Phil Lesh, Bassist for the Grateful Dead, Dies at 84

Chris Morris
·7-min read

Bassist Phil Lesh, whose dense, inventive playing powered the Grateful Dead and, following the 1995 death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, many of the San Francisco band’s touring reincarnations, died Friday. He was 84.

The news was posted on his official Instagram page with the message “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”

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Lesh was a classically trained trumpeter who had studied with avant garde composer Luciano Berio and played with minimalist pioneer Steve Reich when he was recruited to play bass – an instrument he had never studied – at a 1965 show in a Menlo Park, CA, pizza parlor by the Warlocks, a group fronted by his friend Jerry Garcia.

“I was so excited that I didn’t have to think about it…but I knew something great was happening, something bigger than everybody, bigger than me for sure,” Lesh told the Dead’s publicist and official historian Dennis McNally in the 2002 book “A Long Strange Trip.”

It is difficult to envision the oft-sprawling, improvisational work of the Dead without the sophisticated contributions of Lesh, who — like his Bay Area colleague Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and his English contemporary Jack Bruce of Cream — essentially reinvented the role of the bassist in a rock band format, in a unit that began life playing covers of bluegrass, blues and country tunes.

“What makes the Dead’s sound so distinct from any other kind of rock and roll may be Lesh’s bass,” Nick Paumgarten noted in a 2012 New Yorker piece about the band’s devoted “Deadhead” fans.

The writer added, “He did not like to repeat things, which is rare for an instrument usually charged with keeping time. He played around the root and the beat, often skewing the pocket, skipping the one, holding off on the changes, bubbling up around it, or playing a melodic counterpoint. Growing up, he listened more to [classical composers] Elliot Carter and Charles Ives than to Lead Belly or Hank Williams.”

On record, Lesh left his deepest imprint on the Dead’s early albums for Warner Bros. Records, on which he was usually credited for the music alongside Garcia. After a split with producer Dave Hassinger, he helped mix the band’s 1968 sophomore album “Anthem of the Sun,” which employed a cut-up editing technique common to avant garde music of the period.

As a writer, he co-authored a number of compositions – “St. Stephen,” “The Eleven” and the epic “Dark Star” – which became long-form, jam-oriented fixtures of the Dead’s concert repertoire that were much beloved by legions of bootlegging fans. In 1968-70, he was aided and abetted in the band by keyboardist Tom Constanten, his like-minded former roommate at Oakland’s Mills College.

His influence became less prominent after the Dead took a more roots-oriented turn with the million-selling 1970 release “Workingman’s Dead,” after which Garcia would pen the majority of the band’s songs with lyricist Robert Hunter. But, with Garcia, guitarist Bob Weir and drummer Bill Kreutzmann, he remained a constant and irreplaceable component of the act’s lineup for its 30 years on stage.

Lesh was a linchpin in the long afterlife of the Grateful Dead, touring along with other ex-members with the Other Ones (1998-99), the Dead (2003-04, 2008-09) and Furthur (2009-13). After the group was formally laid to rest in 2015 with their “Fare Thee Well” concerts in Northern California and Chicago, Lesh sat out a latter-day incarnation, Dead & Company, in which he was replaced by Allman Brother Band bassist Otell Burbridge.

In later years, he played in Phil Lesh and Friends and with the Terrapin Family Band, an outgrowth of the offerings at Terrapin Crossroads, his family-operated music hall and restaurant in San Rafael, Calif., which opened in 2012. He said the enterprise was inspired by the informal “Midnight Rambles” organized by the Band’s drummer Levon Helm at his Woodstock, N.Y., barn.

Lesh told the New Yorker, “I want to bring musicians who maybe have not had a lot of contact with the Grateful Dead into a band setting and work with them and engage them. It’s not necessarily to teach, but to pull out of them that way of looking at music. So that they can then play this music not the same way but with the same spirit, with the same perspective and goals that we did.”

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead in 1994.

Lesh was born in Berkeley, Calif., on March 15, 1940. He was encouraged to listen to classical music by his mother, and was originally a violin student. He began playing trumpet at Berkeley High. He became interested in avant garde music and jazz, and later noted the impact upon his playing with the Dead by such jazz bassists of Scott La Faro of Bill Evans’ trio and Charlie Haden of Ornette Coleman’s quintet.

After high school, he moved from school to school, studying music at San Francisco State University, the College of San Mateo, the University of California at Berkeley (where he met Constanten) and Mills College, where he studied with Berio and encountered Reich.

Lesh met Garcia while working as a volunteer engineer at the Bay Area public radio station KPFA. He was making a living driving a postal service truck when he dropped into Magoo’s Pizza Parlor to catch the second gig by the group that had grown out of the guitarist’s previous endeavor, Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Lesh accepted Garcia’s invitation to play bass on the spot, and some months later the Warlocks were rechristened the Grateful Dead.

Amid the psychedelic ferment of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury era, the Dead became the top rock ballroom attraction in the city, moving audiences with their long-form, improvisational playing. In 1967 the band was signed by Warner Bros. By that time, Lesh was demonstrating complete mastery of his adopted instrument, and he also contributed high harmonies to the band’s vocal mix.

Between 1967 and 1990, Lesh appeared on all 13 of the Dead’s studio releases and 10 official live albums. From the first, the Dead actively encouraged their fans to record their live shows, and tapes were traded from hand to hand; Lesh swiftly became one of the most-documented bass players in musical history, with an estimated 2,000 Dead shows captured for posterity.

On Aug. 9, 1995, Garcia, who had grappled with health and drug addiction issues for years, suffered a fatal heart attack at the Serenity Knolls treatment center in Forest Knolls, Calif. Lesh wrote in “Searching For the Sound,” his 2005 autobiography, “I was struck numb; I had lost my oldest surviving friend, my brother.”

Acknowledging the Deadheads’ insatiable appetite for their music, the members of the Dead reconvened regularly for more than two decades in various configurations, nearly all of which included Lesh. As late at 2018, the bassist and Bob Weir embarked on a six-concert U.S. tour.

For his part, Lesh – who was portrayed unflatteringly by San Francisco journalist Joel Selvin in his 2018 book, about the Dead’s later years, “Fare Thee Well” — strived to create a musical identity for himself apart from the reunion circuit, and appeared annually as a headliner every Halloween at his “Phil-O-Ween” dates at the Dead-friendly New York venue the Capitol Theatre.

He remained highly active despite an ongoing series of health challenges that included a 1998 liver transplant, successful prostate cancer surgery in 2006, bladder cancer surgery in 2015 and back surgery in 2019.

Just two days before Lesh’s death, the Grateful Dead were named Persons of the Year by MusiCares, the Recording Academy’s charitable wing, which celebrates a different artist at its annual fundraising gala during Grammy Week. The ceremony is expected to kick off the group’s 60th anniversary celebrations, although Lesh’s death will certainly make the anniversary a bittersweet one.

Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and their sons Grahame and Brian, both of whom performed with the Terrapin Family Band.

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