Phil Lesh
Phil Lesh (1940–2024) was the bass player of the Grateful Dead for the band’s whole thirty-year career, a classically trained violinist and jazz trumpeter who had never played the bass when Jerry Garcia recruited him in 1965. He wrote and sang “Box of Rain,” was one of the writers of “Cumberland Blues,” and after the Dead ended in 1995 kept the music going with Phil Lesh and Friends and, with Bob Weir, in Furthur.
Philip Chapman Lesh was born on 15 March 1940 in Berkeley, California, the only child of Frank and Barbara Lesh. He began violin lessons in the third grade and took up the trumpet at 14, and while still in his teens he held the second trumpet chair in the Oakland Symphony Orchestra. At the College of San Mateo he became first trumpet in the big band, which played several of his orchestral pieces, and after transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961 he studied composition with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the spring of 1962. His tastes ran to Bach, Varèse, John Coltrane and Miles Davis rather than to rock, and he eventually set the trumpet aside.
His path to the Dead ran through a bluegrass player. Volunteering as a recording engineer at the Berkeley radio station KPFA, he met Garcia, then a bluegrass banjo player, invited him to perform on the station’s Midnight Special program, and the two became friends despite their different musical interests. In 1965, when Lesh was driving a mail truck, Garcia asked him to play bass in his new rock band, the Warlocks. Lesh said he did not play bass; Garcia pointed out that he had played violin, gave him a long first lesson and told him to set its strings an octave below the guitar’s four lowest strings, then left him to find his own way. The Warlocks soon became the Grateful Dead.
Lesh’s bass, eventually a six-string instrument, worked as a second melodic voice against Garcia’s guitar, trading leads and carrying the band’s long improvisations. When the Dead turned to acoustic instruments and close harmony in 1970, he was part of the songwriting: he shares the credit for “Cumberland Blues” with Garcia and Robert Hunter on Workingman’s Dead (June 1970), and American Beauty (November 1970) opens with “Box of Rain,” which he composed on guitar for his dying father and sang to Hunter’s words. He also wrote the music for “Pride of Cucamonga” and “Unbroken Chain.” In 1969 he had played bass at times with the first New Riders of the Purple Sage, the country band Garcia formed with John Dawson and David Nelson, and he was an executive producer of their first album. He played bass through the Dead’s acoustic sets at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco and Radio City Music Hall in New York in September and October 1980, which became the double album Reckoning (1981), with songs such as “Dark Hollow,” “Rosa Lee McFall” and “Deep Elem Blues.” The Grateful Dead entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
After Garcia’s death in 1995 Lesh led a changing cast of musicians as Phil Lesh and Friends; early in 1999 Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell of Phish joined him for a run of those shows, and the group’s album Love Will See You Through appeared that year. He published his autobiography, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, in 2005. He toured with the other surviving members of the Dead in 2009 and that September started Furthur with Bob Weir, which lasted until early 2014. On 8 March 2012 he opened Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and music venue in San Rafael, California, with the first of twelve Phil Lesh and Friends concerts, and he played there regularly until it closed in November 2021. In 2015 he joined the other surviving members for the “Fare Thee Well” concerts marking the band’s fiftieth anniversary.
Phil Lesh died on 25 October 2024, aged 84, two days after MusiCares named the Grateful Dead its Persons of the Year. He was the oldest member of the band.
