Weir, Wasserman Pair Up in Act Filled With Enough Intensity to Raise the Dead : The Grateful Dead guitarist and singer joined the Bay Area bassist at the Coach House. The sets often lacked the grace and interaction needed to round out the music.

Usually, when a band member moonlights from a major rock group, it’s to kick back, take it easy and do some musical meandering.

With the Grateful Dead, though, laid-back meandering is the gist of the everyday agenda. So it was fitting that Bob Weir tried something different Tuesday night at the Coach House in his duo show with Bay Area bassist Rob Wasserman--namely, near-constant focus and intensity.

As singer and guitarist for the Dead, the Ol’ Man River of rock bands, Weir is part of a slowly unfolding musical ebb and flow. The Big Muddy approach may be just the thing for arena evenings or sunbaked stadium afternoons when the Dead provide the soundtrack for their followers’ gentle communitarianism. But slow and mellow isn’t the ticket when the music is pared down to bare basics--a singer with an acoustic guitar, joined by an accompanist shuttling between a traditional acoustic stand-up bass and an upright electric version that looked like an Art Deco reconstruction of the old-fashioned design.

Weir and Wasserman were anything but mellow, playing two sets that emphasized forceful rhythms and, for just a bassist and guitarist, a fair amount of hard-edged noise.

Still, the 90-minute concert (two 45-minute sets divided by a half-hour intermission) had some of the trappings of a Dead show in miniature. The audience consisted overwhelmingly of new-generation Deadheads, listeners in their teens and early 20s who hadn’t even been born in 1965 when the Grateful Dead began.

The packed Coach House featured the usual uniforms and comportment: tie-dyed shirts and peasant dresses, bandannas and serapes, incense burning, ritualistic free-form dancing in the wings and the characteristically pleasant mood that makes the Deadheads’ hippie-throwback antiquarianism a little easier to stomach than if they were hippies in fashion only.

The repertoire also followed the Dead’s rootsy eclecticism. Most of the show was devoted to originals Weir has recorded with the Dead or on his own albums, but there was also a liberal heaping of standards ranging from Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues” to the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece” to a crooned encore of “Misty.”

Weir sang with immediacy and conviction, even on the good-timey numbers early in the show. The energy of his performance helped compensate for a voice that was as texturally flat and featureless as America’s midsection. (Still, despite an earnest effort, Weir is not a singer you want to hear attempt “Misty.”)

Looking athletic in shorts and a polo shirt, Weir was the lean-and-intense antithesis of his partner in the Dead, Jerry Garcia, rock’s answer to Santa Claus. As Weir strummed his hard, percussive rhythm parts, and Wasserman followed his lead with hammering bass lines, one wished that Garcia were there to provide some of his sweet, airy guitar melodies. Especially in the first set, the music lacked the melodic grace notes and interactive playing that would have made it fuller and more rounded. A harsh sound mix didn’t help.

The second set was less blunt, and more reflective, as Weir explored serious themes. “Artificial Flowers,” an old Broadway show tune once popularized by Bobby Darin, juxtaposed sprightly, ragtime-influenced music with a bleak story about an abandoned child forced to scrape for pennies by making “artificial flowers, flowers for ladies of fashion to wear.”

Weir was able to make his bitter point about the exploited poor and the exploiting rich with some subtlety (at least more so than on “Throwing Stones,” the soapbox anthem that closed the set). Delicacy also was a virtue on “Easy to Fall,” a warm, gently philosophical number.

Weir and Wasserman also took time in the second set to stretch out with more responsive playing that finally enabled Wasserman--best known for recording an album of bass-and-voice duets with the likes of Rickie Lee Jones, Aaron Neville and Lou Reed--to show more than the unremarkable accompaniments he had played through most of the show. Wasserman’s big solo ranged from the obvious (blues rock riffs and “Satisfaction”) to the enchanting (a passage that sounded like twin Celtic or country fiddles, created by bowing a drone with his right hand while simultaneously tapping out a lead with his left hand).

While the show offered the Deadheads something different--concentrated intensity in a small club--Weir and Wasserman didn’t try to reach out and lend the show an extra personal dimension. The Dead rarely speak to their audiences from the stage. Besides a mumbled excuse for some early sound problems, and a directive to the audience to “clap in time” when it was clapping chaotically during one of the more rocking numbers, Weir more or less remained mum, too.

Deadheads might say that talk from the pulpit isn’t necessary when communion through music is complete. As it was, they remained in a rapture from start to finish, applauding each number with religious zeal.

Perhaps if they were a less faithful flock, a more demanding audience, Weir would have reached out in a way that most audiences find important. But in matters of faith--and that’s what’s involved with the world’s only stadium-sized cult band--the normal standards don’t apply.

Kris McKay, a newcomer from Austin, Tex., had the unenviable job of playing an acoustic opening set for a cult that wasn’t hers (she told the audience that she is on the same record label as the Dead, as if that was going to earn her points). While the crowd kept up a steady hum of chatter through McKay’s set, it also displayed its bonhomie by cheering each song lustily as it ended. Such unconsidered applause is about as meaningful as a have-a-nice-day button.

McKay’s more intimate, folk-based (and therefore least heeded) songs sounded best. Her attempts at husky blues belting rang gratingly false as she abandoned control and decorum and raised her voice in a raspy, unflattering growl that did little but bid for attention.