The moment could arrive anywhere, anytime, but you always knew it was coming.
Most bass players in traditional rock & roll bands provide a solid low-end foundation for whats around then.
Maybe they sing an occasional harmony or are content with a supportive, background role.
Phil Lesh performs with The Grateful Dead at Spartan Stadium on April 22, 1979 in San Jose, CaliforniaEd Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
That was never the case with Lesh.
Sometimes he sounded as if he considered his bass, not Garcias guitar, the lead one.
He rarely opened his mouth to sing, especially lead.
Phil is a trained musician who could have expressed himself on any instrument he chose.
But bass was what they needed for the band and he learned to play that.
I have the most tremendous respect for Phils inimitable bass playing.
If you take Phil out, youve just got the Garcia band, and thats a whole different thing.
As he told me, he detested rock when he first heard it in the Fifties.
I thought it was totally infantile, he said.
Three chords over and over again.
Im coming from Beethoven and Mahler.
No wonder he played trumpet and violin and focused on experimental contemporary music in his pre-Dead days.
In any other nascent rock band, disliking that very form could be a dealbreaker.
Instead, Leshs musical taste helped liberate the Dead.
Thanks to him, the Dead, almost from the beginning, could wander and soar into other pastures.
attempt to listen to it without tearing up.
One of the tragedies of the Dead is that we rarely heard more of Leshs voice after that.
A few years later, he took lead vocal duties on two very different songs onFrom the Mars Hotel.
Unbroken Chain was both beautiful and exploratory, while Pride of Cucamonga was a jaunty country shuffle.
Lesh stood alone in other ways.
(In the latter case, the band prevailed.)
But in Leshs mind, the Dead had standards and had to meet them, regularly and constantly.
Anything less undercut the Deads mission.
Of them all, few appeared to do it with as much joy and pleasure as Lesh.
The other defining aspect of a Phil & Friends show was Lesh himself.
