Surviving members of Grateful Dead share praise for Phil Lesh

On Friday (October 25), Phil Lesh, the founding bassist of the Grateful Dead, passed away at 84 years old. Many music icons have been sharing tributes for the beloved musician, and now the surviving members of the Grateful Dead have also posted praise.

“Today we lost a brother,” the group statement in readings on social networks. Continues:

Our hearts and love go out to Jill Lesh, Brian and Grahame. Phil Lesh was irreplaceable. In a Phil Zone note, you could hear and feel the world being born. His bass flowed like a river would flow. It was where the muse took him. He was an explorer of inner and outer space who happened to play bass. He was a circumnavigator of hitherto unknown musical worlds. And more.

We can count on one hand the people who we can say had such a profound influence on our development, in every way. And there have been even fewer people who did it continually over the decades and will continue to do so as long as we live. What a gift it was to us. We won’t say we’ll miss him, for at any given moment, nothing we do will be without the lessons he taught us, and the lessons that are yet to come as the conversations progress.

Phil loved the Dead Heads and always kept them in his heart and mind. The thing is…Phil was much more than a virtuoso bassist, a songwriter, a family man, a cultural icon…

There will be many tributes and everyone will say important things. But we’ve spent our whole lives making music with Phil Lesh and music has a way of saying it all. So listen to the Grateful Dead and, that way, we’ll all take a little bit of Phil with us, forever.

Because all this is a dream that we dreamed one afternoon, a long time ago….

In Bob Weir statementhe recalled how Lesh “introduced me (and us) to the wonders of modern classical music, with its textures and developments, which we soon sought to incorporate into what we had to offer.”

mickey hart wrote that Lesh was “larger than life, in the center of the band and in my ears, filling my brain with waves of bass.” Bill Kreutzmann explained that Lesh “wasn’t just like a brother to me, he was like an older brother. A roommate. A bandmate. A mentor.”

Jerry García’s family also shared a statementwriting that they “will miss his markedly dry humor, his wry smiles and his brilliant ideas.”

Trey Anastasio, who played with Phil Lesh & Friends and at the Fare Thee Well concerts, made a mail commemorating their friendship, and on Friday he covered “Box Of Rain,” one of the Dead’s most beloved songs, written by Lesh, with Phish in Albany. Check that out below.