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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 11 of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our tribute to bassist Phil Lesh. We couldn't squeeze everything we wanted to into just one episode, and part two, which you're about to dive into, is itself a nice long look at what made Phil's approach to playing bass and music in general so unique. Hot off the announcement presses are two new Grateful Dead releases headed your way. First up is a massive new Grateful Dead box set, Enjoying the ride, a limited edition 60 CD that's six zero box set celebrating the Grateful Dead's 60th anniversary with unreleased performances from 20 legendary venues the band played throughout their career. This one's going fast folks. If you want a copy, make sure to head to dead.net now and reserve yours. With the exception of a few tracks from earlier releases, virtually all of the music on Enjoying the Ride is previously unreleased, spanning more than 450 tracks and over 60 hours of music. Of the 20 shows in the collection, 17 are presented in full, with some featuring additional material from the same venue. The remaining three, Fillmore West, Fillmore east and Boston Music hall are curated from multiple performances at each venue, capturing key moments on those legendary stages. This 60 CD box set is limited to only 6,000 individually numbered copies. ALAC and HI res FLAC downloads will also be available on release day, which is May 30th. Enjoying the ride is available exclusively from dead.net and you can pre order your copy today. Also available on May 30, the music never stop distills Enjoying the Ride into a shorter route through the band's diamond Anniversary celebration. Featuring at least one song from every venue in the deluxe set, it offers a briefer but no less illuminating journey through the music that shaped the Grateful Dead's live legacy. It will be available on May 30 from rhino.com on three CDs, six LPs, or digitally. Make sure to visit dead.net for more info on both of these not to be missed releases. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 10. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help the good old Grateful Dead cast by subscribing, sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting the like button and leaving us a review. Thank you very much. Hey, we need your stories for the Deadcast. Do you have a great tour story you'd love to share? Well, head over to stories.dead.net and record yourself telling about that epic road trip or the best show you ever saw, and you just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Deadcast. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available now for your reading pleasure. Those are available@dead.net deadcast index. Check them out in this episode, part two of our tribute to bassist extraordinaire Phil Lesh, we have some very special guests who really help us drill down into what made Phil's approach to playing bass so special and how his unique musicality contributed to making the Grateful Dead's music as unique and timeless as it is. Here's Jesse Jarno.
- [04:59]
Jesse Jarno
Phil Lech contained multitudes, multitudes that rearrange themselves molecularly and unceasingly. We'll be using the August 27, 1972 playing in the Band as our first casting off point today, and what we'll be hearing from Unless otherwise noted, here's how Jerry Garcia described Phil to David Ganz and Blair Jackson in 1981, now included in David's marvelous book Conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [05:48]
Phil Lesh
Phil is an incredibly complex guy. He's an incredibly brilliant, incredibly complex guy.
- [05:53]
Jesse Jarno
And it's like he does things for.
- [05:55]
Phil Lesh
Reasons of his own that are just like his music are not easy for me to understand. I mean, I don't know why he is the way he is or why he does what he does or what kind of thoughts he thinks on and off.
- [06:20]
Jesse Jarno
In Part one of our Phil cast tribute, we got into Phil's biography with a lot of storytelling from Phil himself, and we'll have plenty more of that too. But today we're going to get into his music and under the bass Waves from the Grateful Dead to Phil and friends to Terrapin Crossroads. To help us get into Phil Lesh's bass playing, songwriting and music, please welcome Phil Lesh's bandmate of a dozen years for Midnight north and the Terrapin Family Band, his son, Graham Lesh.
- [06:59]
Graham Lesh
When he started Terrapin Crossroads, he would take all of us musicians and we'd have Phil School. He would listen to us rehearse and have pointers. Never play the same thing.
- [07:11]
Jesse Jarno
Once there was a serious musical philosophy.
- [07:14]
Graham Lesh
Everyone has to be open, but no one person can be too domineering with anything either. The song will lead the way, the music will lead the way.
- [07:23]
Jesse Jarno
The pointers at Phil's school can also be a bit Zen.
- [07:26]
Graham Lesh
Everything's just in one.
- [07:28]
Jesse Jarno
That's a musical concept we'll explore today in a few iterations. This is how Phil described his teaching method to me in 2006.
- [07:36]
Mike Gordon
I try to keep it on a more philosophical basis. I don't want to point out or pick out any player or any situation or any tune that we played last night for intense scrutiny. I just try to suggest ways to look at it and remind musicians that what we really need to do is to listen to one another and play outside of ourselves.
- [07:57]
Jesse Jarno
Phil Laesch was an avant garde musician often tasked with playing song based music.
- [08:02]
Graham Lesh
Another bass player, my friend Adam Minkoff, who is one of the smartest people I know about all of this, he was like, yeah, it's crazy. Your dad kind of almost jams out at the beginning of songs and when there's structure. And then at the end, when maybe the recording is going off into a jam and everyone else is starting to blast off, then he starts finding a single motif and just playing that. Do y'all know the Wall song, the Crosby Nash song, where my dad and Jerry and Kreutzman are all on that.
- [08:40]
Phil Lesh
You see adult. Oh, such a great open door.
- [09:00]
Graham Lesh
And at the end they start to jam. And there, there is a recording where you follow the whole jam. But at least while that is happening, Jerry's starting to play a little more and get a little more out there. And I think the drums are too. But that's when the bass like locks into a single motif. It was always unexpected.
- [09:45]
Jesse Jarno
It's been said that when you listen to Jerry Garcia transition from singing to playing lead guitar, his personality and expression carry through unbroken. The same continuity can be heard in Phil Lesch.
- [09:56]
Graham Lesh
I feel like he has a very specific melodic sense. To me, I attribute that to like, I can hear it because I just know his voice so much because he's my dad. I can kind of, like, hear how he would sing a melody just like, off the cuff or something like that.
- [10:32]
Jesse Jarno
As above, so below was one of Owsley and the Dead's favorite alchemical precepts. And that applied across all the music made by the musician, also known as Ready Kill a watt, from his improvisation to his songwriting. He could play bass prettily, as we just heard on one from the vault, and he could sing prettily as well.
- [10:52]
Phil Lesh
What do you want me to do to do for you to see you for this is all a dream we dream One afternoon on the double if.
- [11:13]
Jesse Jarno
You'Ve ever tried to learn Box of Rain, it's not so much that the chords are complicated or even that there are that many of them, but that they keep moving in different ways.
- [11:23]
Graham Lesh
If you lay it out and you look at it as a chart, they do make sense. And you do start to see the thought process, and it's obviously super unique. You do see the patterns. There is a structure and then a superstructure to each of those. And you can kind of see the thought process with all of them where it's like, oh, this one has this ending, so it goes back to here. And this one has the second ending, so it leads to this other way.
- [11:51]
Phil Lesh
And it's just a box of brain. I don't know who put it there. Believe it if you need it or need it if you dare.
- [12:06]
Jesse Jarno
In 1970, American Beauty began with Box of Rain, the poignant collaboration between Phil and Robert Hunter, written when Phil's father, Graham's grandfather, Frank Lesh, was dying. We explored it in Our American Beauty season, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast in the studio, the song featured Phil on acoustic guitar, Jerry Garcia on piano and overdub pedal steel, David Nelson on lead guitar, Dave Torbert on bass, and Billy Kreutzman on drums. They played it that way at the Fillmore east in 1970, but it didn't really enter the band's live repertoire until 1972. In 1973, maybe the sun is shining.
- [12:49]
Phil Lesh
It'S all we can do Falling from a heavenly sky what do you want me to do? To do all you do See you do this is all a deeply deep one afternoon.
- [13:12]
Jesse Jarno
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is when Phil began to start writing songs for the Dead again. Here he is speaking to andy Childs in 1974.
- [13:20]
Phil Lesh
I didn't write for a very long time, about three years, because it wasn't so much that the boys in the band couldn't play what I imagined it was that it took so long to communicate it.
