Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 11, Episode 1
Phil 85, Part 1
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Ben Fong-Torres, KSAN, 1975.
- Jerry Garcia, by David Gans & Blair Jackson, Conversations with the Dead, 4/28/81.
- Jerry Garcia, MTV, 6/2/83.
- Phil Lesh, by Andy Childs, ZigZag, 9/74.
- Phil Lesh, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 7/30/81.
- Phil Lesh, by Hank Harrison, 1970.
- Phil Lesh, by Gary Lambert, KPFA, 1993.
AUDIO: “Box of Rain” [American Beauty] (0:00-0:07) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: With Phil Lesh’s departure last October, we at the Deadcast weren’t prepared to say goodbye, on a few different levels, and really we’re still not. But with some months to process, we’re at the very least ready to celebrate the 85th anniversary of, in Sun Ra’s term, Phil Lesh’s arrival day.
AUDIO: “Box of Rain” [American Beauty] (0:16-0:29) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's nothing like Phil's bass playing, and it is such an integral part of Grateful Dead music. Without it, it's not Grateful Dead music.
AUDIO: “The Other One” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 3, 4/11/72] (0:00-0:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: I got into the Dead [when] I was young, and so I didn't know anything about music; I still don't know if I do. But when I first heard the Dead, it was songs like “Uncle John's Band.” Workingman’s Dead was my first full album, and then I got Skull and Roses. And hearing him on that, I was like, This is not like a normal bass line. I'd heard a lot of Jimi Hendrix, a lot of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, and was kind of used to that sort of bass playing. But I'd never heard anything like this, where this kind of lead bass is happening.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [Skull and Roses] (0:17-0:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: We had this semi-finished basement in my house when I was a kid. That's where I used to listen to my music and hang out with my friends. And I remember once I was on the main floor of the house, talking to my mom—I was 14, maybe—and my radio was on in the basement. We had this radio station in Ottawa called CHEZ 106 and, on Sundays, they had this guy who played older classic rock. It was 1985; the music's, like, 15 years old at this time. So I'm up there and I couldn't hear the music at all — I didn't even know my radio was on. But then I hear this, bum ba bum ba bum, da da dum, bum bum—and it's like, “That sounds like Phil Lesh playing ‘Not Fade Away’ on Skull and Roses.” I go downstairs, and sure enough, that's what he's playing on the radio, is Phil. And all I heard, I felt—I didn't hear it; I felt it—was Phil playing “Not Fade Away.”
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [Skull and Roses] (1:09-1:29) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We are extremely honored to welcome, from Phish, bassist Mike Gordon, whose earliest impressions were similar to David Lemieux’s.
MIKE GORDON: I remember my friend Peter Paul, who was one of the guitar players in my high school band, used to put these crankin’ car stereos in his car. He was a Dead fan, and I remember he cranked up some Dead tape in the car, with his fancy subwoofers under the seats and everything. And it's just shocking how you can hear the bass that clearly. This was in an era where, for most bands, you weren't even going to hear maybe even one note for the whole concert. And this is the other end of the spectrum.
AUDIO: “Not Fade Away” [Skull and Roses] (3:30-3:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
MIKE GORDON: But with the Dead, both listening at home and going to concerts, it just seemed very fresh. And the bass was at the center point of that, because it's very unpredictable-seeming and beautiful, like a flower blooming. It was indescribable — I still think so. I got to play with Phil [for the final time] just less than a year ago, and I still can't describe it in words very easily. It's almost like a conjuring trick of magic, to be able to imply the chords and the rhythm and all these things without playing them, by weaving in and out of them. ‘I'm going to be melodic, and I'm going to be a powerhouse of solidness’ — that's the way that I perceived it. And it doesn't even seem humanly possible.
JESSE: And from Dead and Co., Oteil Bubridge.
OTEIL BURBRIDGE: Phil had no rules, so he would do all these bass substitutions. For people that don't know music harmony, if you're playing C major, it's like happy, right? But if I play an A, then it makes it a minor. So now I can turn it dark, even though everybody's still playing the same thing. And I can just make it Dracula, or whatever — just create some other tension. And for Phil, there were no rules; he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. So it gave me permission to do a lot of things where I might get a frown in other bands — like, you know, ‘Don't do that, don't bring Dracula out.’
JESSE: We’ll have a lot more with Mike and Oteil a little deeper into today’s episode but we’re going to start today’s Philcast about as far away from the Grateful Dead as it’s possible to get, in Manchester, England.
AUDIO: “Disorder” [Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures] (0:00-0:17) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Joy Division, from their 1979 album Unknown Pleasures, produced by Martin Hannett, a co-founder of Factory Records and sonic visionary for many of the British post-punk label’s earliest acts, first inspired to pick up an electric bass by Phil Lesh while studying at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. I’ve not been able to find a direct quote from Hannett, and I don’t think he was a Dead Head exactly, but the liner notes for a compilation of his work say that Hannett—who died in 1991—modeled himself on Lesh.
AUDIO: “Disorder” [Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures] (2:58-3:09) - [Spotify]
JESSE: How is it that the bassist for an American psychedelic rock band could be the inspiration for one of the UK’s most eminent post-punk producers? That’s one of the questions we’ll be trying to answer. Here’s how Jerry Garcia described Phil Lesh to MTV in 1983.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: When I met Phil, he was a lunatic classical composer. He had an incredible musical education — the most knowledgeable guy I've ever known. An incredible, super live wire, Phil was, when I first met him. He was a real live wire. So we hit it off like sparks: bam, bam, bam.
JESSE: Please welcome back, your pal and mine, Gary Lambert. Gary was a radio conspirator with Phil in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and very kindly provided the audio for one of our core interviews today.
GARY LAMBERT: This interview in particular was for a special that David Gans and I produced for KPFA for one of their day-long Grateful Dead fundraising marathons. The theme we came up with for this particular day was Grateful Dead in the Gone World. It was really about how all sorts of countercultural currents and outsider art had affected and informed the Grateful Dead: everything from the Beats to the American transcendentalists to Lord Buckley, and, of course, a lot of avant garde jazz and classical music. And Phil was just the guy to talk to for such a purpose.
