It’s vital that Phil Lesh, who has died aged 84, claimed that one in all his earliest recollections was of being surprised by listening to Brahms’s Symphony No 1. Lesh turned famend because the bassist with the Grateful Useless, however his classical coaching and wide-ranging musical tastes ensured that his taking part in stretched far past the standard slim confines of the bass guitar in rock music.
The Grateful Useless, shaped in San Francisco in 1965, pioneered their very own model of improvisational music, and Lesh’s taking part in was imaginative sufficient to allow them to roam freely from rock, blues and nation via sprawling jams. Even their most ardent followers acknowledged that their concert events could possibly be hit-and-miss affairs, because the band waited for inspiration. However when it did, the outcomes had been unforgettable.
Their stay performances are preserved in quite a few official recordings and on numerous bootleg tapes, however Reside/Useless (1969) and the box-set So Many Roads (1965-1995) supply examples of the band stretching out at size, with Lesh’s prolonged introduction to Darkish Star on the previous a trademark second. His eloquent, contrapuntal basslines had been as distinctive and very important to the band’s sound as Jerry Garcia’s lead guitar.
Lesh helped write a number of of the Useless’s greatest recognized songs. His most private piece is Field of Rain (from the 1970 album American Magnificence), a melancholy ode to his dying father on which he sang lead vocal, with lyrics by Robert Hunter. However he additionally scored songwriting credit on the Useless’s on-the-road odyssey Truckin’ and Cumberland Blues.
He co-wrote and sang on Unbroken Chain and Satisfaction of Cucamonga from the album From the Mars Lodge (1974), put a funk-like stamp on Passenger from Terrapin Station (1977), and was one of many masterminds behind St Stephen, an early favorite at Grateful Useless concert events.
Born in Berkeley, California, Phil was the son of Frank, an beginner musician who owned a small enterprise, and his spouse, Barbara (nee Chapman). He was typically sorted by his maternal grandmother, Jewel “Bobbie” Chapman, a music lover who saved the radio tuned to classical stations. As Phil wrote in his autobiography Looking for the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Useless (2005): “I used to be woke up to the ability of music early in life via the magic of radio broadcasts and by listening to my father play, from reminiscence, his favorite tunes on the piano.” Lesh started studying the violin, and performed with Berkeley’s Younger Folks’s Symphony Orchestra.
At 14 he switched to the trumpet, then transferred from El Cerrito highschool to Berkeley highschool to check concord. He turned thinking about free jazz and the classical avant garde and, after quick stints at San Francisco State School and the School of San Mateo, enrolled at UCLA Berkeley.
Nevertheless, he once more dropped out in favour of learning with the Italian experimental composer Luciano Berio at Mills School in Oakland (amongst his classmates was the long run star of minimalism, Steve Reich). Lesh created a number of of his personal compositions and tried some writing with Reich.
In 1965 he met Garcia, on the time higher generally known as a bluegrass banjo participant than an electrical guitarist, and who was performing along with his band the Warlocks at a pizza parlour in Menlo Park in San Francisco’s Bay Space. Lesh would recall being struck how “music with that type of directness and ease might ship an aesthetic and emotional payoff similar to that of the best operatic or symphonic works”.
The story goes that Garcia instantly knowledgeable Lesh that he was the band’s new bass participant, to which Lesh replied: “Why not?” Quickly afterwards the group modified its title to the Grateful Useless. Maybe uninhibited as a result of he had by no means beforehand performed bass, Lesh approached the instrument in the identical spirit as different Nineteen Sixties innovators corresponding to Jack Bruce of Cream, John Entwistle of the Who, and Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane.
The Useless’s vibrant profession ended with the dying of Garcia in 1995, a yr after that they had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame. However the band members had often branched out into tasks exterior the band, and continued to take action.
In 1975 Lesh had mixed with the electronics specialist Ned Lagin and numerous California-based musicians on the experimental album Seastones. In 1998 he joined his fellow Useless survivors Bob Weir and Mickey Hart, and the someday Useless keyboard participant Bruce Hornsby, within the Different Ones, who later renamed themselves the Useless.
The identical yr Lesh, who had been affected by persistent hepatitis C, had a liver transplant. Absolutely recovered, he then labored along with his personal outfit, Phil Lesh and Buddies. This had loved a quick incarnation in 1994 when it featured Garcia, however from 1999 turned a rotating group of musicians that included members of Phish, Little Feat, the Allman Brothers Band and Jefferson Airplane.
From 1999 to 2003, a model of the band known as the Phil Lesh Quintet turned its most everlasting incarnation, and so they recorded a few stay albums and the studio album There and Again Once more (2002). In 2008 the group was augmented by Weir and Hart for a live performance in assist of Barack Obama’s presidential marketing campaign.
The group additionally carried out at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and music venue opened by Lesh in San Rafael, California, in 2012, the place Lesh’s sons, Grahame and Brian, each musicians, typically performed with the home band. In 2009 Lesh and Weir had reunited in Furthur, a sextet taking part in music by or within the spirit of the Grateful Useless.
Lesh rejoined Weir, Hart and Grateful Useless drummer Invoice Kreutzmann in 2015 for 3 concert events at Soldier Discipline stadium, Chicago, billed as Fare Thee Properly: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Useless.
In 2006 Lesh had undergone surgical procedure for prostate most cancers, the illness that had killed his father. In 2015, he revealed he had had surgical procedure for bladder most cancers.
He’s survived by his spouse, Jill, with whom he shaped the Unbroken Chain Basis to assist music, training and surroundings charities, Grahame and Brian, and a grandson.
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