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

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 parts 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” or “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.