What would Tom Sawyer have been without Huckleberry Finn? What would Batman have been without Robin? Or Thelma without Louise? Someone can be great on his or her own, but sometimes, in a providential stroke of cosmic fortune, someone else comes along who raises that person from simply “great” to truly transcendent. Such was the case with guitarist Jerry Garcia and bassist Phil Lesh. Just as basketball fans would never have had the all-time great Chicago Bulls teams of the ’90s without Michael Jordan’s wingmate, Scottie Pippen, it is very likely that we would never have had the Grateful Dead if not for Lesh and his fortuitous encounter with Garcia.
Phil Lesh seemed destined for musical distinction from birth. The only question would be in which musical genre he’d make his mark. Born in Berkeley, California, on March 15, 1940, Lesh was surrounded by music from an early age. His father was an amateur musician who would often play the piano for Phil at home. And his grandmother, while not a musician herself, was no less of an important influence. Her love of music, and especially of classical music, seeped into her grandson’s soul and never left. Lesh’s first musical memories, he later recalled, were of a Brahms symphony that his grandmother had tuned in to on the radio. When it came time for young Phil to start learning an instrument, his father hoped it would be the piano. But, in a prelude to his going-his-own-way musical tendencies, Lesh chose the violin. Later in his adolescence, when Lesh became interested in jazz, and in John Coltrane in particular, he took up the trumpet. In his college years, he’d undergo yet another shift, dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, to study with the avant-garde composer Luciano Berio. But it wasn’t until 1965 that his musical trajectory would be established for good.
One day that year, Lesh happened to walk into a San Francisco Bay Area pizza shop where a young musician named Jerome Garcia was playing the bluegrass banjo. Hearing this novel form of music had a transformative effect on Lesh. As he later wrote in his autobiography, he was astonished at how “music with that kind of directness and simplicity could deliver an aesthetic and emotional payoff comparable to that of the greatest operative or symphonic works.”
Lesh and this compelling young banjo player got to talking. He told Lesh he was in a band called the Warlocks and that they were looking for a bass player. When Lesh told him about his own musical background, the banjo player asked him to be their bassist. Lesh agreed despite never having played bass before. With their ensemble now complete, only one thing remained: the matter of their name. After realizing, for various reasons, that they could no longer go by “the Warlocks,” Garcia, as Lesh later recounted, was flipping through an old copy of the Britannica World Language Dictionary and stumbled upon an arresting entry about “the soul of a dead person, or his angel, showing gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged their burial.” Intrigued, Garcia turned to Lesh and said, “Hey, man, how about ‘the Grateful Dead’?” And just like that, one of the most popular bands in rock ‘n’ roll history was born.
Garcia was equally as lucky to have met Lesh as Lesh was to have met Garcia. The newly made Berkeley-born bassist harmonized with Garcia’s electric guitar as well as peanut butter goes with jelly. Lesh’s innovative, experimental style blended naturally with his fellow bandmates’ eclectic musical tastes, helping lend the Grateful Dead their unique sound. Lesh would soon become as accomplished a songwriter as he was a musician, writing and co-writing some of the Dead’s greatest hits, such as “Box of Rain,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Unbroken Chain,” and the fan-favorite “St. Stephen.” Lesh also became an underrated vocalist despite never having trained formally as one. But after a vocal cord injury in 1976, he stopped singing with the band for almost a decade, returning only in a limited capacity and with a reduced range in 1985.
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Although the Grateful Dead only had one top-40 single, they amassed arguably the largest fan following of any American rock band of their era, thanks in part to their liberal tape-sharing policies, as well as how seamlessly they fit into, and played off of, 1960s counterculture.
The Grateful Dead toured and recorded together for a full 30 years, breaking up only due to Garcia’s death in 1995. Lesh and his fellow remaining bandmates then went their separate ways, though occasionally reuniting to perform together. In 2015, the 50th anniversary of the band’s formation, they announced they would tour together one last time. During Lesh’s final performance with his fellow surviving original Grateful Dead bandmates, at a concert titled “Fare Thee Well” in Chicago, Lesh told the audience and all Deadheads throughout the world: “I leave you with this — be kind. Be kind.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.