Phil Lesh, whose expansive approach to the bass as a charter member of
the Grateful Dead made him one of the first performers on that instrument
in a rock band to play a lead role rather than a supporting one, died on
Friday. He was 84.
His death was announced on his Instagram account. No further information
was provided.
In addition to providing explorative bass work, Mr. Lesh sang high harmonies
for the band and provided the occasional lead vocal. He also co-wrote some
of the band’s most noteworthy songs, including ones that inspired
adventurous jams, like “St. Stephen” and “Dark Star,” as well as more
conventional pieces, like “Cumberland Blues,” “Truckin’” and “Box of Rain.”
Key to the dynamic of The Dead was the way Mr. Lesh used the bass to
provide ever-shifting counterpoints to the dancing lines of the lead guitarist
Jerry Garcia, the curt riffs of the rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the bold
rhythms of the drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and, in the
band’s first eight years, the warm organ work of Ron McKernan, known as
Pigpen.
A source of particular excitement was the relationship between Mr. Lesh’s
instrument and Mr. Garcia’s. At times they mirrored each other. At other
times they contrasted, in the process widening the music’s melodic nuances
while helping to create the kind of variety and tension that allowed the band
to improvise at length without losing the listener.
Mr. Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On
the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one
could listen to a song for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his
bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time
signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources,
including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.
The Grateful Dead in performance in San Francisco in 1970. From left, Ron
McKernan, Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Mr. Lesh and Bob Weir.Robert
Altman/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
He had formal training in those last two areas, having played both classical
violin and trumpet, composed music for orchestras and studied with the
avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, all before taking up the bass and
joining the Dead. His work with the band held such value for a significant
portion of its massive following that, at concerts, devotees would position
themselves in the “Phil Zone,” an area named for “the proximity to Lesh’s
position onstage,” according to the 1994 Grateful Dead guidebook
“Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads.”
Mr. Lesh played with the Dead for the band’s entire 30-year history, which
formally ended in 1995 after the death of Mr. Garcia. In 1994, he and the
band were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. After the Dead
disbanded, Mr. Lesh played in the offshoot bands the Other Ones, the Dead
and Furthur, as well as with his own assemblage, Phil Lesh and Friends. He
retired from regular road work in 2014.
Phillip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, Calif., the
only child of Frank and Barbra (Chapman) Lesh. His father was an amateur
piano player who encouraged him to take up an instrument when he was 8;
his first instrument was the violin.
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“I was awakened to the power of music early in life through the magic of
radio broadcasts and by listening to my father play, from memory, his
favorite tunes on the piano,” Mr. Lesh wrote in his 2005 autobiography,
“Searching for the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead.” Music, he
added, “saved me by giving me a real sense of accomplishment.”
While attending El Cerrito High School in the East Bay, Mr. Lesh switched to
trumpet and became a member of the school’s marching band. He later
transferred to Berkeley High School, which had a more sophisticated music
education program. He studied with Bob Hansen, the conductor of the
symphonic Golden Gate Park Band, for whom Phil played first trumpet when
he was 15.
He enrolled in San Francisco State College (now University) but dropped out
after one semester after being rejected by that school’s orchestra. He was
accepted into the Sixth Army Band, stationed in the city, but lost the gig
after being deemed unfit for military service. He had equally brief stints at
the College of San Mateo and the University of California, Berkeley, before
abandoning a long-term commitment to higher education to take a single
graduate-level course with Mr. Berio at Mills College in 1962.
During this period he also worked in a post office and, on a volunteer basis,
as a recording engineer. While attending shows at local nightclubs he met
Mr. Garcia, who at the time was a bluegrass banjo player.
“Jerry’s delivery was both spine-tingling and bloodcurdling,” Mr. Lesh
recalled in his autobiography. “That was my first intimation that music with
that kind of directness and simplicity could deliver an aesthetic and
emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operatic or symphonic
works.”
Mr. Lesh casually mentioned to Mr. Garcia that he was interested in playing
bass. It surprised him when Mr. Garcia invited him to learn the instrument so
he could play it in the band that he was forming in 1964, then named the
Warlocks. Mr. Lesh went along, he told Soundwaves magazine in 2005,
because “it never really mattered to me very much what instrument I was
playing, so long as I could make some music.”
In fact, his lack of experience allowed him to rethink the role of the bass in
rock music, drawing inspiration from the harmonics found in works he loved
by Bach and the jazz bassist Charles Mingus. For role models in rock, he
studied the aggressive approaches of Jack Bruce in Cream and Jack Casady
in another San Francisco group, Jefferson Airplane. In his autobiography,
Mr. Lesh described the sound he and the Dead devised as not rock, jazz or
blues, but “some kind of genre-busting rainbow polka-dot hybrid mutation.”
That sound first came into focus on the band’s second album, “Anthem of
the Sun,” released in 1968, for which Mr. Lesh received co-writing credit on
almost every track. When the band streamlined its sprawling sound to
become more song-oriented on early-1970s albums like “Workingman’s
Dead” and “American Beauty,” Mr. Lesh found a new melodicism in his
playing.
For “American Beauty,” he composed the exquisite melody for “Box of Rain,”
with lyrics, provided by Robert Hunter, that expressed Mr. Lesh’s feelings
about his father’s imminent death from prostate cancer.
Mr. Lesh also took a rare lead vocal on the track. But his lack of training as a
singer eventually did damage to his vocal cords, causing him to stop
harmonizing with the band from 1976 to 1985. After that point he resumed
singing, but at a much lower pitch.
In the wake of the band’s dissolution, Mr. Lesh formed the Other Ones along
with other key members of the Dead in 1998. The next year, the band
released its first and only album, “The Strange Remain,” a live set,
dominated by new interpretations of old Dead songs.
The Other Ones broke up in 2002, but the next year Mr. Lesh and some of
its other members formed a band known simply as the Dead. The new
assemblage toured for one year, vanished, then returned for another
yearlong stint in 2008, after which Mr. Lesh and Mr. Weir formed Furthur,
which lasted until 2014.
He played for the final time with other surviving members of his original
band in 2015, at a series of concerts held at Soldier Field in Chicago billed
as the “Fare Thee Well” shows.
From 1999 to 2006, Mr. Lesh released three albums credited to Phil Lesh
and Friends. In 2012, he opened a live venue in San Rafael, Calif., Terrapin
Crossroads.
Mr. Lesh faced a series of health challenges over the last two decades. In
1988, he underwent a liver transplant after contracting hepatitis C, brought
on by years of alcohol abuse. He was successfully treated for prostate
cancer in 2006 and bladder cancer in 2015. Four years after that, he had
back surgery.
Mr. Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill; their two sons, Grahame and Brian, who
had played with him in the Terrapin Family Band; and a grandson.
In his autobiography, Mr. Lesh compared the Grateful Dead’s music to life
itself. Both, he said, were “a series of recurring themes, transpositions,
repetitions, unexpected developments, all converging to define form that is
not necessarily apparent until its ending has come and gone.”
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