PHIL LESH [1993]: My experience in avant garde music and in classical music and in jazz — I don't know, it just seemed logical to apply some of those structural techniques, if nothing else. You can't use avant garde pitch or rhythmic techniques in rock and roll—god, there I go again. In a popular music band, it'd be self-defeating, and there wouldn't be any communication possible, really, except between the musicians, maybe. But the structural techniques and the kind of overlapping simultaneity that's characteristic of so much classical 20th century music, that sort of thing seemed to be ready to hand, and infinitely applicable to what we had, the potential that we had. So that was one of our first real flowerings I guess, was that period where we did use a lot of avant garde techniques, simultaneous tunes and overlapping and that sort of thing. It was a lot of fun.
JESSE: To Martin Hannett in the late 1960s, Phil Lesh very likely seemed like a total musician, a trained contemporary composer and sound explorer who also played bass, wrote songs, and sang for a rock band. Here’s how Jerry Garcia described Phil Lesh’s personality within the Grateful Dead, from David Gans and Blair Jackson’s 1981 interview, which you can read in Conversations with the Dead.
JERRY GARCIA [4/28/81]: He’s a tremendously brilliant guy, amazingly, and I think he has a huge role. In a way, he’s like one of the fulcrumatic personalities in the band: if Phil is happening, the band’s happening. Phil has more power individually than any of the rest of us has. He really is super-important on that level.
JESSE: This was true from a business point of view, as well. When we spoke with our dear departed correspondent Sam Cutler back in our first season, he told us this story.
SAM CUTLER [2020]: Somebody had to sign the contracts, and he had to formally be the bandleader. Jerry immediately went, “Well, I'm not the bandleader.” He didn't want to do it. Nobody wanted to do it. So then the band went off and had a meeting to decide who was going to do it. And then they came back and they said to me, “Okay, [we’ve] made up a decision” — they’d made up their mind: Phil was gonna do it. So I thought, Okay, “well, why is Phil gonna do it? Okay, fine, I don't care, don't give a fuck, really. But just out of curiosity, why is Phil gonna do it?” So they said, “Well, he's the most difficult person to persuade that it's a good idea to do a particular gig. So if you can persuade him to do the gig, we're cool. We don't give a fuck. But as long as he agrees, everything's cool.” Okay. Their unique Grateful Dead way of organizing things, organizing by default.
JESSE: The Dead had joined the union back when they were still the Warlocks and, though the story isn’t quite as simple as that telling, more often than not, Phil’s name appears on contracts as bandleader for legal reasons. But while having high and enforceable musical standards, Phil Lesh also landed squarely on the side of functioning anarchy. Well, mostly functioning. Before we dive back into Phil Lesh’s life, we’ll have Jerry Garcia offer this story, as told to Ben Fong-Torres on KSAN in 1975, describing what happened when police showed up at the Fillmore Acid Test in early 1966.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: There was some cop on the stage. I remember an amazing scene with Weir and Phil. And Weir and Phil are both tremendous anti-authoritarian guys. They hate any authority figures, and here's this cop, the lieutenant up there, trying to make an announcement over the microphone.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE OF AUTHORITY [1/8/66]: Everybody out! The dance is over, clear the room.
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: The dials are being run by some madman up in the balcony somewhere — ehh! So the cop’s voice is coming in and out, and Kesey is raving some sort of semi-patriotic slogans over the top of the cop’s rap about how we have to clear the place out.
KEN KESEY [1/8/66]: Everybody be calm now. Don’t press forward and kill any 13-year old girls…
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: Phil and Weir, they’re arm in arm around each other, they’re singing something like “The Star Spangled Banner” real loud in the cop’s ear, while some big bear of a freak is bangin’ his hand with a tambourine.
PHIL LESH & BOB WEIR [1/8/66]: [singing at the top of their lungs] O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light; what so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last–
JERRY GARCIA [1975]: And it was like just a huge Marx Brothers movie or something like that. Really, really funny.
Turning On
AUDIO: “Unbroken Chain” [From the Mars Hotel] (2:51-2:58) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Phil Lesh was born in Berkeley, California on March 15th, 1940. His musical life began around four years later, sometime in 1944, a story he was fond of telling. When the Dead traveled to London in September 1974, Andy Childs of ZigZag conducted a rare interview with Lesh, which we tapped into a bit during our “Money Money” episode, and which we return to here. Thank you so much, Andy.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: My grandmother had introduced me to music in the way of when the Philharmonic would broadcast on Sundays over the radio, or NBC Symphony, or the opera. One day when the music was on, she happened to walk out of the room and saw me sitting on the floor with my ear against the wall. My mother told me this; I don't remember. And so she said, “Well, listen, kid, come on in and dig the pretty music.” And I remember it very well the first time — it was Brahms’ First Symphony, with Bruno Water conducting the New York Philharmonic. What a flash.
AUDIO: “Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68” [Brahms, conductor Bruno Walter] (3:00-3:25)
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I think that's probably the biggest single flash I've ever had in my life, except for the first time I took LSD — which might give you an idea of how heavy it was for me. Because, after that, whether it was subconscious or not, I knew that that's what I had to do. I had to have something to do with that. It was just the heaviest thing I imagined.
AUDIO: “Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68” [Brahms, conductor Bruno Walter] (11:55-12:10)
PHIL LESH [9/74]: And so I started taking the violin, which I wasn't very good at. I got to the point where I could play the second violin parts in orchestral pieces here.
JESSE: There was lots to learn, as he explained to Gary Lambert.
PHIL LESH [1993]: Like every little classical student, you'd come up on the three B's, pretty much.
JESSE: That’d be Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms.
PHIL LESH [1993]: I started playing trumpet because I wanted to play jazz, but I also wanted to play classical music with it. When I switched from violin to trumpet, my trumpet teacher, Bob Hanson, who directs the Golden Gate Park band, still… And he turned me on to what the trumpet parts [were], essentially, from all the classical masterworks, from Bach to Mahler.
