Requiescat: Grateful Dead Bassist Phil Lesh [1940 – 2024]

A Non-Fan’s Loving Send Off To A Legend

I have tried to enjoy The Grateful Dead.
Many times, in fact. It never stuck.
Like The Doors, another combo that leaves me cold, they influenced groups I love. Without them, at least a handful of life-changing bands would have been a different affair entirely. Television and Echo & The Bunnymen, respectively. Both changed the course of my music life. So I do have love for The Dead and The Doors, albeit once removed.

The first Dead track on the first Dead record, a combo organ stomper called “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” is the only song I’ve ever liked by them.
And I truly adore it. It’s really good.
It encapsulates the SF pre-Summer of Love vibe, right before it all went downhill.
Allegorically, starting with the very next song on the album, the band goes downhill for me as well.

A Bassed Take

“The Golden Road” is a garage rock classic. The band is in top form.
Particularly the bass player, Phil Lesh.
What got my attention, when I first heard that track, was the galloping, harmony bass into/outro. Throughout the tune, Lesh weaved on and off the beat, employed contrapuntal scale runs, and clever turnarounds. This all stood out, because I’d never heard anything like it before. At that time of its recording, the busiest bassists, who rejected the idea that their lot in life was just to “shut up and lock it down,” would have been mainly funk players, and rare musicians like Paul McCartney. The proggists weren’t out there doing lead bass gymnastics yet. It feels like Phil got there really early, and even Macca wasn’t doing this kind of thing. Lesh’s had his own, melodic style, informed by his knowledge of other instruments. He was the theory nerd in the group, which certainly had something to do with it.

My long running joke/observation is the bass player is either the worst guitarist in the band, who go demoted, or the best all-round musician, who got promoted.
Dee Dee Ramone, or Paul McCartney.
Phil was clearly in the latter camp.
And simmer down, punks, I love Dee Dee’s parts.

Two Minute Time Capsule

“The Golden Road” was recorded in early ’67, which means the track was probably written in ’66 or before. San Francisco was vibrant, weird, The Haight hadn’t become Hippie Disneyland yet, and The Diggers still ruled the neighborhood, thankfully. It would have been a good time to be a kid there in ’66, just like in London’s Soho, which had much better clobber and music, but I digress. “The Golden Road” feels like a glorious, pocket-sized summation of what was happening in SF during that era.

The Dead partnered with songwriters a lot, but when I found out “The Golden Road” was written by some cat called McGannahan Skjellyfetti I dropped my drink. That’s an incredible name which put contemporaries like Van Dyke Parks’ to shame. Turns out “McGannahan Skjellyfetti” was the collective nom de plume of the band, and literally some cat. As in, that’s what keyboardist Pig Pen’s pet kitty was called.

There’s a particularly potent type of pop song that gets it done in two minutes. Like some well-trained special ops team, it gets in and out so fast, you don’t even know what the hell just happened. These songs have the power of leaving you wanting more. It is a skill to say it all in 2/3rds the time of a typical single. These are the tracks we lift the stylus to hear just one more time before moving on.
“Queen of Eyes” by The Soft Boys.
“Open My Eyes” by The Nazz.
“The Good In Everyone” opens Sloan’s One Chord To Another. How many times have I started that LP over?
Same with the first song recorded by The Grateful Dead, which also is the first song on their first album.
The difference is I don’t go further into the album from there, like I do with Sloan.
The first one, and then I’m done with The Dead. Literally it all spirals downward from there for me, after “The Golden Road.”

Like “The Good In Everyone,” “The Golden Road” is bookended by the same progression. It returns to the galloping bass part, and then takes us out on a tense F7#9, which acts as sort of a sonic grimace after two minutes of smile music. It’s a playful choice by Lesh, and my personal joke is it foreshadows half a century of music that will make me wince.
And after a such a promising first date.

This is not to dump on the legions who cherish the band. Loving music is the greatest thing, and I’ll admit I’m fascinated by The Dead. In fact, I can probably go head to head with any mid-level Deadhead on the trivia, since I’ll read or watch anything about them. They were a cultural force, even if I see a lot of libertarian thinking and almost Kiss-level merchandizing in this allegedly hippie group.
But that’s the dirty secret of what the ’60s counterculture became, isn’t it?
Anyone remember the Jerry Garcia neck ties? I reckon they were aimed at the guy with the Deadhead sticker on his Cadillac.

