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    • ‘The legacy of music and love’
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    ‘The legacy of music and love’

    Harry Posted on

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    Phil Lesh, founding member Grateful Dead The artist, whose electric bass playing defined the psychedelic San Francisco sound, died on October 25 at the age of 84.

    The musician’s death was announced at his home official Instagramwith the following caption: “Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. Phil brought great joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love. Currently Lesh We ask that you respect the family’s privacy.”

    He is survived by his wife, Jill, and their two musician sons, Grahame and Brian.

    Carrion We have faced many health problems in recent years. In 1998, he suffered internal bleeding due to Hepatitis-C and underwent liver transplantation. He had surgery to remove his cancerous prostate in 2006, and ten years later successfully completed bladder cancer treatment.

    Like many musicians of the 60s and 70s, Lesh with his bandmate Jerry Garciastruggled with addictions to various bad habits. Although Garcia died in 1995 while being treated for heroin addiction, Lesh got clean with the fierce support of his wife and managed to live for decades.

    Lesh starred in a number of post-Grateful Dead incarnations after Garcia’s passing, including The Other Ones, Next, Phil Lesh & Friends, and The Dead.

    But he was also a frequently seen and often heard member of his home base in Marin County; where he ran and performed at the San Rafael club in California for ten years. Terrapin JunctionIt takes its name from a famous Dead tune.

    Lesh went from violin repairman to one of the most innovative rock bassists ever

    Lesh followed a rather eclectic path to rock ‘n’ roll stardom. He was born in Berkeley, California in 1940. He studied violin in his childhood and later played the trumpet. Lesh also became interested in avant-garde music and free jazz at an early age; both later influenced his unique bass guitar playing in music. Grateful Dead.

    Lesh met while in college at the University of California-Berkeley Tom Constantinewho would briefly play keyboards in one of the earliest incarnations of the Dead. He soon met the bluegrass banjo player while working as a recording engineer at a local radio station. Jerry Garcia.

    Lesh worked day jobs at the post office while maintaining his interest in music, but that quickly faded away when Garcia asked him to join his new folk-rock band, later called The Warlocks. Lesh accepted this offer even though he had never played the bass guitar. His intense interest in music and his unfamiliarity with the bass directly contributed to him becoming one of the most innovative musicians of his time.

    While many bassists are trained to hold the band’s rhythm section alongside the drummer, Lesh immediately felt that his instrument should play more of a leading role. It’s filled with bass lines, leading riffs, and lively counterpoint play from the Dead’s 1965-1995 heyday.

    He joined two other musical explorers, Cream’s Jack Bruce and Jefferson Airplane’s Jack Casady, and later Hot Tuna, in pushing the instrument to its limits; These two musical explorers redefined this formerly hidden instrument as the leading voice in their groups.

    When it came to this kind of sonic experimentation, drugs definitely came into play. The Grateful Dead was the writer’s house band Ken Kesey’s famous “Acid Tests” and sometimes the music could be taken over by psychedelics. This suited Lesh and his bandmates very well.

    More: The Grateful Dead Named MusiCares Person of the Year: How Will They Be Honored During Grammy Week?

    In his 2005 autobiography “Searching for the Voice: My Life with the Grateful DeadLesh talked about such a musical trip.

    “It was as if the music was being sung by giant dragons on the time scale of plate tectonics,” he wrote. “Each note seemed to take days to develop, each overtone sang its own song, each drumbeat created a new heaven and a new earth.”

    Lesh’s bass was the dominant audio component of the Grateful Dead’s famous Wall of Sound concert series

    Although he did not have a particularly melodious voice, Lesh was a fixture on many of the favorite songs he composed for the group;Rain Box” And “Unbreakable Chain.”

    Lesh’s basses were an integral part of Wall of Sound, one of the band’s largest and most costly experiments.

    For a brief tour in 1974, the Dead hit the road with a booming sound system consisting of hundreds of speakers that could accurately project sound up to a quarter mile; It was said to better reach the approximately 100,000 fans who came to see the band. in large outdoor venues.

    One of the Wall’s distinctive features was to have the sound from each of the four strings on Lesh’s bass guitar reflected from four different corners of the speaker system. But the installation and disassembly were so cumbersome that it was abandoned after only a few memorable months.

    After Garcia’s death, Lesh and the other members of the Grateful Dead soon realized that they were willing to continue without their musical and spiritual leader.

    This led to various incarnations of the band that still continue, which have featured fewer and fewer members from the so-called core (remaining) four. Following the brief 2015 Fare Thee Well tour, which was supposed to be the band’s true farewell to fans, Lesh gradually reduced the time he spent on the road and in the band.

    He opened Terrapin Crossroads so he could play anything close to home, and he did so by performing Grateful Dead and other contemporary music, often with his sons. The venue closed in 2021, and Lesh’s subsequent appearances as he entered his 80s were episodic at best.

    But the memory of what Lesh and his band created, from legions of Deadheads to countless live show bootlegs, clearly gave the bassist strength even in his darkest days.

    “The mind of the Grateful Dead band was essentially an engine of transformation,” he wrote at the end of “Searching for Sound.”

    “So he had no morality of his own, made no judgments, took no positions. That just opened the valves for the music to flow.”

    Harry
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