Not Quite Fireplace Music
"Evening Moods," Bob Weir and Ratdog, GDCD 4072, distributed by Arista Records
The title "Evening Moods" makes the album sound like something by Barry White, the kind of thing you listen to if you want to seduce someone with Asti Spumanti in front of a fireplace. There's a soft, fluffy white sweater and an air of sweet innocence. Maybe you're both a little experienced, looking for something "romantic" in a gentle sense of the word. If you're a man, then an album called "Evening Moods" is somehow a sign that your seductive intentions are not quite sincere.
Ratdog's "Evening Moods" might start with the slow funk groove of "Bury Me Standing," but the first words make clear that this is not fireplace music: "Once again the crossroads and there ain't no moon shining through the trees. / God has lost my number, babe, leave me beggin' baby please." This is not a world of gentle seduction and the end of sweet innocence—the characters in Bob Weir's songs have long since lost their literal and metaphorical virginity, and in almost every song, the music gets into improvisational territory that would destroy the fluffy-white sweater mood.
The "evenings" here are just much different than anything Barry White ever tried to describe. "Odessa" is a high-energy R&B number about a woman who "got a mouth, put a junkyard dog to shame." Then there's "October Queen," a long, complicated story about a man who goes to New Orleans to a "Bible-belt convention"—but for him the point is to "spend my tomcat nights in New Orleans" with the same prostitute he meets there every October, his "October Queen." This is the closest the album comes to explicitly talking about "evening moods": "And I know it's gonna be one hell of an evening / Just like the year before, and the year before, and the year before." After that evening in hell, the man returns to his normal life — as a minister with a "congregation that pays my country club dues and rent." So much for the fireplace.
The music of these songs usually starts from something close to the slow funk of "Bury Me Standing." The album is full of blues riffs and increasingly dense textures; its many-sided jams take the funk apart and put it back together again slightly askew. The whole thing would resemble Bob Dylan's "Time Out of Mind" if the songs were bleaker, the rhythms a bit less energetic, and the mix darker. But when it comes down to it, Ratdog is simply not as inscrutable as Dylan; despite the underworld images that creep into the lyrics, the music is basically optimistic, always underwritten by the belief that this next jam may lead to a moment of pure joy.
In that, Bob Weir's band is, unsurprisingly, like his previous band. It would be disingenuous for a reviewer to pretend that he was not a member of the Grateful Dead; in fact, it would be disingenuous of Weir to do so. But he's not shy about the comparison; he invites it by doing a version of "Corinna," one of the Dead's late, unreleased songs, and also by littering the lyrics with more or less explicit references to Dead lyrics. The clearest reference is "Ashes and Glass": not only does its title imply that it might be related to "Throwing Stones" and its chorus of "ashes ashes all fall down, it also includes the phrase "throwing stones." But now it's not the politicians who are throwing them but "the poets". Even musically, "Ashes and Glass" seems like a continuation of the earlier song.
So Weir isn't shy about possible comparisons to the Dead at all—and in fact this is as good a studio album as any the Dead did since their classic material from the early 70s. The improvisational energy Ratdog generates in the studio is something the Dead were rarely ever able to produce if they weren't in front of a live audience. In a way, the only studio album by the Dead that one could fairly compare to it is not a Dead album in name at all, but Weir's "Ace," which he recorded with the Dead but released under his own name in 1972.
Like "Ace," "Evening Moods" also makes clear that the musically most inventive (by which I certainly do not mean the most beautiful) of the Dead's songwriters was often Weir. Jerry Garcia at his best was an exceptional songwriter, but his staple was finding simple figures that could be the basis of endless variations (endlessly interesting if you were a fan) while still remaining connected to that simple figure. Weir, in contrast, has always put a lot of effort into creating complex textures—even risking scaring off a lot of Deadheads (as in "Victim or the Crime" or even the Dead's versions of "Corinna") in the process. He has a particular talent for finding the special material in each song which can be used as a basis for improvising, material that is rarely the obvious choice for jamming.
But now I'm being a bit disingenuous in my comments: the music on this album is not credited to Bob Weir; except for "Corinna," which Weir wrote with Dead percussionist Mickey Hart, the music is always credited to the whole band, and they deserve credit for what's going on here. Bassist Rob Wasserman deserves special mention: in the first notes of "Bury Me Standing," the big, solid sound of his electric upright bass sets the tone for the whole album.
But it is guitarist Mark Karan who has the most to live up to, of course. Certainly, his sound is quite close to Garcia's at times—if it weren't, Weir would probably not have hired him (and he wouldn't have played with the first version of the post-GD band "The Other Ones," either). It is hard to play in a Dead-style improvisational band and do more than Garcia did, because at his best Garcia was as many-sided a guitarist as one could wish for. Still, Karan does manage to find sounds and textures that show that he is more than a Garcia knock-off, especially in the instrumental "The Deep End" that comes out of "October Queen" just before the album closes with the slow, textural "Even So."
"Evening Moods," then, is not what its name might suggest at first, but it does live up to the name in other ways—if one is willing to accept the kind of evening moods that the narrator of "October Queen" is looking for in New Orleans. This is not an album for soft, white fluffy sweaters, fireplaces, and Asti Spumanti. My remarks may have suggested that it is only an album for tie-dyes, campfires, and a dose or two, but that would be to shortchange the music that Weir and his band produce here. "Evening Moods" takes the experience Weir brings from three decades with the Dead in new, more funk-based directions that might turn off some of the Dead's fans (and those looking for Barry White evenings), but could well satisfy those who never quite clicked with the Dead's generally less edgy tone.