- [13:36]
Jesse Jarno
It's worth reminding that Phil was one of the enthusiastic forces behind the 11, which the Dead started playing in 1960. Bob Weir was fond of writing songs in seven, and there was the main 10, which became playing in the band. New Potato Caboose had a Jam in 13. But by the early 70s, the band wasn't practicing the many hours a day when they weren't on tour that they'd need to really learn some of the thick tunes that Phil was fond of writing.
- [14:13]
Phil Lesh
If I wanted to do a tune that alternated between 6, 4 and 5, 4, say just on a level of rhythm or meter rather, it was real hard for the guys in the band to remember when the changes were gonna come. I just sort of gave up trying to do that.
- [14:27]
Jesse Jarno
Check out our Unbroken Chain episode to hear how frustrating it was to teach the band that song.
- [14:32]
Phil Lesh
You just simply count, 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3. Da da da da da da d minor. What's fun about that?
- [14:43]
Jesse Jarno
It ain't fun, but when it came together, it was magnific. Please welcome back from Phish, Mike Gordon.
- [15:04]
David Crosby
There's one time when he had me come and play bass and I said, well, I love Unbroken Chain. He said, okay, let's do that one. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't do that one. Just because I really. I have to learn it. And there's a lot going on in there. And little did I know how right I was, because I said, but I will learn it for next time. And there was a next time and I learned it. I even had Jared, who works for me, help to compose some counterpoint lines and then come up with my own and then just kind of piece it together and it worked out pretty well. But there's a sign if there's six verses, many verses, they're all different. As with Box of Rain, like every. Every verse has a slightly different chord progression.
- [15:44]
Phil Lesh
Blue light rain Whoa, Unbroken chain Looking for familiar faces in an empty window bay.
- [15:57]
David Crosby
And then the middle parts, there's, you know, the whole section that's in 15, like 7 and 8 back and forth. And it's not just math. You know, so many bands, so many of the jazz fusion bands and artists, it really did sound just like math to me, not emotion. But with Phil, and as with the Grateful Dead in general, when they got into the froggier sounding stuff, it really felt like it was for emotional purposes, all the mathematical parts.
- [17:01]
Jesse Jarno
And like Unbroken Chain, he co wrote the Slightly more straightforward Pride of Cucamongo with Bobby Peterson, which we got into in its own episode last year, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast Whoa, I'm proud.
- [17:15]
Phil Lesh
Of Cucamonga Whoa, Little Olives in the Sun Whoa, Whoa, I had With Some Loving and I Dump Some Time.
- [17:32]
Jesse Jarno
With those tunes under their belt, the Dead once again grew comfortable with working in unusual time signatures. And Blues for Allah included Phil's piece King Solomon's Marbles. Certainly we hope to get back into that in the not too distant future. Phil was one of the great instigators of the Far out and the Grateful Dead, which arguably peaked in 1974. Over the previous few years, the band, and Garcia and Loesch especially, had grown close with the electronic composer, jazz pianist, and MIT trained biologist Ned Lagin. We've heard Ned's account of how he connected with the Dead in our Nedcast episode, but here's Phil's version from my conversation with him in 2018.
- [18:26]
Ned Lagin
It's kind of a great story. Ned was studying at mit. He wrote Grateful Dead a letter about space war and electronic music. And one of the things that he was talking about in this letter, if I remember correctly, was the kind of musical organization of this kind of obscure mass by Obrecht, 14th, 15th century, as missa Maria Zart, I think is the name of it. He was reading on and on about the construction of them, how intricately linked all of the little motifs were, and it was very intriguing. The next time we played Boston, Ned kind of showed up.
- [19:20]
Jesse Jarno
Ned was one of the student organizers of the MIT show in May 1970.
- [19:25]
Ned Lagin
Jerry comes yelling over across the stage after he says, phil, Phil, this is the guy. This is the guy, the guy who wrote the letter. You know, that's kind of how we met that first night that we knew each other. We spend all night playing Space War at mit. Literally the original space on a circular cathode ray tube monitor. I kind of formed a bond with him and we. We decided we wanted to do something together. He invited me to join him in doing something together.
- [19:57]
Jesse Jarno
Not long after Ned relocated to California, the two made preparations to perform Seastones live between Grateful Dead sets.
- [20:04]
Ned Lagin
The closest analog would have been maybe Stockhausen electronic music from the late 50s. He's called Contact or the Gesarn de Jonglinga or the Hymnin with all the national Anthem. That was one of the most beautiful things about it. It was so completely out of left field.
- [20:38]
Jesse Jarno
If the One is where it thinks it is and Grateful Dead jams someone should maybe do a wellness check during Seastones. That was Ned and Phil performing at the Miami high Alai on June 23, 1974, one of the first of the interlude sets they performed through the Wall of Sound at Dead shows that year. We talked pretty extensively about Seastones during our Nedcast and numerous episodes following the band through 1974 during our Mars Hotel season. Though fraught in some ways, it was a year of high adventure. This is Phil speaking with andy Childs in September 1974.
- [21:43]
Phil Lesh
I do it all the time. That's what I mean, all the time. I love it. I think it's one of the greatest tools.
- [21:53]
David Crosby
Are you talking about grass?
- [21:55]
Phil Lesh
No, acid.
- [21:56]
David Crosby
Acid?
- [21:57]
Phil Lesh
Oh, yeah. I think it's one of the greatest tools for learning about yourself. And also you can just use it like. Like it's, it's. It's just like, you know, like a. It's. It's my quality knob. I turn my quality when I take a few drops of acid and I turn up my quality knob. Yeah. And listening back to it later on a tape, which, of course drugs can't have any influence on the tape, I find that generally speaking, the quality is just what I thought it was, especially about what I was playing about. The relationship between what I was playing on the whole band is not always that good because not everybody is always on the same plane on the same trip.
- [22:44]
Jesse Jarno
In Dijon later that week, Ned and Phil had a most excellent adventure, which Ned recounted for us in our Money Money episode and which we'll repeat here after the concert.
- [22:55]
Gary Lambert
Phil and I were so up. We were invigorated by the music and the audience and especially by the chemistry, the chemistry of the moment that we decided to check out of the motel and drive to Paris that night. We also wanted to separate ourselves from the Drag Racers from Hell movie, as I characterized it at that motel. Because Dijon had been such a very nice and interesting and sort of cosmic place, it was decided that it was my turn to be the driver. And so very late at night we got on the road and I drove at very high speed, maybe, I don't know, 170, 180 kilometers per hour toward Paris.
- [23:35]
Jesse Jarno
We'll once again let the September 18th seastone soundcheck be our traveling music.
- [23:53]
Gary Lambert
In the middle of what was supposed to be a six hour non stop dark of night run, we heard. Started to hear sounds. It turned out that the tires had heated up so much that the rubber was falling off. We had to get off the highway somewhere in rural France at three or Four in the morning, pitch black, limping out of the car along a rural road. We found a country garage and woke up this fellow who did not speak English to get him to replace all four tires. I had two years of French in high school, but could only speak a few words of French, like, where's the bathroom? And Phil couldn't speak in French at all. Somehow, though, Phil was. Phil was somehow able to negotiate that transaction. Because I was at that point only able to do one thing. Drive. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get out of the car. I was just driving the guy. The mechanic jacked up the car on one of those lifts that elevates the entire car. With me sitting in the car, my hands on the steering wheel, I was still driving in my head. The mechanic replaced all the tires, lowered the car, and I jetted out of the garage, ready to go to Paris. The whole time, I had been driving virtually while I was elevated on the lift and was really ready. But we weren't going anywhere until Phil paid the bill. So Phil threw money at the man and almost get in the car when I zoomed out of there. A few hours later, we pulled up to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was sunrise. It was beautiful. And Phil and I just stood there looking around in happiness and amazement. It was just great. We went over to the Parasite and tried to check in. We were in our cowboy boots, unshaven, and as you know, you could see electric bolts coming out of our heads.
