Jesse Jarno (5:04)

With Phil Lesh's departure last October, we at the Dead cast weren't prepared to say goodbye on a few different levels. And really, we're still not. But with some months to process, we're at the very least ready to celebrate the 85th anniversary of, in Sun Ra's term, Phil Lesch's arrival day. Look out of any window, any morning, any evening, any day, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.

David Lemieux (5:37)

There's nothing like Phil's bass playing, and it is such an integral part of Grateful Dead music. Without it, it's not Grateful Dead music. You know, I got into the Dead, I was young and so I didn't know anything about music. I still don't know if I do, but when I first heard the Dead, it was songs like Uncle John's Band, Working Man's dad was. Was my first full album. Then I got Skull and Roses and hearing him on that and I was like, this is not like a normal bass line. I'd heard a lot of Jimi Hendrix and a lot of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. And I was kind of used to that sort of bass playing. But I'd never heard anything like this where this kind of lead bass is happen. We had this kind of semi finished basement at my house when I was a kid. That's where I used to listen to my music and hang out with my friends. And I remember once I was on the main floor of the house with talking to my mom. I was like 14 maybe, and my radio was on in the basement. We had this radio station in Ottawa called Shea106. And on Sundays they had this guy and he played older classic rock. Yeah, this is 1985. The music's like 15 years old at this time. So I'm up there and I couldn't hear the music at all. Like I didn't even know my radio was on. But then I hear this and it's like. That sounds like Phil Lesh playing Not Fade Away on Skull and Roses. I go downstairs and sure enough, that's what he's playing on the radio is Phil. And all I heard, I felt. Didn't hear it. I felt it was Phil playing Not Fade Away.

Jesse Jarno (8:03)

We are extremely honored to welcome From Fish bassist Mike Gordon, whose earliest impressions were similar to David Lemieux.

Mike Gordon (8:11)

I remember my friend Peter Paul, who was one of the guitar players in my high school band, used to like these cranking car scenarios in his car. And I. And he was a Dead fan and he would remember he cranked up some whatever Dead tape in the car with his fancy subwoofers under the seats and everything. And it's just shocking how you can hear the bass that clearly. And this was in an era where most bands you weren't even going to hear maybe one note for the whole concert. And this is the other end of the spectrum. But with the Dead both listening at home and going to concerts, it just seemed very fresh. And the bass was like at the center point of that because it was very unpredictable seeming and beautiful, like a flower blooming. It was indescribable, I still think so. I got to play with Phil just less than a year ago. And I still can't describe it in words very easily. It's almost like a conjuring trick of magic to be able to imply the chords and the rhythm and all these things without playing them by weaving in and out of them. I'm going to be melodic and I'm going to be a powerhouse of solidness. That's the way that I perceived it. And it doesn't even seem humanly possible.

Jesse Jarno (9:50)

And from Dead and company Oteal Burbridge.

Oteil Burbridge (9:53)

Phil had no rules, so he would do all these bass substitutions. So if it's like if some. For people that don't know music, harmony, if you're playing C major and it's like, happy, right? But if I play A, then it makes it A minor. So now I can turn it dark, even though everybody's still playing the same thing. And I can just make Dracula, you know, or whatever, just create some other tension. And Phil, there was no rules. He was allowed to do whatever he wanted. So it gave me permission to do a lot of things where I might get a frown in other bands like, you know, don't do that. Don't bring Dracula out.

Jesse Jarno (10:33)

We'll have a lot more with Mike and Ottil a bit deeper into this episode, but we're going to start today's Phil Cast about as far away from the Grateful Bed as it's possible to get in Manchester, England. That was Joy Division from their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures, produced by Martin Hannett, a co founder of Factory Records and sonic visionary for many of the British post punk label's earliest acts. First inspired to pick up an electric bass by Phil Lesh while studying at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. I've not been able to find a direct quote from Hannit, and I don't think he was a Deadhead exactly. But the liner notes for a compilation of his work say that Hannit, who died in 1991, modeled himself on Lesh. How is it that the bassist for an American psychedelic rock band could be the inspiration for One of the UK's most eminent post punk producers? That's one of the questions we'll be trying to answer. Here's how Jerry Garcia described Phil Lash to MTV in 1983.

Jerry Garcia (12:00)

When I met Phil, he was a lunatic classical composer. He had an incredible musical education. The most knowledgeable guy I've ever known. Incredible super livewire Phil was. When I first met him, he was a live real livewire. So we hit it off like sparks, you know, bam, bam, bam.

Jesse Jarno (12:18)

Please welcome back your pal and mine, Gary Lambert. Gary was a radio conspirator with phil in the 80s and 90s and very kindly provided the audio for one of our core interviews today.

Gary Lambert (12:29)

Well, this interview in Particular was for a special that David Ganz and I produced for KPFA for one of their day long Grateful Dead fundraising marathons. And the theme we came up with for this particular day was Grateful Dead in the Gone World. It was really about how all sorts of countercultural currents and outsider art had affected and informed the Grateful Dead. Everything from the Beats to the American Transcendentalists to Lord Buckley and of course a lot of avant garde jazz and classical music. And Phil was just the guy to talk to for such a purpose.

Phil Lesh (13:09)

My experience in avant garde music and in classical music and in jazz, I don't know, it just seemed logical to apply some of those structural techniques, if nothing else. You can't use avant garde pitch or rhythmic techniques in a rock and roll. God, there I go again. In a popular music band, it'd be self defeating and there wouldn't be any communication possible really, except between the musicians maybe, but the structural techniques and the kind of overlap simultaneity that's characteristic of so much classical 20th century music, that sort of thing seemed to be ready to hand and infinitely applicable to what we had, the potential that we had. So that was one of our first real flowerings, I guess, was that period where we did use a lot of avant garde techniques and simultaneous tunes and overlapping and that sort of thing. It was a lot of fun.

