Sure, guitarist Jerry Garcia got most of the attention during the Dead’s three-decade existence. That’s probably why few people—including many Deadheads—are aware the group may never have succeeded were it not for Lesh, a trumpeter/electronic composer-turned-bassist. In 1965 San Francisco, the band sprang from mostly bluegrass and rock & roll roots—but Phil brought a different influence. “I went in with the idea I didn’t want to be a standard bassist,” he says. “At that time, who played anything interesting in rock & roll bass? There wasn’t anything going on, and I didn’t want to be relegated to the role of just thumping along. I wanted to bring a more fluid, melodic approach to the instrument.” With little background in pop music, Lesh drew instead on his classical training—particularly contrapuntal composers such as Bach and Palestrina—for inspiration. “In counterpoint the bass line is a melody, as are all the other lines, yet they all fit together. They move at different speeds sometimes, but it’s always interesting, and it’s always linear. The voices always lead somewhere.”

The Dead’s musical coagulation was by no means immediate; the early LSD-party “Acid Test” gigs are part of rock legend, but they weren’t necessarily musical nirvana. Eventually Lesh, Garcia, guitarist/singer Bob Weir, and drummers Bill Kruetzmann and Mickey Hart learned to improvise lines that twisted around one another like a musical caduceus. The Dead’s early period, marked by extended experimental jams on simple themes like “Dark Star,” is best captured on the classic ’69 set Live/Dead. The next year the band took a sharp studio turn with Workingman’s Dead and its follow-up, American Beauty, opting for rootsy, focused songs. They eventually developed an entirely singular, largely improvisational live style that was sometimes wretchedly awful (as the band freely admits) but sometimes superb, as if each member’s part had been orchestrated to perfection. Touring almost constantly year after year, the Dead developed into not only a bizarre countercultural phenomenon but also a cottage industry for merchandise and ticket sales. By the early ’90s the Grateful Dead was regularly topping the charts for concert grosses, but it all ended abruptly when Garcia—after numerous bouts with addiction and illness—died on August 9, 1995.

We’ve wanted to interview Lesh since our first issue—but for years he politely declined all requests. After the Dead’s brutal touring schedule ended and Phil began to put together some projects of his own, he finally agreed. Between benefits and other gigs with his band, Phil Lesh & Friends, the energetic, affable musician—who turned 60 in March—sat down with us at his small Marin County office. We covered so much ground we had to split the article into two sections; his role with the Dead and his important role in the development of bass equipment.

Why did you avoid giving interviews for so long?
I don’t consider myself a virtuoso bass player. The only thing that makes me stand out, if in fact I do stand out, is my approach to the instrument. I always thought that would be perceptible to other musicians—that it wouldn’t need to be explained or deconstructed.

Your style is so different—it seems there’s a standard way to play bass, and a Phil Lesh way.
There’s only two? [Laughs.] It probably has a lot to do with the musicians I played with for 30 years. We all pretty much started out together and learned together; even Garcia had just picked up the electric guitar when the band started. Then we learned to weave our talents together.

Garcia once said he never understood your bass playing until he heard a tape accidentally sped up—and then your approach finally made sense.
That’s one way to hear it. It surprised me when he said that, but looking back I’m glad he finally figured it out!

When you’re improvising a line, are you planning where it will go?
Yes and no. In the short term I like to mix it up; from one bar to the next I may not know exactly what notes I’m going to play in between, but I know where I’m going to end up. There was a Formula One driver named Ayrton Senna who didn’t think only about the turn as he was going around it, or even as he was coming into it. He had a vision of the entire track, and he always knew exactly where he was. So he planned his laps around the whole track—not just on this turn or that turn. He was World Champion three times. Similarly I try to think about the whole verse or chorus or even the whole song. In a jam, I think, How can I get this to go to another key? How can I fit in a certain rhythm, or interpolate something into the rhythm, to make the jam go somewhere else? I’m really looking at the music on the long view. I’m zooming out.

Charlie Mingus once said the best way to listen to his music was to focus in front of it and listen to the whole thing, rather than try to follow any one voice. That’s what I try to do: I try to listen to the whole band at once.

