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Phil Lesh, a founding member of the Grateful Dead whose electric bass playing came to define the psychedelic San Francisco sound, died Oct. 25 at age 84.
The musician’s death was announced on his official Instagram, with a post reading: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed 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. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”
He is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two musician sons, Grahame and Brian.
Lesh faced a number of health hurdles over the past decades. In 1998, he received a liver transplant after bleeding internally as a result of Hepatitis-C. In 2006, he had surgery to remove his cancerous prostate, and a decade later he successfully underwent treatment for bladder cancer.
As was the case for many musicians in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Lesh, along with his bandmate Jerry Garcia, battled addictions to various vices. Although Garcia died in 1995 while being treated for a heroin addiction, Lesh, with the fierce support of his wife, got clean and managed to live on for decades.
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Lesh played in a number of post-Grateful Dead incarnations after Garcia’s passing, including The Other Ones, Further, Phil Lesh & Friends and The Dead.
But he also was an often-seen and often-heard staple of his Marin County home base, where for a decade he ran and performed at his San Rafael, California, club Terrapin Crossroads, named after a famous Dead tune.
Lesh went from tinkering with the violin to one of the most innovative rock bass players ever
Lesh took a notably eclectic path to rock ‘n’ roll stardom. Born in 1940 in Berkeley, California, he studied violin as a child and later played trumpet. Lesh also developed an early interest in avant-garde music and free jazz, both of which later influenced his unique bass playing in the Grateful Dead.
While in college at the University of California-Berkeley, Lesh met Tom Constanten, who would briefly play keyboards for one of the earliest incarnations of the Dead. A bit later, while working as a recording engineer at a local radio station, he met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia.
Lesh held down day jobs at the post office while pursuing his interest in music, but that faded away quickly when Garcia asked him to join his fledgling folk-rock band, then called The Warlocks. Lesh agreed, even though he had never played bass guitar. His broad interest in music and his unfamiliarity with the bass directly contributed to him becoming one of the most innovative players of his time.
While many bass players were trained to hold down a band’s rhythm section in conjunction with the drummer, Lesh immediately felt his instrument should play more of a leading role. His bass lines through the Dead’s 1965-1995 heyday are rife with lead riffs and buoyant counterpoint play.
In pushing the instrument’s boundaries he joined fellow travelers Jack Bruce of Cream and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane and later Hot Tuna, two other musical explorers who redefined the formerly hidden-away instrument as a leading voice in their bands.
When it came to such sonic experimentation, drugs certainly came into play. The Grateful Dead was the house band at author Ken Kesey’s famous “Acid Tests,” and sometimes the music could get taken over by the psychedelics. Which suited Lesh and his bandmates just fine.
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In his 2005 autobiography, “Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead,” Lesh wrote of one such musical trip.
“It was as if the music was being sung by gigantic dragons on the timescale of plate tectonics,” he wrote. “Each note seemed to take days to develop, ever overtone sang its own song, each drumbeat generated a new heaven and a new earth.”
Lesh’s bass was a dominant sonic component of the Grateful Dead’s famous Wall of Sound concert array
Although not blessed with a particularly tuneful voice, Lesh was a fixture on a number of crowd-favorite songs he composed for the band, including “Box of Rain” and “Unbroken Chain.”
Lesh’s bass was an integral part of the one of the band’s biggest – and most costly – experiments: the Wall of Sound.
For a brief tour in 1974, the Dead hit the road with a thundering audio system with hundreds of speakers that could project sound accurately for it was said up to a quarter mile, the better reach the nearly 100,000 fans that were coming to see the group at large outdoor venues.
One of the Wall’s distinctive features was making sure that the sound from each of the four strings on Lesh’s bass guitar were projected out of four distinct corners of the speaker system. But the set-up was so cumbersome to put up and take down that it was ditched after only a few memorable months.
After Garcia’s death, Lesh and the other members of the Grateful Dead soon found they were eager to continue without their musical and spiritual leader.
That led to a variety of still-ongoing incarnations of the group, which increasingly featured fewer members of the so-dubbed core (remaining) four. After what was supposed to be the band’s true good-bye to fans, the short 2015 Fare Thee Well tour, Lesh increasingly decreased his time on the road and on a bandstsand.
He opened Terrapin Crossroads to be able to play anything close to home, and often did so with his sons, performing Grateful Dead as well as other contemporary fare. The venue closed in 2021, and after that Lesh’s appearances were episodic at best as he slipped into his 80s.
But the memory of what Lesh and his band created, from its legions of Deadheads to its countless live show bootlegs, clearly powered the bass player through even his darkest days.
“The Grateful Dead group mind was in essence an engine of transformation,” he wrote at the conclusion of “Searching for the Sound.”
“As such, it had no morality of its own, it made no judgments, took no positions. It merely opened valves for music to pour through.”
