Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead member who died, had roots in Palo Alto

BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer

Phil Lesh, a classically trained violinist and jazz trumpeter who found his true calling reinventing the role of rock bass guitar as a founding member of the Grateful Dead, died yesterday (Oct. 25) at age 84.

The Grateful Dead practiced in its early days at Lesh’s home in the Professorville neighborhood of Palo Alto at 1012 High Street. That’s where Jerry Garcia came up with the name for the band, legend has it.

They played their first ever show at Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in downtown Menlo Park on May 5, 1965, when the band was still called the Warlocks. Jordan Mendelson, technical director and assistant general manager at The Guild Theatre in Menlo Park, said he was shocked and saddened to hear that Lesh had died yesterday — but Lesh lived a very full life, Mendelson said.

Mendelson was introduced to Lesh in 2016 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., where Lesh often played with his band, Lesh and Friends.

“There was always a little bit of magic to everything that he said. He was a man of few words when I was talking with him, but just an absolute legend,” said Mendelson, Lesh’s driver and production assistant. Mendelson, a bassist himself, saw one of Lesh’s last shows at the Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael.

“All of these guys, the only way they would ever stop playing is when they actually died. That’s the only way you’re going to get somebody like Phil to stop, and he was going right up until the very end,” Mendelson said yesterday.

Lesh’s legacy will live on through music. There’s not a bass player in a jam band who wasn’t influenced by his style, Mendelson said.

Palo Alto resident Rob Levitsky has been a fan of the Grateful Dead since October 1976, when he saw them with The Who at the Oakland Coliseum. The Grateful Dead pioneered louder sound systems using walls of speakers, an upgrade from the PA systems used before.

Lesh used these loud speakers to hit so-called “Phil bombs” — chords played in a lower register that the whole crowd felt.

“The whole arena would kind of shake, and people would cheer,” Levitsky said yesterday.

It was New Year’s Eve in 1963, and Jerry Garcia was teaching banjo lessons at Dana Morgan Music Store in downtown Palo Alto at 534 Bryant St., Levitsky said.

Garcia’s students didn’t show up because of the holiday. Guitarist Bob Weir heard Garcia practicing and went in, and they became friends and fellow musicians, Levitsky said. Their original bassist was Dana Morgan Jr., the son of the store owner who could help get them instruments, Levitsky said. But Garcia decided Morgan Jr. wasn’t good enough and replaced him with Lesh.

The Grateful Dead played at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater throughout the 1980s. Then they got too popular for the venue. By the time Garcia died in 1995, the band was playing for crowds of more than 100,000.

Lesh’s health — he received a liver transplant at Stanford Hospital in 1998 — had him tour less often than his old bandmates.

Lesh’s last show with Grateful Dead members was in 2015 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Levitsky said.

Lesh also had a band called Terrapin Family Band. He played with his son, Grahame Lesh.

Lesh was the oldest and one of the longest surviving members of the band that came to define the acid rock sound emanating from San Francisco in the 1960s.

“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,” a post on his social media said yesterday (Oct. 26).

The statement didn’t cite a cause of death. Lesh had previously survived bouts of prostate cancer, bladder cancer and the liver transplant necessitated by the debilitating effects of a hepatitis C infection and years of heavy drinking.

Although he kept a relatively low public profile, rarely granting interviews or speaking to the audience, fans and fellow band members recognized Lesh as a critical member of the Grateful Dead whose thundering lines on the six-string electric bass provided a brilliant counterpoint to lead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s soaring solos and anchored the band’s famous marathon jams. “When Phil’s happening the band’s happening,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called Lesh the group’s intellectual who brought a classical composer’s mindset and skills to a five-chord rock ’n’ roll band.

Lesh credited Garcia with teaching him to play the bass in the unorthodox lead-guitar style that he would become famous for, mixing thundering arpeggios with snippets of spontaneously composed orchestral passages.

Fellow bass player Rob Wasserman once said Lesh’s style set him apart from every other bassist he knew of. While most others were content to keep time and take the occasional solo, Wasserman said Lesh was both good enough and confident enough to lead his fellow musicians through a song’s melody.

“He happens to play bass but he’s more like a horn player, doing all those arpeggios — and he has that counterpoint going all the time,” he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, starting with lessons in third grade. He took up the trumpet at 14, eventually earning the second chair in California’s Oakland Symphony Orchestra while still in his teens.

But he had largely put both instruments aside and was driving a mail truck and working as a sound engineer for a small radio station in 1965 when Garcia recruited him to The Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia he didn’t play the bass, the musician asked, “Didn’t you used to play violin?” When Lesh said yes, Garcia told him, “There you go, man.”

Armed with a cheap four-string instrument his girlfriend bought him, Lesh sat down for a seven-hour lesson with Garcia, following the latter’s advice that he tune his instrument’s strings an octave lower than the four bottom strings on Garcia’s guitar. Then Garcia turned him loose, allowing Lesh to develop the spontaneous style of playing that he would embrace for the rest of his life.

Lesh and Garcia would frequently exchange leads, often spontaneously, while the band as a whole would frequently break into long experimental, jazz-influenced jams during concerts. The result was that even well-known Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin’” or “Sugar Magnolia” rarely sounded the same two performances in a row, something that would inspire loyal fans to attend show after show.

“It’s always fluid, we just pretty much figure it out on the fly,” Lesh said, chuckling, during a rare 2009 interview with The Associated Press. “You can’t set those things in stone in the rehearsal room.”

Phillip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, the only child of Frank Lesh, an office equipment repairman, and his wife, Barbara.

He would say in later years that his love of music came from listening to broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic on his grandmother’s radio. One of his earliest memories was hearing the great German composer Bruno Walter lead that orchestra through Brahms’ First Symphony. Musical influences he often cited were not rock musicians but composers like Bach and Edgard Varese, as well as jazz greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

Lesh had gravitated from classical music to cool jazz by the time he arrived at the College of San Mateo, eventually becoming the first trumpet player in the school’s big band and a composer of several orchestral pieces the group performed.

But he set the trumpet aside after college, concluding he didn’t have the lung power to become an elite player.

Soon after he took up the bass, The Warlocks renamed themselves the Grateful Dead and Lesh began captivating audiences with his dexterity. Crowds gathered in what came to be known as “The Phil Zone” directly in front of his position onstage.

Although he was never a prolific songwriter, Lesh also composed music for, and sometimes sang, some of the band’s most beloved songs. Among them were the upbeat country rocker “Pride of Cucamonga,” the jazz-influenced “Unbroken Chain” and the ethereally beautiful “Box of Rain.”

Lesh composed the latter on guitar as a gift for his dying father, and he recalled that Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, upon hearing the instrumental recording, approached him the next day with a lyric sheet. On that sheet, he said, were “some of the most moving and heartfelt lyrics I’ve ever had the good fortune to sing.” The band often closed its concerts with the song.

After the group’s dissolution following Garcia’s 1995 death, Lesh often skipped joining the other surviving members when they got together to perform.

He did take part in a 2009 Grateful Dead tour and again in 2015 for a handful of “Fare Thee Well” concerts marking both the band’s 50th anniversary and what Lesh said would be the last time he would play with the others.

He did continue to play frequently, however, with a rotating cast of musicians he called Phil Lesh and Friends.

In later years he usually held those performances at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and nightclub he opened near his Northern California home in 2012, which was named after the Grateful Dead song and album “Terrapin Station.” Having benefitted from a donors liver transplant, Lesh would advocate at the end of each show that his fans to become organ donors on their drivers licenses, Levitsky said.

Lesh is survived by his wife, Jill, and sons Brian and Grahame.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.