Phil Lesh, the bassist who co-founded the Grateful Dead and served as the bedrock of the band’s sound for their entire 30-year run, passed away on Friday morning. He was 84.
Lesh’s death was announced with a message to his official social media channels on Friday afternoon.
“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning,” the post read. “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. We request that you respect the Lesh family’s privacy at this time.”
In 1965, Lesh joined up with Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, and Ronald “Pigpen” McKernan to form a band then known as The Warlocks. That group would soon become the Grateful Dead, and over the course of 30 years they went from one drop in the sea of ’60s psychedelic rock to a monolithic cultural force that filled stadiums and created mini boomtowns in the parking lots outside their shows. Until forming the band with Garcia, Lesh had never played the bass guitar. This, coupled with Lesh’s vast experiences in classical music rather than rock, resulted in his unique non-repeating style of bass guitar playing.
The height of Lesh’s compositional contributions to the Grateful Dead was in the early stages of their career, creating complex arrangements like “The Eleven” and “New Potato Caboose”. When the band moved into a folk-inspired phase at the end of the 1960s, Lesh worked with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter to create “Box of Rain”. The song was a standout of the Dead’s most accessible album American Beauty (1970) and became a staple of Lesh’s performances in his post-Dead career.
Though a part of the Dead’s three-part harmony structure for their folk/country albums American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead, by 1974 Lesh had begun to experience vocal cord damage from his improper singing technique and stopped singing live. He would go 12 years before singing live again, returning to the vocal lineup in 1985 with a deep baritone. Shortly before his prolonged singing hiatus, Lesh wrote “Pride of Cucamonga” and “Unbroken Chain” for the Dead’s 1974 album From the Mars Hotel. The Dead never performed “Pride of Cucamonga” live and didn’t play “Unbroken Chain” until their final year in 1995, debuting it just four months before Jerry Garcia’s death.
Following the dissolution of the Grateful Dead in 1995, Lesh went on to perform with various arrangements of his bandmates in The Other Ones, The Dead, and Furthur. He formed his own band Phil Lesh & Friends which played with a rotating cast of musicians all the way up until March of 2024 when he celebrated his 84th birthday with a three-night run at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY. Phil Lesh & Friends released one studio album, 2002’s There and Back Again, featuring Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring, John Molo, and Rob Barraco.
In 2005, Lesh published his memoir Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead, the first member of the band to do so and the only one until Kreutzmann’s 2015 memoir Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams and Drugs with the Grateful Dead. In 2012, Lesh and his wife Jill Lesh opened Terrapin Crossroads in San Rafael, CA. The restaurant and music venue was a hub for Grateful Dead fandom where the owner was known to stop by for unannounced sit-ins. Terrapin Crossroads closed in 2021 in the wake of the COVID pandemic.
Following two decades of spin-offs with various Grateful Dead members, the “Core Four” of Weir, Lesh, Kreutzmann, and Hart reunited for the Dead’s 50th anniversary. Billed as Fare Thee Well, they recruited Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio as a stand-in for Garcia and played five stadium concerts in Santa Clara, CA and Chicago’s Soldier Field—the site of the final Grateful Dead concert in 1995. The shows were a massive success both commercially and critically and ignited a renewed interest among the Grateful Dead in younger audiences. Fare Thee Well was the final time Lesh, Weir, Kreutzmann, and Hart appeared together publicly. The band was expected to appear together in December when they will be celebrated at the Kennedy Center Honors.
Lesh experienced several health setbacks in the post-Garcia years, beginning in 1998 when he underwent a liver transplant due to a chronic hepatitis C infection. Afterward, he became a staunch proponent of organ donation and regularly encouraged audiences at his shows to become donors, an occurrence so common it became known as the “donor rap” among fans. In 2006, Lesh revealed a prostate cancer diagnosis and underwent successful surgery to remove it. Nine years later, Lesh stated that he had bladder cancer and would undergo surgery to remove it. Most recently, Lesh was scheduled to perform at his own Sunday Daydream series of festival-like concerts in August but canceled after he was diagnosed with COVID. This year, he pivoted to a heavy online presence with the launch of his Terrapin Clubhouse YouTube channel.
Phil Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and their sons Grahame and Brian, both musicians. RIP Phil.
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