Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Template:Use American English Template:Infobox musical artist
Philip Chapman Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024) was an American musician and a founding member of the Grateful Dead, with whom he developed a unique style of improvised six-string bass guitar. He was their bassist throughout their 30-year career.<ref name=thetimes>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
After the group disbanded in 1995, Lesh continued the tradition of Grateful Dead family music with a side project, Phil Lesh and Friends, which paid homage to the Dead's music by playing their repertoire, as well as songs by members of his own group. Lesh operated a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads. From 2009 to 2014, he performed in Furthur alongside former Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir. He scaled back touring in 2014 but continued to perform concerts.
BackgroundEdit
Lesh was born in Berkeley, California, on March 15, 1940,<ref name="LarkinGE">Template:Cite book</ref> the only child of Frank Lesh, an amateur piano player, and Barbra Chapman.<ref name=thetimes /> His father encouraged him to take up the violin at the age of eight. At El Cerrito High School in East Bay he became a member of the school's marching band.<ref name=thetimes />
While enrolled at Berkeley High School he switched to trumpet and participated in the school's music-related extracurricular activities.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> He studied the instrument under Bob Hansen, conductor of the symphonic Golden Gate Park Band and became interested in avant-garde classical music and free jazz.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> By his mid-teens, inspired by Beethoven and Charles Ives, he had decided that he wanted to be a composer.<ref name=thetimes />
Lesh enrolled at the College of San Mateo, where he wrote arrangements for the community college's big band and played trumpet.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> After transferring with sophomore standing to the University of California, Berkeley in 1961, he befriended future Grateful Dead keyboardist Tom Constanten.Template:Sfn At Constanten's suggestion, he studied under the Italian modernist Luciano Berio in a graduate-level course at Mills College in the spring of 1962, where their classmates included Steve Reich and Stanford University cross-registrant John Chowning.<ref name="Lesh, Phil 2005">Lesh, Phil (2005). Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Template:ISBN.</ref>
While volunteering for radio station KPFA as a recording engineer, Lesh met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia. He invited Garcia to perform on the station's Midnight Special show,Template:Sfn and despite their different musical interests they became friends. Lesh briefly worked in the Post Office Department, where he drove a service truck. In spring 1965 he saw Garcia's new band, the Warlocks, in concert, and was impressed. A few weeks later Garcia invited him to become the group's bassist.Template:Sfn This was unexpected, as Lesh had never played bass guitar.Template:Sfn According to Lesh, the first song he rehearsed with the band was "I Know You Rider".<ref name="Lesh, Phil 2005"/> He joined them for their third or fourth gig (memories vary) and stayed until the end.Template:Cn
The group changed its name to the Grateful Dead and began playing at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests parties (LSD then being legal in California).<ref name=thetimes /> In late 1966 Lesh moved with the group to San Francisco, where they were signed to a recording deal with Warner Brothers, and found himself playing at venues such as The Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom.<ref name=thetimes /> As Lesh had never before played bass he learned "on the job", which meant he had no preconceived ideas about the instrument's traditional role in the rhythm section and was free to develop his own style.<ref name=thetimes /> In his autobiography, he credited Jack Casady (the bassist in San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane) as an influence on the direction in which his instincts were taking him.<ref name="Lesh, Phil 2005"/> He said that his playing style was influenced more by Bach's counterpoint than by contemporaneous rock and soul bass players.<ref name=Jackson/> He also cited Jack Bruce of Cream as an influence.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
MusicEdit