Jesse Jarno (14:08)

To Martin Hannon in the late 1960s, Phil Lesh very likely seemed like a total musician, a trained contemporary composer and sound explorer who also played bass, wrote songs and sang for a rock band. Here's how Jerry Garcia described Phil Lesh's personality within the Grateful Dead from David Ganz And Blair Jackson's 1981 interview, which you can read in conversations with the Dead, linked to@dead.net deadcast.

Jerry Garcia (14:34)

He's a tremendously brilliant guy, amazingly, and I think he has a huge role. He's like, in a way, he's like one of the full chromatic personalities in the band. It's like if Phil is happening, the bands happening. Like Phil has more power, I think individually than any of the wrestlers has. He really is super important on that level.

Jesse Jarno (14:55)

This was true from a business point of view as well. When we spoke with our dear departed correspondent Sam Cutler back in our first season, he told us this story.

Sam Cutler (15:05)

Somebody had to sign the contract and he had to formally be the band leader. And Jerry immediately went, well, I'm not the band leader. He didn't want to do it right. Nobody wanted to do it. So then the band went off and had a meeting to Decide who was going to do it. And then they came back and they just, they said to me, okay, they made up a decision that their mind. They made up their minds Phil was going to do it. So it was like, okay, well why is Phil going to do it? Okay, you know, fine, I don't care, you know, I don't give a fuck really. But, you know, just out of curiosity sake, why is Phil going to do it? So he said, well, he's the most difficult person to persuade that it's a good idea to do a particular gig. So if you can persuade him to do the gig, we're cool, we don't give a fuck. But if we. You know what I mean? As long as he agrees, everything's cool.

Tom Constantin (15:52)

Okay.

Sam Cutler (15:53)

The unique Grateful Dead way of organizing things. It's kind of organizing by default.

Jesse Jarno (16:00)

The Dead had joined the union back when they were still the Warlocks. And though the story isn't quite as simple as that, telling more often than not, Phil's name appears on contracts as bandleader for legal reasons. But while having high and enforceable musical standards, Phil Lesh also landed squarely on the side of functioning anarchy while mostly functioning. Before we dive back into Phil Lesh's life, we'll have Jerry Garcia offer this story as told to Ben Fongtoris on khe San in 1975, describing what happened when the police showed up at the Fillmore acid test in early 1966.

Jerry Garcia (16:35)

There was some cop on the stage. I remember an amazing scene with Weir and Phil and. And Weir and Phil are both tremendous anti authoritarian guys. They hate any authority figures. And here's this cop. You have the lieutenant up there trying to make an announcement over the microphone.

Tom Constantin (16:49)

Everybody ought to dance his own way.

Gary Lambert (16:51)

At a clear house.

Jerry Garcia (16:53)

The dials are being run by some madman up in the balcony somewhere. So the cops voice is coming in and out, you know, and Keezy is raving some sort of semi patriotic slogans over the top of the copy. We have to clear the place out.

Jesse Jarno (17:08)

Everybody be calm now.

Tom Constantin (17:10)

Don't press forward and kill any little 13 year old girl.

Jerry Garcia (17:14)

And weird, they're arm in arm, you know, around each other and they're singing something like the Star Spangled Banner real loud in the cops ear. You know, some big bear of a freak is banging his hand with a.

Tom Constantin (17:24)

Tambourine who say, can you sing? My daughter's early life. What a proudly we hailed at the twilight last Beaming.

Jerry Garcia (17:43)

It was like just a huge Marx Brothers movie or something like that. Really, really funny.

Jesse Jarno (17:57)

Phil Lesh was born in Berkeley, California on March 15, 1940. His musical life began around four years later, sometime in 1944, a story he was fond of telling. When the Dead traveled to London in September 1974, Andy Childs of Zigzag conducted a rare interview with Lesh, which we tapped into a bit during our Ship of Fools episode and which we return to here. Thank you so much, Andy.

Tom Constantin (18:24)

My grandmother had like, introduced me to music in the way of, like when the. When the Philharmonic would broadcast on Sundays over the radio or NBC Symphony, you know, are they operating it? One day when the music was on, she happened to walk out of the room and saw me sitting on the floor with my ear against the wall. My mother told me this, I don't remember. And so she said, well, listen kid, come on in and dig the pretty music, you know. And I remember very well the first time it was Brown's first Symphony with Bruno Valter conducting New York Filler mine. What a flash. I think that's probably the biggest single flash I've ever had in my life, except for the first time I took lsd, which might give you an idea of how heavy it was for me. Because after that, you know, whether it was subconscious or not, I knew that that's what I had to do. I had to have something to do with that. It was just the heaviest thing I'd actually imagined. And so I started taking the violin, which I wasn't very good at at all. I got to the point where I could play the second violin parts in orchestra pieces.

Jesse Jarno (20:20)

There was lots to learn. As he explained to Gary Lambert, like.

Phil Lesh (20:23)

Every little classical student, you'd come up on the three Bs, pretty much that'd.

Jesse Jarno (20:27)

Be Beethoven, Bach and Brahms.

Phil Lesh (20:30)

I started playing trumpet because I wanted to play jazz, but I also wanted to play classical music with it. When I switched from violin to trumpet, my trumpet teacher, Bob Hanson, who directs the Golden Gate Park Band still, and he turned me on to the. What are like the trumpet parts essentially from all the classical masterworks from Bach to Mahler. I discovered Mahler and Bruckner through these trumpet books and I started looking at, listening to their music and listening and looking at the scores. And that was what made me decide I wanted to go into composition at the time was studying Mahler, discovering Mahler. After that, it was like I just devoured everything I could find. And I was pretty much. I was pretty much self taught in that, in that respect.

