Phil Lesh Was the Uncompromising Embodiment of the Grateful Dead

The moment could arrive anywhere, anytime, but you always knew it was coming. It was the moment, at a Grateful Dead show or on a live recording, when Phil Lesh and his bass would make themselves known.  

Most bass players in traditional rock & roll bands provide a solid low-end foundation for what’s around then. Maybe they sing an occasional harmony or are content with a supportive, background role. That was never the case with Lesh. At some point, whether in early jams on “China Cat Sunflower” or “Dark Star” or “Fire on the Mountain” or many other songs over the three decades before Jerry Garcia died, Lesh never settled for the conventional walking bass lines heard on most rock or blues records. Instead, his instrument would poke around the melody, pushing, prodding, and nudging the music out of one section and into a new, uncharted one. Sometimes he sounded as if he considered his bass, not Garcia’s guitar, the lead one. The idea, as he told me in a 2014 interview for my Dead biography So Many Roads, was to avoid doing “something somebody else had done.”

Lesh, who died Friday at 84, was never the frontman of the Dead, never its flashiest onstage presence nor its most colorful dresser. He rarely opened his mouth to sing, especially lead. Other aspects of the Dead — Garcia’s sweet, crinkled smile and lead guitar parts, or the immediately recognizable dual drumming of Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann — stood out more. 

But Lesh embodied the Dead as much as anyone, maybe sometimes more. From its music to its fanbase, the band didn’t do anything the way anyone had done it before, and the way Lesh approached his instrument was of a piece with that sensibility. Starting with his distinctive, jabbing sound, Lesh didn’t just make us rethink the role of the bass; he helped the culture reimagine how a rock and roll band should expand and mutate. If Garcia was Captain Trips, Lesh could be General Trips: the band’s gatekeeper, mad scientist, and, ultimately, the fiercest defender of their mission.

The late Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who could be pretty cranky himself about various aspects of the Dead’s world, music, and culture, had no issues acknowledging Lesh’s presence. “Phil is one of the most accomplished instrumentalists in rock & roll,” Hunter told me in an unpublished quote from my 2015 interview with him for Rolling Stone. “Phil is a trained musician who could have expressed himself on any instrument he chose. But bass was what they needed for the band and he learned to play that.  I have the most tremendous respect for Phil’s inimitable bass playing. If you take Phil out, you’ve just got the Garcia band, and that’s a whole different thing.”

When Lesh joined the Dead in 1965 (they were still the Warlocks at that point), he was pretty different from the rest of the gang. As he told me, he “detested” rock when he first heard it in the Fifties. “I thought it was totally infantile,” he said. “Three chords over and over again. I’m coming from Beethoven and Mahler.” No wonder he played trumpet and violin and focused on experimental contemporary music in his pre-Dead days. 

In any other nascent rock band, disliking that very form could be a dealbreaker. Instead, Lesh’s musical taste helped liberate the Dead. Since he was less rooted in vernacular music than the others, who were schooled in jazz, bluegrass or folk, he was less constrained by such limitations. Thanks to him, the Dead, almost from the beginning, could wander and soar into other pastures. He wasn’t the only experimentalist in the band, but it appeared to come the most naturally to him, and it paved the way for how the Dead could take a concise song like “Dark Star” and play, dissemble, and build it back up over close to an hour. 

In a way, that same element of surprise also factored into another of Lesh’s greatest contributions to the band. In 1970, he surprised the world once again when their earthy classic American Beauty opened with the sound of Lesh’s own voice. One of the most nakedly moving songs in their entire catalog, “Box of Rain,” co-written with Hunter, wasn’t remotely out there; instead, it was as sturdy as a well-made chair. Written about the death of Lesh’s father, it struck an unusually emotional chord in the band, especially from the normally stoic Lesh. Try to listen to it without tearing up. 

One of the tragedies of the Dead is that we rarely heard more of Lesh’s voice after that. A few years later, he took lead vocal duties on two very different songs on From the Mars Hotel. “Unbroken Chain” was both beautiful and exploratory, while “Pride of Cucamonga” was a jaunty country shuffle. Thanks to what he called “too much alcohol and advancing age,” he lost the ability to sing high notes. 

Lesh stood alone in other ways. To the consternation of the Dead’s various managers and the other band members, he would question a plan or scheme he didn’t think was right for them — whether it was playing on a Mississippi riverboat or making a video for their 1987 surprise hit “Touch of Grey.” (In the latter case, the band prevailed.) During the making of 1968’s Anthem of the Sun, Joe Smith, the head of their first label, Warner Brothers, famously wrote a letter to the band, grousing, “It’s apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior.” But in Lesh’s mind, the Dead had standards and had to meet them, regularly and constantly. Anything less undercut the Dead’s mission. 

After Garcia’s death, the other members of the Dead soldiered on, sometimes together and sometimes in their own bands, playing many of the songs in their repertoire. Of them all, few appeared to do it with as much joy and pleasure as Lesh. The changing lineup of Phil Lesh & Friends was itself a testament to the enduring quality of the Dead’s music. Recruiting players as varied as the blues-rooted Warren Haynes or jazz guitarist John Scofield or the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, Lesh demonstrated the way Dead music could be played by musicians outside their world and transformed along the way. If that music continues to be played by musicians in different genres for decades to come, as it likely will, you have Lesh to thank for that. 

The other defining aspect of a Phil & Friends show was Lesh himself. No matter the lineup or venue, one could always count on seeing Lesh, holding his monstrous bass guitar, grinning widely and practically bouncing on his toes. His stance said it all: That dream some people had, one afternoon long ago, didn’t ever have to end.