National treasure, Bob Weir, has a new side project called Wolf Bros featuring super producer Don Was on bass and Jay Lane from Primus on drums. They sound pretty tight on this recent Tiny Desk concert.
Here’s all you need to know about the Wolf Bros:
The new trio teams Weir with Don Was, the ever-busy producer, bassist, and head of Blue Note Records who somehow found time to tour with Dead & Company (in between producing albums by Mayer, the Rolling Stones, and Gregg Allman), and Jay Lane, the RatDog and Primus drummer who first played with Weir in the early ’90s. These are players who know each other’s moves well, but the idea behind Bob Weir and Wolf Bros is a new one for them all. “For a while now I’ve been itchin’ to explore our songs in a trio setting,” Weir explains. “An upright bass, my acoustic or electric guitar, a drummer.” Last spring, he finally scratched that itch when he enlisted Was and Lane to try out some Dead songs and “tunes from my back pages.” The result was, as he says, “big fun.” Fans can expect a take on Dead classics that’s more acoustic and jazz-based than the freewheeling jams of Dead & Company. Then again, with Weir at the helm, it may be wiser to expect the unexpected.