Jesse Jarno (21:48)

Phil Lesh was discovering jazz in this period too. A product of the legendary Berklee High School jazz program. He became a fan of trumpet player Clifford Brown. This is Cherokee. And Lesh loved big band arranger Stan Kenton. This is the track Maynard Ferguson named after the trumpet player. For more on Stan Kenton, check out our episode about the Dead and the Sufi choir from last season. Step by step. It was jazz that first radicalized Philosopher. The summer after his high school graduation, though, Phil Lesh leveled up, discovering the music of Miles Davis, whose band then featured young saxophonist John Coltrane.

Tom Constantin (23:29)

When Coltrane was alive, I would catch him every chance I had, because back in the late 50s, when he was with Miles Davis, I had had the opportunity to catch that six step with Miles Davis and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley live in San Francisco. I think he won the old jazz club.

Jesse Jarno (24:09)

That was Miles Davis with John Coltrane at the Olympia in Paris around the time. Phil must have seen them and a dozen springs before the Dead played the same venue. But Phil Lesh was hungry for all kinds of music, even if he wasn't quite cut out for college. His first attempt was San Francisco State University, though was back home in Berkeley before the end of the first semester. The next year he entered San Mateo College, a community college south of San Francisco with an excellent jazz program.

Tom Constantin (24:37)

I started taking a trumpet, which was about age 14. That lasted for about six years. I went all the way through junior college, playing in the jazz band in junior college and writing. That's where I started actually doing some real writing for the jazz band.

Jesse Jarno (24:54)

College of San Mateo Big Band.

Jerry Garcia (24:56)

The first one we hear is a.

Jesse Jarno (24:59)

Tune composed and arranged by Phil Lesh, student and first chair trumpet, who is going to New York to study next year. The title of the tune is Finnegan's Awake. That was Finnegan's Awake, a piece Phil Lesh wrote for the College of San Mateo jazz band in 1959 when he was 19. If anyone's looking for a deep cover to learn, some have said that forgiveness is the key to every door. Others have said that it's a library card. In Lesh's case, it was a job as a librarian.

Phil Lesh (25:55)

I mostly searched it out and I discovered Ives when I went down to college at College of San Mateo Junior College. Actually, there was a book there by the Cowles, Henry Cowell and his wife, about Charles Ives. And I don't believe even believe there was any. Oh, there might have been one or two recordings of like. There might have been a recording of the Concord Sonata available. The idea of Iveson's music just caught my imagination so much. The idea of the simultaneity of it, the metaphor of consciousness. In our consciousness, we're not only thinking of one thing at any given time, we're thinking. We have things in the back of our mind. We have things on the sides of our mind. Not only that, our autonomic systems are running our body while we're blithely thinking about paying the rent. So it's a fascinating metaphor, and Ives's music is the first 20th century or first music of any kind to really address that for me, that simultaneity of experience.

Jesse Jarno (27:06)

We've told parts of Phil Lesh's early story in a few other episodes, which we'll hint at here. It was at the College of San Mateo that Phil Lesh first made the acquaintance of Bobby Peterson, a slightly older hipster who was responsible for turning Phil onto deeper levels of jazz, poetry and cannabis. This is from David Ganz's Cornerstone 1981 interview with Phil, which you can read in David's Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast thank you, David Peterson.

Phil Lesh (27:36)

Robert Peterson.

Tom Constantin (27:37)

He's a poet. We spent most of our time hanging out, reading Henry Miller aloud. That was really fun, man, because there was no future. I loved Ginsburg. I loved his work. Kerouac was okay, but I expected more somehow from on the Road than I got out of it. When I first read it, rereading it, I get more out of it because I finally met Nick. Who is the guy? Anyway, Peterson went by.

Phil Lesh (28:03)

I loved Ginsburg.

Tom Constantin (28:04)

I loved Howell so much I started to set it to music.

Jesse Jarno (28:07)

A decade later, Bobby Peterson would start occasionally penning lyrics for the dead, beginning with new potato caboose on Anthem of the Sun. We delved a bunch into Bobby Peterson during our Unbroken Chain and Pride of Cucamonga episodes. It was during Lesh's years at the College of San Mateo that he began delving into the bohemian party scene in nearby Palo Alto, which we explored at length during our episodes about Robert Hunter's silver snarling trumpet. This is from the audiobook to Phil Lesh's Searching for the Sound from Simon and Schuster, all of which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast I had come down for.

Phil Lesh (28:55)

A weekend cruise and was directed as if by an unseen hand to a party up in the hills. It was a clear, brisk evening. People were milling about on the lawn while the house was radiating energy. Several rooms held musicians, and from inside an alto saxophonist could be heard playing solo over the laughing voices from the front yard.

Jesse Jarno (29:13)

It was sometime in late 1961 or early 1962, that Phil Lesh made his way to the chateau in Menlo park, the party house that was the center of the early scene where Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and others congregated.

Phil Lesh (29:27)

Later that evening, I was introduced to the singer guitarist. Hey, Phil, this is Jerry. He's a musician too. I responded with some snotty comeback like, yeah, well, I play jazz, man. But Jerry just said something like, cool, you gotta meet Lester and Jackson. And naming local East Palo Alto guys who played jazz in houses and at parties. Even then, he was about furthering the music.

Jesse Jarno (29:51)

The two became fast friends.

Jerry Garcia (29:53)

At the time, he was working at a radio station over there that was one of the Pacific, you know, like educational TV on the radio is what it boils down to. He was the engineer for a funk music show that was during my folkie period, you know, so he liked the music that I was playing, my little blues tunes and folk songs and stuff. So he engineered this hour long program I did for that radio show. And that was kind of our first musical connection because we were worlds apart musically.