AUDIO: “Symphony No. 5” [Mahler, conducted by Boulez] (0:00-0:28)
PHIL LESH [1993]: I discovered Mahler and Bruckner through these trumpet books, and I started looking and listening to their music, listening and looking at the scores. And that was what made me decide I wanted to go into composition.
AUDIO: “Symphony No. 5” [Mahler, conducted by Boulez] (8:10-8:19)
PHIL LESH [1993]: At the time, I was studying Mahler, discovering Mahler. After that, I just devoured everything I could find. I was pretty much self- taught in that respect.
JESSE: Phil Lesh was discovering jazz in this period, too, a product of the legendary Berkeley High School jazz program. He became a fan of trumpet player Clifford Brown. This is “Cherokee.”
AUDIO: “Cherokee” [Clifford Brown, Memorial Album] (0:00-0:22) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And Lesh loved big band arranger Stan Kenton. This is the track “Maynard Ferguson,” named after the trumpet player.
AUDIO: “Maynard Ferguson” [Stan Kenton Orchestra, Stan Kenton Presents] (0:00-0:22) - [Spotify]
A Subterranean
JESSE: For more on Stan Kenton, check out our episode about the Dead and the Sufi Choir from last season. Step by step, it was jazz that first radicalized Phil. The summer after his high school graduation, though, Phil Lesh leveled up, discovering the music of Miles Davis, whose band then featured young saxophone player John Coltrane.
AUDIO: “Freddie Freeloader” [Miles Davis, Kind of Blue] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: When Coltrane was alive, I would catch him every chance I had, because back in the late ‘50s, when he was with Miles Davis, I had had the opportunity to catch that sextet with Miles Davis and Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley live in San Francisco, at one of the old jazz clubs there.
AUDIO: “So What” [Miles Davis with John Coltrane, Bootleg Series 6, 3/60] (6:09-6:31) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Miles Davis with John Coltrane at the Olympia in Paris, around the time Phil must’ve seen them, and a dozen springs before the Dead played the same venue. But Phil Lesh was hungry for all kinds of music, even if he wasn’t quite cut out for college. His first attempt was San Francisco State University, though was back home in Berkeley before the end of his first semester. The next year, he entered San Mateo College, a community college south of San Francisco with an excellent jazz program.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I started taking the trumpet, which would’ve been about age 14. That lasted for about six years. I went all the way through junior college, playing in the jazz band in junior college, and writing. That's where I started actually doing some real writing for the jazz band.
CONDUCTOR [4/5/59]: College of San Mateo Big Band. The first one we hear is a tune composed and arranged by Phil Lesh, student and first chair trumpet, who is going to New York to study next year. The title of the tune is “Finnegan’s Awake.”
AUDIO: “Finnegan’s Awake” [Phil Lesh & the College of San Mateo Big Band, 4/5/59] (0:27-0:50) - [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Finnegan's Awake,” a piece Phil Lesh wrote for the College of San Mateo Jazz Band in 1959, when he was 19, if anyone’s looking for a deep cover to learn. Some have said that forgiveness is the key to every door, others have said that it’s a library card. In Lesh’s case, it was a job as a librarian.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I mostly searched it out. And I discovered Ives when I went down to college, at College of San Mateo Junior College, actually. There was a book there by the Cowells, Henry Cowell and his wife, about Charles Ives. And I don't believe there was… there might have been a recording of the Concord Sonata available.
AUDIO: “In the Inn” [Charles Ives; John Kirkpatrick, piano, Sonata No. 2] (1:04-1:19) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: The idea of Ives’s music just caught my imagination so much — the idea of the simultaneity of it, the metaphor of consciousness. In other words, in our consciousness, we're not only thinking of one thing at any given time; we have things in the back of our mind, we have things on the sides of our mind. Not only that, our autonomic systems are running our body while we're blithely thinking about paying the rent. So it's a fascinating metaphor, and Ives’s music is the first 20th century, or first music of any kind, to really address that for me, that simultaneity of experience.
JESSE: We’ve told parts of Phil Lesh’s early story in a few other episodes, which we’ll hint at here. It was at the College of San Mateo that Phil Lesh first made the acquaintance of Bobby Petersen, a slightly older hipster who was responsible for turning Phil onto deeper levels of jazz, poetry, and cannabis. This is from David Gans’s cornerstone 1981 interview with Phil, which you can read in David’s Conversations with the Dead. Thanks, David.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: Robert Petersen. He's a poet. We spent most of our time hanging out, reading Henry Miller aloud to each other. That was really fun, man, ‘cause there was no future. I loved Ginsberg, I loved his work. Kerouac was okay, but I expected more somehow from On the Road than what I got out of it on first reading. Re-reading, I got more out of it because I finally met Neal [Cassady], who is the guy. But I loved Ginsberg. I loved “Howl” so much that I started to set it to music.
JESSE: A decade later, Bobby Petersen would begin occasionally penning lyrics for the Dead with “New Potato Caboose” on Anthem of the Sun.
AUDIO: “New Potato Caboose” [Anthem of the Sun] (1:35-1:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We delved a bunch into Bobby Petersen during our “Unbroken Chain” and “Pride of Cucamonga” episodes. It was during Lesh’s years at the College of San Mateo that he began delving into the bohemian party scene in nearby Palo Alto, which we explored at length during our episodes about Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet (part 1, part 2). This is from the audiobook to Phil Lesh’s Searching for the Sound, from Simon and Schuster.
PHIL LESH [Searching for the Sound]: I had come down for a weekend cruise and was directed, as if by an unseen hand, to a party up in the hills. It was a clear, brisk evening. People were milling about on the lawn while the house was radiating energy. Several rooms held musicians, and from inside, an alto saxophonist could be heard playing solo over the laughing voices from the front yard.
JESSE: It was sometime in late 1961 or early 1962 that Phil Lesh made his way to the Chateau in Menlo Park, the party house that was the center of the early scene where Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and others congregated.
