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    • Phil Lesh, the groundbreaking Grateful Dead bassist, dies at the age of 84
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    Phil Lesh, the groundbreaking Grateful Dead bassist, dies at the age of 84

    Vaseline Posted on

    Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead whose electric bass playing came to define San Francisco’s psychedelic sound, died on October 25 at the age of 84.

    The musician’s death was announced on his official Instagram, with the following post: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founder of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to everyone. around him and leave behind a legacy of music and love. We ask that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.

    He is survived by his wife Jill and their two musician sons, Grahame and Brian.

    Lesh has faced a number of health hurdles in recent decades. In 1998 he received a liver transplant after internal bleeding due to Hepatitis C. In 2006, he had surgery to remove his prostate cancer, and ten years later he successfully underwent treatment for bladder cancer.

    As was the case for many musicians in the ’60s and ’70s, Lesh, along with his bandmate Jerry Garcia, battled addictions to various vices. Although Garcia died in 1995 while being treated for heroin addiction, Lesh, with the fierce support of his wife, came clean and managed to live on for decades.

    Lesh starred in a number of post-Grateful Dead incarnations after Garcia’s death, including The Other Ones, Further, Phil Lesh & Friends and The Dead.

    But he was also a frequently seen and heard part of his Marin County home base, where he ran and performed for a decade at his club Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, California, named after a famous Dead song.

    Lesh went from tinkering with the violin to becoming one of the most innovative rock bassists ever

    Lesh took a remarkably eclectic path to rock ‘n’ roll stardom. Born in 1940 in Berkeley, California, he studied violin as a child and later played trumpet. Lesh also developed an early interest in avant-garde music and free jazz, both of which later influenced his unique bass playing in the Grateful Dead.

    While studying at the University of California-Berkeley, Lesh met Tom Constanten, who would briefly play keyboards for one of the earliest incarnations of the Dead. A little later, while working as a recording engineer at a local radio station, he met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia.

    Lesh held down a job at the post office while pursuing his interest in music, but that quickly disappeared when Garcia asked him to join his fledgling folk-rock band, then called The Warlocks. Lesh agreed, even though he had never played bass guitar before. His broad interest in music and his unfamiliarity with the bass directly contributed to his becoming one of the most innovative players of his time.

    While many bassists were trained to work with the drummer to control a band’s rhythm section, Lesh immediately felt that his instrument should play more of a leading role. His bass lines during the Dead’s heyday (1965-1995) are full of lead riffs and lively counterpoint playing.

    In pushing the instrument’s boundaries, he joined fellow travelers Jack Bruce of Cream and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and later Hot Tuna, two other musical explorers who redefined the previously hidden instrument as a leading voice in their bands.

    When it came to such sonic experiments, drugs certainly played a role. The Grateful Dead was the house band on author Ken Kesey’s famous ‘Acid Tests’, and at times the music could be taken over by the psychedelics. That suited Lesh and his band members just fine.

    More: The Grateful Dead Named MusiCares Persons of the Year: How They’ll Be Honored at the Grammys

    In his 2005 autobiography, “Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead,” Lesh wrote about one such musical trip.

    “It was as if the music were being sung by gigantic dragons on the time scale of plate tectonics,” he wrote. “Every note seemed to take days to develop, every overtone sang its own song, every drum beat generated a new heaven and a new earth.”

    Lesh’s bass was a dominant sonic component of the Grateful Dead’s famous Wall of Sound concert arrangement

    Although not blessed with a particularly melodic voice, Lesh was a fixture on a number of crowd-favorite songs he composed for the band, including “Box of Rain” and “Unbroken Chain.”

    Lesh’s bass was an integral part of one of the band’s biggest – and most expensive – experiments: the Wall of Sound.

    For a short tour in 1974, The Dead hit the road with a thunderous audio system with hundreds of speakers that could project sound accurately, as it was said that up to a quarter mile away they could better reach the nearly 100,000 fans who came to see the group. at large outdoor locations.

    One of the Wall’s distinguishing features was to allow the sound of each of the four strings on Lesh’s bass guitar to be projected from four different corners of the speaker system. But the setup was so cumbersome to set up and take down that it was dumped after just a few memorable months.

    After Garcia’s death, Lesh and the other members of the Grateful Dead quickly discovered that they were eager to continue without their musical and spiritual leader.

    That led to a variety of still-running incarnations of the group, which included fewer and fewer members of the so-called core (remaining) four. After what should have been the band’s true farewell to the fans, the short Fare Thee Well tour of 2015, Lesh reduced his time on the road and on the sand.

    He opened Terrapin Crossroads to play everything close to home, and often did so with his sons, performing Grateful Dead as well as other contemporary fare. The venue closed in 2021, and after that Lesh’s performances were episodic at best as he entered his 80s.

    But the memory of what Lesh and his band created, from the legions of Deadheads to the countless bootlegs of live shows, clearly got the bassist through even his darkest days.

    “The spirit of the Grateful Dead group was essentially an engine of transformation,” he wrote at the end of “Searching for the Sound.”

    “As such, it had no morals of its own, it did not judge, it did not take a position. It just opened the valves for music to flow through.”

    Vaseline
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