Mike Gordon (30:30)

This is my dream.

Jesse Jarno (30:33)

When the night wins.

Rich Mahan (30:36)

Wayne.

Jesse Jarno (30:40)

That was Jerry Garcia at the tangent in May 1963 on the before the Dead box set. The tape Phil Lesch made of Garcia doesn't seem to survive, but the special titled the Long Black Veil and Other ballads aired on March 19, 1962, four days after Phil's 22nd birthday.

Jerry Garcia (30:59)

He had a little place in Berkeley, a little apartment in Berkeley, and he had like a card table that had orchestra charts, orchestra scoring paper, these things with a million staves on him. He was writing this thing for four orchestras, you know, and he no piano or anything. You know, he had perfect pitch. He just pulled the notes out of his head.

Jesse Jarno (31:18)

The piece was called Foci and would have required 123 musicians and four conductors. Man, I'd love to see Longplay or Big Ears or another contemporary music festival resurrect this score and debut it. Loesch completed his classes at the College of San Mateo in spring 61, entering UC Berkeley in the fall as a sophomore. It was while registering for classes that he connected with Tom Constantin, a fellow musical traveler who joined the Grateful Dead for the all important year of 1969. There's a bunch more about Phil Lesh and Tom Constantin's musical connection in our episode about TC, which we've linked back to@dead.net deadcast. But despite making an important new musical comrade, UC Berkeley and Phil didn't agree either.

Tom Constantin (32:05)

I just quit School. After the fall semester, I just quit Berkeley. I didn't even tell my parents for weeks. So TC and I were like raving on together, and I was trying to compose. I actually composed a short piece, which I still have the scorching and for orchestra. And DC was always interested in chamber music and I wasn't always interested in orchestra. But we did have common interests or common love, like a Mahler. And so that was. That was one point of contact. So we were like two sides of a coin. He was. He was into Bach and more of the constructionist kind of thing. I was more into the. Into the expressive area.

Jesse Jarno (32:45)

But TC was a little bit more motivated than Phil, at least academically, and began taking classes at Mills College.

Tom Constantin (32:52)

In my late college years, which lasted to about 62, I was fortunate enough to get into a class at Mills College in Oakland, California. It was right across the bay from San Francisco with the Luciano Berry.

Jesse Jarno (33:06)

Italian composer Luciano Berio was in his mid-30s and deeply engaged in electronic music as well as electroacoustic composition, like his influential 1958 piece Thema Imaggio e Joyce built on James Joyce's Ulysses.

Tom Constantin (33:34)

Guy is amazing. The guy is so amazing that osmosis. Absolutely. He doesn't teach you a fucking thing. He just does his thing and you have to do your thing, but he'll.

Phil Lesh (33:45)

Play tapes for you.

Tom Constantin (33:46)

And we went through the writer Spring, analyzed the rider, Spring, that kind of thing. He doesn't teach anything about composition because he knows it can't be taught. And so after that, it was like completely open. And I kept composing and kept. It stayed in that. In that area of music for like a couple more years. But then it was like getting to be a dead end, both philosophically and also practically.

Jesse Jarno (34:33)

Lesh and his roommate Tom Constantin decamped to TC's native Las Vegas with a plan to get jobs and travel with Berrio to Europe for the summer. Things went awry when Phil Lesh met TC's parents.

Tom Constantin (34:45)

I got kicked out of the house. And you didn't go to Europe? I didn't go to Europe.

Sam Cutler (34:48)

He did.

Tom Constantin (34:49)

He went and he kept me informed of what was going on. I mean, he got to see the premier of Barrio's opera, Passaggio, which is a masterpiece. I've seen a score. Everybody agrees it's a total masterpiece. It's never been performed in this country. Always been performed.

Phil Lesh (35:02)

Once in Santa Fe.

Jesse Jarno (35:23)

Phil missed a scandalous debut where Berio instructed the choir to mimic the audience's noises, a move borrowed by Ned Legion in Munich in 74. By the fall of 62, Loesch was back in Palo Alto, living at the chateau. He continued to work on his piece for four orchestras titled Foci, moving back to San Francisco, rooming again with TC and getting a job at the post office. It's appropriate for the next story that their house was located on Eureka Street. This is Phil speaking with Hank Harrison in 1970.

Tom Constantin (35:56)

So I lived with TC on Eureka street for just damn near a year. Let's say September 63, October 63, all the way through to August 64 when.

Phil Lesh (36:06)

The Beatles came to town.

Tom Constantin (36:07)

That was the month that everything changed. That was the month I took acid.

Jesse Jarno (36:15)

We'll let Phil narrate this from the Searching for the Sound audiobook.

Phil Lesh (36:19)

One day after work, I was handed a foil wrapped cube by one of my co workers. Here you go. He whispered 250mics.

Jesse Jarno (36:28)

He left half for TC.

Phil Lesh (36:36)

I don't remember much after that, just a kaleidoscope of emotional peaks. At one point I found myself outside in the front yard on a beautiful starry night, conducting with extravagant gestures Mahler's Great Tragedy Symphony, which was blasting from the house.

Jesse Jarno (37:12)

I suspect the story of Phil's first dose actually took place in spring 1964, because a few other things happened around then too. While the Beatles did play the Cow palace in August, they also came to town sort of that February when they appeared in local living rooms for three consecutive weeks. Ladies and gentlemen, here are four of the nicest youngsters we've ever had on our stage.

Tom Constantin (37:35)

The Beatles. Bring them on.

