Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead co-founder and bassist, dies at 84

Phil Lesh, the classically trained musician who co-founded the Grateful Dead and whose unconventional bass playing gave the band some of its experimental direction, died Friday at age 84.

Lesh's death was announced on social media, with a brief statement reading: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was filled with his family and love. Phil brought immense joy to all those around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We ask that you respect the Lesh family's privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given.

Since the Dead's first incarnation as the Warlocks, Lesh enjoyed a three-decade-long partnership with lead guitarist Jerry Garcia. He is also responsible for their long-form improvisation tendencies, electronic experimentation, and nightly free-form “space” interludes. After the group disbanded due to Garcia's death in 1995, Lesh became an active keeper of its live flame in various configurations with former band members and in several iterations of Phil Lesh & Friends, which included numerous guests from Extended Generations of Improvised. – Rock community.

Philip Chapman Lesh, the eldest member of the Dead, was born on March 15, 1940 in Berkeley, California. His father fixed office machines and his parents co-owned a repair business. Lesh played viola and trumpet at school but gradually became more interested in composing than performing. He attended UC-Berkeley, where he befriended the more musically adventurous Tom Constanten (who played keyboards with the Dead for a time), but dropped out in his first semester. Along with Constantin, he attended a course at Mills College taught by the great Italian avant-garde composer Luciano Berio, where he met future Minimalist figurehead Steve Rich, with whom he collaborated on a musical “Happening” called Event III/Coffee Break.

In 1959, Lesh met Garcia at a Bay Area house party where she was directed, according to her 2005 memoir, “as if by an invisible hand.” After meeting Lesh again after a 1964 Warlocks gig, Garcia invited him to join the band on bass guitar, an instrument Lesh had never played. The following year Lesh played his first show with the Warlocks at the Bikini A-Go-Go in Hayward, California. The renamed Grateful Dead became the house band for Ken Casey's infamous acid test. Lesh, a staunch advocate of psychedelics as evidence of “a spiritual realm,” was deeply affected by these evenings that erased the lines between band and audience.

The Grateful Dead played “electric chamber music”, according to Lesh, whose primary influence was Johann Sebastian Bach's style of counterpoint (the relationship of two independent yet interdependent musical voices) as a bassist. When not dropping his infamous “bass bombs”, he played his instrument as if it were a low guitar, usually with a pick, and often as a lead instrument. The sixties became an era of intense musical experimentation for the group, most notably on the band's second album, Music of the sunWhere Lesh suggested overdubbing several different live versions of “The Other One” over one and letting them stand out. “I have a nostalgic feeling for that psychedelic-Ranger era, when we used to play music Live it to the fullest, he told Rolling Stone in 2014.

“Box of Rain” and “Unbroken Chain” were warm psychedelic masterpieces among a handful of songs that Lesh co-wrote for the Dead. He contributed the high part to the four-part melodic mastery of the band Workingman's Dead And American BeautyBut at times the audience chanted “let Phil sing” but eventually left the song to others. In 1975, he played electronically processed bass on electronic musician Ned Lagin's Abstract. Cystones.

Although touring had lost its appeal, Lesh soldiered on with the Dead throughout the increasingly difficult eighties, when drug problems rocked the band, then into the nineties, ending with Garcia's death. “Jerry was the hub,” he said The Rolling Stones. “We were spokespersons. And music was tread on wheels.”

In 1998, Lesh received a liver transplant for hepatitis C, which he had contracted decades earlier. The procedure led him to become a passionate organ donor advocate. He survived prostate cancer in 2006.

A solo 1994 acoustic show featuring some Grateful Dead members was billed as Phil Lesh & Friends, a moniker he would use for the rest of his career performing with an ever-changing musical cast. The group's 1999 post-Dead debut, featuring Phish's Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell. Jamie has also released three rock albums under the name Lesh. During Outs, Lesh sometimes joined his former bandmates in Grateful Dead repertory formations such as The Other Ones, The Dead and Further, which also featured Bob Weir. In 2005, Lesh published his memoirs Searching for Words: My Life with the Grateful Dead.

Lesh's wife, Jill, whom he married in 1984, became a close partner in all aspects of his life. In 2012, Leshes opened Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and venue in San Rafael, California. Their sons, Graham and Brian, act as the house band and the bassist himself has been known for occasional live Dead karaoke evenings.

Lesh and the rest of the Dead celebrated their 50th anniversary^m In 2015, Anastasio joined the anniversary with a series of “Fare the Well” events in Chicago. That year Lesh revealed that he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. “I'm one of these guys who's always open,” he said in 2013. “See, music is infinite. There's an infinite number of ways to do it, an infinite number of melodies that can go with a one-four-five progression, it's absolutely infinite, no floor, no ceiling.”