Phil Lesh, the classically trained musician who co-founded the Grateful Dead and whose unconventional bass playing steered the band into some of its most experimental directions, died Friday at the age of 84.
Lesh’s death was announced on social media, with a short statement reading: “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.” No cause of death was given.
From the time of the Dead’s earliest incarnation as the Warlocks, Lesh enjoyed an intimate three-decade-long partnership with lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. He also claimed responsibility for their long-form improvisation inclinations, electronic experiments, and nightly free-form “space” interludes. After the group dissolved in 1995 due to Garcia’s death, Lesh went on to become an active keeper of its live flame in various configurations with former band members and in several iterations of Phil Lesh and Friends. The latter included numerous guests from the extended multigenerational improvised-rock community.
Philip Chapman Lesh, the Dead’s elder member, was born March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California. His father fixed office machines and his parents co-owned a repair business. Lesh played viola and trumpet in school but gradually became more interested in composing than in performing. He attended UC-Berkeley, where he befriended the even more musically adventurous Tom Constanten (who would play keyboards with the Dead for a time), but dropped out during his first semester. With Constanten, he attended a course taught by the great Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio at Mills College, where he met future minimalist figurehead Steve Reich, with whom he collaborated on a musical “happening” called Event III/Coffee Break.
In 1959, Lesh met Garcia at a Bay Area house party to which he had been directed, according to his 2005 memoir, “as if by an unseen hand.” Upon meeting Lesh again after a 1964 Warlocks gig, Garcia invited him to join the band on bass guitar, an instrument Lesh had never played. Lesh played his first show with the Warlocks at the Bikini A-Go-Go in Hayward, California, the following year. The rechristened Grateful Dead became the house band for Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Tests. Lesh, a staunch advocate of psychedelics as proof of “a spiritual realm,” was profoundly affected by these evenings that erased the line between band and audience.
The Grateful Dead played “electric chamber music,” according to Lesh, whose primary influence as a bassist was Johann Sebastian Bach’s style of counterpoint (the relationship of two independent yet interdependent musical voices). When not dropping his infamous “bass bombs,” he played his instrument as though it were a low guitar, usually with a pick, and often like a lead instrument. The Sixties became an era of intense musical experimentation for the group, most prominently on the band’s second album, Anthem of the Sun, where Lesh suggested overdubbing several different live versions of “The Other One” on top of one another and letting them drift apart. “I have nostalgic feelings for that psychedelic-ranger era, when we would play Anthem live in its entirety,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014. “It was apocalyptic — every time.”
“Box of Rain” and “Unbroken Chain” were warm psychedelic masterpieces among the handful of songs Lesh co-wrote for the Dead. He contributed the high parts to the four-part harmonies the band mastered on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, but eventually left the singing to others despite occasional audience chants to “let Phil sing.” In 1975, he played electronically processed bass on electronic musician Ned Lagin’s abstract Seastones.
Although touring had lost its allure, Lesh soldiered on with the Dead throughout the increasingly difficult Eighties, when drug problems rocked the band, then into the Nineties, concluding with Garcia’s death. “Jerry was the hub,” he told Rolling Stone. “We were the spokes. And the music was the tread on the wheel.”
In 1998, Lesh received a liver transplant for the hepatitis C he had contracted decades earlier. The procedure led him to become an impassioned organ-donor advocate. He survived prostate cancer in 2006.
A one-off 1994 acoustic show featuring some Grateful Dead members was billed as Phil Lesh and Friends, a moniker he would use for performances with an ever-shifting musical cast for the remainder of his career. (The group’s 1999 post-Dead debut featured Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of Phish. Lesh also released three albums of jammy rock under the name.)
During the aughts, Lesh sometimes rejoined his former bandmates in such Grateful Dead repertory formations as the Other Ones, the Dead, and Furthur, which also featured Bob Weir. In 2005, Lesh published his memoir, Searching for the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead.
Lesh’s wife, Jill, whom he married in 1984, became a close partner in all aspects of his life. In 2012, the Leshes opened Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and venue, in San Rafael, California. Their sons, Grahame and Brian, serve as house band, and the bassist himself was known to sometimes accompany evenings of live Dead karaoke.
Lesh and the rest of the Dead celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2015 with a series of “Fare Thee Well” shows in Chicago, joined by Anastasio and organized by promoter Peter Shapiro. “Phil was like a father to me. I feel very lucky to be able to say that,” Shapiro tells Rolling Stone. “It’s a good lesson to live life as much as possible because Phil did that and I am fortunate to have been able to do so many shows together with him and his magic bass and magic energy.”
That year, Lesh revealed he had contracted bladder cancer. “I’m one of these guys who’s always open,” he told Relix in 2010. “See, music is infinite. There’s an infinite number of ways to do it, an infinite number of melodies that can go with a one-four-five progression, it’s absolutely infinite, no floors, no ceiling.”