Lesh became an innovator in the new role that the electric bass was developing during the mid-1960s.Template:Sfn Contemporary bass players such as Casady, Bruce, James Jamerson, and Paul McCartney had adopted a more melodic, contrapuntal approach to the instrument. Before this, bass players in rock had generally played a conventional timekeeping role within the beat of the song, within (or underpinning) the song's harmonic or chord structure. While not abandoning these elements, Lesh went on his own improvised excursions during a song or instrumental, and in the group's long improvised jams in their live performances Lesh's six-string bass complemented Garcia's guitar solosTemplate:Sfn with cascades of notes and unusual time signatures.<ref name=thetimes /> This became a characteristic part of the so-called San Francisco Sound in the new rock music.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>
Early on, Lesh grasped the sonic possibilities presented by recording in the studio, and his style of playing often led to complaints by the band's record label. Joe Smith of Warner Bros. wrote a letter about cost overruns that had accumulated during studio sessions for the band's second album, Anthem of the Sun (1968). According to music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Smith singled him out as "the catalyst for chaos within the band", writing: "It's apparent that nobody in your organization has enough influence over Phil Lesh to evoke anything resembling normal behavior."<ref name="Erlewine"/> Lesh was not a prolific composer or singer with the Grateful Dead, though he did occasionally make contributions such as the opening track on American Beauty, "Box of Rain". He co-wrote several of the band's best-known compositions, including "St Stephen", "The Eleven" and "Dark Star".<ref name=thetimes /> His high tenor voice contributed to the Grateful Dead's three-part harmony sections in their group vocals in the early days of the band, until he largely relinquished singing high parts to Donna Godchaux (and subsequently Brent Mydland and Vince Welnick) in 1974 because of vocal cord damage from improper singing technique.Template:Sfn In the early 80s, he resumed singing lead vocals on songs closer to his natural vocal range.Template:Sfn
Lesh introduced his bandmates to the aural explorations of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. All of the band's shows were recorded by Deadhead tapers, and it became possible to listen to any given performance from 1972 or 1974 and hear the Grateful Dead interpreting the musical innovations that Lesh stimulated through Coltrane's influence.<ref name="Erlewine">Template:Cite news</ref> Throughout the Dead's career, his interest in jazz avant-garde music remained a crucial influence on the group. He later introduced the band to composer Charles Ives, which created their ability to go spontaneously from a discordant jam into a blues or country song.Template:Sfn In the 30 years between 1965 and 1995 Lesh played almost 2,500 concerts with the Grateful Dead, many of them lasting for up to six hours.<ref name=thetimes />
Lesh collaborated with Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the Dead's onetime sound engineer (and former source of LSD) in designing the Wall of Sound, an enormous sound reinforcement system they used for forty-odd shows in the 1974 tour.<ref name="Erlewine"/> After two years of problem-solving and planning, the forty-foot high Wall of Sound was first used publicly at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on March 23, 1974. With nine independent channels, the powerful system contained 604 speakers driven by 26,400 watts of power. Lesh compared playing through the system to "piloting a flying saucer. Or riding your own sound wave".<ref name="Greenfield2011">Template:Cite magazine</ref> According to Lesh, Owsley persuaded the Dead to record every one of their shows, emphasizing the necessity of listening to the tapes.<ref name="Browne2011">Template:Cite magazine</ref>
In 1994, Lesh was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Grateful Dead.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Post-Grateful DeadEdit
After the Grateful Dead disbanded, Lesh continued to play the band's music in concert with its offshoots The Other Ones and The Dead and to promote San Francisco hippy philosophy,<ref name=thetimes /> as well as performing with his own band, Phil Lesh and Friends.<ref name=Chronicle/> In 1999 and 2000, he co-headlined two tours with Bob Dylan.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
Lesh published his autobiography, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead in 2005.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In 2009, he went on tour with the remaining members of the Grateful Dead. After the 2009 summer tour, Lesh formed a new band with Bob Weir named Furthur which debuted in September 2009.<ref name=JamBase/>
