Grateful Dead founding member and influential bassist Phil Lesh has died aged 84

LOS ANGELES – Phil Lesh, a classically trained jazz violinist and trumpeter who found his true calling reinventing the role of the rock bass guitar as founding member of the Grateful Dead, died on Friday at the age of 84.

Lesh’s death was announced on his Instagram account. Lesh was the oldest and one of the longest-serving members of the band that came to define the acid rock sound emanating from San Francisco in the 1960s.

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought immense joy to all those around him and left behind a legacy of music and love.” statement on Instagram read in part.

The statement did not cite a specific cause of death and attempts to reach representatives for additional details were not immediately successful. Lesh had previously survived bouts of prostate cancer, bladder cancer and a 1998 liver transplant, necessitated by the debilitating effects of a hepatitis C infection and years of heavy drinking.

Lesh’s death comes two days after MusiCares named the Grateful Dead Person of the Year. MusiCares, which helps music professionals in need of financial or other assistance, cited Lesh’s Unbroken Chain Foundation among other philanthropic initiatives. The dead will be honored in January at a benefit gala before the The Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Although he kept a relatively low public profile, rarely giving interviews or speaking to the public, fans and fellow band members recognized Lesh as an essential member of the Grateful Dead whose thundering lyrics on the six-string electric bass provided a brilliant counterpoint for lead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s he belted out solos and anchored the band’s famous marathon jams.

“When Phil happens, the band happens,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called him the intellectual of the group who brought the mindset and skills of a classical songwriter to a five-chord rock ‘n’ roll band.

Lesh credited Garcia with teaching him to play bass in the unorthodox lead guitar style he would become famous for, mixing thunderous arpeggios with bits of spontaneously composed orchestral passages.

Fellow bassist Rob Wasserman once said that Lesh’s style set him apart from all the other bassists he knew. While most others were content to keep time and take the occasional solo, Wasserman said Lesh was good enough and confident enough to lead his fellow musicians through the melody of a song.

“He happens to play bass, but he’s more like a horn player, doing all those arpeggios — and he’s got that counterpoint all the time,” he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, beginning with lessons in the third grade. He took up the trumpet at 14, eventually earning second chair in the Oakland Symphony Orchestra in California as a teenager.

But he had largely put both instruments aside and was driving a mail truck and working as a sound engineer for a small radio station in 1965 when Garcia recruited him to play bass in an aging rock band called The Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia he didn’t play bass, the musician asked, “You don’t play violin?” When he said yes, Garcia told him, “There you go, man.”

Armed with an inexpensive four-string instrument his girlfriend bought him, Lesh sat down for a seven-hour lesson with Garcia, following the latter’s advice to tune his instrument’s strings an octave lower than the bottom four strings from Garcia’s guitar. Then Garcia let him loose, allowing Lesh to develop the spontaneous style of playing he would embrace for the rest of his life.

Lesh and Garcia would often trade cues, often spontaneously, while the band as a whole would frequently make long experimental, jazz-influenced songs during concerts. The result was that even well-known Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin'” or “Sugar Magnolia” rarely played the same two shows in a row, which would inspire loyal fans to attend show after show.

“It’s always fluid, we figure it out as we go,” Lesh said with a chuckle during a rare 2009 interview with The Associated Press. “You can’t set that stuff in stone in the rehearsal room.”

Phillip Chapman Lesh was born on March 15, 1940, in Berkeley, California, the only child of Frank Lesh, an office equipment repairman, and his wife, Barbara.

He would say in later years that his love of music came from listening to the New York Philharmonic broadcasts on his grandmother’s radio. One of his earliest memories was hearing the great German composer Bruno Walter lead that orchestra through Brahms’s First Symphony.

The musical influences he often cited were not rock musicians, but composers such as Bach and Edgard Varèse, as well as jazz greats such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis.

By the time he arrived at the College of San Mateo, Lesh had gravitated from classical music to cool jazz, eventually becoming the first trumpet player in the school’s big band and the composer of several orchestral pieces performed by the group.

But he put the trumpet aside after college, concluding that he didn’t have the lung power to become an elite player.

Shortly after taking up bass, the Wizards renamed themselves the Grateful Dead, and Lesh began captivating audiences with his dexterity. Crowds gathered in what became known as the “Phil Zone”, right in front of his stage position.

Although never a prolific songwriter, Lesh also composed music for, and sometimes performed on, some of the band’s best-loved songs. These included the country rocker “Pride of Cucamonga,” the jazz-influenced “Unbroken Chain,” and the ethereally beautiful “Box of Rain.”

Lesh composed the latter on guitar as a gift for his dying father, and recalled that Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, upon hearing the instrumental recording, approached him the next day with a sheet of lyrics. On that sheet, he said, were “some of the most moving and heartfelt lyrics I’ve ever had the good fortune to sing.”

The band often closed their concerts with the song.

After the group disbanded after Garcia’s death in 1995, Lesh often omitted to join the other surviving members when they got together to perform.

He did attend a Grateful Dead tour in 2009 and again in 2015 for a couple of “Fare Thee Well” concerts marking both the band’s 50th anniversary and what Lesh said would be his last time when he will sing with the others.

However, he continued to perform frequently with a rotating cast of musicians he called Phil Lesh and Friends.

In later years, he performed those shows at Terrapin Crossroads, a restaurant and nightclub he opened near his Northern California home in 2012, which was named after the Grateful Dead song and album “Terrapin Station.”

Lesh is survived by his wife Jill and sons Brian and Grahame.

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John Rogers, the lead writer for this obituary, retired from The Associated Press in 2021.