Jesse Jarno (37:37)

What's more, Phil Lesh's first dose helped reset him from a mild depression. And he soon ran into his old classmate Steve Reichstag, which set up the two for some collaborations that spring. That was Reich's Music for Two or More Pianos and tape, written around this time. In 1964, the composer drafted Lesh and Constantin to create music for an event organized by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which they presciently pronounced Meme troupe.

Tom Constantin (38:15)

Yeah, well, I was doing the Meme Troupe at that time, which was as avant garde as I ever got.

Jesse Jarno (38:18)

Together with Gwendolyn Watson and John Gibson, Steve Reich, Tom Constantin and Phil Lesh briefly became the San Francisco Improvisation Group. In late May, Reich organized a series of Music now concerts in TC's memory. These followed their first doses. Loesch composed a piece called Six and Seven Eighths for Bernardo. As I discovered while researching this, Phil's piece was broadcast on KPFA at least twice in late 1964. And early 1965, the first time a.

Tom Constantin (39:13)

Performance ever opened up for me when I was high. I mean, I got so high. It was one of their events down there.

Phil Lesh (39:20)

We would do a theatrical event where.

Tom Constantin (39:22)

We all had strictly limited roles. Otherwise I played the trumpet and Steve.

Phil Lesh (39:26)

Played the piano and Ronnie Davis climbed up, down the ladder and stuff.

Tom Constantin (39:29)

It was like. And then we had an improvisation on the event where you were able to do anything you wanted. It was in one of those that I got really off performing.

Phil Lesh (39:38)

That was really a big flash for.

Tom Constantin (39:39)

Me because I found a whole day inside a half hour.

Phil Lesh (39:43)

I later told Bobby Peterson, remember that day you lost about four years ago? I found it.

Jesse Jarno (39:50)

But after that brief Moment in early 1964, Loesch took what turned out to be a year long pause from music. Here's how he described it to andy Childs in 1974.

Tom Constantin (40:01)

At that point I was out of music entirely. I had nothing to do with it except I was a great listener. And I figured, well, man, if I can't be a musician, then I'll be a great listener. And great listeners are very important. Without them, music might not survive.

Jesse Jarno (40:18)

There was plenty to listen to and not just music. Poetry was an anchor of the Bay Area scene just as much as jazz or folk. Both the Beats and what came before.

Phil Lesh (40:28)

Charles Olson was my man.

Tom Constantin (40:30)

Between cruiser and Plato's sea mountains and just below Atlantis, Gloucester tore her way west northwest 1/2 west to arrive where she is from her old union with.

Rich Mahan (40:46)

Africa just where the canaries lie off.

Jesse Jarno (40:51)

Born in 1910, Charles Olson was a modernist who connected earlier generations of poets with the Beats.

Phil Lesh (40:57)

The beat poetry was what you'd call, I don't know, I guess we called it beat poetry then. That was a big influence on all of us. Not so much on what would become songwriting style or anything like that, but just on our lives. We wanted to make our lives a poem.

Tom Constantin (41:12)

She takes a brown stained, salt sticky cigarette but he takes a mussel shell. He takes a clam shell. She takes a stick. He is tiny with a flying run and leap Shaggy blonde misses all the laggers tumbles from one foot.

Jesse Jarno (41:34)

That was from Hop, Skip and Jump by Gary Snyder, one of many local poets.

Phil Lesh (41:39)

I remember just before I went down to Palo Alto to join the band.

Tom Constantin (41:42)

This is 65.

Phil Lesh (41:44)

There was a poetry reading in a union hall in San Francisco. Philip Whalen, Lou Welch, Gary Snyder. Outstanding evening.

Jesse Jarno (41:53)

Presented by Small Press, Poetry Publications, Synapse, Wild Dog and Coyote's journal. The one dozen poets reading was held May 28, 1965 at San Francisco's Fugazi Hall.

Phil Lesh (42:05)

I remember all the people that were later to be part of the San Francisco scene. I'd seen them at that when I met them again, I'd seen them at that poetry reading. Scully was there, pretty sure. Chet Helms and Luria Castell. Yeah, she was there.

Jesse Jarno (42:21)

L'ria Castell would co found the family dog an integral early part of the scene and was one of the residents of 710 Ashbury before the Dead moved in the next year.

Phil Lesh (42:30)

George Hunter, those people, the Charlins, they were there. That was one of the things that was the precursor of the trips festival kind of scene. That was one of the events that everybody would show up at. It was before the music actually started happening. That was about the only scene you could go to with like, poetry readings.

Tom Constantin (42:48)

All the ages draw a line on another stretch of sand and everybody try to do the hop, skip and jump.

Jesse Jarno (43:00)

Phil Lesh had a busy May 1965, two days before the poetry reading on the 28th. He'd seen the Warlocks for the first time on the 26th and became their new bassist. A story we'll get to momentarily. But perhaps just as pivotal was a show he saw two weeks before that, on May 14th at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.

Tom Constantin (43:29)

We'd just been to see the Rolling Stones and the Birds have been in town. This is 60, their first gigs ever, you know.

Jesse Jarno (43:36)

That was from a slightly later performance in Ireland included for Verisimilitude. The show at the Cow palace was the Rolling Stones Northern California debut, their third trip to the States. Two days earlier in la, they'd recorded Satisfaction. Also on the bill were the Birds, who'd released their debut single a month earlier. This is also not from the cow Palace. Hey, Mr. Champion. The stones and the Birds shared the bill with Paul Revere and the Raiders and local talent, the Beau Brummels and the Veg tables, you know, the vegetables. I still love you even though I know I should.

Tom Constantin (44:36)

And that was the one where the kids rushed the stage, the cops were trying to.

Phil Lesh (44:39)

Trying to keep him off.

Tom Constantin (44:40)

And Jagger was doing his dance around the cops with his microphone cord, tripping them up. It was far out. Rifkin led the entire hate community dancing to the aisle. This was before any of any of the flower. I mean, that was really.

