A Blog About Phil Lesh

Not how you want to start a weekend but alas nobody's getting out of here alive. Death comes for all of us and today it took Phil Lesh. 

I know enough to know there's better opinions and more knowledgeable people to speak on the matter. But I also know enough to know how to pay timely respects to a legendary figure in American music history. This is the best I can do. 

The Grateful Dead need no introduction. From 1965-1995 they played more live music than anyone in history. And they did it with a sound so unique that it defies explanation. It's blues and bluegrass and folk and country and rock and jug band and just about everything in between. Even Mickey Hart is rapping now, which is actually insane to think about and another example that they're a little bit of everything. 

Mostly, they're irreplecable and I'm here to argue that's directly because of Phil Lesh.

To understand why, you have to first understand the roots of the band. 

They started in 1965. Jerry Garcia met Bill (the drummer) in the early 60's while buying a banjo from a music store Bill worked at. Bill offered Jerry a job to give guitar lessons. Shortly thereafter, a teenage Bob Weir walked in off the street on New Years Eve and got introduced to Jerry. Guitar lessons were exchanged and shortly thereafter, a band called Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions was born. It was an old jug-band-bluegrass-string amalgamation with Pigpen ripping the harmonica over Jerry and a collective of legends-at-inception: Robert Hunter, Bob Weir and David Nelson. But no Phil Lesh. Not yet at least.

The unique thing here is that it's all acoustic. 

The other unique thing is that the Grateful Dead RARELY went unplugged: 1970 at Harper College certainly comes to mind and again for the Dead Reckoning Tour in the mid 80's. But really it's a completely different sound than Mother McCrees in 1964. Remember that.

Then in 1965, Jerry Garcia wanted to go electric. I don't know the story on how the idea came about, but the general concept is that the band would only become more unique if mixed with modern advances in equipment like the electric guitar. So they went electric and changed their name to the Warlocks. 

But in the process, they needed to find electric equipment, which was expensive. So they brought along a below average bass player whose family owned the local music store. He let the band use the store's equipment for free which was a huge plus because nobody cared about the bass player.

The music's alright but Jerry really knows the bass player blows. They need a guy that can hold the sound while Jerry wanders around the guitar neck and has a nice trip without getting pissed off with the bridges and transitions. Maybe not the sexiest spot on stage, but the bass player is critical to where Jerry needs to go to make the music what it is. 

So they bring along a guy named Phil Lesh - a classically trained, musical genius with absolutely ZERO experience playing the bass. He's a composer dropout from UC Berkley and he loves doing drugs. It's a perfect fit for a group of misfit toys, and from here, everything changes. 

Phil Lesh made things weird. He made it unique. He got the band to break into 30 minute improvisations. He locked in with Bill Kreutzmann and later Mickey Hart in arguably the best bass/percussion partnership in Rock N Roll history. And as I type this out, a stark realization comes to the front of my mind. 

Jerry Garcia is arguably one of the best guitar players of all time. Certainly one of the most recognizable and absolutely one of the most unique. His image and status so far exceeded the rest of the band combined. 

But if you listen to Jerry Garcia solo work, or Jerry Garcia Band, or Jerry Garcia Accoustic Band, or New Riders of the Purple Sage or Legion of Mary or really any of his collaborations, you'll know they drastically miss something from the Grateful Dead. 

And comparatively, Jerry played with much better musicians than his bandmates in their time apart. But he always said there was no greater challenge or better feeling than performing live with the Grateful Dead. 

That's because of Phil Lesh. The powerful energy and thumping melodies and unbelievable ability to quite literally compose an entire bass line - not just one repetitive 8-bar basic piece of bullshit. I'm talking about a full blown piece of individual music like he was conducting the New York Philharmonic all on his 6-string bass.

What makes that significant is the Grateful Dead relied on simplicity in the structure. Example: Morning Dew is three chords. Example: I Know You Rider is three chords. Most of their core stuff is predicated on basic blues structure where it's really in the musician's talent to explore and differentiate. To play along with them can be as easy or as hard as you want. But I can assure you it's much easier than you think and that's the way they designed it. 

But listen close enough and you'll find a bass player wandering around songs almost chaotically, leading his own opus to Bill's beat. Somehow in that way he was both uniting the stage while pursuing his own individual sound. Like a baseball team playing their own positions with absolutely no control over whether the guy next to him does his own job. 

The Grateful Dead, in a sense, existed long before Phil Lesh showed up. Those guys had been playing together for years, trying to figure something out together, taking chances and doing drugs. A lot of people know a lot more than me, but I'm willing to say they didn't come together the right way until Phil showed up. Why and how is worth 10,000 words so I'll just settle on this. 

There's no Grateful Dead if there's no Phil Lesh. 

He will be missed. 

Please do yourself a favor and read some tributes from some smarter people. They're definitely out there.

For now here's the only song he sang for the band.* He wrote it for his dad while he was dying from cancer. Really powerful stuff if you think about it.

EDIT: *One of two songs. He also sang Unbroken Chain.