“Phil brought immense joy to everyone around him and leaves behind a legacy of music and love,” according to a statement released upon his passing.
The Grateful Dead’s founding member and veteran bassist, Phil Lesh, passed away on Friday. He was eighty-four.
Phil Lesh, the bassist and founding member of the Grateful Dead, passed away peacefully this morning, according to a statement posted on social media to share the news. His family was all around him, and he exuded affection. Phil left a legacy of love and music, and he made everyone around him incredibly happy. At this time, we ask that you respect the privacy of the Lesh family. The reason of death was not stated.
Lesh, one of the Grateful Dead’s co-founders and longest-tenured members, was a vital component of a band that came to represent rock music’s touring and live performances. They became the pioneers of the jam band movement with their unique instrumental interplay, iconic imagery, strong sense of community, and association with the hippie lifestyle. Their fan base of “Deadheads” was as devoted as any other band of the 20th century and continued to be so well into the new millennium.
Lesh, who was born in Berkeley, California, in 1940, was raised playing the trumpet and enjoying free jazz and avant-garde classical music. Following brief stints at several music institutions, he met bluegrass banjo player Jerry Garcia in 1962 and was convinced to become the bassist for Garcia’s new rock group, The Warlocks, even though he had never played the instrument previously. After Garcia discovered a term in a dictionary, the band—which also featured Bob Weir as co-singer/guitarist, Bill Kreutzmann as drummer, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan as keyboardist—was christened the Grateful Dead in 1965.
After mastering the bass, Lesh’s passion for jazz and classical music greatly impacted his playing, which gave his sound a lyrical and improvisational edge that was uncommon for the four-string in rock. His playing became as essential to (and recognizable within) the Grateful Dead’s sound as the lead guitar, and he became regarded as one of the instrumental pioneers of his time.
Known for their expansive, blissed-out live performances, their love of psychedelic drugs like DMT and LSD, and their soft, folk-influenced jams, the Dead were one of the mainstays of the psych-rock genre emerging from San Francisco at the end of the 1960s. Lesh noted in his 2006 autobiography, Searching For the Sound, “We discovered that while high we were able to go very far out musically but still come back to some kind of recognizable space or song structure.” “I realized right away that this combination of music and acid was the instrument I had been seeking.”
Although Lesh was not the band’s lead singer or lyricist, he did write and perform a few original Dead tunes, and his tenor frequently helped the three-part harmonies the group used. Of those, “Box of Rain,” the lead single from their iconic 1970 album American Beauty, which was co-written with poet Robert Hunter about Lesh’s father who was dying at the time, is arguably the most memorable. It was also the last song performed at the group’s last performance with Garcia in 1995.
They were a less frequent presence on the Billboard Hot 100, where they charted just four entries in their first decade, none higher than the No. 64-peaking “Truckin’” in 1971, despite the fact that the group sold steadily throughout the 1960s and 1970s—six of their LPs from the 1970s reached the top 30 of the Billboard 200, with 1970’s Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and 1972’s live triple album all being certified Platinum by the RIAA. However, the band’s live reputation kept them a vital part of the rock fabric well into the 1980s. In 1987, they scored their only pop hit, the catchy top 10 smash “Touch of Grey,” which attracted a new generation of fans thanks to its well-received music video, which featured the band dressed as skeletons.
Garcia’s health started to deteriorate in the late 1980s, though, and he passed suddenly in 1995. The band decided to break up soon after. Lesh continued to perform with the band’s offshoot, The Other Ones, which was formed with original member Bob Weir, longtime percussionist Mickey Hart, and keyboardist Bruce Hornsby. The band progressively added more former Grateful Dead members to its lineup before changing its name to The Dead in 2003. Ten years later, Lesh formed Furthur, another jam band he co-founded with Weir, and in 1999, he formed Phil Lesh and Friends, a band that included a revolving live and recording cast reinterpreting classic songs by the Grateful Dead and some of its contemporaries.
Lesh mostly avoided writing or recording any original songs in later years, preferring to keep the focus on his live show, even though he remained busy with these Grateful Dead offshoots and a few 50th anniversary stadium shows hosted by the band’s surviving members as part of the Fare Thee Well celebration. He said, “What’s the point?” to Billboard in 2012. “Recordings are no longer profitable for anyone, at least not for people like us. Additionally, the more time I spend in the music industry, the less I enjoy the concept of preserving music in amber so that it remains consistent each time it is played back. I’m simply not like recording, specifically, since I want it to be unique each time.
Lesh was listed as the 57th greatest bassist of all time by Bass Player magazine in 2017. Lesh transformed the Grateful Dead from a hippy jam band to an artistic group that could achieve levels of interactive bliss, according to the magazine. He was more of an improvising composer than a bassist. “He could spin long motivating statements, sometimes lasting over a minute, while balancing roots with bouncy, offbeat upper-register figures, frequently leading the band into daring new harmonic territory.”
The 2025 MusiCares Persons of the Year will be Grateful Dead. Two nights prior to the 67th annual Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena, on Friday, January 31, the 34th annual Persons of the Year charity gala will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
