Snagged this great interview with Bob Weir from MSN Re: Masters is a monthly interview column dedicated to exploring a veteran artist's body of workJuly 1, 2007In 1991, the Grateful Dead began a series of live, archival releases called "From the Vault." The first fruits were titled, naturally enough, "One From the Vault" (a 1975 show from San Francisco) and "Two From the Vault" (a Los Angeles concert from 1968). Since then, there have been more than 50 officially sanctioned live albums from the band -- none of them a follow-up to this series. Hear "Three From the Vault" View gallery: Grateful Dead Sixteen years later, the Dead are finally issuing "Three From the Vault," a 1971 concert from Port Chester, N.Y. Even the official press release offers no particular explanation for the decision to revive this line, stating that it simply represents "the band's longstanding policy of gleefully monkey-wrenching the space-time continuum whenever and wherever possible." Whatever. What is most interesting about "Three From the Vault" is not the backstory but the sound. It documents the band at an especially intriguing moment: fresh off the releases of "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead," their two strongest studio efforts, and stripped down to a five-piece lineup: just guitarist Jerry Garcia, drummer Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Phil Lesh, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan on keyboards and harmonica, and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir. It was the most conventional rock 'n' roll setup in the Dead's long history (usually they had a second drummer, Mickey Hart, and often a second keyboard player as well), and coincided with the period in which they were most focused on fully realized, well-structured songs. The set features the world premieres of "Bird Song" and "Deal," and the second ever performances of five other songs, including such staples as "Playing in the Band" and "Wharf Rat." Only a few songs stretch out beyond the 10-minute mark. In some ways, this release could be considered the Grateful Dead for non-Deadheads. "Three From the Vault" is one of the first results of a comprehensive licensing agreement that the Dead signed last year with Rhino Entertainment to manage exclusively the band's intellectual property. Rhino now oversees everything from the band's live archive and its Web site to its merchandise. (Grateful Dead Productions retains creative control, and the deal does not include the band's music publishing.) But whether the Rhino deal inspired the resurgence of the "Vault" series or whether it was coming anyway ... well, who knows? From his Bay Area home, Bob Weir discussed the reopening of the Vault, the vagaries of the archiving process, and what he refers to as the Dead's "rock 'n' roll Dixieland" approach to collective improvisation. "The music happens somewhere between what the band does and what the audience captures," says Weir. "So if you're going over their heads, it doesn't amount to much." MSN Music: So this album is part of the "Vault" series, as opposed to the "Dick's Picks" series, or the other one-off live releases from the Dead's archive. Can you explain the distinctions between all of these, or is it vague to you, too? Bob Weir: It's pretty vague from my end. It makes sense to the archivist, though, and that's what matters. There has to be some sort of system, and the guy who set it all up for us is a classically trained archivist, so I trust his sensibility. But do you know why one album is part of one series and another album is part of another series? No, I don't, but he does, and the people who follow this stuff closely do -- or at least I hope they do! I don't pay that much attention to our old stuff, really. I have bigger fish to fry. How involved are you in the archival releases? Do you actually participate in the process, or do you just sign off at the end? The guys in the band really aren't all that involved. We all have different, ongoing projects that take up our time: I have my band Ratdog; Mickey and Phil have their own things going. So I think I can speak for everybody that we look at our archives as our past accomplishments -- we're happy with them, proud of them, but not really all that concerned about them. There's only so much I'm going to be able to enjoy going back to that stuff. After 40-some years, is listening to old Grateful Dead shows something you can do for fun, or is it something that you do when it's necessary but wouldn't choose to do on your own time? I will say that life was simpler then, and we were a tight, lean outfit and could turn on a dime. The bigger ensembles maybe had more thump to them, but that band was like a powerful sports car, agile.It's a chore, it's a responsibility, and I try to dodge it as much as I can. If I go back and listen to one of our shows, I just want to make sure it's well recorded and not get involved in the aesthetic decisions, because I'm always going to hear stuff that we could have done better. That would just be tormenting myself. Is there anything in this particular show that surprised you when you went back to it? Well, the surprises came with regularity -- probably every other song. So it is kind of intriguing to go back to it, but there's only so much I can listen to before something comes over me and I need to move on. Speaking as someone who is not a Deadhead, this album presents probably my favorite version of the band -- the five-piece lineup recorded some of the things I enjoy the most. I will say that life was simpler then, and we were a tight, lean outfit and could turn on a dime. The bigger ensembles maybe had more thump to them, but that band was like a powerful sports car, agile. We were listening hard to each other and providing each other corners and really taking those corners. This show came the year after the release of "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead," albums which represented the Dead's most focused songwriting efforts. How did that discipline in the studio manifest itself onstage? As we matured as songwriters, what that gave us was a body of songs to interpret, with more facility with the craft and the art of songwriting. It was more fun onstage, more adventure, the more we had. And these songs were never written to be played the same way twice. So the more we wrote, the more involved we got, the more fun we had and the more the songs revealed themselves to us. Also, we were developing facility at the performance level, taking more structured songs and finding new covers and new punches for them. Not long after these songs were written, they had become completely different. A recording of any of our songs, even in the studio, is just a snapshot of a moment, at best. It's an intuitive kind of endeavor to play the way we did -- you try to find your thread in a song, the place you could fit in. For me, it was somewhere in the middle of the rhythm section. So you had to understand the words, the characters -- you had to understand The Song, in capital letters; you couldn't just arbitrarily come in and make noise. Was it different for you to find that proper place in this smaller lineup? Did your actual plan of attack for the songs change as the group's composition changed? We always approached songs the same. We got good at it in that small ensemble, and then the facility we gained there we were able to bring back to the larger group. If you learn it doing it smaller, you can always do it larger. And we only got but so big, and always added pieces incrementally. When you signed the deal with Rhino, you said that one of the priorities would be figuring out digital plans for the band's enormous archives. Are you making progress on that project? It will be very expensive and very time-consuming to digitize our vaults. It should be done, but it will be a while in coming. Certainly one of the first orders of business with Rhino has to be starting to kick around ideas of how we can get this done. I have no idea yet when it will happen, but it should definitely be sooner rather than later. What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Grateful Dead? For some people, there seems to be some sort of sense that we were gurus, that we were implying in our lyrics that by grasping some sort of key that we had that it could open you up to some sort of cosmic consciousness. And that does exist in our lyrics, but it also exists in everything on earth. So I think there was a tendency to read too much into our lyrics. I think the bulk of the people understand what we were up to and loved it for what it was -- and I think that probably will be our enduring legacy. And for those who did make too much of it, maybe that's working for them, and that can be their own sense of the legacy. When you say that people understood what you were up to, how would you define what that was? On a nightly basis, we stated a theme, and then we took it for a walk in the woods.