- [26:28]
Jesse Jarno
That was from Ned Lage and Seastones, released by round records in 1975. A record that actually had no artists listed on the front cover or even on the back on the LP sticker. It's credited to Ned Lagin and Phil Lesh. But that attribution came because during the Dead's year off the road, Jerry Garcia had the Legion of Mary. Bobby Weir had Kingfish. Keith and Donna had the Keith and Donna Band. And from the perspective of Round Records, it'd be nice if Phil Lesh had a project, too, along with Jerry Garcia. He was Ned Legion's sponsor in the Dead world.
- [27:01]
Ned Lagin
It was essentially. It was a composition that Ned composed. Pretty much had it all laid out how he wanted it to go and the sequence of events and so on the way he mixed it, it was quad that was folded in to stereo. But all kinds of strange spatial things would happen. Remember, I was playing it for Garcia and Mountain Girl over at their place in Stinson Beach. And there's this one part where there's lots of low frequency Glissando type stuff. MG gets up and looks out the window and she says, I thought I heard a tank. In a nutshell. To me it's kind of Ned's way of expressing his kind of aesthetic so that you don't know what you're hearing, but it reminds you maybe of something. And it'll of course remind different people of different things.
- [28:01]
Jesse Jarno
Seastone's included an all star cast including David Crosby.
- [28:05]
Ned Lagin
It was such a gas to see Crosby jumping in on something like that.
- [28:08]
Jesse Jarno
And we'll let Crosby our segue point. Phil Lesh didn't join up with projects outside the Dead too often, but David Crosby was one of them, playing bass on numerous tracks on Cross's classic 1970 album, if I Could Only Remember My Name.
- [28:25]
Phil Lesh
I thought I met a man who said you knew a man who knew what was going on. I was mistaken.
- [28:51]
Jesse Jarno
They even briefly formed a quartet featuring Crosby, Garcia, Lasch and Kreutzman.
- [28:56]
Rob Collier
David and the Dorks, or Jerry and the Jerks, depending on who got to the microphone first. If we'd gotten to do it more, it could have been really good.
- [29:03]
Jesse Jarno
That was David Crosby, of course. For lots more about the so called Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, check our Addicts of My Life episode. CROs and Loesch stayed friendly over the years. When we spoke with David in 2021, they just hung out.
- [29:17]
Rob Collier
Do you guys know that I had lunch with Phil Lesh yesterday?
- [29:21]
Jesse Jarno
Philes would occasionally sit in with other bands over the years. The amount of artists he recorded with outside the Dead's immediate circle could be counted on Jerry Garcia's right hand. He appeared on Graham Nash's Songs for Beginners.
- [29:35]
Phil Lesh
I used to be a king.
- [29:42]
Jesse Jarno
And.
- [29:42]
Phil Lesh
Everything around me turned to rust it's cause I built my life Life on sand and I watched it crumble in the dust.
- [29:58]
Jesse Jarno
We're going to zoom in on one of Phil Lesh's side jams, though it might not sound like that at first. That's from Jerry Garcia's Reflections, where the Dead backed him on half the album. In 1981, Garcia told Musician magazine this story. Phil played on four songs for a solo album of mine called Reflections. Now I write pretty conventionally structured songs, so I asked Phil to play basically the same lines on each chorus so I could anchor it in the bass. But I didn't really see the beauty of what he'd done till later when I was running off copies of the tape at fast forward. The bass was brought up to a nice skipping tempo right in that mellow mid range guitar tone, and I was struck by the amazing beauty of his bassline. There was this wonderful syncopation and beautiful harmonic ideas that were barely perceptible at regular speed, but when it's brought up to twice the speed, God, it just blew me out. I'm not sure which song Garcia is referring to specifically, but if you have any ideas, feel free to chime in on the episode page@dead.net deadcast I'm going to propose they love each other. And being a member of the Dead and all. Alongside his own singular bass style, Phil Lesch explored the world of boutique basses. First, Alembic modified Phil's Guild Starfire into the instrument known as Big Brown, which hit the stage in its custom form in the summer of 1971, giving Loesch the warm, punchy sound that defined the band in 1971 and 1972 especially. And now let's isolate Baked Brown Gram Lesh.
- [32:32]
Graham Lesh
It's always melodic, and it's always not exactly in the rhythmic place that you think, but it is so perfectly groovy and funky at the same time. And it's always like playing off of what you maybe expect a traditional bass sound to play, like, where the notes should be.
- [32:57]
Jesse Jarno
Almost last episode, Mike Gordon from Phish told us something in almost exactly the same terms, which we're going to repeat for emphasis before we start getting into the specifics of Phil's bass playing.
- [33:09]
David Crosby
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.
- [33:28]
Jesse Jarno
In our last episode, Mike told us about how early in his career, he avoided studying Phil Lesh's bass lines too closely for fear of sounding too much like him.
- [33:37]
David Crosby
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 until I started playing with Grateful Dead members. And then I thought, okay, now I got to take the deep dive and see what's in there. Often it ended up being surprising. And so I spent the whole week learning these songs like I had never before. I played some of them before, but I never really listened to see what the hell was going on. And I was pretty blown away in some cases. I wrote lines down in musical notation. I think that's when I really, really learned that he's not playing the pattern, not playing the riff from the song, and weaving in between so much of the time. I. I was really pretty. Pretty blown away. It took me a while to realize, like, let's say that lick at the end of Scarlet Before Fire that. That everyone's doing the lick and he doesn't even do, like, one note of that lick. And I. I think it took me years to even realize that. To really. That. That's pretty incredible to avoid.
- [35:32]
Jesse Jarno
That was for May 25, 1977. Dave's picks 1. Like every member of the Dead, Phil Lesh's playing evolved over the years. There's a somewhat reductionist way to compare Phil's playing in the earlier eras versus the 80s and 90s, to go under the waves of Phil's vibrations and to get down with that a little bit more. Please welcome to the Dead cast Rob Collier, who teaches music history and theory at Alverno College in Wisconsin.
- [35:58]
David Lemieux
It seemed like in the 70s he would avoid playing unison figures with the band at all cost. Like, no matter what. Like, even something as simple as, like, the hits before the chorus of Eyes of the World, basically the whole band goes and sort of drops into the chorus. Phil will not play that. Like, he will play anything.
- [36:30]
Jesse Jarno
But that's August 13, 1975.
- [36:51]
David Lemieux
In the 80s and 90s, he plays those figures with the band. He plays those hits with the band. So it's like sort of little moments like that, but then also bigger moments like slipknot in late 80s and 90s, he's kind of playing those, like, intricate arpeggio figures. With Jerry in the 70s. Absolutely not. Sort of playing these weird syncopated figures against those lines. I tend to hear his playing as like, he's thinking counterpoint. Like he's providing not just like support for Jerry's lead lines, but like a counter melody to Jerry's lead lines.
- [38:23]
Jesse Jarno
Mike Gordon.
- [38:25]
David Crosby
That really makes sense that it would come out of his classical training, even if it wasn't a complete and thorough classical training, training and sensibility to think about counterpoint in that way.
- [38:36]
David Lemieux
Rather than sounding like a jazz bass player, he sounds like a jazz trumpeter or a jazz sax player. Like, his lines have more of that kind of like, soloistic feel rather than the sort of walking line.
- [38:50]
Jesse Jarno
We'll head back to the Venita 72 version of playing in the Band.