PHIL LESH [Searching for the Sound]: Later that evening, I was introduced to the singer/guitarist. “Hey, Phil, this is Jerry. He's a musician, too.” I responded with some snotty comeback, like, “Yeah, well, I play jazz, man.” But Jerry just said something like, “Cool. You’ve got to meet Lester and Jackson” — naming local East Palo Alto guys, who played jazz in houses and at parties. Even then he was about furthering the music.
JESSE: The two became fast friends.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: At the time, he was working at a radio station over there that was one of the Pacifica — like educational TV on the radio, is what it boils down to. He was the engineer for a folk music show and, at the time, that was during my folky period. So he liked the music that I was playing, my little blues tunes and folk songs and stuff. So he engineered this hour-long program I did for that radio show. And that was kind of our first musical connection, because we were worlds apart musically.
AUDIO: “Long Black Veil” [Jerry Garcia, Before the Dead, 5/63] (2:27-2:47) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Jerry Garcia at the Tangent in May 1963 on the Before the Dead box set. The tape Phil Lesh made of Garcia doesn’t seem to survive, but the special—titled “The Long Black Veil and Other Ballads”—aired on March 19th, 1962, four days after Phil’s 22nd birthday.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: He had a little place in Berkeley, a little apartment at Berkeley, and he had a card table that had orchestra charts, orchestra scoring paper, these things with a million staves on him. He was writing this thing for four orchestras — no piano or anything. He had perfect pitch, he just pulled the notes out of his head.
JESSE: The piece was called “Foci,” and would have required 123 musicians and four conductors. Man, I’d love to see Longplay or Big Ears or another contemporary music festival resurrect this score and debut it. Lesh completed his classes at the College of San Mateo in spring 1961, entering UC Berkeley in the fall as a sophomore. It was while registering for classes that he connected with Tom Constanten, a fellow musical traveler who joined the Grateful Dead for the all-important year of 1969. There’s a bunch more about Phil Lesh and Tom Constanten’s musical connection in our episode about TC. But, despite making an important new musical comrade, UC Berkeley and Phil didn’t agree either.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I just quit school after the middle of the semester, the fall semester. I just quit Berkeley, and I didn't tell my parents for weeks. So TC and I were raving together and I was trying to compose. I actually composed a short piece which I still have the score for, for orchestra. TC was always interested in chamber music, and I was always interested in orchestra. But we did have common interests or common loves, like Mahler. So that was one point. We were like two sides of a coin — he was into Bach, more of the constructionist kind of thing. And I was more into the expressive area.
JESSE: But TC was a little bit more motivated than Phil, at least academically, and began taking classes at Mills College.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: In my late college years, which lasted till about ‘62, I was fortunate enough to get into a class at Mills College in Oakland, California—which was right across the bay from San Francisco—with Luciano Berio.
JESSE: Italian composer Luciano Berio was in his mid-30s and deeply engaged in electronic music, as well as electroacoustic composition, like his influential 1958 piece “Thema (Omaggio a Joyce),” built on James Joyce’s Ulysses.
AUDIO: “Thema (Omaggio a Joyce)” [Luciano Berio, Acousmatrix – The History of Electronic Music VII] (4:07-4:19) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: The guy’s amazing, the guy’s so amazing. Osmosis — he doesn't teach you a fuckin’ thing. He just does his thing, and you have to do your thing. But he'll play tapes for you. We went through The Rite of Spring, analyzed The Rite of Spring, that kind of thing.
AUDIO: “The Rite of Spring” [Stravinsky, conducted by Stokowski] (0:42-0:57) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: But he doesn't teach anything about composition, because he knows it can't be taught. And so, after that, it was completely open. I kept composing and stayed in that little area of music for a couple more years, but it was getting to be a dead end — both philosophically and also practically.
JESSE: Lesh and his roommate Tom Constanten decamped to TC’s native Las Vegas, with a plan to get jobs and travel with Berio to Europe for the summer. Things went awry when Phil Lesh met TC’s parents.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I got kicked out of the house.
DAVID GANS [7/30/81]: And you didn’t go to Europe?
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: I didn’t go to Europe. He did. He kept me informed of what was going on. He got to see the premiere of Berio’s opera, Passaggio, which is a masterpiece. I’ve seen a score. Everybody agrees it’s a total masterpiece. It’s never been performed in this country… well, it’s been performed once in Santa Fe.
AUDIO: “Passagio [Stazione 1]” [Berio, performed by Coro dell’Accademia filarmonica Romana, Elise Ross, Orchestra da camera Nuova Consonanza] (2:44-3:04)
JESSE: Phil missed a scandalous debut, where Berio instructed the choir to mimic the audience’s noises, a move borrowed by Ned Lagin in Munich in 1974. By the fall of ‘62, Lesh was back in Palo Alto, living at the Chateau. He continued to work on his piece for four orchestras, titled “Foci,” moving back to San Francisco, rooming again with TC, and getting a job at the post office. It’s appropriate for the next story that their house was located on Eureka Street. This is Phil speaking with Hank Harrison in 1970.
PHIL LESH [1970]: I lived with TC on Eureka Street for just damn near a year: let's say September ‘63, or October ‘63, all the way through to August ‘64 when the Beatles came to town. That was the month that everything changed: that was the month I took acid.
AUDIO: “A Hard Day’s Night” [The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night] (0:00-0:03) - [Spotify]
JESSE: We’ll let Phil narrate this from the Searching for the Sound audiobook.
PHIL LESH [Searching for the Sound]: One day after work, I was handed a foil wrap cube by one of my co-workers. “Here you go,” he whispered. “250 mikes.”
JESSE: He left half for TC.
AUDIO: “A Hard Day’s Night” [The Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night] (2:22-2:27) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [Searching for the Sound]: I don't remember much after that, just a kaleidoscope of emotional peaks. At one point I found myself outside in the front yard on a beautiful starry night, conducting with extravagant gestures Mahler's great tragic symphony, which was blasting from the house.
