Death of Phil Lesh: Bassist, founding member of The Grateful Dead, dies at age 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 age 84.

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

“Phil Lesh, bassist and founding member of The Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning. He was surrounded by his family and full of love. “Phil brought great joy to everyone around him and left behind a legacy of music and love,” the Instagram post read. the statement is partially read.

The statement did not give a specific cause of death, and attempts to reach representatives for additional details were not immediately successful. Lesh previously survived bouts with prostate cancer, bladder cancer and a liver transplant in 1998, brought on by the debilitating effects of a hepatitis C infection and years of alcohol abuse.

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Although he kept a relatively low profile in public life, rarely giving interviews or performing in public, Lesh was recognized by fans and bandmates as a critical member of the Grateful Dead, whose thunderous six-string electric bass lines provided a brilliant counterpoint to the lead guitarist. Jerry Garcia’s soaring solos became the basis of the band’s famous marathon jams.

“When Phil happens, band happens,” Garcia once said.

Drummer Mickey Hart called him the band’s intellectual, bringing the thinking and skills of a classical composer to the five-chord rock and roll band.

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

Fellow bassist Rob Wasserman once said that Lesh’s style was different from that of any other bassist he knew. According to Wasserman, while most others were content to hang in there and take the occasional solo, Lesh was good enough and confident enough to lead his fellow musicians through the melody of a song.

“He plays bass, but it’s more like a horn doing all these arpeggios and he has this counterpoint going on all the time,” he said.

Lesh began his long musical odyssey as a classically trained violinist, starting with lessons in the third grade. He began playing trumpet at age 14 and, while still a teenager, received second place in the Oakland California Symphony Orchestra.

But in 1965, he had largely put both instruments aside, driving a mail truck and working as a sound engineer for a small radio station, when Garcia hired him to play bass in a fledgling rock band called the Warlocks.

When Lesh told Garcia that he didn’t play bass, the musician asked, “Didn’t you play the violin?” When he said yes, Garcia told him, “That’s it, man.”

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

Lesh and Garcia traded parts frequently, often spontaneously, while the group as a whole often engaged in long, experimental jazz jams during concerts. As a result, even famous Grateful Dead songs like “Truckin'” or “Sugar Magnolia” were rarely performed in the same way twice in a row, inspiring loyal fans to attend concert after concert.

“Things are always changing, we just figure it out on the fly,” Loesch said, chuckling, during a rare interview with The Associated Press in 2009. “You can’t set these things in stone in the rehearsal room.

Lesh was a native of Berkeley and was living in Marin at the time of his passing.

The Grateful Dead formed in Palo Alto in 1965. The band played their last concert with the song “Deadheads” last year at Oracle Park.