- [38:54]
David Lemieux
Now playing in the Band, Phil's bass line, I think of it as having, like, two melodic motions. It starts with this kind of root, fifth, sixth, Root, motion, Root, five, six, root. This, to me, is like a Motown groove. He plays, essentially, that in playing in the band from the 70s through the 90s, it's not always that verbatim. That, as an element, is kind of always in there somehow. And then the other motion, in the 70s, it was a motion from F sharp up to A. That was kind of the ending motion for the bass line. And how he got from F sharp to A would change. And in 71 and 72, he kind of sticks to that basic groove. In a lot of performances of playing in the band, it's probably never like, verbatim the same. There is often that kind of start with that sort of Motown groove and then make that motion so that he can end on the A and then get back to the top of the pattern.
- [40:38]
Jesse Jarno
By the 80s, the approach had changed. This is from Madison Square Garden in 1982 on in and out of the Garden.
- [40:46]
Phil Lesh
Some folks trust reason, Others trust your mind I don't trust nothing but I know it to my draw See it.
- [40:56]
Rich Mahan
Once again now.
- [41:03]
David Lemieux
The 82 version, that little Motown figure is kind of there, but it's so obscured, you can sort of pick it out. Like, I can pick it out just because I notated it. And I can sort of see that it's there in almost every measure. But listening to it, you probably wouldn't recognize it as like, oh, yeah, this is the same kind of groove.
- [41:32]
Phil Lesh
Now, some folks look for answers, they look for fights Some folks dropping treetops Just looking for their fights and I can tell you future But I can't stop for nothing I'm just staying in the band.
- [41:51]
Jesse Jarno
Mike Gordon.
- [41:52]
David Crosby
I got invited to be on some kind of a chat or some Something like that, where everyone just got to ask Phil some questions. And the one that they used was very technical. And this was my question. And so you can hear him asking it. He said, this is from the bass player of Fish. And then he just laughs. And the question is, do you feel like you were the one who, let's say, spearheaded the idea of playing an upper octave on the downbeat and then the lower octave a few beats later and the next beat, rather than the way most bass players do, by playing a lower octave and then an upper octave? So first he just laughs because all the other questions were nothing like that? And then his answer was, okay, well, I'll answer. My answer is, the person that came up with that, as far as I know, is Bach. And so there's a lot of years that that's already been happening. Before I did it. And that was my answer.
- [42:56]
Jesse Jarno
To return to the Venita version of playing in the band, though, Rob just called out two moments in the jam that speak to the way Phil thought as a bassist within the Dead, rhythmically and harmonically.
- [43:06]
David Lemieux
He starts on an E, sort of a high, maybe tenor register, E. And then sort of walks down, mostly down the scale, E, D, C, A to G. And then sort of does a little kind of turnaround and then does that go. Gets back up to the E, kind of walks down again. He plays this figure four times, and it kind of starts the same every time, but it's a different length, like, rhythmically or metrically each time. So I, like, counted it out. The first time he plays this pattern, it's 25 16th notes long, right? Like there. He's not playing exclusively in 16th notes, but, like, that's. The length is 25. The length of 25 16th notes. You could notate it in a measure, a bar of 2516, which is not a super common time signature. The next time it's 26 16th notes. He repeats it again, but it's 23 16th notes long. He repeats it again, but It's 27 16th notes long.
- [44:44]
Jesse Jarno
This is an example of the eternal Grateful Dead rhythmic philosophy. The one is where it thinks it is.
- [44:49]
David Lemieux
One of the cool things about the plane and the band jam. They're all locked into a pulse, but they have basically abandoned a time signature. Like, they're not playing in 4, 4. They've left that 10, 4 kind of grouping behind. Basically every band member sort of invents their own time signature. They can kind of play in whatever they want as long as they're locked into this. Kind of like that pulse is always there. The other moment is kind of similar, except instead of a descending line, he plays an ascending line. And he kind of starts on D, moves up to E, moves up to F, moves up to G, moves up to A, and then drops back down to D to start this ascent again. But again, he can play in whatever meter, whatever time signature he wants. You listen to it and you recognize, like, yeah, he's playing this kind of ascending figure. It's slow enough, kind of like he's ascending slowly enough that it's easy to hear him ascend and then kind of drop back down to restart. Makes no attempt to conform to any kind of regular meter. He can take as much time as he wants getting from the starting point to the top of this ascent before dropping back down. Before Phil was a bass player, he was an experimental composer and a lot of that sort of mid century classical music, modern classical music. It incorporated elements of noise, like non traditional musical elements. So even if you were playing a piano, for instance, like John Cage had his prepared piano. So he wanted that piano to not sound like a piano where put all of these objects in the belly of the piano to create all of these different timbres.
- [48:09]
Jesse Jarno
This is another part of Phil Lesh's bass voice that might be considered. In the 50s and 60s, classical and jazz musicians began exploring what are called extended techniques, creating sounds from their instrument beyond the scales and chords implied by its construction. Here's Lesh in Cincinnati on December 4, 1973, coaxing some extended tones from Big Brown's complex of knobs. In June of 1974, Phil switched over to his first fully custom base, made by Alembic and officially known as Osiris. Though nicknamed Mission Control by fans because of its enormous field of knobs, designed to be a quadraphonic part of the wall of Sound. We discussed Mission Control at length in our Loose Lucy episode last year, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. Though the quad base was legendary when deployed, it didn't happen that often. Here's how Phil described it to me when I interviewed him in 2018.
- [49:29]
Ned Lagin
I never really used it as much as I could have. The problem was that if I'm playing on one string and then the next string, the one string would come out across over by Jerry and then the other one would come out behind me and so the other guys in the band wouldn't be able to really understand what I was playing. May have been a problem all along. Anyway.
- [50:17]
Jesse Jarno
Phil often said that this one drummer period from 1971 to 1974 were his favorite years of Grateful Dead music. And it's easy to hear why. Besides Pig Pen, everybody was relatively healthy. And the bass was often front and center in the band's dynamic. And Phil's vocals are regular part of the mix. I love his high harmony on Jack Straw.
- [50:39]
Phil Lesh
We can share the women we can share the wine we can share what we got Abuse Cause we done share all the plan.
- [50:57]
Jesse Jarno
But the late 1970s and early 1980s were a rough time for Lesh. He took the band's road hiatus especially hard, a topic he addresses in searching for the sound.
- [51:26]
Phil Lesh
As I was to discover. An idle Mind is the Devil's workshop. It's very difficult at this distance in time to analyze the motivation for my conduct in the next few years. It may be that I was feeling some degree of isolation after 10 years of complete immersion in the band, in its music. Thus began my descent into alcoholism.
- [51:45]
Jesse Jarno
We've linked to the audiobook@dead.net deadcast. There was a lot of bad behavior and a brief regrettable marriage. Later, Phil would refer to this period as the Heineken years. His presence inside the Dead seemed to diminish. For starters, when the band returned to the road in 1976, Phil no longer had a vocal microphone. Here's how Bob Weir described it to David Ganz in 1977.
- [52:10]
Phil Lesh
Yeah, he blew his voice singing. Improper singing technique.
- [52:15]
Gary Lambert
He could get it back with an operation, but it's.
- [52:19]
Phil Lesh
Hell is an expensive operation. Then after that, you can't.
- [52:22]
Gary Lambert
You can't talk, you can't whisper or.
- [52:24]
Phil Lesh
Anything for six weeks, and then you.
- [52:29]
Gary Lambert
Come back very slowly.
- [52:31]
Jesse Jarno
He was still writing songs, though. In 1977, Phil Co wrote Passenger with Peter Monk, an answer song to Fleetwood Mac's Station man, sung on Terrapin Station by Bobby Weir and Donna Gods. And during the Terrapin sessions as well, the band recorded the song Equinox now on the Beyond Description box and the expanded Terrapin Station. Though it was sung by Jerry Garcia, the music was by Philadelphia, with lyrics again by Peter Monk, who wrote the words for Passenger. It's a big bummer it disappeared so quickly. We mentioned Phil's infinitely changing multitudes earlier, and it's a trait Jerry Garcia recognized intimately. This is Garcia speaking with David Ganz and Blair Jackson in 1981 from Conversations with Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast.