Jesse Jarno (44:56)

The show got Lesh's head going at some point, I'm going to guess, maybe even the next night, Saturday, May 15, Lesh attended a party, I'm going to guess, in the Palo Alto Menlo Park Vicinity. But again, just guessing, Garcia, he was.

Tom Constantin (45:09)

At the party, too. We were both stoned out of our minds. He had the band even then. Weir came along with some grass and went on the car and got. I happened to mention sometime during that evening, Garcia, music. You know, I think I'll take up the election.

Jesse Jarno (45:22)

We're going to mix in some of David Ganz's 1981 interview with Phil from Conversations with the Dead.

Tom Constantin (45:28)

There's a stone moment. I didn't think anything more about it. This is the honest truth. I didn't think anything about it.

Jesse Jarno (45:34)

As we've discussed before, time often operated at strange speeds in the 60s.

Tom Constantin (45:39)

So next month, or next.

Jesse Jarno (45:41)

Whatever it was the next week, probably on Wednesday, May 26th.

Tom Constantin (45:46)

So we all took some acid and went down here as a rock and roll band at this pizza parlor. Mill Park, California. Great city.

Jesse Jarno (45:53)

Here's how he remembered the scene to David Ganz.

Tom Constantin (45:56)

We came bopping in there, man, and it was really happening. Pigpen ate my mind. He just ate my mind. With the heart singing the blues, man, they wouldn't let you dance, but I did it anyway.

Jesse Jarno (46:10)

And Jerry Garcia speaking to MTV in 1983.

Jerry Garcia (46:13)

Phil and I knew each other socially. We were friends. We weren't musically involved with each other. But then I ran into him again when the Warlocks had started. And there was my old pal Phil, see? And now he was driving a truck for the post office, you know, and a hippie, you know. And he came down to see the band of Warlocks as they were at that time.

Jesse Jarno (46:35)

That night, Phil Lesh received a job offer.

Jerry Garcia (46:37)

He came down from San Francisco, down the peninsula, and said, oh, man, this is amazing. I said, hey, man, how would you like to play bass in the band, you know?

Tom Constantin (46:44)

First he takes me aside and puts me down at a table and puts a beer in my hand. He says, listen, man, you're gonna play bass in my band. But I were, you know. Who, me? Well, Jesus, you know, it might be possible. Actually, it excited the shit out of me because it was something to do. But the flash was, holy shit. You mean I can get paid for having fun?

Jerry Garcia (47:10)

Because I knew that with Phil, he had so much talent and he knew everything there was to know about music, you know. So the structure of rock and roll was certainly no problem for him. And all I had to do was tell him how the bass was tuned, you know, and two weeks later, he played his first gig.

Tom Constantin (47:27)

Two weeks before the first gig, I didn't play too good, man. It was real wooden sounding, real stiff. But we actually did play a gig two weeks afterwards.

Jesse Jarno (47:36)

Traditionally, it's recorded that Phil Lesh made his Warlocks debut on June 18, 1965, at Frenchies, a Go Go joint in Hayward. Though some newspaper evidence suggests that there was another band at Frenchy's that night, and the Warlocks gig might have been a week earlier. There are no tapes, so we'll needle drop this dramatic moment with another pivotal 60s event that occurred that same week, recorded on the other side of the country.

Tom Constantin (48:09)

For three or four years after that, when I would tell people how long I'd been playing the bass, they would say, amazing. But now that it's been almost 10 years, I don't have that excuse anymore.

Jerry Garcia (48:23)

And basically, he invented. He's invented the instrument, you know, as he's gone along. I mean, he's a guy who's invented a way to play.

Jesse Jarno (48:30)

Here's something that Phil Lesh told Gary Lambert that I think actually holds the key to some of the Grateful Bed's magic.

Phil Lesh (48:36)

None of us need to be instrumental virtuosos, because the meat of our music doesn't lie in flights of technique. It lies in the interplay between us and the tension and the space that we can create and the many levels of that space which can occur simultaneously.

Jesse Jarno (48:58)

It was less important that the Dead be able to shred than it was for them to listen to each other. Philash might be described as a virtuoso bassist by some, but that's not because of his technique so much as how, what and why he played.

Tom Constantin (49:12)

I rarely, rarely hear bass players play stuff that's not a pattern, you know? And in fact, that's the way people think of it. They say, okay, you lay down the bass pattern for this one, right? Or whatever, the bass line. Sometimes they call it the bass line, but it's still. It's still very repetitive. I like to play it more in the sense of, like, the continual bass from the Baroque period or the real bass line in classical music, Beethoven all the way up to Mahler, in a way that makes the music move to different places, even though in rock and roll music, it just seems to be more convenient to play the root of the chord all the time.

Jesse Jarno (49:56)

But it took some time for that to manifest. When Phil Lesch joined the Warlocks, he also became one of their lead vocalists. This is from the November 1965 emergency crew demo, recorded just after Phil discovered the single by the New England band the Warlocks in a record store. Almost immediately, Loesch began contributing to the band's songwriting from the very start. His songs pushed at the boundaries of conventional rock and roll. He wrote both the words and music to Cardboard Cowboy in 1966, which was also referred to in the band as the Monster because it was so musically unwieldy and hard to learn. The acid tests occurred from December 1965 through early 1966. But it took slightly longer for the Dead to be able to express the psychedelic experience in music. And part of that was Phil Lesh's already well expanded musical vocabulary. That's from Live dad, from Phil's 1974 conversation with Andy Childs.

