The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh Plays On

For in joy will you go

And in peace will you be brought along.

The mountains and the hills

will bring into song before you

And all the trees of the field clap their hands.

Isaiah 55:12

Phil Lesh recounted to an interviewer once of how as a four-year-old first hearing a symphony broadcast, he was amazed. He knew that if he wanted anything, he wanted that. 

Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, passed away last week, surrounded by family at age 84. He was in the vortex of the psychedelic counterculture, he was literally a rock star, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his focus was always the music. It was a holy thing to him.

He followed where the music led him, learning violin as a child and then trumpet. He studied music composition, played classical and jazz, and studied electronic music under Luciano Berio.  

But he found himself in his twenties in a lie that had not gelled. He was working as a mailman, and hanging out, until another young musician, Jerry Garcia, asked him to join his band. Lesh knew Garcia as a bluegrass and folk musician, a musical world which didn’t intersect his. But they both were now bit by bug of the new kind of rock music advanced by Bob Dylan and by the Beatles, which seemed wide open for experimentation and was bubbling with energy. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Unity Is a Common Goal, Often Abused)

Lesh had never played the electric bass before or rock and roll, but Garcia persuaded him quickly that he’d have no trouble picking it up. He did and in the midst of a wild and creative community and at the center of the adventure portrayed so memorably by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Lesh found the life immersed in music that he had dreamed of. His bass playing was fantastically original, somehow managing to swing like jazz, stomp like rock, and open into the depths of beauty. Beethoven had rolled over, as Chuck Berry said, and was playing in the band.

It is far too easy to construct easy dichotomies to explain the world. Great musicians defy such cliches. Duke Ellington wrote extended suites, symphonic jazz, and ballet music. Yo Yo Ma and Winton Marsalis play every sort of music; Yitzchak Perlman plays klezmer music with jazz-raised and bluegrass-trained Andy Statman; Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin played and wrote both classical and jazz compositions. Phil Lesh was such a musician, so profoundly American in reaching for a living synthesis of all that came before and that reaches out with inspiration to a future that will keep it going.

This process, embodied in the unfolding of music itself, was more than just exciting to Lesh. He associated it with the deepest pursuit as humans — the religious quest. 

Might seem strange coming from an iconic hippie and rock and roller, but, as the lyric to a song Lesh played many times goes: Sometimes you get shown the light / in the strangest of places if you look at it right. Lesh had a profound sense of the holiness of music. He spoke of that in a 1990 interview.

Music has a certain continuity to it, throughout the history of Western music, anyway. It started out as church music; and I believe, in the sense that we … one of our original sayings was “every place we play is church.” And in that sense, we feel a kind of continuity with that tradition: music is raising consciousness, as well, of course, as being entertainment. That, to me, is the core of the timeless tradition.

If you have read Tom Wolfe’s Acid Test, you know that he portrays that entire scene as the emergence of the religious core in a new form. The wildness of that scene, then, Lesh was always putting in the context of the age-old tradition of music, finding the new story, the new song through which the chaos is transformed into creativity.

Lesh portrayed that process to another interviewer in 2015:

We’re trying to tap into that eternal music that is always playing in the cosmos out there somewhere. The best thing I can do as a musician is to lose myself, to forget about myself, forget whatever it is that I am trying to do, and be all ears and hands. There is no ego, no Phil there at all at the best moments.

The connection between this kind of work — and in Hebrew, the word for “work” and “service” is the same — and the core religious ethos is the same. The known self is offered entirely to the service of that which is deeper, that which is behind it all, and only reveals itself to the one capable of such unselfish giving — when we give our very self the divine gives itself to us.

I met Lesh and the Grateful Dead as a high-schooler, and I’ve followed his music all through the years, sometimes right up close at concerts, sometimes at a distance. He risked it all each night, opening up his musical conversation to us all. Sometimes, not much resulted. Sometimes, it was earth-shaking. Always, though, it was a seeking that was intensely human, deeply faithful to the quest that the best music always embarks upon. It is so much a part of our civilization’s tradition of always seeking to reveal more and to see the fresh harmony at work in each grain of sand and blade of grass.

The kinship to seeking from our Book is great. We seek a conversation with the Book’s Author, not just a repetition of insights already learned. As well, the Hebrew Bible is not just read — it is sung. Poetry and music are part of its mix, as one can hear in any synagogue that maintains the millennia-old traditions of reading Scripture. Isaiah sings of nature itself breaking out into song; Sing to the Lord all the earth, cries the Book of Psalms. 

America has been a home for a religiosity that sings out in all things and while honoring tradition, renews itself as well. Whitman’s poetry sings of it clearly; Lincoln was not a church attender, but his religious vision was extraordinary and changed the world. Lesh clearly was a part of that. (READ MORE: Created in God’s Image: Where Human Greatness Lies)

I only found out last week of Lesh’s involvement with Jewish life. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency ran a beautiful article about how Lesh hosted annual Passover celebrations at the Marin County restaurant he and his family ran, and how he found both inspiration and fun in what they did for the Passover Seder each year.

Farewell, Phil. Our paths were intertwined for the good. The great music plays on, your voice still sings in its choir, and the mighty bass still vibrates beneath it all, with the grace of Bach counterpoint and the fire of rock and roll. The mountains are singing and the trees clap their hands.

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