- [54:04]
Phil Lesh
His periods of being enthusiastic and being an estrangement, which we all have about the great. We're all ambivalent about the Grateful Dead.
- [54:12]
Graham Lesh
You know what I mean?
- [54:13]
Phil Lesh
And it's like a love. It gets to be a love hate thing after a while, that he goes through those changes with greater frequency. Sometimes during the course of a gig, he'll go through two or three great big changes and that he's like much harder on himself than anybody is on him. He's like. He punishes himself in his own mental being or his own own artistic space or whatever it is.
- [54:41]
Jesse Jarno
But in the 1980s, Phil's role did seem to diminish. Gary Lambert I thought of the Grateful.
- [54:49]
Rob Collier
Dead in terms of breakthroughs and plateaus. And I think things plateaued for Phil maybe earlier than they did for some. And maybe as the band became more competent, they also took on less risk. It made them a better, more disciplined band in a lot of ways. But yes, there's always A trade off there. And I think Phil may have been more keenly aware of that trade off.
- [55:12]
Jesse Jarno
In 1982, the dead rearranged themselves on stage for the first time in a few years, putting Jerry Garcia on the right side stage left, and Phil Lesh on the opposite stage right or left for the audience. David Ganz discussed it with Phil not long after it happened.
- [55:28]
Phil Lesh
You might have noticed by the time we got to the Greek that I'd moved over next to Billy.
- [55:32]
Jesse Jarno
In a band with two drummers, the bassist was having trouble hearing the kick drum, so moved himself closer to Billy Kreutzman. There's a reason Kreutzman was nicknamed Bill the Drummer and not Bill a drummer.
- [55:43]
Phil Lesh
We had a band meeting early this year and I said, look, I want to be next to Billy. And Jerry finally said, I'll try. Please. Yeah, I guess you just push for something for five years or more.
- [55:53]
Jesse Jarno
You guys are pretty much not into confrontations, are you?
- [55:57]
Phil Lesh
It's totally useless. Never been. It's never been. It's never been truthful. It's never worked for us.
- [56:02]
Jesse Jarno
Perhaps the thing that reawakened Phil Lesh and certainly made him more audible within the Grateful Dead was his switch from four string to six string bass. Debuted during the very last shows of 1982. We'll soundtrack this next segment with the bird song from October 11, 1983. Now on in and out of the garden, the modulus 6 string bass was virtually invented for him by Jeff Gould. Rob Collier.
- [56:58]
David Lemieux
I don't think his playing fundamentally changed. You do get a few extra notes on the bottom and on the top, but more than that, it sort of allows you to play like across the neck instead of like so much up and down. You wouldn't have to shift to get those higher notes. He can kind of keep his hand in the same position to get the higher notes or to get the lower notes.
- [57:27]
David Crosby
Mike Gordon, I started to learn, maybe he told me, and maybe I just noticed that he kept his. His hands in a similar part of the neck, often around the seventh fret, which is basically about halfway between the nut and not the bridge, but maybe the end of the most bass players, even if they have a low string five string bass and they want to play a low E, they're going to play it at the lowest string on a first string base is E. So they would just play that open with no fingers. But Phil would never do that. He always or usually wouldn't do it. He would play the B string five frets up. So what that means Is it means a couple of things. First of all, he has to fret the note. It's not open. And by having to fret it, that means you can let go really quickly and have a shorter note, more control, because there's more ways to shorten the note. You can put your palm on with your right hand, but you can also let go really quickly with your left hand by using a fretted note. The other thing is it puts me my hand closer to that seventh position because it's the fifth fret. So some of my fingers, if I'm playing with my index finger, some of my fingers are right over that seventh fret. And by what happens is by sticking to that same part of the neck, it makes the tone consistent. The weird thing about guitars and basses as compared to pianos is there's a lot of ways to play the same note, but the more you go up the neck or the pickups, the rounder and less defined the note sounds. And the more you go down the neck toward the nut and the end of the strings, the tuning heads, the more cutting it is. But by forcing yourself to stay in the middle of the neck like that, the amount from roundness to cutting stays more consistent. And then you can start to dial it in to be punchy and to sound like you want. There's still going to be choices, still going to be different from string to string and fret to fret and. But this consistency thing is incredible.
- [60:51]
Jesse Jarno
Though. Phil Lesh started singing occasional backup vocals on truckin starting in 1977, he didn't get a vocal mic again until 1984. It resulted in the beginning of chants for we want Phil. Here's Garcia responding to one such chant at the frost amphitheater in 1985. Now on Dave's Picks 49, we're hanging onto him for a while. But they did in fact let Phil sing here, doing his version of Bob Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues with some of his own lyrics.
- [61:23]
Phil Lesh
Well, if you see cnn, please tell.
- [61:28]
Graham Lesh
Her things tonight.
- [61:34]
Phil Lesh
My spark's still twisted My tentacles are all in and out.
- [61:44]
Graham Lesh
I don't even have the strength.
- [62:03]
Jesse Jarno
In 1986, there was a new Phil Lesch song to celebrate. For the first time in almost a decade, Revolutionary Hamstrung Blues was co written once again with lyricist Bobby Peterson, this time with additional music by Brent Midland. The Dead played it only once and the song disappeared from the band's orbit. Probably around the time of Jerry Garcia's diabetic coma. That summer gone entirely by the time the band finished up in the Dark the next year. But by the late 1980s, Phil Lesch was committed to the Dead again. Around the time in the Dark came out, Phil threw himself into another wide scale project as a serious big eared patron of the arts, Gary Lambert.
- [63:00]
Rob Collier
This was right after Jerry had come out of the coma and the band was revitalized. They gave permission for KPFA to broadcast their New Year's Eve show from Henry J. Kaiser. And I got to co host that. And they also gave me some production responsibilities, one of which was to figure out a way to fill up the break between sets. And I said, why don't we let the Grateful Dead program the music for the break? And so I reached out to each band member and said, if you could pick one or two short tunes that we could play during the break, what would they be? And of course, being the Grateful Dead, they came up with this entertainingly eclectic list of stuff from a Duke Ellington Frank Sinatra duet to Garcia, I think, specifically trying to trip me up by naming a 16th century Italian Renaissance Christmas carol. But I found it and something called RIU RIU Chiu Ri U. And then when I asked Phil, he just said, well, you couldn't play what I want to play at the break because it's an hour long symphony by a dead British composer named Havergal Bryant. It's kind of a. So there, you know, said, okay, what can you do? I gave it my best shot. But a few weeks after New Year's Eve, I decided to call Phil's bluff. And I sent him a note and said, listen, you know, you're very well liked at kpfa. You have history there. So I'm sure if you ever wanted to come in and play that Symphony by Haverg O'Brien and talk about it, you'd be welcome. And Phil said, oh, that's a good idea. And I said, maybe we could even do it more than once. And then Phil said, why don't we just turn it into a regular show?
- [65:34]
Phil Lesh
You're listening to KPFA and KPFB in Berkeley, KFCF in Fresno. Stay tuned now for Rex Radio.
- [65:42]
Rob Collier
Basically, it was Phil and I getting to talk about music. Yeah, the show was mostly music, but we would do an introduction and give a little background. Good evening and welcome to Rex Radio. I'm Gary Lambert and we're back for yet another month with dispatches from the far frontiers of musical experience. We have about 54 minutes of music to cram into a one hour slot, except for one show we had a 59 minute piece by Cecil Taylor. The show was an hour. So Phil just came on and said, ladies and gentlemen, Cecil Taylor. And then Cecil just like has at the piano for 59 minutes.
- [66:34]
Jesse Jarno
That was from Cecil Taylor's Silver Tongues. Phil was a fun dj.
- [66:39]
Phil Lesh
Tonight's music is the music, we might say, of synesthesia. Music that goes beyond the oral medium to speak in an almost visual language.
