Phil Lesh, Oakland Coliseum, 1995
Photo by Stephen Dorian Miner
Phil Lesh is 83 years old today.
Lesh is a musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead. He played bass guitar throughout the group’s 30-year career.
After the band's disbanding in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with the side project, Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their originals, common covers and the songs of the members of his band.
Phil & Friends helped keep a legitimate entity for the band's music to continue and has played sporadically throughout the years. Lesh opened a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads, and has been performing with Furthur alongside former Grateful Dead bandmate, Bob Weir.
Lesh started out as a violin player. While enrolled at Berkeley High School, he switched to trumpet. Studying the instrument under Bob Hansen, conductor of the symphonic Golden Gate Park Band, he developed a keen interest in avant-garde classical music and free jazz.
At the College of San Mateo, Lesh played trumpet in and wrote for the school's big band. (A snippet of tape of Lesh on trumpet in college can be heard on "Born Cross-Eyed" from the Grateful Dead's 1968 release, Anthem of the Sun.)
After transferring with sophomore standing to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he befriended future Grateful Dead keyboardist, Tom Constanten, before dropping out after less than a semester.
At the behest of Constanten, he studied under the Italian modernist, Luciano Berio, in a graduate-level course at Mills College in the spring of 1962. Their classmates included Steve Reich and Stanford University cross-registrant, John Chowning.
While volunteering for KPFA as a recording engineer during this period, Lesh met then-bluegrass banjo player, Jerry Garcia. Despite seemingly antipodal musical interests, they formed an enduring friendship.
Following a brief period rooming with Constanten in Las Vegas, a stint with the United States Postal Service and a collaboration with Reich, Lesh was talked into becoming the bass guitarist for Garcia's new rock group, then known as the Warlocks, in the fall of 1964.
This was a peculiar turn of events, as Lesh had never played bass before. According to Lesh, the first song he rehearsed with the band was "I Know You Rider.“ He joined them for their third or fourth gig (memories vary) and stayed until the end.
Since Lesh had never played bass, it meant that to a great extent he learned "on the job," yet it also meant he had no preconceived attitudes about the instrument's traditional "rhythm section" role.
Indeed, he has said that his playing style was influenced more by Bach counterpoint than by rock or soul bass players — although one can also hear the fluidity and power of a jazz bassist such as Charles Mingus or Jimmy Garrison in Lesh's work, along with stylistic allusions to fellow San Francisco psychedelic-era bassist, Jack Casady.
Lesh was an innovator in the new role that the electric bass developed during the mid-1960s. Contemporaries such as James Jamerson, Paul McCartney and Jack Casady adopted a more melodic, contrapuntal approach to the instrument.
Before this, bass players in rock had generally played a conventional timekeeping role within the beat of the song, and within (or underpinning) the song's harmonic or chord structure.
While not abandoning these aspects, Lesh took his own improvised excursions during a song or instrumental. This was a characteristic aspect of the so-called San Francisco Sound in the new rock music.
In many Dead jams, Lesh's bass is — in essence — as much a lead instrument as Garcia's guitar.
Lesh was not a prolific composer or singer with the Grateful Dead, although some of the songs he did contribute — "New Potato Caboose," "Box of Rain," "Unbroken Chain" and "Pride of Cucamonga" — are among the best-known in the band's repertoire.
Lesh's high tenor voice contributed to the Grateful Dead's four-part harmony sections in their group vocals in the early days of the band, until he relinquished singing high parts to Donna Godchaux.
In the 1980s, he resumed singing, but as a baritone. His interest in avant-garde music was a crucial influence on the Dead.
In 2012, Lesh founded Terrapin Crossroads, in San Rafael, California. The venue officially opened on March 17, 2012, with a first of a run of twelve concerts by Phil Lesh and Friends. When not on tour, Lesh's sons, Grahame and Brian, serve as the house band at Terrapin Crossroads.
Phil Lesh and Friends made appearances in the summer of 2013 at both Mountain Jam Music Festival and Gathering of the Vibes Festival. Lesh frequently tours with Phil Lesh and Friends.
In October, 2015, Lesh revealed that he had undergone surgery as treatment for bladder cancer. He stated that his prognosis was good and that he expected to make a full recovery.