Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir Recalls Providing Haven for Sammy Hagar

The great thing about making a solid living in music and entertainment is the ability it gives you to live near people doing the same thing. Though their styles may be different, Grateful Dead's Bob Weir can look down the street and occasionally catch sight of the "Red Rocker" himself, Sammy Hagar.

Weir says he's enjoyed getting to know Sammy over the years, and told Rolling Stone about one incident where the singer dropped by after arguing with his wife. Weir explained, "He's more fun than a frog in a glass of milk, and he's got his studio right around the corner here. He's nuts. We hang together a bit. When he gets thrown out of the house, typically I'll get a phone call -- 'Bob, I'm coming down there. I've got to show you my new car.' He comes down there, he's a little edgy, and he's got a new car and he takes me out and scares the living crap out of me. And he gets it out of his system and everything's fine."

Speaking of getting it out of your system, Weir himself has quite a few outlets for his musical inspiration these days. He counts Further, Ratdog, and some collaborative work with Bruce Hornsby amongst his projects, and gave the magazine an idea of what's coming next.

"Personally, I'm working on my orchestral piece. It's now twice the size of what it was when we tried it out a year ago in May. That's evolved a bit and we're looking to stage it and probably record it as well," says Weir. "I'm looking forward to some more solo acoustic dates. That's a lot of fun for me, because I get to be alone with the song. And I get to hear every little nuance; if my instrument does something that I wasn't expecting, I get to chase that. Chase that down a little bit. It's simple enough so that I can hear everything that I'm singing and playing, and I'm hearing stuff that I wouldn't, in an ensemble, be able to hear. And I'm working with that stuff so that the songs are showing me new sides of themselves."