- [66:49]
Rob Collier
This was in the period when Phil had really ramped up his support of experimental, improvised and composed music through the Rex Foundation. He was really generating a lot of grants and things like the Ralph J. Gleason Award and all of that for people who really lived on the musical fringes and really had no other means of getting their music played or recorded or performed or any of that. And there's an excellent documentary about that called the Grateful and the Dead, which I recommend.
- [67:21]
Jesse Jarno
For several years, composers or their families.
- [67:24]
Gary Lambert
In many parts of Britain have been secretly supported by an infamous American rock.
- [67:28]
David Crosby
Band about which most of them knew nothing. They had no idea who were behind.
- [67:33]
Gary Lambert
The funds that flowed from the mysterious.
- [67:35]
Jesse Jarno
Rex foundation of San Francisco. Founded in 1983 and named after the late Rhodey Rex Jackson, the Rex Foundation's Angel Grants became an unexpected force in underground music and art starting in the 1980s, providing supportive funds for a range of creators, from alchemical filmmaker Harry Smith to harmlotic sax titan Ornette Coleman, and, via Phil Lesch's sponsorship, a range of contemporary classical composers.
- [68:03]
Rob Collier
The composers were just flabbergasted. First of all, they'd get These checks for $10,000 from the Rex foundation, which they had never heard of, especially the ones in Britain.
- [68:14]
Phil Lesh
What I wanted to do when I tried to interest the Rex foundation in supporting this music was I wanted to bring this music to an audience so that others could enjoy it as I had. I would say, if there is a unifying factor of all these composers, just the fact that they're all outsiders. None of them are part of what you might call a musical establishment.
- [68:34]
Rob Collier
So we originally created the show as a vehicle for that. It was originally called Rex Radio. We started in June of 1987 and played a lot of wonderful, very obscure music, very eclectic music.
- [68:50]
Jesse Jarno
Eventually they changed the name of the show to Eyes of Veil of Order, running on KPFA from 1988 through 1994. We've posted a link to their old playlist@dead.net Deadcast. They were part of the local outsider musical community too.
- [69:06]
Phil Lesh
And now a little new feature that we have here, the Rex foundation radio date book Jan. 17 at Jazz in Flight Gallery at 333 Dolores St. The Hieroglyphic Ensemble with Peter Affelbaum. They're going to do two sets that's an avant garde big band. On February 5th and 6th in Berkeley, the Berkley Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Ngannou, is going to be doing Maxwell Davies Symphony Number two, which is a very important piece. I think I'm definitely going to be there to hear that.
- [69:39]
Rob Collier
He got turned on to some of the new stuff coming out of New York, coming out of the Knitting Factory and the downtown jazz scene. And he became a big fan of David Murray, for example. And that's how David Murray kind of got ushered into the Grateful Dead scene. When Phil would come to New York, you know, on a day off between Dead shows of the Garden, he'd go see Anthony Braxton at the Knitting Factory. We did that together twice on consecutive years. McCoy Tyner's yearly residency at the club called Sweet Basil occurred during a Dead Garden run. And Phil and I hopped in the car right after a Dead show and went down to catch McCoy's late set. One year with Brent, and then, sadly, the next year, Brent was gone. And the next year it was with Bruce and Vince. You know, I've seen seeing these keyboard. It's just like with jaws dropping. Watching McCoy play was really a glorious thing to behold. He seemed in really good spirits and really engaged during that whole eight years we were doing the radio show.
- [71:17]
Jesse Jarno
Like his bandmates, Phil Lesh embraced the midi rig on his instrument. On the title track of Infrared Roses, he's credited with midi trombone, French horn, strings and bells. The band's music was hardly static as the 90s unfolded, and Loesch was very much a part of it. Though they'd never make it to a Dead album, between 1992 and 1994, Loesch debuted three new original songs, Wave to the Wind if the Shoe Fits, and Childhood's End, his most productive songwriting period since maybe ever.
- [72:19]
Phil Lesh
Always gets us to be round about this time of year.
- [72:30]
Jesse Jarno
That was Childhood's End, which will get its first official release this year on the forthcoming Enjoying the Ride box set, recorded October 3, 1994, at Boston Garden. David Lemieux spoke with Phil about it quite some time ago.
- [72:43]
Graham Lesh
I'm talking like, oh, 20 years ago. And I said, hey, you have this big flurry, like, flurry of new songs. Three new songs in the 90s. And he said he just was feeling very inspired again to write songs again. I remember him telling me he Said the one song he wished had developed more and was Childhood's End. So I'm happy to have that to be the one that's on here. It's such a good song.
- [73:11]
Phil Lesh
Reach behind the wind Stretch beyond the sky.
- [73:28]
Graham Lesh
It'S very different from any. That's the thing, I think everything Phil ever did was very different from anything Phil ever did.
- [73:35]
Jesse Jarno
This is true. There's a reason rivers are one of the eternal Grateful Dead images. Never the same for even a second. The Grateful Dead's music in the 1990s is sometimes obscured by the decline in Jerry Garcia's health. And it's easy to forget that the other musicians on stage continued their own singular evolutions.
- [73:52]
David Crosby
Mike Gordon There was a time when in the early 90s, when I was able to get a little bit in the inner circle at a few Dead shows. Once or twice they put me on stage on the side with a monitor person. And they had this really nice thing for people sitting there where they could push buttons and hear what each band member was hearing in their in ear monitor mix. So there were six buttons and then there was a seventh button and you could just solo anything you wanted and they would just assign it to that seventh button. So guess what I picked. Just use your imagination. One thing I noticed when I was doing that on the stage, probably like 90 throw between 93 and 95, is that he really was sometimes repeating patterns. It wasn't as void of pattern as. As he preaches, but it's unhinged where someone else would just do it. The whole song. Even then it's going to be the way the notes are approached. It's likely to be in between everything. It's really a redefining moment. And some band members had trouble with it because it was unpredictable. It wasn't as solid. But more than the complaints is a holy fuck. This is so unique. And so to be able to not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
- [75:46]
Jesse Jarno
When Mike allowed himself to study Phil Lesh's bass playing, he got really into it for many years. He played a modulus bass, an instrument designed with Phil in mind, and rebuilt his own bass rig several times. Trying what Phil tried.
- [75:59]
David Crosby
It's actually embarrassing, but yes, more than once. I think I modeled at least three different Meyer systems. Always a few years late. Like when he had moved on to the next one. I was on to the previous one. So end of the 90s might have started with. These were 18 inch speakers. I think there were a total of four 18s and two 15s and some horns and unpowered, so requiring separate power amps. And then another system when they started to have powered the big speaker with two 18s each. Those are meant to be subs and really just carry the deepest, deepest frequencies for concerts or, you know, movie theaters or whatever. So they would. They would cross over at 80 hertz. So that would mean that only halfway up the bass neck with the fundamental tone actually move those speakers at all. So he had one of those gigantic boxes altered so that the crossover would allow it to go up to 500 hertz. And what that meant was every note on the bass and then some was going to move the air of those speakers on that one side. And that model is called the PL650. PL750 plus. For Phil Esch.
- [77:41]
Jesse Jarno
That was from the Capital center in spring 1993 from the forthcoming Enjoying the Ride box. Maybe around the time Mike is discussing.
- [77:49]
David Crosby
So I started copying everything. I mean, there was the shit on record, and some of it is compression and tube amps and things like that. But the stuff live was really blowing me away. First being up front and then being able to be closer. And so I just started shamelessly copying it. And it wasn't just the speakers and the EQ and the preamp, all that. It was also the pick that he used and the strings. I think the strings that I ended up using. For many years, he had just dabbled in a little bit. Kid Candelario was his base tech for a while, and he was saying, okay, these strings, this pick. And I was copying. And by the time I ended up playing with Phil and he was checking out my strings, he's like, what? What the hell are those? He had only used them for a little bit. And they're like. They're halfway between flat. And early on, bass players that used the pick used flatter strings sometimes because the round wound strings that are typical would be kind of grungy sounding with the pick. But later on, and that included Phil. But later on, he always liked round wound strings. And when I talked to him, he just said, I need to hear the upper harmonics. Losing my hearing a bit. I want to hear the grunge and the sizzle, so I need to use round wounds. And so I started to develop my own path. I mean, now I'd switched to Cerec basses, and I gradually developed my own thing and in various ways had other influences woven in, but none as big as Philosopher.
