Phil Lesh: The Dead’s Working Man
Karaoke night comes with a psychedelic twist at Terrapin Crossroads. The club and restaurant, opened by Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and his wife, Jill, in 2012, is located in a former Seafood Peddler in San Rafael, California, near the Dead’s old rehearsal space and recording studio, north of San Francisco. Tonight, patrons have signed up to sing their favorite tunes from the Dead’s albums and set lists with a live band.
The twist: Lesh plays bass all night. The woman belting “Cosmic Charlie,” the couple harmonizing sweetly in “Brown-Eyed Women” and the precocious little girl who nails the chorus in “Deal” to big applause are all backed by a guy from the original records and shows — and who wears a luminous smile as he improvises in each song.
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Lesh was the Dead’s quiet, reliable center — the melodic anchor in their jamming — every night from 1965 until their end, in 1995, following the death of guitarist Jerry Garcia. Today, at 74, the bassist is still looking for new routes to joy and discovery. “There was no way we could have played anything in the Dead in every way possible,” Lesh says, sitting in a lounge upstairs for his first-ever solo Rolling Stone interview. “Thank goodness. Imagine how boring it would have been.”
He’s in a new phase of that exploration. On April 2nd, Lesh opened a marathon residency at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York — more than 40 shows across this year with his ever-changing ensemble, Phil Lesh and Friends. The Dead played some legendary gigs at that venue in 1970 and ’71. Lesh promises to honor that standard “with a new lineup every time. While we will be revisiting Grateful Dead classics, they’ll always be different, the way they were conceived.”
Lesh plays often with versions of his band in Terrapin Crossroads’ cozy ballroom, and he has toured in recent years with Dead guitarist Bob Weir in Furthur — an astonishing workload for a man who survived a 1998 liver transplant, then beat prostate cancer in 2006. Lesh estimates he played 200 shows in 2012, “more than twice what the Dead averaged in a year.” But, he says, “I am not a guy who can dial down. I would fade away into nothingness if I couldn’t play.”
Born in Berkeley on March 15th, 1940, Lesh played violin and trumpet in school and was pursuing a career in avant-garde composition when he joined the Dead in 1965, at the dawn of San Francisco’s psychedelic ferment. One of his few original songs for the band, “Box of Rain”— written with lyricist Robert Hunter as Lesh’s father was dying of cancer — would be the last song the Grateful Dead performed live, in July 1995. One month later, Garcia was dead from a heart attack.
“It’s another lifetime,” Lesh says of the Dead now, noting that since Garcia’s passing he has played “with 50 different bands,” most featuring younger musicians such as guitarist Luther Dickinson, Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson and Lesh’s two sons, Grahame and Brian. Over two days of conversation, Lesh uses the words “cordial” and “distant” to characterize his current relationships with Weir and the Dead’s surviving drummers, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart.
But he also speaks of their original fraternity and the reverberations in his music now with thankful fondness. At one point, Lesh, who was an only child, declares, “I found my true brothers through the art of music and a series of improbable coincidences. Life found me my family.”
With this club and the Port Chester residency, you’re playing as much music as you did with the Dead. But the audience comes to you. Is that a concession to age?
I don’t ever want to stop playing music. But traveling, one-nighters — it’s spiritually deadening. At this point in my life, there wasn’t enough time left for me to waste it riding on a bus or sitting in a hotel room. It’s hours not being productive, hours I’m not spending with my family. It’s a kind of limbo, and I’ve been experiencing these limbo states for 47 years.
The Grateful Dead always had a dream of something like this place, even in the Sixties. We used to fantasize about the rock & roll satellite. We had a tech guy whose father was involved in the nascent communications-satellite industry. His dad would build us a satellite, put it in orbit, and we would sit in one place and beam the music up to the world at large. That was in 1968.
Did the Dead ever question the high cost of touring, especially on Garcia’s health in the Eighties and Nineties?
We were locked in a vicious cycle. We had hired so many people. Since our only source of income was touring, we had to stay at it or lay people off. That was not something we were willing to contemplate. To our shame, nobody ever said, “Why don’t we just take a year off?” It could have changed everything.
I was drinking very heavily. I reached a low point in the New Year’s-week run, 1981. I was looking at myself and not liking what I saw. Two months later, I met Jill, and it all turned around. But in the Grateful Dead, you couldn’t take care of anybody but yourself. You couldn’t convince anybody to do anything. Everyone was stubborn in their own ways.
It is ironic that the members of rock’s most empathic, improvising band had trouble talking to one another.
