"I was four years old, heard a symphony concert on the radio, and it destroyed my mind," says Phil Lesh in a phone interview from his California home. "I wasn't really sure what I was listening to at the time, but I knew I wanted to become part of it."
The veteran musician, best recognized for his three-decade career as bassist and early experimenter for the Grateful Dead, began his training on the violin, an instrument that fostered his keen understanding of classical composition. His studies eventually led him to jazz and to the trumpet, which he played through high school and in college while pursuing avant-garde interests. He then swapped the horn for a bass guitar after friend and fellow musician, Jerry Garcia, talked him into joining his trippy rock group, the Warlocks. It was June of 1965.
The abrupt transition from trumpet to bass couldn't have been easy, but Lesh apparently took it in stride. "It's an unconscious thing — you learn about music, you go through training, you learn how it's made, how parts fit together, and you apply that to what you play," he says, adding, "Being a bass-player gave me a chance to apply the training I'd had in harmony and counterpoint to bass playing, as opposed to working off what I was hearing other musicians play."
Lesh didn't follow a traditional blues-oriented bass approach. He was less of a rhythm keeper and more of a lead player, with a melodic style and rich, pervasive tone that was pushed up in the mix. In fact, Lesh is known for being one of several '60s musicians to help redefine the role of bass player.
And of course, the Grateful Dead (formerly the Warlocks) was one of several counterculture bands to draw from and fuse so many genres — psychedelic rock, jazz, country, R&B, gospel, folk, bluegrass — that it defied easy categorization.
So, the Dead began making music history, experimenting with light and sound to create multi-sensory, highly improvisational concert marathons. Early on, the band delivered a couple of classic studio albums, American Beauty and Working Man's Dead. But it was the concerts that played the biggest role in amassing an army of Deadheads. The band also pioneered the free and open taping of shows — not to mention fan caravans — which have become common in contemporary jam-band circles.
Lesh was not the most prolific songwriter, but his interest in avant-garde music helped push the Dead into new territory. He was considered to be an essential part of the group and its mystique, best summed up in the oft-repeated Deadhead proverb: "If Phil's on, the band's on."
After Garcia died in 1995, Lesh continued to play with Grateful Dead offshoots The Other Ones and The Dead, but his most fruitful musical efforts arose from Phil Lesh & Friends. This ever-changing line-up of all-star musicians continues the tradition of exploring Dead music in new ways by incorporating the players' personalized interpretations. Lesh's collective also performs a wide array of covers, as well as material by participating musicians. All this keeps things interesting for Lesh, who is most content at the end of a show "if I feel like I've been able to contribute to a conversation among all the musicians in the band."
The first leg of the 2006 Phil Lesh & Friends Summer Tour makes three stops in Florida, a state Lesh admittedly visits infrequently. All three dates — which include this Friday's show at TBPAC — showcase the musical talents of keyboardist Rob Barraco (The Zen Tricksters) and drummer John Molo (Bruce Hornsby and the Range), both of whom have toured with Phil & Friends on several occasions and contributed to the group's lone commercial release, 2002's There and Back Again. Also on board is singer-songwriter Joan Osborne, who performed as a vocalist with The Dead in 2003 and with Phil & Friends in '05 and '06. The two most recent additions are multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell and top-tier jazz guitarist John Scofield.
Campbell played everything from a cittern, fiddle and mandolin to a pedal steel, lap steel and slide guitar on Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour, and caught Lesh's attention when Dylan co-headlined with Phil & Friends. "Bob and I did a couple of tours, and I was blown away by Larry's playing at that time," says Lesh, who eventually ran into Campbell again at last year's Jammys. Lesh says he was extremely interested in luring Campbell: "We talked and I invited him to join the Phil & Friends tour."
Campbell came aboard in November of 2005, though his duties were filled by Scofield for a few dates in December due to commitments Campbell made prior to his enlistment. Scofield had performed with Lesh five or six years prior, and though they'd agreed to get together again, the cards never fell into place until last December because of scheduling conflicts.
Scofield joined Phil & Friends again for two shows this past May — this time with Campbell — at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre, which was recorded for an upcoming DVD release. Message board rants, show reviews and comments on the Phil & Friends Myspace page concur: These shows were truly inspired and revealed a natural onstage chemistry between the two string-playing pros.
Not that this should be surprising; capable musicians who excel at improvisation intuitively know how to play with other capable musicians, and Lesh, a patriarch of jam bands nationwide, seems to have a good idea about which capable musicians to bring together to get the most out of musical conversations.
But you'll never hear him claim to have it all figured out. In fact, Lesh's goals haven't changed much from when he started playing. "I'm still learning. Music is infinite and you can never get to the bottom of it and you can never know it all, so my goals are essentially the same — I'll never know it all, so I just want to continue exploring and learning more about it."
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2006.