AUDIO: “Symphony No. 6 (finale)” [Mahler, conducted by Bernstein] (10:47-11:09)
JESSE: I suspect the story of Phil’s first dose actually took place in spring 1964, because a few other things happened around then, too. While the Beatles did play the Cow Palace in August, they also came to town, sort of, that February, when they appeared in local living rooms for three consecutive weeks.
ED SULLIVAN [2/64]: Ladies and gentlemen, here are four of the nicest young kids we’ve ever had on our stage. The Beatles!
JESSE: What’s more, Phil Lesh’s first dose helped reset him from a mild depression, and he soon ran into his old classmate Steve Reich, which set up the two for some collaborations that spring.
AUDIO: “Music For Two or More Pianos and Tape” [Steve Reich] (3:20-3:32)
JESSE: That was Reich’s “Music For Two or More Pianos and Tape,” written around this time in 1964. The composer drafted Lesh and Constanten to create music for an event organized by a group called the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which they presciently pronounced Meme Troupe.
PHIL LESH [1970]: I was doing the Mime Troupe at that time, which was as avant garde as I ever got.
JESSE: Together with Gwendolyn Watson and Jon Gibson, Steve Reich, Tom Constanten, and Phil Lesh, briefly became the San Francisco Improvisation Group. In late May, Reich organized a series of Music Now concerts. In TC’s memory, these followed their first doses. Lesh composed a piece titled “6 & 7/8 for Bernardo Moreno.”
AUDIO: “6 & ⅞ For Bernardo Moreno” [Phil Lesh] (2:29-2:55) [archive.org]
JESSE: As I discovered while researching this, Phil’s piece was broadcast on KPFA at least twice in early 1964 and early 1965.
PHIL LESH [1970]: The first time a performance ever opened up for me when I was high—I mean, I've got so high—was one of their events down there. We would do a theatrical event where we all had strictly limited roles. In other words, I played the trumpet and Steve played the piano, and Ronnie Davis climbed up and down the ladder and stuff. And then we had an improvisation on the event where you were able to do anything you wanted. It was in one of those that I got really off performing. That was a really big flash for me — I found a whole day inside of that hour. I later told Bobby Peterson: “Remember that day you lost, four years ago? I found it!”
JESSE: But after that brief moment in early 1964, Lesh took what turned out to be a year-long pause from music. Here’s how he described it to Andy Childs in 1974.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: At that point, I was out of music entirely. I had nothing to do with it, except I was a great listener. And I figured: Well, man, you know, if I can't be a musician, then I'll be a great listener, and great listeners are very important. Without them, music might not survive.
Beatdom
JESSE: There was plenty to listen to, and not just music. Poetry was an anchor of the Bay Area scene, just as much as jazz or folk, both the Beats and what came before.
PHIL LESH [1993]: Charles Olson was my man.
AUDIO: “Between Cruiser and Plato” [Charles Olson, Charles Olson Reads from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI] (0:00-0:21) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Born in 1910, Charles Olson was a modernist who connected earlier generations of poets with the Beats.
PHIL LESH [1993]: The Beat poetry—well, I guess we called it Beat poetry then—was a big influence on all of us. Not so much on what would become songwriting style or anything like that, but just on our lives. We wanted to make our lives a poem.
AUDIO: “Hop Skip and Jump” [Gary Snyder] (1:25-1:47) [YouTube]
she
takes a brown-stained salt sticky cigarette
butt.
He takes a mussel shell. He takes a clamshell. she takes
a stick.
he is tiny, with a flying run and leap. shaggy blonde, misses all the ligers. Tumbles on one foot.
JESSE: That was from “Hop Skip and Jump” by Gary Snyder, one of many local poets.
PHIL LESH [1993]: I remember just before I went down to Palo Alto to join the band—this is ‘65—there was a poetry reading in a union hall in San Francisco. Phillip Whalen, Lou Welch, Gary Snyder. Outstanding evening.
JESSE: Presented by small-press poetry publications, Synapse, Wild Dog, and Coyote’s Journal, the One Dozen Poets Reading was held May 28th, 1965 at San Francisco’s Fugazi Hall.
PHIL LESH [1993]: And I remember all the people that were later to be part of the San Francisco scene, I'd seen them. When I met them again, I'd seen them at that poetry reading. [Rock] Scully was there; I'm pretty sure Chet Helms, and Luria Castell. Yeah, she was there.
JESSE: Luria Castell would co-found the Family Dog, an integral early part of the scene, and was one of the residents of 710 Ashbury before the Dead moved in the next year.
PHIL LESH [1993]: George Hunter, those people, the Charlatans, they were there. That was one of the things that was the precursor of the Trips Festival scene. That was one of the events that everybody would show up at, because before the music actually started happening, that was about the only scene you could go to, the poetry readings.
AUDIO: “Hop Skip and Jump” [Gary Snyder] (2:14-2:30) [YouTube]
Learning to Jam
JESSE: Phil Lesh had a busy May 1965. Two days before the poetry reading on the 28th, he’d seen the Warlocks for the first time, on the 26th, and became their new bassist, a story we’ll get to momentarily, but perhaps just as pivotal was a show he saw two weeks before that, on May 14th at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.
AUDIO: “The Last Time” [The Rolling Stones, Live 1965: Music from Charlie is My Darling] (0:08-0:17) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: We’d just been to see the Rolling Stones, and The Byrds had been in town. This was ‘65, their first gigs ever.
JESSE: That was from a slightly later performance in Ireland, included for verisimilitude. The show at the Cow Palace was the Rolling Stones’ northern California debut, their third trip to the States. Two days earlier in LA, they’d recorded “Satisfaction.” Also on the bill were the Byrds, who’d released their debut single a month earlier. This is also not from the Cow Palace.
AUDIO: “Mr. Tambourine Man” [The Byrds, The Big T N T Show] (0:08-0:25) - [YouTube]
JESSE: The Stones and the Byrds shared the bill with Paul Revere and the Raiders, and local talent, the Beau Brummels and the Vejtables. You know, the Vejtables.