It wasn’t affecting the music. That’s the Grateful Dead way. You do whatever you want. But when we’re onstage together, we are one. We are open to each other, to the cosmic pipeline. It worked for years and years. Then it didn’t work anymore.
What do you get out of playing with the younger musicians in Phil Lesh and Friends?
In any situation, I listen more than I play, at least at first. But it never fails at some point: I let go of everything and just play what’s coming through the pipeline. It necessarily has to be different with every group of musicians that comes in. My job is to find a middle ground, so they can lock in with me. Everybody has to give up a little of their version of the music to achieve a collective sound.
Was that your role in the Dead?
I had not played the bass before joining the Dead, and I hadn’t heard a lot of rock & roll before the Beatles. The biggest influences on my playing were Bach and Beethoven — always melody. But as I started to play with the band, it became necessary to run variations. You play the verse one way, then the second verse is slightly different. That was the key to the Grateful Dead: Don’t repeat. Make the song different every time you play it.
You met Garcia in 1962, when he was still a folk musician. What were your first impressions of him?
I have never heard anybody play banjo like that, before or since. His ideas would spill over one another like a flood. And he would pop out the notes like rivets, each perfectly formed. I can’t tell you how hard that is, to be that consistent at that speed.
It’s funny — we didn’t get along that well at first. He was the coolest guy around. Everybody thought so. I’m a skeptic. I kept asking myself, “What’s so cool about this guy?” But he was so not full of himself. You just knew he had this big heart, and there was room in there for the whole universe. Then I started listening to him play, to the songs, how they were little dramas. And it started working on me. It was so organic, the way our relationship developed.
When did you realize that the music had infinite possibilities?
It was the first time we stretched out on “Viola Lee Blues” [on 1967’s The Grateful Dead]. We worked up into this frenzy and, without a count, we came slamming back down into the groove and finished the song. I somewhat ingenuously turned to Jerry and said, “Man, this could be art.”
It’s one of those wonderful things where if you start thinking about it, it won’t happen. And that is what happened later on. Jerry didn’t want to do “Viola Lee” after a certain point, because we had lost the ability to bring it back down like that.
Fans still mourn Garcia’s passing, but the Dead’s first great loss was original singer-organist and frontman Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, who died in 1973.
When he passed, Jerry said to me, “That fucker — now he knows what’s on the other side.” I think Jerry was intimidated, because he knew he had to be the guy now. And that was never his trip. He never wanted to be the guy.
What kind of leader was he?
He would lead by omission. Everybody would have an idea, and he wouldn’t like any of them. It wasn’t saying, “This is the way we’re gonna go.” It was, “We’re not going any of those ways. So figure it out.”
It was anti-leadership. Somebody told me once that Jerry had unreal stage fright. He never mentioned this to me. You could never tell. He’d sit there with a cigarette, play runs on the guitar for hours before the show. It was no problem understanding what he was playing. In that sense, his leadership was very solid.
There is also the paradox of his heroin use, as if he never found as much pleasure in music as the fans for whom he made it.
Paradox is very stressful. You have to hold these things in opposition, because they will never combine. That stress may be what caused his heart failure. And Jerry had a lot of residual pain from his youth. [Garcia was five when his father drowned during a family vacation.]
But I would often see him, during shows, engaging with a single person in the crowd, playing to them. That’s also connected to the ego loss. When the music is happening, we are totally in the flow. We’re not making it. We’re not even there. That’s the highest thing there is — except for maybe playing music with your kids.
How musical was your dad?
My father was an office-machine repairman. His father played clarinet. There’s a legend in the family that Grandpa Bill played in one of John Philip Sousa’s bands. I still have his old clarinet. My dad played euphonium in high school and taught himself piano. He would play barrelhouse stuff at an upright piano we had. It was for his own pleasure. When my parents learned I was serious about music, they wanted me to have something to fall back on. To their great chagrin, I never provided that.
How did your classical studies and work in experimental composition affect and transform the Dead?
The free improvisation — I can say I suggested that. I said, “Listen to John Coltrane. We can do this.” We’d already been playing on one chord. When we got into the space and feedback, the avant-garde stuff I had been doing came into play.
My favorite example of that is 1968’s “Anthem of the Sun,” with its mix of electronics, live tapes and twisted-blues writing. The result is the most extreme and primal album the Dead ever made.
We had 10 or 12 live versions of “The Other One” that we overlaid on one another. I’ll take credit for that: “Let’s make this sound like a thousand-petal lotus, guys” coming from that drum pattern. That was the most fun I ever had in a recording studio. Me and Jerry mixing, [engineer] Dan Healy speeding the tape up and down. The whole thing was a composition. It was also an improvisation, in the mixing.
