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Happy Birthday Phil Lesh: Listen To 5 Bass Solos Performed With Grateful Dead

March 15, 2022

Today marks Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s 82nd birthday. Philip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940 in Berkeley, California. To celebrate Phil’s birthday, JamBase profiles the once unlikely bassist and shares audio featuring five bass solos Lesh delivered with the Grateful Dead.

While Lesh is inextricably linked with the bass guitar, he began his musical journey playing violin before switching to trumpet. In the early 1960s, Lesh became involved with a constellation of Bay Area academic institutions pursuing his love of free jazz and avant garde classical music. A fateful meeting with bluegrass enthusiast Jerry Garcia while volunteering as an engineer at Berkeley’s KPFA would lead Lesh down the low-end path.

In 1964, Phil joined a band Garcia was forming called the Warlocks. Largely led by blues and R&B leaning vocalist and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the band was heading in a more rock direction. With drummer Bill Kreutzmann in tow and Bob Weir rounding out the two guitar attack with Garcia, all they needed was a bass player. While he had never played bass before, Phil would oblige. In 1965, the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead.

Playing bass was a tabula rosa for Lesh. While his classically trained musical background served him well, Phil was able to view the bass from outside the preconceived notions of the instrument’s role in rock at the time. Influenced by other bassists who were pushing the envelope on the instrument in rock ‘n’ roll including Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady and Cream’s Jack Bruce, Phil also kept an ear to his jazz heroes like Charles Mingus. Lesh would join these bassists as one of the instrument’s revolutionary players.

Lesh and Kreutzmann — joined by fellow drummer Mickey Hart in 1967 — provided one of the most interesting rhythm sections in rock. They shifted the bass/drums paradigm. Whereas most of the great rock drummers of the time — Keith Moon, John Bonham, Mitch Mitchell — played with more force, Billy, who was also heavily influenced by jazz, is a more finesse player. Using an automotive metaphor, Phil’s bass work — which included bounding, bubbly lines as well as heavy chording — provided the engine of the Grateful Dead while Bill and Mickey were the well-lubricated transmission, shifting gears on the improvisational highway.

But to quote Robert Hunter in “Eyes Of The World”: “Sometimes we ride on your horses/Sometimes we walk alone.” While bass solos were never a fixture of Grateful Dead shows like “Drums,” Lesh was known to drop some serious low-end knowledge on folks. Three of the bass solos in the audio below come during the aforementioned “Eyes of the World.”

But the compilation from the YouTube account FerniFF begins with a bass solo during a show on February 4, 1973 in Iowa City. Lesh’s segment emerges from a jam and Phil soon goes to his bag dropping chords but also utilizing techniques more associated with the six-string like bends, hammer-ons and pull-offs. His playing on “Eyes” — all three from the storied year of 1977 — is more melodic, almost bird-song-like, indicative, perhaps, of his trumpet background. There’s also some big bombs on a “Dark Star” from Madison, Wisconsin on February 15, 1973.

To celebrate Phil Lesh’s birthday, listen to five bass solos with the Grateful Dead below:

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