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‘Legacy of music and love’

‘Legacy of music and love’

Sakege011 mins

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Phil Lesh, founding member of the Grateful dead whose electric bass came to define San Francisco’s psychedelic sound, died on October 25 at age 84.

The musician’s death was announced in his official Instagramwith a post that reads: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member 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 a legacy of music. and love. We request that you respect the privacy of the Lesh family at this time.”

He is survived by his wife, Jill, and his two musical sons, Grahame and Brian.

lesh Faced a series of health obstacles in recent decades. In 1998, he received a liver transplant after internal bleeding as a result of hepatitis C. In 2006, he underwent surgery to remove his cancerous prostate and a decade later underwent successful treatment for bladder cancer.

As was the case with many musicians in the ’60s and ’70s, Lesh, along with his bandmate Jerry GarciaHe fought against addictions to various vices. Although Garcia died in 1995 while receiving treatment for heroin addiction, Lesh, with the strong support of his wife, managed to detoxify and live for decades.

Lesh played in several post-Grateful Dead incarnations after Garcia’s passing, including The Other Ones, Further, Phil Lesh & Friends, and The Dead.

But he was also a much-seen and heard staple in his Marin County home base, where for a decade he raced and performed at his San Rafael, California, club. Aquatic Turtle Crossroadswhich is named after a famous Dead tune.

Lesh went from playing violin to being one of the most innovative rock bassists of all time.

Lesh took a remarkably 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, which later influenced his unique way of playing bass in the Grateful dead.

While studying at the University of California-Berkeley, Lesh met Tom Constantenwho would briefly play keyboards for one of the first incarnations of the Dead. A little later, while working as a recording engineer at a local radio station, he met the bluegrass banjo player. Jerry Garcia.

Lesh held down day jobs at the post office while pursuing his interest in music, but that quickly faded when Garcia asked him to join his fledgling folk-rock band, then called The Warlocks. Lesh agreed, even though he had never played bass. His broad interest in music and his lack of knowledge of the bass contributed directly to him becoming one of the most innovative instrumentalists of his time.

While many bassists were trained to hold down the rhythm section of a band alongside the drummer, Lesh immediately felt that his instrument should play a larger role. His bass lines during the Dead’s heyday between 1965 and 1995 are filled with lead riffs and jaunty counterpoint.

Expanding the boundaries of the instrument, 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 previously hidden instrument as a lead voice in their bands.

When it came to sonic experimentation, drugs certainly came into play. The Grateful Dead was the author’s house band. Ken Kesey’s famous “Acid Tests” and sometimes psychedelics can take over music. Which suited Lesh and his bandmates very well.

Further: The Grateful Dead Named MusiCares People of the Year: How They Will Be Honored Grammy Week

In his 2005 autobiography, “Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead” Lesh wrote about one of those musical journeys.

“It was as if the music was being sung by giant dragons on the time scale of plate tectonics,” he wrote. “Each note seemed to take days to develop, each harmonic sang its own song, each drumbeat generated a new heaven and a new earth.”

Lesh’s bass was a dominant sonic component at the Grateful Dead’s famous Wall of Sound concert.

Although not blessed with a particularly melodious voice, Lesh participated in several of the crowd favorite songs he composed for the band, including “rain box” and “unbroken chain.”

Lesh’s bass was an integral part of one of the band’s biggest (and most expensive) experiments: the Wall of Sound.

For a brief tour in 1974, the Dead hit the road with a thunderous audio system with hundreds of speakers that could accurately project sound (it was said up to a quarter of a mile), the better to reach the nearly 100,000 fans who came to see the group. in large outdoor spaces.

One of Wall’s signature features was ensuring that the sound from each of the four strings on Lesh’s bass was projected from four different corners of the speaker system. But the setup was so cumbersome to assemble and disassemble that it was abandoned after only a few memorable months.

After Garcia’s death, Lesh and the other members of the Grateful Dead soon discovered that they were eager to continue without their musical and spiritual leader.

That led to a variety of still-ongoing incarnations of the group, which featured fewer and fewer members of the (remaining) core four. After what was supposed to be the band’s true farewell to fans, 2015’s brief Fare Thee Well tour, Lesh increasingly diminished his time on the road and in the band’s arena.

He opened Terrapin Crossroads so he could play anything close to home, and he often did so with his children, performing Grateful Dead and other contemporary songs. The venue closed in 2021, and after that, Lesh’s appearances were episodic at best, as he reached his 80s.

But the memory of what Lesh and his band created, from his legions of Deadheads to his countless bootlegs of live shows, clearly fueled the bassist even in his darkest days.

“The mind of the Grateful Dead group was essentially an engine of transformation,” he wrote at the end of “Searching for the Sound.”

“As such, he had no morality of his own, he did not make judgments or take positions. “It just opened valves for the music to flow.”

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