Tom Constantin (51:48)

Most of that stuff originally was my idea. Yeah. There we were with all these electric instruments. And it was starting to be obvious to me that it could be used for that. For those functions in that kind of manner. The electric instruments, even though you can't control them too well, they more or less end up being pretty tonal. Harmonic. Not even harmonic tonal in the sense that the sounds that come out usually tend to have the harmonic structure of tonal notes. We are actually. He was one of the masters of that stuff. He doesn't do it anymore at all. I can't imagine why. Because he would just come out with this incredible stuff and it was absolutely awful Tom of his head. Totally intuitive. That's why it amazes me that he doesn't, you know, he doesn't explore that. Maybe he just thinks that that is too complicated or whatever, which it isn't. I mean, if you've got an ear, the whole range of any kind of music is open to you. You don't have to know what the rules are. This is my theory, anyway.

Phil Lesh (53:07)

Being a college dropout.

Jesse Jarno (53:27)

The Dead's debut album didn't leave too much space for the visionary music Lesh imagined. But the album that became Anthem of the sun gave him a chance to apply his skill set to the Dead.

Phil Lesh (53:37)

I think Anthem of the sun is a good example of what that meant to us in our music and how we could use some of that in our music. In fact, that's been my primary goal in the Grateful Dead, is to. Is to work that kind of flexibility into the music so that we could ideally open up any song into that world. By the time we'd already made a record with songs on it, our first record with Dave Hassinger, we were ready to do something else. We were definitely ready to push the boundaries of the envelope as far as we could. And that's why we did Anthem of the Sun. That way, the openness of the material allowed us to do that.

Tom Constantin (54:45)

What we.

Phil Lesh (54:45)

Wanted to do in Anthem of the sun, at which I believe we succeeded, was to create a complete tapestry, a complete flow from beginning to end, without any artificial divisions into songs. I mean, the songs emerge from the flux. In the case of the second side, they return to it. To me, it's the most successful album we made in that period where we were trying to make albums with a unified concept. In fact, that's probably the only one that we really did with. It had a unified concept. And the concept wasn't literary or lyrical, it was musical.

Jesse Jarno (55:36)

It's a topic we aspire to swan dive into entirely someday. One way to think of both Anthem of the sun is and its equally wild follow up, Axa Maxoa, is as multi track tape compositions with numerous possible realizations. The Dead shifted towards more inside forms. With Working Man's Dead and American Beauty. Phil found his own way into the material.

Gary Lambert (56:11)

Gary Lambert, he was always very conscious of tone. The shape of his notes was always palpable, like one of the film moments I love best in all the Grateful Dead music. It seems so simple, but it's a little bass line. In the run up to Friend of the Devil, it starts on a couple of acoustic guitars and then Phil plays that and. And the tone on that was just pristine and beautiful. The notes so distinctive and things like that, you know, maybe touch me at least as profoundly as the really weird stuff he was playing.

Jerry Garcia (57:00)

I lit up from.

Jesse Jarno (57:01)

You know, I was trailed by 20 hounds. It was during these years that Phil Lesh defined his bass style, part of the musical frontline in a way that was as unusual then as it is now. Gary Lambert it's something that he might.

Gary Lambert (57:17)

Not have come to had it not been for jazz or had it not been for Ives or all this music where simultaneity of expression was happening, rather than a tightly constricted accompanist soloist role.

Jesse Jarno (57:31)

Lesh's musical role and the prominence of the bass in the band's mix suggested truly that the Dead didn't organize themselves like other bands.

Gary Lambert (57:39)

It kind of anticipated something Ornette Coleman said years later about getting rid of the cast system in music. You know, taking away all. All those assumptions about who's leading, who's following, and. And Phil was onto that. And perhaps the fact that he really didn't have a very firm idea or certainly a very high regard for what a bass player was supposed to be doing in a rock band, it kind of freed him to do that.

Jesse Jarno (58:05)

Oteal Burbridge of Dead and company has spent lots of time thinking about Phil Lesch's bass playing.

Oteil Burbridge (58:10)

Phil has this way of like. I just. It's like mercury. You try to put your finger on it and it goes just. You can't do it, you know? Amazing. Oh, he's so. He's just a constant puzzle, which is beautiful. He's. He says it all the time. His. His whole ethos is like, you know, wait, I think it's a Beethoven quote. It's every artist's duty to confound expectation and that. So that's. That's his bass playing perfectly.

Jesse Jarno (58:49)

Unpacking Phil's bass playing as a bassist might be the musical equivalent of reading one of Phil's favorite authors, James Joyce.

Oteil Burbridge (58:57)

He left me all these little Easter eggs because when you dig into something and then you're like, oh, shit, look what he did there. And I'm like, you slick bastard. Thanks, Phil. Because then it gives you other ideas.

Jesse Jarno (59:10)

It's one thing for an idiosyncratic basis to create their own musical style inside the cozy confines of their long running musical project. But inadvertently and quite collectively, the Dead fabricated a total style that other musicians might use as a framework, if not exactly a template. Mike Gordon started playing bass early in high school and soon thereafter discovered the Grateful Dead.

Mike Gordon (59:32)

I started high school in 79. I had a band. I went to my first arena concert in 1980, which was Jay Giles at Boston Garden, and then the Allman Brothers in 81 and the Dead in 82. So those are my first arena concerts. But by the middle of high school there, certainly by the end of high school, I was definitely a Dead fan. And everything about Grateful Dead music, it combined a bunch of things I had liked before in new ways, and every little piece of it was a microcosm, including the bass. And eventually I thought the bass was probably the most unique thing about it of all. Fel's contribution.

Jesse Jarno (60:36)

That was from Mike Gordon's first dead show, September 18, 1982, at Boston Garden, about a year before he entered the University of Vermont, where he responded to a flyer posted on a dorm wall and joined the band that became F. That was from Fish's first show in December 1983. In our playing Dead episode, we heard from Mike's bandmate Trey Anastasio about the Dead's impact on him. Mike Gordon, too, tried to take only what he needed from Phil Lesh's base plane.

