Death of Phil Lesh: Bassist, founder of The Grateful Dead, dies at the age of 84

SAN FRANCISCO– Phil Lesh, a classically trained violinist and jazz trumpeter who found his true calling by reinventing the role of the rock bass guitar as a founding member of the iconic band The Grateful Dead, died Friday at the age of 84.

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

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founder of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. 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,” Instagram statement read in part read.

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

Although he kept a relatively low profile in public and rarely gave interviews or spoke to the public, fans and bandmates recognized Lesh as a critical member of the Grateful Dead whose thunderous lines on the six-string electric bass provided a brilliant counterpoint to the lead guitarist. Jerry Garcia’s 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 mentality and skills of a classical composer to a five-chord rock ‘n’ roll band.

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

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

“He happens to play bass, but he’s more like a horn player, doing all those arpeggios — and he has that counterpoint going on 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 age 14 and eventually took 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 a fledgling rock band called The Warlocks.

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

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

Lesh and Garcia regularly exchanged leads, often spontaneously, while the band as a whole regularly broke out long experimental, jazz-influenced jams during concerts. The result was that even well-known Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin'” or “Sugar Magnolia” rarely sounded the same two performances in a row, something that would inspire loyal fans to attend show after show.

“It’s always fluid, we figure it out pretty much right away,” Lesh said with a chuckle during a rare 2009 interview with The Associated Press. ‘You can’t set those things in stone in the rehearsal room.

Lesh was born in Berkeley and lived in Marin at the time of his death.