powered Honda FCX Clarity, which promises zero emissions, has caught his eye. It just became available for lease and is limited to 200 Southern California drivers for the first three years. "I want cars to be environmentally friendly, and I'm trying to do that. I guess Honda is already advertising its fuel-cell car. As soon as that rolls off the line, I'm going to get one."
Two wheels versus four wheels
After the death of Garcia, the Grateful Dead retired that name out of respect for their leader, and these days Weir leads his own band, Ratdog. While stars want to plug their latest commercial project, Weir brushes aside talk of the band and its summer tour. Instead, he wants to discuss another project he's passionate about.
In an effort to go greener than his Lexus, he offers up the utilitarian mode of bicycling for things like errands or work. "I would really love to see zero sum transportation," he says.
"There are a few human hybrid electric bicycles that I'm looking into," Weir explains. "That means you pedal and you also have a battery and a little dynamo, and when you go downhill, when you hit the brakes, it charges the battery. I can't remember the name of the hybrid bike, it's a $7500 bike that looks like I'm going to have to get it. I'm researching that right now. That's where I'm going."
Weir hopes fans will follow his lead. He already owns a road bike and mountain bike and will continue to ride off-road for fun, especially since the sport began in that area. While he does get recognized riding, Weir says, "There are no heroes in your own backyard."
But using his bike to run errands is another issue. "I live two miles up a hill. You know, I'm 60 years old, and I don't want getting home to be a horrendous huff for me. I do ride a bicycle and I do ride it up hill, but it's a lot of work. So I designate that as my workout, but I'd like to be able to just get around on one."
Weir, who reads car magazines such as Motor Trend and understands car enthusiasts' need for that Sunday drive, hopes they become more conscious of their environmental impact. His sister-in-law is Lelani Munter, a racer in the Indy Pro Series. "She's an environmentalist, as well," he says. "She's trying to get car racing to go green."
A couple times, Weir almost bought a BMW motorcycle, but it was almost as if some greater force kept him away from that purchase, nudging him to stick with cars and bicycles.
"I'm the kind of guy who shouldn't have a motorcycle," he says. "I've always wanted one. I have a good friend in Colorado who's an emergency room doctor. He ran an ER in Denver for 20 years. I'd get a royalty check that would come to my home rather than my office -- this happened on a couple of occasions and I'm looking at a check and I'm thinking, 'Okay, I'm just going to take this check down to the BMW place.' I'm on my way out the door -- this happened twice -- the phone rings and it's my friend, Charlie."
"He's just calling to catch up. At the end of the chat he'll say, 'Now you haven't been thinking of getting a motorcycle again have ya?' And then I'd have to tell him, 'I was just on my way out the door,'" Weir says, chuckling throughout the story. "He says, 'Here in the ER, we call them donor cycles.' 80 to 90 percent of the worst stuff he sees in the emergency room is motorcycle-related. And that'll cool my jets for a while. He's saved my life on numerous occasions with just a quick phone call."
As I thank him for this rather lengthy car chat, Weir replies in his folksy manner, "Well, you know, I've got some stories to tell."
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