Mike Gordon (61:26)

At a certain point, I will say that I specifically avoided learning his bass lines because I liked it too much. And a lot of times there weren't patterns and lines to figure out, like there are with other bass players. Anyway, so there were a little bit with my high school band. And then early on in the first, let's say, year with Fish, there were some Grateful Dead covers I was learning. But it wasn't really a matter of taking a deep dive into the. Into the bass playing. I think it was just too. It's strange that I didn't early on because that's how I did it with everything, including piano and guitar and bass. All the way through high school, I just heard stuff, and I would just, like, maybe put it on a cassette, on my cassette recorder from the radio or a record, and then sit there at the piano and rewind every second and really go deep into. And so I don't know why with Phil, I didn't do more of that. And my only guess, I know at a certain point I just liked it too much, and it was going to become too much. It was going to rub off on me anyway. And if I was going to keep any originality to my own playing, I would have to avoid it.

Jesse Jarno (62:42)

For starters, Phil sounded different from the other bass players Mike had seen just at that time.

Mike Gordon (62:48)

99% of rock concerts, including the Rolling Stones and everyone on Death, involved a boomy, indiscernible sound for most of the instruments, especially the bass in an arena. And all you're going to get was just a distant wallowing. And Phil, and also Dan Healy and some of the others really set themselves apart to say, thought that we're going to. We're going to find new technology. Even with Dan Healy coming up with new laws of physics, deriving new laws that had not yet been derived.

Jesse Jarno (63:20)

One aspect that made Phil Lesh different from many other rock bassists is that he used a pick instead of his fingers.

Mike Gordon (63:26)

With the classic bass players who used a pick, like, at least some of the time, Chris Squire and Getty Lee, some people like that, and Verdin from the Doobie Brothers. These are sounds that are very aggressively Trebley. But Phil took out those frequencies in order to make the pick sound organic, like an upright bass. So there's still something that happens with the attack and still something with the tone and even the muting with the palms. That happens when you use a pick differently than when you use your fingers. And he adjusted all that so it would still not be aggressively trebly. But there's always an attack that you can discern that cuts through the other instruments. If you watch the Festival Express movie, where all those bands, including the Grateful Dead, are going Across Canada on a train. And they do a great set in the middle of like they're playing some great songs. The middle of Canada, I forget where. And it's the classic Phil sound, exactly like you would expect it. Except he's not using a pick, he's using his fingers. And I asked him about that. I don't think he had an answer. But it wasn't just the sound of the pick that made it sound so clear. It was the width of space he left between the notes and how quickly the like stopping the note happened. Not just starting the note and all these things that he probably wouldn't even be able to put into words. But it was the same sound without the pick.

Jesse Jarno (65:18)

One way up, one way up, one way over another. This darkness got to give every now and then. Mike got the most unusual experience of getting to play bass while Phil played guitar and got to pick up some pro tips.

Mike Gordon (65:42)

So he invited me to play for the 60th birthday thing based on Box of Rain. Because, you know, on the original recording of Box of Rain, it's not him playing bass and he wanted to play guitar. That was one time, a couple other instances where I was having trouble getting a sound and it wasn't a big bass rig, it was just some rented stuff. And he actually came over and helped me and certain frequencies that I thought maybe to boost and others to cut. He did it backwards. Like I was taking 2k all the way out and he was like, well, if it were me, I'd turn that one up and turn down 4k. He always turned down 4k because the bass makes a clicky sound. It's just the pick makes a clicky sound.

Jesse Jarno (66:43)

That's the August 13th, 1975 eyes of the world from one from the vault.

Mike Gordon (66:48)

It's like all this combination of using a pick and making it so that the attack comes through with these eqing or whatever should be the opposite of organic. It should be like aggressively. It should be heinous sounding and edgy and trebly in an offensive way. It just is just the right amount to cut through and still sound organic, like an upright bass.

Jesse Jarno (67:14)

Phil Lesh was a total bassist occupying a different totality than most bassists perceived.

Mike Gordon (67:20)

Everyone attributes Jocko as maybe the most influential electric bass player. And Phil liked him. And maybe Jocko and James Jamerson or something.

Jesse Jarno (67:30)

This is Jocko Pastorius playing Donna lee from his 1976 self titled debut.

Mike Gordon (68:00)

Feel like I don't know Scott LaFaro and peep out of Jazz. And they were bringing a certain well, Jocko was bringing a melodic sense into bass playing, but this idea that there was still even Jocko's playing a sense of here's the chords being outlined and now I'm gonna do an embellishment pretty quickly and I'm gonna come back to outlining the chords. And it almost seems like a nobler challenge. What Phil was doing, which is it's all one the melody and that which is solid and supportive and create defines the chords and defines the rhythm is the same friggin thing. It's that is melodic. So that's, in my opinion, a whole different level than what Jocko was doing. And some people like that. Just to be able to say that this very solid bed that everyone in rock and roll depends on as the bass is now hereby up and is going to be melodic whether you like it or not.

Jesse Jarno (69:49)

And this is where we're going to pause, but hardly end our look into Phil Lesh's life in music. We'll be back next episode with a lot more Phil, more from Mike Gordon, Phil's collaborator Ned Lagin, and a look into the eyes of chaos and veil of order. Until then, focus your third eye back on the eyes of the world. Bass solo from August 13, 1975.

Rich Mahan (70:46)

Thank you very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode, Mike Gordon, Oteal Burbridge, Sam Cutler, David Lemieux and Gary Lambert. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz, for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jones. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.