Phil Lesh Was the Grateful Dead’s Great Explorer

When Grateful Dead co-founder, bassist, sometime backing vocalist, and eternal experimenter Phil Lesh died on Friday at the age of 84, Deadheads were keen to let you know he wasn’t just some guy in the group. Lesh, whose roots were in the avant-garde, was one of the first musicians in rock music to play the bass as though it were a lead instrument — ironic in that he was trained in violin, trumpet, and modern classical composition before Jerry Garcia asked him to join the pre-Dead band the Warlocks and fill that position.

With lead guitarist Garcia and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, Lesh was the bottom layer in an unpredictable rush of sound. Add in keyboards, a drummer, a second more far-out drummer, Donna Jean Godchaux screaming “yeaaaaahhhhh!,” and a lot of other mayhem, and you start to understand what made the Grateful Dead special. It was a big stew, and Phil Lesh was a main ingredient.

After Garcia died in 1995, Lesh played with several post-Dead bands as well as his own evolving group, Phil Lesh and Friends, which, by the end, featured up-and-comers on the scene often 50 years his junior. Recently, he began posting “clubhouse sessions” to YouTube with a rotating door of younger players, including a series called Darkstarthon that used the signature Dead exploration jam “Dark Star” as a launching point.

Bass-playing in a rock context is oftentimes the lone bastion of conservatism: Just keep the beat. Lesh’s mission statement rejected that. “The fervent belief we shared then, and that perseveres today, is that the energy liberated by this creation of music and ecstatic dancing is somehow making the world better,” he wrote in his 2005 memoir Searching For the Sound, “or at least holding the line against depredations of entropy and ignorance.” Lesh spent his entire career holding that line, and these ten tracks showcase how.

Let’s dive right into the deep end. “The Other One” is a quintessential early Grateful Dead jam that never left their set list. Frequently emerging from the free-form percussion exercise “Drums,” it begins with a loping Lesh fanfare before the band crashes in. The Frankfurt ’72 show is a perfect example of the Dead’s triple layer, with Garcia dervishing up top, Lesh worming down low, and Weir feeding them both with irregular rhythms and chords. This is a half-hour exploration that jazzes its way into atonal space, but Lesh never loses the groove.

If “The Other One” is trial by fire, this is a much more agreeable entry into the Grateful Dead and their only mainstream radio smash. It might be pop, but it’s still a great song, with clever lyrics, a sing-along chorus, and a perfect (albeit short) Garcia guitar solo. And what’s the first thing you hear when the tune fades in? Phil Lesh bah-bum-bah-bum-ing along. For a regular pop song, that’s all the bass player would do. But by the 20-second mark, Lesh is doing his typical galloping runs under the melody and coming out during rests in the chorus for some giddy yap fills.

Lesh did not write and sing lead vocals on many Grateful Dead songs, but when he did, it was a knockout. “Box of Rain,” which he composed for his dying father, is a gorgeous, melancholy melody with complex chord changes. Opening the Dead’s fifth studio album, American Beauty, it marked a turn from the more experimental material in the studio (Phil’s forte). But he sure put his stamp on the transition.

In Searching for the Sound, Lesh wrote that his fondest musical memories of the Grateful Dead remained the early days, when Ron “Pigpen” McKernan would come out from behind the keyboards and strut around to a psychedelic version of an R&B classic, like “Big Boss Man” or “Turn on Your Lovelight.” (Lesh called these “rave-ups.”) But the best for jamming — and for Lesh — was “Hard to Handle.” For his Fallout From the Phil Zone collection, Phil selected the August 16, 1971, version from the Hollywood Palladium, but I have to speak my truth: Just a few weeks earlier — at Yale, of all places — the band laid down the best “Hard to Handle” in history. If Phil’s thunga-thunga-thung riff doesn’t get you moving, check your pulse, because you might be dead.

This is another of the rare Lesh-on-lead-vocals tracks, but unlike the anthemic “Box of Rain,” “Unbroken Chain” makes you work for it. (Indeed, the phrase “searching for the sound,” which Lesh borrowed for his memoir, comes from this tune.) The song starts with an unusual guitar filter and some deep bass strides, then continues with harmonies from Godchaux, a time-signature change, and Ned Lagin’s synthesizers. Though a “mellow tune,” everyone — especially Lesh down low — is keeping busy, proving that when Lesh presented something to his bandmates, it was never dashed-off.

A Lesh composition, “The Eleven” gets its name from its tricky 11/8 time signature. This February 1969 rendition is a tremendous showcase for his bass running like a jackrabbit just as frantically as Garcia’s lead guitar or the four-armed drumming of Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. Even the Lesh-less post-Dead group Dead & Co., which tends to keep things super mellow, kicks it into a higher gear when they bust this out.

In ’77 and ’78, the Dead turned up the funk, and some naysayers turned their back on what they derogatorily called “Disco Dead.” Either way, this era is certainly bass-heavy, and while there is an entire shelf of Dead literature calling May 8, 1977’s “Scarlet > Fire” from Ithaca the period’s apex, I have a fondness for this “The Music Never Stopped” from a few weeks later, especially since you can really hear how Phil takes a simple “disco” bass line and curves it, bends it, and slaps it around.

“Dark Star,” which the entire band created, is the blank canvas, no-two-versions-slightly-the-same communion with inner and outer space that was most likely to send Heads into epiphanic euphoria (or the occasional bad trip). Attending a Dead show was already entering a special club, but getting a “Dark Star” was entry to the VIP section. I can’t really select a specific “Dark Star” for this list (that’s too personal, man!). Instead, check out “Grayfolded,” initiated by Lesh, in which decades’ worth of “Dark Stars” were mixed and blended and baked into a whole new composition. This one section called “The Phil Zone,” where you’ll hear Lesh strumming the bass, plunking harmonics, and launching arcs of feedback, reveals his kid-in-the-candy-store side amid all his high-tech gear and seems like the appropriate sampling.

Among those who saluted Lesh at his passing was jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis, who played with the Dead at a handful of gigs over the years. The high point is this 16-minute version of “Eyes of the World.” Lesh’s bass explorations are unceasing while Marsalis and Garcia trade solos, and Brent Mydland slots in his perfectly glassy electric-piano tones.

This may sound like a joke, but if you want to know what makes Lesh different, look to “Donor Rap.” He received a liver transplant in 1998 from a man named Cody, and Lesh soon cleared a moment in the set list to share his story. Cody had once told his mother that, if anything should happen to him, he wanted his organs donated. Lesh then encouraged audience members to do the same. Tapers began putting “Donor Rap” on show recordings, and official releases and streams list the little chat as its own track. Heads being Heads, you can go to Reddit to find rankings for best versions of “Donor Rap,” the highest form of flattery from this fandom.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed “The Phil Zone” as a post-Grateful Dead project.

Phil Lesh Was the Grateful Dead’s Great Explorer