AUDIO: “I Still Love You” [The Vejtables, Lesser-Known Psychedelic Works 2] (0:00-0:13) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: That was the one where the kids rushed the stage. The cops were trying to keep ‘em off, and Jagger was doing his dance around the cops with his microphone cord, trippin’ them up. It was far out. [Danny] Rifkin led the entire Haight community dancing through the aisles. This was before any of the flower shit — it was really something else.
JESSE: The show got Lesh’s head going. At some point, I’m going to guess maybe even the next night, Saturday, May 15th, Lesh attended a party, I’m going to guess in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park vicinity, but again, just guessing.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Garcia, he was at the party, too. We were both stoned out of our minds. He had the band even then, and Weir came along with some grass. We went out in the car and got high. I happened to mention at some time during that evening to Garcia: “I think I’ll take up the electric bass and join a band or something.”
JESSE: We’re going to mix in some of David Gans’s 1981 interview Phil from Conversations with the Dead.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: It was a stoned moment, and I didn’t think anything more about it — this is the honest truth, I didn’t think any more about it.
JESSE: As we’ve discussed before, time often operated at strange speeds in the ‘60s.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: So, next month, or next whatever it was —
JESSE: The next week, probably, on Wednesday, May 26th.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: — we all took some acid, and went down to hear this rock and roll band at this pizza parlor in Menlo Park, California. Great scene.
JESSE: Here’s how he remembered the scene to David Gans.
PHIL LESH [7/30/81]: We came bopping in there, and it was really happening. Pigpen ate my mind with the harp, singing the blues. They wouldn’t let you dance, but I did it anyway — we were so fuckin’ stoned!
JESSE: And Jerry Garcia speaking to MTV in 1983.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: Phil and I knew each other socially. We were friends; we weren't musically involved with each other. But then I ran into him again when the Warlocks had started. And there was my old pal, Phil, see, and now he was driving a truck for the post office and a hippie. He came down to see the band the Warlocks, as they were at that time.
JESSE: That night, Phil Lesh received a job offer.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: He came down from San Francisco, down the Peninsula, and said, “Oh, man, this is amazing.” I said, “Hey, man, how would you like to play bass in the band?”
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Garcia takes me aside, [he] puts me down at a table with a beer in my hand. He says, “Listen, man, you're gonna play bass in my band.” I said, “Uh, but I, err… who, me? Well, geez. That might be possible.” Actually, it excited the shit out of me because it was something to do. The flash was: holy shit, you mean I can get paid for having fun?
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: Because I knew that, with Phil, he had so much talent, and he knew everything there was to know about music. So the structure of rock and roll was certainly no problem for him. All I had to do was tell him how the bass was tuned. And two weeks later, he played his first gig.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: [I started] two weeks before the first gig, I didn't play too good, man. It was real wooden sounding, real stiff. But we actually did play a gig two weeks afterwards.
JESSE: Traditionally, it’s recorded that Phil Lesh made his Warlocks debut on June 18th, 1965 at Frenchy’s, a go-go joint in Hayward, though some newspaper evidence suggests there was another band at Frenchy’s that night, and the Warlocks gig might’ve been a week earlier. There are no tapes, so we’ll needle-drop this dramatic moment with another pivotal ‘60s event that occurred that same week, recorded on the other side of the country two days before Phil’s first gig with the Warlocks.
AUDIO: “Like A Rolling Stone” [Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited] (0:00-0:10) - [Spotify]
PHIL LESH [9/74]: For three or four years after that, when I would tell people how long I've been playing the bass, they would say, “Amazing….” But now that it’s been almost 10 years, I don't have that excuse anymore.
JERRY GARCIA [6/2/83]: And basically, he's invented the instrument as he's gone along. He's a guy who's invented a way to play.
JESSE: Here’s something that Phil Lesh told Gary Lambert that I think actually holds the key to some of the Grateful Dead’s magic.
PHIL LESH [1993]: None of us need to be instrumental virtuosos, because the meat of our music doesn't lie in flights of technique. It lies in the interplay between us, and the tension and the space that we can create, and the many levels of that space which can occur simultaneously.
JESSE: It was less important that the Dead be able to shred than it was for them to listen to each other. Phil Lesh might be described as a virtuoso bassist by some, but that’s not because of his technique so much as how, what, and why he played.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: I rarely, rarely hear bass players play stuff that's not a pattern. And, in fact, that’s the way people think of it. They say, “Okay, you lay down the bass pattern for this one.” The bass line — sometimes they call it the bass line. But it’s still very repetitive. I like to play it more in the sense of the continuo bass from the Baroque period, or the bass line in the bass — the real bass line in classical music, Beethoven all the way up to Mahler, in a way that makes the music move to different places. Even though, in rock and roll music, it just seems to be more convenient to play the root of the chord all the time.
JESSE: But it took some time for that to manifest. When Phil Lesh joined the Warlocks, he also became one of their lead vocalists. This is from the November 1965 Emergency Crew demo, recorded just after Phil discovered the single by the New England band the Warlocks in a record store.
AUDIO: “Early Morning Rain” [Birth of the Dead] (0:07-0:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Almost immediately, Lesh began contributing to the band’s songwriting. From the very start, his songs pushed at the boundaries of conventional rock and roll. He wrote both the words and music to “Cardboard Cowboy” in 1966, which was also referred to in the band as “The Monster” because it was so musically unwieldy and hard to learn.
AUDIO: “Cardboard Cowboy” [The Grateful Dead 2017 expanded edition, 7/29/66] (1:00-1:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The Acid Tests occurred from December 1965 through early 1966, but it took slightly longer for the Dead to be able to express the psychedelic experience in their music, and part of that was Phil Lesh’s already well-expanded musical vocabulary.
AUDIO: “Feedback” [Live/Dead] (1:10-1:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s from Live/Dead. From his 1974 conversation with Andy Childs.
