Phil Lesh, founding member of the Grateful Dead and influential bassist, dies at 84

LOS ANGELES – Phil Lesh, a classically trained violinist and jazz trumpeter who found his true calling by reinventing the role of the rock bass guitar as founding member of the Grateful Dead, died on Friday at the age of 84.

Lesh’s death was announced on his Instagram account. Lesh was the oldest and one of the longest-lived members of the band that came to define the acid rock sound coming out of San Francisco in the 1960s.

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. “Phil brought great joy to everyone around him and left behind a legacy of music and love.” Instagram statement partially reads.

The statement did not give a specific cause of death, and attempts to reach representatives for additional details were not immediately successful. Lesha previously survived bouts of prostate cancer, bladder cancer and a liver transplant in 1998, prompted by the debilitating effects of hepatitis C infection and years of alcohol abuse.

Lesh’s death came two days after MusiCares named the Grateful Dead its Person of the Year. MusiCares, which helps music professionals in need of financial or other assistance, named Lesh’s Unbroken Chain Foundation among other charitable initiatives. The Dead will be honored in January at a charity gala before Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Although he kept a relatively low profile in public life, rarely giving interviews or performing in public, Lesh was recognized by fans and bandmates as a critical member of the Grateful Dead, whose thunderous six-string electric bass provided a brilliant counterpoint. lead guitarist Jerry Garcia fast-paced solos became the basis for the band’s famous marathon jams.

“When the Phil thing happens, the group thing happens,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called him the band’s intellectual, bringing the thinking and skills of a classical composer to the five-chord rock and roll band.

Lesh credited Garcia with teaching him to play bass in the unorthodox lead guitar style for which he became famous, mixing thunderous arpeggios with snippets of spontaneously composed orchestral passages.

Fellow bassist Rob Wasserman once said that Lesh’s style set him apart from all the other bassists he knew. While most others were content to hang in there and take the occasional solo, Wasserman said Lesh was good enough and confident enough to lead his fellow musicians through the song’s melody.

“He plays bass guitar, but it’s more like a horn playing all these arpeggios—and he has this counterpoint going on all the time,” he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, starting with lessons in the third grade. He began playing trumpet at age 14 and, while still a teenager, received second place in the Oakland California Symphony Orchestra.

But he had largely put both instruments aside and was driving a mail truck and working as a sound engineer for a small radio station in 1965 when Garcia hired him to play bass in a fledgling rock band called the Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia that he didn’t play bass, the musician asked, “Didn’t you play the violin?” When he said yes, Garcia told him, “That’s it, man.”

Armed with a cheap four-string instrument that a girlfriend had bought him, Lesh sat down for a seven-hour lesson with Garcia, following the latter’s advice to tune the strings of his instrument an octave lower than the bottom four strings of Garcia’s guitar. Garcia then let him go, allowing Lesh to develop a spontaneous playing style that he would follow for the rest of his life.

Lesh and Garcia traded solos frequently, often spontaneously, while the group as a whole often engaged in long, experimental jazz jams during concerts. As a result, even famous Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin'” and “Sugar Magnolia” were rarely performed in the same way twice in a row, inspiring loyal fans to attend concert after concert.

“Things are always changing, we just figure it out on the fly,” Loesch said, chuckling, during a rare interview with The Associated Press in 2009. “You can’t carve these things in stone in the rehearsal room.”

Philip Chapman Lesch was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, the only child of Frank Lesch, an office equipment repairman, and his wife Barbara.

He would later say that his love for music came from listening to his grandmother’s New York Philharmonic radio broadcasts. One of his earliest memories was watching the great German composer Bruno Walter lead this orchestra in Brahms’s First Symphony.

The musical influences he often cited were not rock musicians, but composers such as Bach and Edgard Varèse, and jazz greats such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

By the time he entered the College of San Mateo, Lesh gravitated from classical music to cool jazz, eventually becoming the first trumpet player in the school’s big band and the author of several orchestral works that the group performed.

But after graduating from college, he put down the trumpet, concluding that he didn’t have the lung strength to become an elite musician.

Soon after he picked up the bass, The Warlocks renamed themselves the Grateful Dead, and Lesh began captivating audiences with his dexterity. Crowds gathered in the so-called “Phil Zone” directly in front of his position on stage.

Although Lesh was never a prolific songwriter, he also composed music and occasionally performed on some of the band’s best-loved songs. Among them were the upbeat country rocker “Pride of Cucamonga,” the jazzy “Unbroken Chain” and the ethereal beauty “Box of Rain.”

The latter was composed by Lesh on guitar as a gift to his dying father, and he recalled that Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, having heard the instrumental recording, approached him the next day with a sheet of lyrics. According to him, this sheet contained “some of the most touching and heartfelt lyrics that I have ever had the pleasure of singing.”

The group often ended their concerts with this song.

After the group disbanded following Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh often refused to join the other surviving members when they came together to perform.

He took part in the Grateful Dead’s 2009 tour, and again in 2015 took part in several “Fare Thee Well” concerts, celebrating both the band’s 50th anniversary and what Lesh said would be the last time when he plays with the others.

However, he continued to play frequently with a rotating cast of musicians he called “Phil Lesh and Friends.”

In subsequent years, he typically held these shows at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and nightclub he opened near his Northern California home in 2012 and which was named after the Grateful Dead song and album “Terrapin Station.”

Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and sons Brian and Graham.

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John Rogers, the lead writer of this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.