Your playing tends to be staccato. Even on a very slow song, like “Row, Jimmy,” you use a lot of space even when you aren’t playing rests.
I like to hear interior rhythm. On a slow song I don’t like to hear the bass going chonnnng … chonnnng. “Row, Jimmy” in particular has kind of a reggae groove—a double-time of the actual tempo—which becomes obvious at the end. In order to articulate that rhythm, or pieces of that rhythm, the notes have to stop at a certain place as well as start at a certain place. I play staccato to articulate that interior rhythm. There has to be a certain amount of silence—at least to my ear.

Few bassists can make a groove bounce the way you can.
I picked that up from Garcia. His playing would imply this sort of [vocalizes offbeat-heavy rhythm]. I love the offbeat groove. “Not Fade Away” is my favorite example of that: The groove goes bum-bum-bummm-ba-dum-bum, but I like to play ba-DAM-ba-DAM-ba-DAMM-ba-DAM-DAM. The first time I did that, Bill Kreutzmann looked at me like I was nuts—but I said, “Keep playing! Just keep playing! Do your thing and let me do mine!”

I also think about playing for dancers. I love irregular rhythms and meters, and one of the most fun things I can think of is playing a rhythm part where the downbeat doesn’t fall with somebody’s foot. That offbeat thing is a way to sort of confuse the dancers, so they don’t know what foot they’re on. I’m trying to get them to fly—to leave both of their feet off the ground.

Some Grateful Dead songs were incredibly slow. How challenging was that for you?
Immensely challenging. My trumpet teacher used to tell me it’s infinitely harder to play slow and quiet than it is to play fast and loud. It’s more effective, too. In the Grateful Dead, the slower it got the more interesting it could become, because the divisions inside the beats were that much further apart—so you could put more in there.

When I do really slow songs now, I encourage the band to put some interior rhythm into the rhythm—always implied rather than overtly stated. There are times, though, when you want to beat ’em over the head. “Cold Rain and the Snow” is my favorite for that—the groove just hammers out.

When you’re playing, are you thinking more than the average bassist?
In certain circumstances yes, because I’m trying to make the music go into a particular key or rhythm. I didn’t do that so much with the Grateful Dead, because I wasn’t driving the music as much—but in the bands I’m working with now, I’m driving it.

It’s been a revelation playing with all the wonderful musicians out there—and it’s also been a revelation to learn how many excellent musicians love Grateful Dead music, are delighted to get a chance to play it, and are willing to bring everything they have to it. The music is rich enough and has enough depth that it can support many different interpretations. In fact, some of the music I’ve been involved with lately has been more interesting than the stuff the Grateful Dead did.

Do you feel you missed out on anything during all those years?
Not particularly. In some ways, the Grateful Dead was all just preparation—30 years of preparation!

The first music you got into was classical and jazz. As a kid why weren’t you interested in pop music?
I hated pop music—but you have to remember how old I am. I was born in 1940, and in the ’40s pop music was swing bands, small groups, and occasionally vocal music. Vocal music didn’t become really popular until there was a general musicians’ strike in 1944—you couldn’t play on the radio or on records unless you were backing a vocalist, because the vocalists belonged to a different union. When the musicians came back, everyone was listening to vocal music, because that’s all that had been on the radio for a while.

I was four years old when I got turned on to music. It was a Brahms symphony. My grandmother would listen to the radio broadcasts on Sunday, and one time she noticed me sitting in my room, which was next to hers, with my ear against the wall listening to this stuff. So she said, “Why don’t you come in and sit with me?” I did—and the music just blew me away.

I took up violin at age eight, and at ten I started performing with the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra in Berkeley. We played the great classics: Beethoven’s Fifth, Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Wagner’s Meistersinger. I played with them until I graduated from high school—but by age 14 I had switched to trumpet. I was a much better trumpet player than violinist, so I got to play in the Oakland Symphony, a semi-pro organization at the time. There I got to play my favorite symphony—Brahms’s First—as well as some Sibelius.