PHIL LESH [9/74]: Most of that stuff originally was my idea. There we were, with all these electric instruments, and it was starting to be obvious to me that it could be used for those functions, that kind of manner. The electric instruments, even though you can't control them too well, more or less end up being pretty tonal. You know, harmonic. Not even harmonic: tonal, in the sense that the sounds that come out usually tend to have the harmonic structure of tonal notes.
AUDIO: “Feedback” [Live/Dead] (1:44-2:02) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [Andy Childs, 9/74]: Weir actually was one of the masters of that stuff. He doesn't do it anymore at all. I can't imagine why, because he would just come out with this incredible stuff. And it was absolutely off the top of his head, totally. That's why it amazes me that he doesn't explore that. Maybe he just thinks that that is too complicated or whatever, which it isn't. I mean, if you've got an ear, the whole range of any kind of music is open to you. You don't have to know what the rules are. This is my theory anyway, being a college dropout.
AUDIO: “Feedback” [Live/Dead] (3:27-3:45) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Anthem
JESSE: The Dead’s debut album didn’t leave too much space for the visionary music Lesh imagined, but the album that became Anthem of the Sun gave him a chance to apply his skill set to the Dead.
PHIL LESH [1993]: I think Anthem of the Sun is a good example of what that meant to us in our music, and how we could use some of that in our music. And, in fact, that's been my primary goal in the Grateful Dead, to work that kind of flexibility into the music, so that we could ideally open up any song into that world.
AUDIO: “That’s It For the Other One” [Anthem of the Sun] (5:04-5:21) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [1993]: By the time we'd already made a record with songs on it, our first record with Dave Hassinger, we were ready to do something else. We were definitely ready to push the boundaries of the envelope as far as we could, and that's why we did Anthem of the Sun that way. The openness of the material allowed us to do that.
AUDIO: “That’s It For the Other One” [Anthem of the Sun] (5:35-5:55) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
PHIL LESH [1993]: What we wanted to do in Anthem of the Sun—at which I believe we succeeded—was to create a complete tapestry: a complete flow from beginning to end, without any artificial divisions into songs. The songs emerge from the flux; in the case of the second side, they return to it. To me, it's the most successful album we made in that period where we were trying to make albums with a unified concept. In fact, that's probably the only one that we really did that had a unified concept. And the concept wasn't literary or lyrical — it was musical.
AUDIO: “That’s It For the Other One” [Anthem of the Sun] (6:27-6:45) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It’s a topic we aspire to swan dive into entirely someday. One way to think of both Anthem of the Sun and its equally wild followup Aoxoxmoxoa is as multitrack tape compositions with numerous possible realizations.
AUDIO: “New Potato Caboose” [Anthem of the Sun] (1:35-1:47) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Style
JESSE: The Dead shifted towards more inside forms with Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, Phil found his own way into the material. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: He was always very conscious of tone. The shape of his notes was always palpable. One of the Phil moments I love best in all the Grateful Dead music — it seems so simple, but it's the little bass line in the run up to “Friend of the Devil.” It starts on a couple of acoustic guitars, and then Phil plays that [vocalizes bass melody] — and the tone on that was just pristine and beautiful, the notes so distinctive. Things like that touch me at least as profoundly as the really weird stuff he was playing.
AUDIO: “Friend of the Devil” [American Beauty] (0:09-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was during these years that Phil Lesh defined his bass style, part of the musical frontline in a way that was as unusual then as it is now. Gary Lambert.
GARY LAMBERT: It's something that he might not have come to had it not been for jazz, or had it not been for Ives, or all this music where simultaneity of expression was happening, rather than a tightly constricted accompanist-soloist role.
JESSE: Lesh’s musical role, and the prominence of the bass in the band’s mix, suggested truly that the Dead didn’t organize themselves like other bands.
GARY LAMBERT: It kind of anticipated something Ornette Coleman said years later about getting rid of the caste system in music — taking away all those assumptions about who's leading, who's following. Phil was onto that, and perhaps the fact that he really didn't have a very firm idea, or certainly a very high regard, for what a bass player was supposed to be doing in a rock band, it kind of freed him to do that.
JESSE: Oteil Burbridge of Dead & Co. has spent lots of time thinking about Phil Lesh’s bass playing.
OTEIL BURBRIDGE: Phil has this way of like… it's like mercury, you try to put your finger on it and it goes… you can't do it! It's amazing. Oh, he's so… he's just a constant puzzle, which is beautiful. His whole ethos is like, I think it's a Beethoven quote: “It’s every artist’s duty to confound expectation.” So that's perfect, that’s his bass playing perfectly.
JESSE: Unpacking Phil’s bass playing as a bassist might be the musical equivalent of reading one of Phil’s favorite authors, James Joyce.
OTEIL BURBRIDGE: He left me all these little easter eggs, because when you dig into something, then you're like: Oh, shit, look what he did there. And I’m like — you slick bastard! Thanks, Phil. Because then it gives you other ideas.
JESSE: It’s one thing for an idiosyncratic bassist to create their own musical style inside the cozy confines of their long-running musical project, but inadvertently and quite collectively the Dead fabricated a total style that other musicians might use as a framework, if not exactly a template. Mike Gordon started playing bass early in high school, and soon thereafter discovered the Grateful Dead.
MIKE GORDON: I started high school in ‘79. I had a band, and I went to my first arena concert in 1980, which was J. Geils at Boston Garden. Then the Allman Brothers in ‘81, and the Dead in ‘82. So, those are my first arena concerts. But by the middle of high school, certainly by the end of high school, I was definitely a Dead fan. Everything about Grateful Dead music, it combined a bunch of things I had liked before in new ways, and every little piece of it was a microcosm, including the bass. Eventually, I thought the bass was probably the most unique thing about it of all, Phil's contribution.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [9/18/82] (3:52-4:12)
JESSE: That was from Mike Gordon’s first Dead show, September 18, 1982 at Boston Garden, about a year before he entered the University of Vermont, where he responded to a flyer posted on a dorm wall and joined the band that became Phish.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [Phish, 12/2/83] (6:10-6:30)
JESSE: That was from Phish’s first show in December 1983. In our “Playing Dead” episodes (part 1, part 2), we heard from Mike’s bandmate Trey Anastasio about the Dead’s impact on him. Mike Gordon, too, tried to take only what he needed from Phil Lesh’s bass playing.