- [79:39]
Jesse Jarno
After marrying Jill Johnstone In 1984, the two had their first son, Graham, in 1986, and Brian A few years later, from very early on, they were regulars at Bay Area Dead shows.
- [79:51]
Graham Lesh
My brother and I heard a lot of first sets in the Grateful Dead in the eight years that I was alive. While the Grateful Dead was going. Jerry died when I was 8. We would go to a lot of first sets and then, you know, go back and go to sleep because we were little kids.
- [80:07]
Jesse Jarno
But they also went on the road.
- [80:09]
Graham Lesh
My folks traveled as a family unit. It would just be us adjacent to all this craziness, I think, to a little bit more of an extent than maybe before my brother and I were born. And we would go to museums and do all kinds of family stuff, kind of. In addition to the crazy tour, rock and roll lifestyle.
- [80:30]
Jesse Jarno
Graham and Brian had an impact on two of the band's more memorable onstage activities during their last years on the road.
- [80:36]
Graham Lesh
We were super young, but they hired some guy to come as Barney to entertain the kids in the kids room backstage.
- [80:43]
David Lemieux
I love you, you love me. We're a happy family.
- [80:52]
Jesse Jarno
When the Dead took the stage for the second set at Nassau Coliseum on April 1, 1993, at stage right was a giant purple dinosaur playing a modulus bass. Jerry Garcia did a double take.
- [81:04]
Graham Lesh
It was not my dad in the costume. It was my dad behind the road cases. When the guy just, like, dancing out in front of the crowd. I think they got a cease and desist from whoever owned the rights to the images to Barney the dinosaur, which I think is a fun coda to that story.
- [81:44]
Jesse Jarno
Graham was starting to learn the Grateful Dead's music, too.
- [81:47]
Graham Lesh
I was probably around so much Grateful Dead that I definitely remember, like, as a little kid, the working man's American beauty stuff was really. It's kind of kid friendly, the more country ish stuff.
- [82:01]
Phil Lesh
Come hear Uncle John's bend by the riverside Got some things to talk about here beside the rising tide Come here Uncle John's band Cling to the tide Come on along Go alone He's come.
- [82:25]
Graham Lesh
Today his children home it was the Mars Hotel record. We just listened to that. I, like, remember driving around when I was a kid and it being pointed out that that was the bass. Like, I could tell that that was my dad singing.
- [82:51]
Phil Lesh
You will catch it when you try.
- [82:56]
Graham Lesh
Obviously, I. I really liked Unbroken Chain. That was my dad's song. And it's a. I don't know. To a kid, it doesn't sound as complicated as maybe it does to someone who has a music education at that. It was told to me that the band didn't play it. They'd never Played the whole song. They put it together in the studio, and that just kind of blew my mind. I was like, but like, why? And I think me just like, being a kid being like, but why, though, is what kind of triggered that. So as a little kid, I think that is what put the bug in there in my dad's ear to finally.
- [83:42]
Jesse Jarno
Play it, which they did in March 1995. Thanks, Graham. David Lemieux.
- [83:48]
Graham Lesh
I still listen to the audience tape of the breakout in Philadelphia, and I get goosebumps listening to it because they end the first set with a typical first set closer, and then they don't walk off stage, and then they go into it and you're like, oh, it's this little thing. And you know. And then you. When people pick up on the chord progression and then Phil starts singing, it's like goosebumps talking about it.
- [84:12]
Phil Lesh
Whoa.
- [84:59]
Jesse Jarno
As he got older, Graham would learn a lot more about what made Unbroken Chains such an achievement. Though not because he set out to particularly.
- [85:07]
Graham Lesh
I think I started taking piano lessons when I was seven or eight, somewhere around there. The main backdrop of taking piano lessons, taking music theory, all of that, which really was, like, for both of my parents, like, hey, you should do this because it's part of a full education, not because we want you to be a musician, not for any other reason than it's like taking math class or something, or English. Like, you should know this. And that was the case for both my brother and I. And I think that's a really wise way of thinking about music education.
- [85:40]
Jesse Jarno
Even though Graham's dad was Phil Lesh, there will eternally be some things parents just don't understand.
- [85:46]
Graham Lesh
When I was a teenager, I got into all kinds of hip hop and metal and grunge, for sure. I loved Audioslave and Soundgarden. My dad told this story at my wedding, actually. I was listening to Metallica really loud, and he made some comment about that ungodly noise or something like that. I came back, snooty little teenager that I was, and said, yeah, maybe to the untrained ear, I feel like he would have enjoyed some of the technical compositions of a lot of that stuff if he had gotten past the gunshot, snare drums, and, you know, the volume.
- [86:39]
Jesse Jarno
In fact, Phil did cover Metallica once with the 2004 band that toured as the Dead, featuring Bobby Weir and the drummers alongside Jeff Clementi, Jimmy Herring and Warren Haynes, who sang this version of Nothing Else Matters. But that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves in some ways. Phil Lesch was Just gearing up during the final years of the grateful dead. Fall 1994 had seen the first gig billed officially as Phil Lesh and Friends, at the Berkeley Community Theater adjacent to Phil's alma mater, Berkeley High, where his friends for the night were Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Vince Wellnick.
- [87:31]
Phil Lesh
River Undee, river of Snow Get a little restless Wanna see some waves river of Cold, river of Clear that always gets stupid round about this time of year.
- [87:58]
Jesse Jarno
The first Phil and Friends gig didn't exactly establish a template for what Phil Lesh would do with the rest of his career, but it also did in the years immediately following Jerry Garcia's departure. Loesch was reluctant to return to the stage, urged back in part by our friend David Ganz and eventually reuniting with his bandmates for the first Other ones tour in 1998, releasing the live album the Strange Remain and cementing Phil's long reconnection with the lost corners of the Dead songbook.
- [88:27]
Phil Lesh
O Mountain Water, the J. Merchant's Daughter, Fountains of the Moon, Electric Bow, and Then to Me I Hold a Carrion Throne, Rowdy Row.
- [88:58]
Jesse Jarno
In those years, it was reported that Loesch was creating an orchestral work based on Grateful Then music. When I spoke with Phil in 2006, he had this to say.
- [89:07]
Mike Gordon
I worked on that for almost a couple years. That was during a period where I was more or less retired right after Gary died. I mean, 50 pages of sketches and some of it very detailed for orchestra. And what I was looking for was closure with Grateful Dead music in any way so I could, so I could maybe move on and something else. The thing that I discovered, there's no such thing as closure with the music. The music demands to be to the constant be evolving. So if I was to write it down in my version of it, to write it all down, that would fix it for all time in my version of it, that that wouldn't be satisfying because the nature of music is to continually evolve. So I pretty much abandoned that.
- [89:50]
Jesse Jarno
In 1998, the world changed for Phil when he received a life saving liver transplant, the result of hepatitis C acquired during his brief bad period as a needle sharing speed freak in the mid-60s before joining the Warlocks. From then on, all of Phil Lesh's live performances in every configuration included what Tapers quickly labeled the donor wrap, a permanent part of the set list. This one is from Radio City Music Hall, March 2, 2018.
