Phil Lesh, founding member and longtime bassist for legendary rock outfit the Grateful Useless, died Friday. He was 84.
The information was introduced on social media, with an announcement that learn: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of the Grateful Useless, handed peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his household and full of affection. Phil introduced immense pleasure to everybody round him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. We request that you just respect the Lesh household’s privateness presently.” No reason behind demise was given.
As one of many co-founders and longest-tenured members of the Grateful Useless, Lesh was an important a part of a gaggle that grew to become synonymous with touring and stay efficiency in rock music. With their singular instrumental interaction, their trademark iconography, their robust sense of neighborhood and their affiliation with the hippie life-style, they grew to become the forefathers of the jam band motion — with a fanbase of “Deadheads” as singularly devoted as every other band of the twentieth century, enduring effectively into the brand new millennium.
Born in 1940 in Berkeley, California, Lesh grew up as a trumpet participant and appreciator of avant-garde classical and free jazz. After short-lived research at quite a lot of music faculties, he met bluegrass banjo participant Jerry Garcia in 1962 and was persuaded to affix Garcia’s new rock band, The Warlocks, as their bassist — regardless of by no means enjoying the instrument earlier than. The band, which additionally included Bob Weir as co-singer/guitarist with Garcia, Invoice Kreutzmann as drummer and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan as keyboardist, was renamed Grateful Useless in 1965, after a phrase Garcia discovered within the dictionary.
As soon as he grew to become proficient within the bass, Lesh’s enjoying model grew to become closely influenced by his musical pursuits in jazz and classical, giving his sound a melodic and improvisational high quality hardly ever heard from the four-string in rock earlier than. He got here to be thought-about one of many instrumental innovators of his period, and his enjoying grew to become as crucial to (and identifiable inside) the Grateful Useless’s sound because the group’s lead guitar.
By the tip of the ’60s, the Useless had turn into one of many main lights of the psych-rock motion popping out of San Francisco, identified for his or her light, folk-influenced jams, their sprawling, blissed-out stay exhibits, and their affinity for psychedelic medication like DMT and LSD. (“We discovered that whereas excessive we had been in a position to go very far out musically however nonetheless come again to some sort of recognizable area or tune construction,” Lesh wrote in his 2006 autobiography, Looking For the Sound. “I knew immediately that this mixture — acid and music — was the device I’d been on the lookout for.”)
Lesh was not a principal singer or songwriter within the band, however his tenor typically contributed to the group’s three-part harmonies, and he did write and sing a handful of authentic Useless songs. The perfect-remembered of these was most likely “Field of Rain,” opening monitor to their traditional 1970 album American Magnificence — co-penned with lyricist Robert Hunter about Lesh’s then-dying father — which ended up being the final tune performed on the group’s ultimate live performance with Garcia in 1995.
Whereas the group bought steadily all through the ’60s and ’70s — six of the group’s ’70s LPs reached the highest 30 of the Billboard 200, with 1970’s Workingman’s Useless and American Magnificence and 1972’s stay triple album all being licensed Platinum by the RIAA — they had been a less-regular presence on the Billboard Scorching 100, the place they charted simply 4 entries of their first decade, and none increased than the No. 64-peaking “Truckin’” in 1971. However the group’s stay status saved them an important a part of the rock cloth effectively into the ’80s, and in 1987 they scored their lone pop hit with the catchy prime 10 smash “Contact of Gray” — which together with its in style music video, that includes the band performing as skeletons, launched them to a brand new technology of followers.
Nonetheless within the late ’80s Garcia’s well being started to falter, and in 1995 he handed away, with the band deciding to disband shortly after. Following the group’s dissolution, Lesh continued enjoying with offshoot The Different Ones (with authentic member Bob Weir, longtime percussionist Mickey Hart and keyboardist Bruce Hornsby), which regularly expanded its lineup to incorporate extra former Grateful Useless members and rebranded as The Useless in 2003. As well as, Lesh began Phil Lesh and Mates in 1999, with a rotating stay and recording solid reinterpreting previous songs by the Grateful Useless and a few of their friends, and a decade later he created Furthur, one other jam band co-founded with Weir.
Regardless of remaining busy with these Grateful Useless offshoots — in addition to a handful of fiftieth anniversary stadium exhibits placed on by the band’s surviving members because the Fare Thee Properly celebration — Lesh largely shunned writing or recording any authentic songs in later years, preferring to maintain the concentrate on his stay present. “What’s the purpose?” he remarked to Billboard in 2012. “No person makes cash on recordings anymore — no less than the likes of us don’t. And the longer I’m in music the much less time I like the thought of freezing music in amber in order that it’s the identical each time you play it again. I would like it to be completely different each time, so I’m simply not into recording, notably.”
In 2017, Bass Participant journal ranked Lesh because the 57th best bassist of all time. “Extra an improvising composer than mere bassist, Lesh elevated the Grateful Useless from hippie jam band to a creative ensemble able to reaching heights of interactive ecstasy,” the journal wrote. “Balancing roots with bouncy, offbeat upper-register figures, he might spin lengthy motivic statements generally lasting over a minute, typically steering the band into daring new harmonic territory.”
Grateful Useless might be honored because the 2025 MusiCares Individuals of the 12 months. The thirty fourth annual Individuals of the 12 months profit gala might be held on the Los Angeles Conference Heart on Friday, Jan. 31, two nights earlier than the 67th annual Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Enviornment.
This story first appeared on billboard.com