MIKE GORDON: At a certain point, I will say that I specifically avoided learning his bass lines because I liked it too much. And a lot of the times, there weren't patterns and lines to figure out like there are with other bass players anyway. So, a little bit with my high school band, and then early on in the first, let's say, year with Phish, there were some Grateful Dead covers I was learning. But it wasn't really a matter of taking a deep dive into the bass playing. I think it was just to… it's strange that I didn't early on, because that's how I did it with everything, including piano and guitar and bass. All the way through high school, I just heard stuff, and I would just maybe put it on my cassette recorder from the radio, then sit there at the piano, rewind every second and really go deep. So I don't know why with Phil I didn't do more of that. My only guess is at a certain point I just liked it too much, and it was gonna become too much… it was gonna rub off on me anyway, and if I was gonna keep any originality to my own playing, I would have to avoid it.
JESSE: For starters, Phil sounded different than the other bassists Mike had seen.
MIKE GORDON: At that time, 99% of rock concerts, including the Rolling Stones and everyone on down, involved a boomy, indiscernible sound for most of the instruments, especially the bass, in an arena. And all you were going to get was just a distant wallowing. Phil—and also Dan Healy and some of the others—really set themselves apart to say: We're going to find new technology. Even with Dan Healy coming up with new laws of physics, deriving new laws that had not yet been derived.
JESSE: One aspect that made Phil Lesh different from many other rock bassists is that he used a pick instead of his fingers.
MIKE GORDON: With the classic bass players who used a pick—like, at least some of the time, Chris Squire [of Yes] and Geddy Lee [of Rush], some people like that, and Tiran [Porter] from the Doobie Brothers—there are these sounds that are very aggressively trebly. But Phil took out those frequencies in order to make the pick sound organic, like an upright bass. So there's still something that happens with the attack, still something with the tone, and even the muting with the palms that happens when you use a pick, differently than when you use your fingers. And he adjusted all that so it would still not be aggressively trebly. But there's always an attack that you can discern that cuts through the other instruments.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Festival Express] (4:48-5:03)
MIKE GORDON: If you watch the Festival Express movie—where all those bands including the Grateful Dead are going across Canada on a train—they do a great set. They're playing some great songs in the middle of Canada, I forget where, and it's the classic Phil sound exactly like you would expect it, except he's not using a pick. He's using his fingers.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Festival Express] (5:04-5:18)
MIKE GORDON: And I asked him about that. I don't think he had an answer, but it wasn't just the sound of the pick that made it sound so clear: it was the space he left between the notes, and how quickly the stopping of the note happens—not just starting the note—and all these things that he probably wouldn't even be able to put into words. But it was the same sound without the pick.
AUDIO: “New Speedway Boogie” [Festival Express] (5:22-5:39)
JESSE: Every now and then, Mike got the most unusual experience of getting to play bass while Phil Lesh played guitar and got to pick up some pro tips.
MIKE GORDON: He invited me to play for his 60th birthday thing, bass on “Box of Rain.” On the original recording of “Box of Rain,” it's not him playing bass, and he wanted to play guitar. That was one time. A couple other instances, I was having trouble getting a sound—it wasn't a big bass rig, just some rented stuff—and he actually came over and helped me. Certain frequencies that I thought maybe to boost and others to cut, he did it backwards. Like, I was taking 2K all the way out, and he was like, “Well, if it were me, I’d turn that one up and turned down 4K.” He always turned down 4K, because the bass makes a clicky sound. It's just the pick makes a clicky sound.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (8:02-8:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s the August 13th, 1975 “Eyes of the World,” from One From the Vault.
MIKE GORDON: It's all this combination of… like, using a pick and making it so that the attack comes through with his EQ-ing or whatever, should be the opposite of organic. It should be aggressive, it should be heinous sounding, and edgy and trebly in an offensive way. It just is just the right amount to cut through and still sound organic like an upright bass.
JESSE: Phil Lesh was a total bassist, occupying a totality that most bassists don’t perceive.
MIKE GORDON: Everyone attributes Jaco as maybe the most influential electric bass player. And Phil liked him, maybe Jaco and James Jamerson or something.
JESSE: This is Jaco Pastorius playing “Donna Lee” from his 1976 self-titled debut.
AUDIO: “Donna Lee” [Jaco Pastorius, s/t] (0:00-0:25) - [Spotify]
MIKE GORDON: Phil liked, I don't know, Scott LaFaro and people out of jazz,. They were bringing a certain… well, Jaco was bringing a melodic sense into bass playing. But this idea that there was still, even in Jaco’s playing, a sense of: here's the chords being outlined, and now I'm going to do an embellishment pretty quickly, and then I'm going to come back to outlining the chords.
AUDIO: “Donna Lee” [Jaco Pastorius, s/t] (0:43-1:05) - [Spotify]
MIKE GORDON: And it almost seems like a nobler challenge what Phil was doing, which is: it's all one. The melody and that which is solid and supportive and defines the chords, defines the rhythm, is the same friggin’ thing. That is melodic. So that's, in my opinion, a whole different level than what Jaco was doing, and some people like that. Just to be able to say: Fuck that. This very solid bed that everyone in rock and roll depends on as the bass is now hereby fucked up and is going to be melodic, whether you like it or not.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (8:26-8:54) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And this is where we’re going to pause, but hardly end, our look into Phil Lesh’s life and music. We’ll be back next episode with a lot more Phil, more from Mike Gordon, Phil’s collaborator Ned Lagin, and look into the Eyes of Chaos and Veil of Order. Until then, focus your third eye back on the “Eyes of the World” bass solo from August 13th, 1975.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (9:10-9:40) - [Spotify] [YouTube]