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    • Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking bassist, has died aged 84
    New Jersey

    Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s groundbreaking bassist, has died aged 84

    Seren Anwen Posted on

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

    The musician’s death was announced on his official Instagram with a post that read: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought great joy to everyone around him and leaves a legacy of music and love. We ask that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy during 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 over the past few decades. In 1998, he received a liver transplant after suffering internal bleeding as a result of a hepatitis C infection. In 2006, he had surgery to remove his cancerous prostate and a decade later underwent successful treatment for bladder cancer.

    Like many musicians in the ’60s and ’70s, Lesh, along with his bandmate Jerry Garcia, battled addiction to various vices. Although Garcia died in 1995 while being treated for heroin addiction, Lesh, with his wife’s strong support, got clean and managed to live on for decades.

    Lesh played 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 an often-seen and often-heard fixture at his home base in Marin County, where he ran and performed for a decade at his club Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, Calif., named after a famous Dead song.

    Lesh developed from a violin tinkerer to one of the most innovative rock bassists of all time

    Lesh took a particularly varied path to rock ‘n’ roll stardom. He was born in Berkeley, California in 1940, 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 with the Grateful Dead.

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

    Lesh worked part-time at the post office while pursuing his interest in music, but that quickly faded when Garcia asked him to join his young 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 him becoming one of the most innovative players of his time.

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

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

    When it came to such sound experiments, drugs certainly came into play. The Grateful Dead was the house band for author Ken Kesey’s famous “Acid Tests,” and sometimes the music was taken over by the psychedelics. Which Lesh and his bandmates really liked.

    More: The Grateful Dead named MusiCares Person of the Year: How they’ll be honored during Grammy week

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

    “It was as if the music was being sung by gigantic dragons on the time scale of plate tectonics,” he wrote. “Each note seemed to take days to develop, each overtone sang its own song, each drumbeat created 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 series

    Although Lesh wasn’t blessed with a particularly melodic voice, he was an integral part of a number of crowd favorites 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 largest – and most expensive – experiments: the Wall of Sound.

    For a short tour in 1974, the Dead hit the road with a thundering audio system with hundreds of speakers that could supposedly project sound precisely up to a quarter mile to better reach the nearly 100,000 fans who came to see the group at large outdoor venues.

    One of the special features of the Wall was to ensure that the sound of each of the four strings of Lesh’s bass guitar was projected from four different corners of the speaker system. However, assembling and dismantling the structure was so cumbersome that it was abandoned after just a few memorable months.

    After Garcia’s death, Lesh and the other members of the Grateful Dead soon discovered that they desperately wanted to move on without their musical and spiritual leader.

    This led to a number of ongoing incarnations of the group, in which fewer and fewer members of the so-called (remaining) core group appeared. After the short Fare Thee Well tour in 2015, which was supposed to be the band’s real farewell to the fans, Lesh increasingly shortened his time on tour and in the band.

    He opened Terrapin Crossroads to play everything in his homeland and often did so with his sons, performing the Grateful Dead and other contemporary tunes. The venue closed in 2021 and after that Lesh’s performances were episodic at best as he slipped into his 80s.

    But the memory of what Lesh and his band created, from their legions of Deadheads to their countless live show bootlegs, clearly fueled the bassist even in his darkest days.

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

    “As such, she had no morals of her own, she did not judge, took no positions. It just opened up valves for music to flow through.”

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    Seren Anwen
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