When I graduated from high school I started getting turned on to jazz. I loved big bands, with their five trumpets, five trombones, and five saxophones going [sings horn part] wham-bam-bammm!—very powerful. But I hated ’50s pop, and I hated rock & roll when I first heard it. I thought it was just mindless; I was completely deaf to its nuances. I had my idea of what music was, and when you’re 15 or 16 you have your opinions.

At a certain point I decided I wanted to compose, so I went to college and ended up in a graduate-level composition class taught by the famous Italian composer Luciano Berio. In the class were guys like [future noted composers] Steve Reich, John Chowning, and Bob Moran. But I realized there’s no future in composing unless you follow the academic path, and I wasn’t willing to put the time and effort into what I considered grunt work [laughs] to make my way in the academic composition world.

How did you start to appreciate rock & roll?
By the time the Beatles came in, I guess I had grown up enough to have a little tolerance, and I started listening in a new way. I was working for the post office, and I had a Beatle haircut—I was one of the first men in San Francisco to wear their hair down to their shoulders. But then some business type on Market Street wrote a letter to the United States Postmaster General complaining about my hair. So they called me in and said I’d have to cut it, and I said, “Okay.” Later they called me in again and told me it wasn’t short enough, so I said, “See you later!”

When did you first consider playing bass?
One of my best friends, Len Lasher, was a fabulous bassist who later played in the San Francisco Symphony. One day I asked if he’d teach me bass as a second instrument. He said, “I would never teach anyone to play bass as a second instrument.” Gee, sorry! Then at a party five or six years later, I mentioned to Jerry Garcia that the electric bass was an interesting instrument—that I thought it had some potential beyond what I had been hearing.

How did you start playing with him?
The word started getting around that he had put together a rock & roll band. At the time he was the best banjo player on earth—or at least he was the most interesting and had the most potential. I thought, That’s an interesting concept—Garcia playing electric guitar. So we went down to Magoo’s Pizza Parlor in Menlo Park to see his band, the Warlocks.

The Warlocks had a bassist, Dana Morgan Jr. I don’t know what his approach was, but I do know Jerry wasn’t satisfied with it. During a break he took me aside and said, “Listen, man—you’re a musician. I want you to come play bass in this band.” I told him I’d do it, but I said, “Look—you have to give me at least one lesson.” He told me the four strings on the bass were the same as the bottom four strings on a guitar, only down an octave—and then he said, “That’s all you need to know.”

When was the first time you picked up a bass?
June 7, 1965. Or close to that, anyway—that’s the date we use for the formation of the Grateful Dead. I borrowed a bass from the music store where Jerry was teaching banjo. I had been playing around with the guitar a little, figuring out where the notes were. My roommate gave me some good advice: “Never play on open string string unless you absolutely mean it.”

How much did you influence the Grateful Dead’s musical direction?
My biggest influence was in the beginning, when we were an experimental-music band. Then we started concentrating on songwriting. It was a natural development; we explored the psychedelic jam pretty completely, and then as a reaction to that, we wanted to bring things down to something very stated and complete in a short time period. That was a wonderful move, because it gave us the material to combine those two approaches, which is what we finally did in the late ’70s through the early ’90s.

What moments from your career do you consider highlights?
Playing at the Pyramids in ’78 was a highlight of a certain kind, although we didn’t play very well. But everything tends to roll together into one—it was good and it was bad. I can tell you the particularly bad moments, like Woodstock. We had some excuses—the stage was sinking, and the equipment was starting to roll toward the edge. The PA went off, the lights went off, and radio signals from the Air Force were coming out of my amp. It was not an atmosphere conducive to good music. I don’t think anybody played well that night, but we were the worst. We played better at Monterey Pop, but we were sandwiched between the Who and Jimi Hendrix, so nobody remembered us. We’ve always blown the big ones, as Garcia once said.

Do any recent performances stand out?
I did a bass duet with Mike Gordon when I sat in with Phish. I generally abhor bass duets, but it was marvelous—it was actually beautiful.

Did you have predetermined roles going into it?
No—we just played it by ear. He knows how to get out of my way, and I know how to get out of his. It was like two hippopotomi humping!