In 2012, Lesh founded a music venue called Terrapin Crossroads, in San Rafael, California. The venue officially opened on March 8, 2012, with a first of a run of twelve concerts by Phil Lesh and Friends.<ref name=TerrCrossOpeningNews/><ref name=DeadLivesOn/> When not on tour, Lesh's sons, Grahame and Brian, served as the house band at Terrapin Crossroads.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In addition to songs from the Dead catalog, Lesh played material by Mumford & Sons, Zac Brown Band and other contemporary acts with his sons.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Terrapin Crossroads closed in November 2021 when their lease on the property expired.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Lesh began performing again with Phil Lesh and Friends in 2012. Furthur disbanded in early 2014 and, at age 74, Lesh ceased touring full time. Thereafter he performed regularly at Terrapin Crossroads with various Phil Lesh and Friends lineups as well as with the Terrapin Family Band. In the early 2010s he performed select shows at venues throughout the United States, notably the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, as well as at festivals.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He took part in the 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts, and a short North American tour with Bob Weir in the spring of 2018.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked him as the 11th greatest bass player.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In March 2023, he celebrated his 83rd birthday and hundredth show at the Capitol Theatre.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Personal life, health and deathEdit
Template:Sister project Lesh married Jill Johnstone, a waitress from the cafe next door to the Grateful Dead's office in San Francisco.<ref name=thetimes /> They had two sons, Grahame and Brian, both of whom became musicians and played with their father in the Terrapin Family Band.<ref name=thetimes /> They frequently played together, both publicly and in private. They performed in an annual benefit concert group known as Philharmonia, dating from 1997, including on December 18, 2011 at a Christmas gig which included Bob Weir and Jackie Greene at the Tenderloin Middle School cafeteria attended by 250 people.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Lesh and his wife administered their charitable organization, the Unbroken Chain Foundation.
Lesh had a lifelong interest in the occult and was a member of the Research Into Lost Knowledge organisation.<ref name=thetimes />
In 1998, Lesh underwent a liver transplant as a result of a chronic hepatitis C infection.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He became an outspoken advocate for organ donation on live recordings of his performances.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
On October 26, 2006, Lesh stated on his official website that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the disease that killed his father, and would be undergoing an operation in December 2006.<ref>Vaziri, Aidin (October 29, 2006). "Grateful Dead Founder Lesh Battling Prostate Cancer", SFGate. Retrieved October 17, 2015.</ref> On December 7, 2006, he reported that he had undergone prostate surgery and the cancer had been removed.<ref>"Phil Lesh Doing Well", JamBase, December 8, 2006. Retrieved October 17, 2015.</ref> In October 2015, Lesh announced that he had had bladder cancer surgery. He stated that his prognosis was good and that he expected to make a full recovery.<ref>Kreps, Daniel (October 17, 2015). "Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh Reveals Bladder Cancer Battle", Rolling Stone. Retrieved October 17, 2015.</ref>
In August 2019, Lesh announced that he was to undergo back surgery and he and his band canceled engagements at the Outlaw Music Festival, Telluride Blues & Brews Festival, and Dirt Farmers Festival. He was expected to make a full recovery.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}Template:Cbignore</ref>
Lesh died on October 25, 2024, at the age of 84.<ref name="DeVille 2024">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Gehr 2024">Template:Cite magazine</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
DiscographyEdit
Template:See also The Other Ones:
- The Strange Remain (1999)
- Love Will See You Through (1999)
- There and Back Again (2002)
- Live at the Warfield (2006)
NotesEdit
ReferencesEdit
- Philzone.com—Phil Lesh and Friends fan site
- Parker, T. Virgil. "Phil Lesh: All in the Music", College Crier
- Phil Lesh and Friends at archive.org
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book
- Template:Cite book
External linksEdit
- Phil Lesh and Friends official website
- Terrapin Crossroads—Phil Lesh's new music and dining venue in San Rafael, CA (Marin County)
- Phil Lesh on the Grateful Dead's Official Site
- {{#if:|Template:PAGENAMEBASE discography at Discogs|{{#if:Template:Wikidata|Template:Wikidata Template:PAGENAMEBASE discography at DiscogsTemplate:EditAtWikidata|Template:PAGENAMEBASE discography at Discogs}}}}
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