As you may have heard by now, the Grateful Dead plan to wrap up their career with five upcoming concerts: June 27 and 28 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., and July 3-5 at Soldier Field in Chicago. And in a new interview with The New Yorker, the band’s guitarist/singer Bob Weir, along with Phish‘s Trey Anastasio who is filling in for the late Jerry Garcia, discussed a bit about the shows.
Weir noted that Jeff Tanski, a Broadway musician (who has worked on Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) has created charts for up to 70 Grateful Dead songs for the shows. Anastasio corrected Weir, saying, “Ninety! And by the time we’re done I bet it’s a hundred.”
Anastasio also mentioned that he’s learning all of those songs because “I don’t want to be the problem,” i.e. the reason why the band can’t play as many different songs as they want to.
He also added, “Bob and I joked that the first song I sing ought to be ‘Dire Wolf,’ which has the chorus ‘Don’t murder me.'” Which reveals that Anastasio isn’t just on hand to play Garcia’s lead guitar lines, but also to sing lead vocals on at least some of the late frontman’s songs.
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