Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead founder and influential bassist, dies at age 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 founding member of the Grateful Dead, died Friday at the age of 84.

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

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

The statement did not provide a specific cause of death and efforts to reach representatives for additional details were not immediately successful. Lesh had previously survived bouts of prostate cancer, bladder cancer and a 1998 liver transplant, necessitated by the debilitating effects of a hepatitis C infection and years of heavy drinking.

Lesh’s death comes two days after MusiCares named the Grateful Dead its People of the Year. MusiCares, which helps music professionals who need financial or other forms of assistance, mentioned Lesh’s Unbroken Chain Foundation, among others. The Dead will be honored in January at a benefit gala preceding the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Although he kept a relatively low profile in public and rarely gave interviews or spoke to the public, fans and bandmates recognized Lesh as a critical member of the Grateful Dead, whose thunderous lines on the six-string electric bass provided a brilliant counterpoint. lead guitarist Jerry Garcia soaring solos and anchored the band’s famous marathon jams.

“When Phil happens, the band happens,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called him the intellectual of the group who brought the mentality and skills of a classical composer to a five-chord rock ‘n’ roll band.

Lesh credited Garcia with teaching him to play bass in the unorthodox lead guitar style for which he would become famous, mixing thunderous arpeggios with fragments 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 keep time and take the occasional solo, Wasserman said Lesh was both good enough and confident enough to lead his fellow musicians through a song’s melody.

“He happens to play bass, but he’s more like a horn player, doing all those arpeggios — and he has that counterpoint going on all the time,” he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, beginning with lessons in the third grade. He took up the trumpet at age 14 and eventually took second chair in the Oakland Symphony Orchestra in California as a teenager.

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 recruited him to play bass in a fledgling rock band called The Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia he didn’t play bass, the musician asked, “Didn’t you used to play violin?” When he said yes, Garcia told him, “Here you go, man.”

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

Lesh and Garcia regularly exchanged leads, often spontaneously, while the band as a whole regularly broke out long experimental, jazz-influenced jams during concerts. The result was that even well-known Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin’” or “Sugar Magnolia” rarely sounded the same two performances in a row, something that would inspire loyal fans to attend show after show.

“It’s always fluid, we figure it out pretty much right away,” Lesh said with a chuckle during a rare 2009 interview with The Associated Press. “You can’t set those things in stone in the rehearsal room.”

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

In later years he would say that his love of music came from listening to broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on his grandmother’s radio. One of his earliest memories was hearing the great German composer Bruno Walter lead that orchestra through Brahms’ First Symphony.

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

Lesh had transitioned from classical music to cool jazz by the time he arrived at the College of San Mateo, eventually becoming the principal trumpeter in the school’s big band and composer of several orchestral pieces that the group performed.

But after college, he put the trumpet aside, concluding he didn’t have the lung power to become an elite player.

Shortly after taking up bass, The Warlocks renamed themselves the Grateful Dead and Lesh began to captivate audiences with his agility. A crowd gathered in what became known as “The Phil Zone”, directly in front of his position on stage.

Although never a prolific songwriter, Lesh also composed music for, and sometimes sang, some of the band’s most beloved songs. Among them were the upbeat country rocker “Pride of Cucamonga,” the jazz-influenced “Unbroken Chain” and the ethereally beautiful “Box of Rain.”

Lesh composed the latter on guitar as a gift for his dying father, and he recalled that when Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter heard the instrumental recording, he approached him the next day with a lyric sheet. That sheet, he said, contained “some of the most moving and heartfelt lyrics I have ever had the pleasure of singing.”

The band often closed its concerts with the song.

Following the group’s dissolution following Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh often skipped joining the other surviving members when they gathered to perform.

He joined a Grateful Dead tour in 2009 and again in 2015 for a handful of “Fare Thee Well” concerts celebrating both the band’s 50th anniversary and what Lesh said would be the last time he would play with the others.

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

In later years, he usually held those gigs at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and nightclub he opened near his home in Northern California in 2012, named after the Grateful Dead song and album “Terrapin Station.”

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

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