NEW YORK (AP) -- Bob Weir recalls it as though it were yesterday, how he and Jerry Garcia crossed paths and, in the time it took to knock on a door, began a musical odyssey that would take two eerily aligned words, Grateful Dead, and turn them into a household name.
"It was New Year's Eve of 1964," Weir says, his voice warming to the memory. "He was waiting for his students to show up and I walked by the back alley behind this music store he was teaching in."
"I apprised him that it being New Year's Eve, his students probably weren't going to show up," Weir recalls, chuckling. "We waited awhile and they didn't, so we broke into the front of the store where they kept the instruments and we jammed all night long."
"Within a week we had thrown together a jug band," Weir continued. "About a year later that turned into a rock 'n' roll band."
Soon after, the band changed its name from the Warlocks, and before you knew it 30 years had slipped by. The Grateful Dead had become an institution.
To the public it has been an institution in flux since Garcia died of a heart attack on Aug. 9 at age 53.
Although Garcia sometimes had talked of the band surviving him, that seemed unlikely amid the shock that followed his death. Now, Weir says, it might be so.
"I more or less expect that everybody's going to want to get together and play again," he said during a recent phone conversation from the San Francisco Bay area. "I'd be really surprised if we didn't come up with something by next summer."
The first step, he said, is figuring out just how the band can go back on the road without the man who was one of its two lead singers, its lead guitarist and half of one of its two principal songwriting teams. Would it take two people, maybe even three, to replace him?
"There have been all kinds of suggestions, but I don't want to wade into any of that," Weir answers.
"For one thing," he adds with a quick laugh, "I'd be forgetting some of the most interesting ones. Everybody has an idea."
In the meantime, band members are pursuing various individual projects they had planned months in advance.
"But we'll have some time in the next couple of months, and we'll just chase it around then and see what happens," Weir said.
For Weir, the solo projects had been piling up for some time, among them his new side band, Ratdog, and its expanded version, Ratdog Revue, featuring bassist Rob Wasserman, Grateful Dead keyboard player Vince Welnick and others.
Meanwhile, two Grateful Dead recording projects wrapped up in the weeks before Garcia's death also have just been released.
The first,
''We were really cooking then,'' says Weir. ''I don't like to listen to it that much because it's us and I've heard it, but yeah, it was a good night.''
The other is ''The Music Never Stopped,'' a collection of folk, blues, bluegrass and early rock, by artists Weir and Garcia grew up listening to.
For, as the Grateful Dead forged first a musical identity and then a new musical genre, the band never strayed too far from the sounds its guitarists brought to that first New Year's Eve collaboration.
Garcia had grown up in the Bay area listening to everything from early rock 'n' roll to pop standards to the Grand Ole Opry.
As for Weir: ''I used to listen to Lightnin' Hopkins, the Rev. Gary Davis, Mance Lipscomb, all the seminal blues players,'' he said. ''Also the Everly Brothers and a little bit of Elvis, although I was never a huge Elvis fan. Of course Chuck Berry and the Beatles were a monster influence on me. And I also listened to a fair bit of country music ... a lot of George Jones, for instance.''
Now 48, he had taken up the guitar in his teens.
''I think I got some money for graduating eighth grade,'' he recalled. ''Anyway, I went out and got one. It was cheap and it was almost impossible to play.''
He persisted, studying chord charts, learning from records, eventually developing into one of rock music's most dynamic rhythm guitar players. By the early 1970s, when the Dead were already a bid deal, he took his only formal lessons, from the Rev. Davis, the legendary street preacher whose song ''Sampson and Delilah,'' is included on ''The Music Never Stopped.''
With such a varied background, it was never unusual to hear the Grateful Dead, amid its original material and its spacey musical jams, break into an old Merle Haggard or Marty Robbins cowboy song, a Chuck Berry rocker, a Howlin' Wolf blues screamer.
Which got a couple of the Grateful Dead's friends to thinking: Wasn't it time more of the people the Grateful Dead had influenced heard from the people who had influenced them?
''I grew up listening to the Grateful Dead, and part of the message I got from them was an increased knowledge and appreciation of American roots music,'' says musician and musicologist Henry Kaiser, who co-produced the recording with David Gans, the host of the syndicated program ''The Grateful Dead Radio Hour.''
The two spoke with Garcia and Weir, then plowed through the Grateful Dead archives. They were aided by the fact that Dead fans, like historians and baseball fanatics, keep lists of everything.
In 30 years, the Grateful Dead have played a lot of songs, however. Starting with five CDs worth of material, Kaiser and Gans narrowed their selections down to one collection by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Haggard, Davis and others.
Just before he died, Garcia spoke with Kaiser about the project one last time.
''He was just like he always was,'' Kaiser recalled wistfully. ''Like an enthusiastic high school kid.''
Looking back over 30-plus years of friendship, Weir recalls a more mercurial Garcia.
''He was an incredibly talented person, and he was getting even more so as he got older,'' he says. ''But it was always day to day with him, his mood would always change.''
But in those last days, Weir added, Garcia was indeed the picture of that big, enthusiastic kid the public so often saw.
''I think it's important to realize that he died smiling,'' he said. ''He was on an upswing when it happened.''
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