- [90:19]
Phil Lesh
I'm a liver transplant survivor and I'm lucky to be alive at all, much less I've spent the last 20 years watching my son grow up. Sons grow up. Meeting my grandson, playing lots of music with great people, that, that never would have happened if it hadn't been for Cody, who decided to be an organ donor. Because kind of spontaneously one day and he just told his mom, hey, man, if anything ever happens to me, you know, I want to be an organ donor. And so I like to encourage everyone that I meet and everyone, every audience that I perform in front of to join me in honoring his courage, his generosity of spirit, simply by turning to someone that you love and that loves you. And you tell them, hey, if anything ever happens to me, you know, I want to be an organ donor. I mean, you could actually do it right now if you have that person next to you.
- [91:14]
Jesse Jarno
Thanks, Cody. In 1999, Phil Esch began what might be described as his second act, or maybe his third act. But whatever it was, his quarter century leading Phil Esch and Friends lineups lasted almost as long as his time in the Grateful Dead itself.
- [91:28]
Graham Lesh
It.
- [92:00]
Jesse Jarno
That was the classic Phil and Friends lineup from The Warfield in 1999, featuring guitarist Steve Kimmock, drummer John Molo, and from Fish, guitarist Crane Estasio and pianist Paige McConnell. Phil soon convened what became known as the Quintet, a band featuring guitarists Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring, drummer John Molo and keyboardist Rob Barocco. They recorded a studio album in 2002 with new songs by Phil and Robert Hunter. There and back again.
- [92:46]
Phil Lesh
On this night on this night on this night on this night on this night of a Thousand Stars.
- [92:59]
Jesse Jarno
And alongside There and Back again, released in 2002, was a new batch of material called the Planet Jams, written for a never staged concert spectacle that in a way constitutes something of a lost album.
- [93:35]
Graham Lesh
He wrote all these Planet Jams. I think they played each one once, they performed all of them. And Candace Brightman made this amazing for each planet backdrop. And that was the only hint that they were doing anything unique. They were just these pieces of music that sounded like jams. They weren't jams. They were composed and they're really cool. He called it the Entrada Jam. It was like the entrance music for this journey through the cosmos. They would play it in whatever key was going to lead to the. To the planet. That came after. He and Hunter were going to work on this and Hunter wrote lyrics for all these planets and it was supposed to be the jams would go into the songs also in that mode. They never finished it. I encourage anyone to go track down the Planet Jams.
- [95:03]
Jesse Jarno
We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast.
- [95:29]
Graham Lesh
I wrote the song to the lyrics that Hunter wrote for Jupiter. Yes. And my friend Alex Coford from the Terrapin Family Band wrote an amazing song to Mercury that we play sometimes, but, you know, the others are just out there. There's a lot of wonderful lyrics. I was able to record Jupiter with my dad playing bass. It came out on the Midnight north record that we put out like a year and a half ago.
- [96:00]
Phil Lesh
I want to do what I think I should Carve my coffin out of juniper wood and build my house of sticks Insane when it falls I won't give a damn.
- [96:21]
Jesse Jarno
That's on Midnight North's 2023 album Diamonds in the Zodiac, which takes its title from one of Hunter's lyrics. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast but as much time as we spend exploring the first half of Phil Lesh's musical life, we're really going to have to give the short end of the stick to the second half. Even the unflappable Gary Lambert is flapped when trying to conceive of highlights.
- [96:44]
Rob Collier
It was Phil, very inadvertent. It had those origins in first just some benefit shows for the Unbroken Chain Foundation. Phil discovering that there were a lot of musicians who were playing this music with the help of David Ganz, and he just got turned on to playing it again without all the infrastructure of the Grateful Dead. I think that was an important part of the appeal for him. He could schedule gigs fairly spontaneously. He could pick out a random collection of friends or sometimes it was Phil Lesh and strangers. Sometimes it was Phil Lesh and people he was meeting on stage for the first time when they sat. And he really liked that random aspect of it, the malleability of it, the fact that any combination of musicians could sound different from any other combination. And that sort of became his aesthetic.
- [97:36]
Jesse Jarno
Many of Phil's friends were drawn from disparate musical worlds, inviting in jazz players especially.
- [97:42]
Mike Gordon
I invite these guys to play with me because they're not part of the so called Japanese Grateful band scene, because I want to get that different perspective on the music from these musicians. And so I. What I do is I send them lists of songs and I send CDs of various versions of the. Of the songs. And so they can sort of get them, listen to them, get them into their subconscious, their etheric, as we like to say. And then we just, we rehearse a little and I try to get the concept across a. That what I'm looking for is a conversation between all the musicians in the band. So that when we're improvising, we're all improvising at the same time. We're all seeing one another.
- [98:27]
Jesse Jarno
With his various configurations of friends, Phil was able to try things he was never able to do with the Dead.
- [98:33]
David Crosby
Mike Gordon and Phil, when we used to tour them, when we toured with them in 06, with me and Trey in the duo, it was interesting to see how they were handling that jam in 15, because they weren't just making it 15. They were also. Bill would. Would interpret it in different ways, like, let's pretend it's some other, like, 13 for a while, and then circle back around and just toying with it, seeing what it could become in different ways.
- [99:00]
Jesse Jarno
Phil even got some of his old bases back into action, including Big Brown.
- [99:04]
Mike Gordon
I'd forgotten how stiff the action was. I haven't gotten around to making any changes with that, lowering the action or anything, but the sound of it is just amazing. It's louder than anything I've played since. The thing is, I've got all those great. All those knobs on it. There's tone controls on it. That allows me to do feedback in a way that I can't with my currentage. So I use it for feedback and for color. Really. We just did some last night. I used it last night. The thing that stuck with me is that now I want to have those same guys then.
- [99:39]
Rob Collier
Once he got Terrapin Crossroads up and running, it was just like the greatest little playhouse in the world. You know, we can try anything here.
- [99:46]
Jesse Jarno
In 2011, Phil and his wife Jill, opened Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, a few blocks from the Dead's former Front street headquarters, where countless Phil and Friends lineups congregated. And the bar owner anchored the Terrapin family band with his son Graham and other musicians. And of course, Phil periodically reunited with various configurations of former Grateful Deads, including the Fare Thee well shows in 2015, after Terrapin Crossroads closed in 2021. In 2024, Phil convened the Terrapin Clubhouse, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast, for a beautifully improvised cap to a beautifully improvised career.
- [101:07]
Graham Lesh
Graham Lesh, my brother had this. This studio space, this warehouse space that he was using as an office and a studio. And then he was going to sort of get rid of it. We had storage stuff there. We had family stuff. It was just such a cool space. And so my mom and dad were like, why don't we do something multimedia? It's kind of an extension of the Terrapin Crossroads idea of the Levon Helm Studios idea of let the people come to you. So my dad wouldn't have to travel and tour as much. Anytime some of the friends would be in town, we'd put together a band and just turn on the cameras and see what happened.
- [101:59]
Rob Collier
Gary Lambert Phil's natural impulse as a teacher, like sitting around and talking about Darkstar with those younger musicians, them hanging on his every word. It was like an object lesson in the process of collective improvisation. Each young musician like Daniel Donato could energize it in one way. I think the last one they did was with Michaela Davis on harp. And there's a moment where they're playing Mountains of the Moon and Michaela is playing that exquisite harp on Mountains of the Moon. And there was a shot like through the harp of Phil, like in the background, just beaming, beaming with delight. Because that was like maybe that was the way he'd heard it in his head for years. I've talked to a bunch of those musicians who had that experience of playing with them and utterly life altering for them.
- [103:26]
Graham Lesh
We called it the Dark Starathon, the never ending Dark Star. It's just an excuse to jam and just be open and open minded with the whole thing.
- [103:35]
Jesse Jarno
Dark Star is always playing somewhere. Phil Ash once said, wherever that is, that's where Phil is too.
- [104:15]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast, friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Graham Lesh, Mike Gordon, Ned Lagin, David Crosby, David Lemieux, Gary Lambert and Rob Collier. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast. As always, David Ganz. Thank you for your ongoing contributions of audio from your interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.