On 1970’s “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” you finessed the exploration into something more earthbound.
It was the other side of the coin, as evidenced in the way we were able to weave those things in live performance. The second-set phenomenon — that’s the fusion of Workingman’s Dead and Anthem of the Sun.
My goal, as long as I’m doing two-set shows, is to make them both second sets somehow. That was one reason I started Phil and Friends. It’s not so much passing on the music as the way it’s done. I have nostalgic feelings for that psychedelic-ranger era, when we would play Anthem live in its entirety. It was apocalyptic – every time.
What did LSD do for you?
It confirmed my suspicions that there is more to life than meets the eye. There is more to the world than you can touch or analyze scientifically. It proved to me there was a spiritual realm.
When did you stop taking it and why?
It’s hard to do that and live in the world. What you have to do is visit that realm, then bring back what you can and apply it to your life. Owsley [Stanley, LSD chemist and the Dead’s early sound man] would yell at me for saying this, but after a while, it seemed I didn’t have the time to properly prepare and process that experience.
It was never a party thing for us. It was a sacrament, and it helped us learn about the music — how to open up, lose the ego, lose the showbiz. When you hit the first note, the music is infinite. You narrow it down as you go. But you can make a change — one note in a scale — and the possibilities open up again.
You get a lot of the musicians in Phil Lesh and Friends from jam bands. What is your take on that scene’s reliance on the Dead model?
I get the feeling that the jamming isn’t jamming. The rhythm sections just repeat under the soloists. That is not collective improvisation. It’s soloing and accompaniment. I thought of the Grateful Dead as electric chamber music — the music of friends, give and take, back and forth. That model has been lost in the jam-band scene. When Grateful Dead music became a genre, it solidified into a set of rules. You do two sets. You string songs together in medleys. You do drums and space. But that’s the letter. The spirit has been lost.
Do you think guitarists like Trey Anastasio from Phish and Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes play freer in your bands?
I like to think so. That’s what I encourage, within the embrace of what everybody else in the band is doing. It’s freedom in context. Rugged individualism is great. When that happens, you’ve got a solo. When everybody’s doing the weave, you’ve got collective improvisation.
How would you sum up Garcia’s legacy? He left an enormous body of work — the albums and live releases. But what are the lessons in there?
He left behind a standard of quality to which we can aspire. The range of experience that he could transmit, comment on and teach us — that is so unique. You get somebody like that once every hundred years.
How is your relationship with Weir? You have toured with him as Furthur since 2009. But there was a long estrangement after Garcia’s death.
We’re like brothers that get along most of the time. When we disagree, we disagree so radically. I have to say, there is nobody that plays like him. He has these enormous hands, which enable him to play all kinds of altered chords on the guitar. And his sense of rhythm — it implies so much. That’s why it was perfect for the Grateful Dead.
Were you concerned for his health when he fell onstage during a Furthur show last year at the Capitol Theatre?
Yes, it makes me very concerned. But what to do? Furthur is on a break. We’re letting it take a nap. Bob is booked for the whole year with Ratdog, like I am in Port Chester. I would bet money that sometime this year Bob and I will do something. But it won’t be Furthur.
Your last reunion tour with Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann, as the Dead, was in 2009. Can you imagine playing together again? You are in a cycle — with the club and Port Chester — that seems to be moving away from that.
Those guys are all in a cycle too. We spent 30 years developing this group mind. It was telepathic. My metaphor for us was each of us had to be like a spoke on a wheel. And what we’re after is what’s in the center.
But when Jerry passed, it left such a hole. We all had relationships with each other. But the primary relationship was the one each of us had with Jerry. Jerry was the hub. We were the spokes. And the music was the tread on the wheel.
It’s taken me 15 years to come to terms with Jerry’s death. And I’m not completely there yet.
What’s missing in terms of —
My acceptance? I miss his humor. His wit. His sparkle. I don’t miss the playing so much. But I miss that indefinable spark that he brought to everything and made me love him. That’s a driving thing for me. If I can hold on to that aspect of him, then he’s still alive for me somehow.
The club, Furthur, Port Chester — do they help you fill that hole now?
It’s impossible to fill it. I’m putting boundaries around it. There is still everything else surrounding it. There’s this whole galaxy out here. So we’re going to explore that galaxy and let the hole be there. We love and respect it. We miss it like crazy. But we have to move on. We have to keep living. We have to keep playing.
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