Nonplussed Ultra

I saw The Dead during the Jerry years, both outside, in a stadium, and inside, in an arena. The latter was a “secret” gig, billed as The Warlocks, which is how they poached their way into Hampton Roads Coliseum, which they had been banned from. I liked the idea of that totally punk move more than I enjoyed the show, truth be known. Fans call that night one of the legendary Dead performances of the era. Tapes of it are very popular.
Personally, I thought it was…fine.
Same with the other show. Having seen the band in both of their prime environments, and walking away indifferent, I realized they just weren’t for me.
Imagine going to mass at The Vatican and leaving thinking “meh, I guess religion’s not my bag.” At least I was self-aware enough to realize that I was the problem.
Ok, maybe.

Lesh was, however, my favorite member, by far. At those two shows, my eyes were on him 80% of the time. Indeed, his playing was sublime. Sometimes you can just see that a musician’s fingers are directly connected to the brain, and having to think things out isn’t part of the equation. It just flows, like it did with Lesh’s jazz heroes. Even with the goofy-ass Alembic basses, which had more switching options than my modular synth, and that bass’ companion, borderline ridiculous, amplification rig, there was something about Phil that seemed unique and actually wonderful. He was so clearly in a class by himself. It felt like he was the lovable geek in the band. To me, he was the coolest looking member of The Dead, already sporting the hip nerd look when Thurston Moore was still in grade school. I was charmed when I eventually learned that he had his own sect of super fans, and even his own Zone™.

This geek grokking was confirmed when I found out, later, that avant garde composers had been receiving checks for amounts like $10,000 from a mysterious source. Sometimes the composer’s family would get it, years later, if the writer had passed. The benefactor turned out to be Lesh who, having been moved by a particular modern composition, and knowing a dedication to that kind of life isn’t exactly the path to easy street, sent a “thank you note” of sorts. He was known as a generous man in so many other ways, as well.
Somewhere, someone, at sometime, in Dead pun stylee, had to have referred to him as a “PhilAnthropist.”

Before joining The Grateful Dead, neé Warlocks, Lesh had studied with Luciano Berio, as well as other Darmstadt School alum, and even played with minimalist hero Steve Reich. They were classmates with at the experimental Mills College, along with John Chowing, a pioneer of digital synthesis. So this interest in the avant garde was always there, and likely informed what he was doing, both in and out of The Phil Zone. It’s been said that he played more like an improvising composer than a bassist. That’s certainly how I view him. 

He Sang A Little While And Then Flew On

Phil Lesh, founding member of one of the most impactful bands in history, became part of the cosmos today, at age 84. It’s hard to be sad when musicians who lived through that era clear eight decades. Keep in mind that he was a liver transplant recipient almost 30 years ago. He’d also survived bladder cancer. Beyond with their name, The Grateful Dead essentially rode shotgun with mortality their entire career. It seems like most of their songs were about death, or inspired by it. Goth bands had nothing on these guys.
So today I suggest we celebrate Phil’s life.

These days my life is split between the east coast and San Francisco. I live a ten minute walk from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. On the way to the post office, or hardware store, I pass that intersection, with its mélange of clichés. There are head shops and overpriced natural markets. There are tie-dye boutiques, their façades painted with dancing bears, plus mediocre renderings of Jimi Hendrix, and Jerry Garcia in his Travis Bean playing period. Of course there is a Ben & Jerry’s on the corner. Usually, mere feet from it, there is a trust-funded hippie kid, drunk on nostalgia and high on SF’s potent weed, playing songs by, well, you know.

Were I town today, I would most certainly stroll through the Panhandle park, where the bands used the play to acid-drenched fans, up the hill at Masonic, and over to the old Grateful Dead house, which is mere steps away from the famous corner. I’d tell myself it’s an amateur sociologist exercise, rubbernecking while the faithful have a candlelight vigil but, truthfully, it would be to pay respects myself.

Today, plenty of fans are going pour out ink, expressing what The Dead meant to them, and how Phil was such a big part of it. Rightly, you may wonder why I bothered to write this, when The Dead were really just a one-hit wonder in my world, even if I recognize their nearly incalculable impact on not just music, but society, writ large. The reason is to illustrate that some artists have an impact on people who don’t even care for their work.
Man, do I ever love the idea of Phil Lesh.
I genuinely liked what I knew about him, and marveled at his innovative nature. Each year brought a new discovery that made me respect him even more. To the point that I’d often revisit the music, but, well… nope.
Maybe one day.

From this non-fan of an unquestionably important band, I’ll say that hearing this news has affected me more than I thought it would.

He was a notably affable guy, who was good to his friends, and generous to artists, but also kept the band on the rails when they lost focus in the studio.
A professional amongst the pranksters.
Fare thee well, you were admired more than words can tell.

Philip Chapman Lesh
March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024

• Source: https://louderthanwar.com/requiescat-grateful-dead-bassist-phil-lesh-1940-2024/