In your current band, do you ask the other musicians to focus on what you’re doing?
I encourage them to do what I do—listen to everything, and work with anybody and everybody who has something interesting to say. That’s what I look for in a musician: someone who’s willing to suspend that role-playing mode. I don’t want people to play lead guitar or rhythm guitar or keyboard; I want everybody to play lead and rhythm. I’ll do the same thing, and so will the drummer. What you then have, when we open up the songs or do a prelude or epilogue, is a web of melodic and rhythmic ideas.

That approach is pretty rare in rock & roll. Why have so few bands been able to create that kind of unified musical web?
I don’t know. The Grateful Dead was able to do it by spending literally years trying to make polyphony—really interesting music without words. But it also works with vocals. In my current group I’m always telling everyone to keep the groove going while I’m singing—don’t back off. Don’t fade away and make the vocal naked; I want ideas behind the singing. I want comments and responses to the vocal, and even to the words.

On my most recent tour we played five or six songs in an hour and a half, and the rest consisted of lead-ins, expansions in the middles of songs, or transitions from one song to the next. Sometimes we’d just jam for 20 minutes before we’d start a song—that’s exciting to me. My goal is to go up there without a set list, and not even to talk it over beforehand like the Grateful Dead did.

How did the Dead arrange sets?
The first set would be pretty spontaneous, but there would always be gaps. We’d do a song and stop; somebody would think of a tune and play a few chords, and we’d all know what it was—and then we’d do that one. In the second set we’d say, Okay—we’ll start with this, go through some transitions, and end up here and go into Drums and Space, and then we’ll close with whatever ballad and rocker. That got to be a little tedious after about 20 years. We talked about trying some different things, but in the end nobody wanted to do any work to experiment.

What’s your personal favorite studio performance?
There isn’t one. “Help on the Way” [Blues for Allah] is okay; it’s not particularly probing or expansive or adventurous, but it’s a nice bass line. I pulled that out of the implications of what Jerry was doing.

You went through a songwriting period in the ’70s.
I wrote about five songs. But we had such great stuff coming out of Garcia and [lyricist Robert] Hunter and Bobby and [lyricist John] Barlow. Writing songs in the Dead was difficult; mine are a little more complicated than some of the others, and I had trouble getting the band to play them. We recorded “Unbroken Chain” [The Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel] in two sections; I had a huge problem getting the band to play it as a single gesture, which is the way music should come out, so I didn’t even want to think about playing it live. But in 1995 I decided, Hey—I’m gonna make these guys play this song. So we played it about five times, and then Jerry died.

Any favorite performances on live records?
I don’t know. There’s so much on record that I couldn’t possibly remember. My favorite performance is always the last one I did. Understand that the Grateful Dead played 2,500 concerts—it’s in the Guinness Book of Records. And they all tend to run together. For 30 years it’s been one big gig.

Selected Discography

With Phil Lesh & Friends
Love Will See You Through, Arista

Live with the Grateful Dead
(on Grateful Dead)
Dick’s Picks, Volumes 1–13
Fillmore East 2-11-69
Dozin’ at the Knick; One from the Vault

(on Arista)
Fallout from the Phil Zone
Without a Net
Reckoning
Dead Set

(on Warner Bros.)
Europe ’72
Grateful Dead
Live/Dead

Grateful Dead studio albums
(on Arista)
Built to Last
In the Dark
Go to Heaven
Shakedown Street
Terrapin Station

(on Grateful Dead)
Blues for Allah
The Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel
Wake of the Flood

(on Warner Bros.)
American Beauty
Workingman’s Dead
Aoxomoxoa
Anthem of the Sun
The Grateful Dead

With Jerry Garcia
Reflections, Arista

With Bob Weir
Ace, Arista

With Mickey Hart
Rolling Thunder, Arista

With Graham Nash & David Crosby
Graham Nash/David Crosby, Atlantic

With David Bromberg
(both on Columbia)
Wanted Dead or Alive
Demon in Disguise

With Ned Lagi
Seastones, Rykodisc

Please read part two of this article, Anthem Of The Tone: Phil Lesh & The Modern Electric Bass.