gdead.berkeley.edu/gdead.berkeley.edu.tar/gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Lesh.2004

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"PHIL LESH: OPERATING PRINCIPLES" by  Dennis Cook
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            PHIL LESH: OPERATING PRINCIPLES


                  Photo by Jay Blakesberg
            Things change when Phil Lesh enters a room. There's a tangible shift
            to the atmosphere. Tall, unassuming, yet possessed of a mighty aura
            that lets you know you're in the presence of someone whose life has
            moved human consciousness a couple inches to the left. Case in
            point, the surprise appearance Lesh made at Gov't Mule's 1000th show
            in San Francisco this April. Despite the top-notch rockin' of the
            first set, an audible ooh-aah hit the audience as Phil snaked his
            way past the amps and cables, sending out invisible arms to gather
            us together. It's a not-so-quiet unity that arises from the man's
            character, an understanding that if he is present then every little
            thing is gonna be all right.
            As he struck the first booming low notes on his bass the line
            between the outside world and the one coming alive inside the
            Warfield Theatre was established. A scattershot jerky jam shook off
            the last vestiges of what the musicians brought in with them, a
            custom akin to Sumos throwing salt before a match, yoga
            practitioners taking their first centering breaths in the mountain
            pose, the drawing of a sacred circle. It's an astral flare that
            lights up your internal horizon and says, "Be present! Be here with
            us! Now!" And then we're off.

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            "It's the power of music to access these states of consciousness or
            these realms of interaction," Lesh tells us. "Music is such a
            profound art form, it doesn't seem like we're justifying playing
            music if we can't explore new realms and open new areas of
            consciousness, states of being, states of mind, for ourselves and
            for our listeners. It's a collaborative effort. We all contribute to
            the opening of these doors."
            He stresses the importance of the listeners in attendance, often
            thanking audiences for making the music with the band.
            "It's a communal ritual in a way. We sort of all agree to get
            together and transform our consciousness," says Lesh. This in an era
            of fence building and private entertainments where there are less
            and less of such shared rites. "Well, not as long as we're playing!"
            he enthuses.

                  Photo by Jay Blakesberg
            Born March 15, 1940 in Berkeley, Lesh studied trumpet and violin
            before finding his musical voice on the electric bass in the '60s.
            He studied classical composition at Mills College with Italy's
            Luciano Berio, who composed works inspired by such varied sources as
            the Bible and writer Italo Calvino as well as combining electronic
            music with the more austere musique concrete. But the most
            significant step in his musical maturation came when he joined the
            Warlocks, a San Francisco psychedelic jug band, in 1965. This group
            would soon transform into the Grateful Dead, a band that has forever
            changed the landscape of rock, complicating easy categorization,
            stretching themselves and their listeners for more than 30 years as
            they make what they all refer to as simply "Grateful Dead Music."

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            "I guess I'd have to say it's all music at the bottom line. I know
            that there's a theory of rock 'n' roll that's been promulgated over
            the years by critics really, not musicians, that states that rock
            'n' roll is incapable of expressing anything deep or profound or
            complex," states Lesh.
            "To me, that's a lot like Stravinsky saying in his lecture The
            Poetics of Music that music by it's nature is incapable of
            expressing anything at all. What he meant was his music was
            incapable of expressing anything at all. That turns out to be true
            if you listen to Stravinsky's music. It's brilliant and it's
            wonderful but there's a lot of it that's mostly surface."
            He continues, "To my mind, what we play is not so much rock or jazz
            or anything else but something that transcends all those categories
            or is perhaps is part of a larger category you might consider
            improvisational music. Since our ideal of improvisation is
            collective improvisation it's necessarily gonna be more detailed,
            more diverse, more complicated than the kind of music where it's
            just a solo with accompaniment."

                  Photo by Michael Weintrob
            Citing jazz pillar John Coltrane as one of his main personal
            artistic heroes, Lesh tells us, "The Coltrane Quartet and the long
            jams they would do in one chord was a defining factor for us because
            it was a demonstration that this could be done. There's so much room
            inside this one chord. It's only one chord and you can never ever
            get to the bottom of it. Believe me, that was a major influence on
            us."
            After the death of Jerry Garcia on August 9, 1995 from a heart
            attack in his room at a substance abuse center in Forest Hills, CA,
            the future of this music fell into question. What followed for Lesh
            and the other members of the Dead was not an end to things but a
            turning of a wheel towards the light, towards creation, with each
            member throwing themselves into new creative outlets. What was
            unclear was whether or not the surviving members of the Grateful
            Dead would ever perform together again after the dissolution of the
            short lived Other Ones, the group they formed in the immediate wake
            of Garcia's passing.
            After a period of years apart, the Other Ones regrouped in August of
            2002 and toured intermittently for much of that year. In February of
            the following year they officially changed their name to The Dead,
            an abbreviation used by fans since they had first christened
            themselves in the '60s. More than a symbolic gesture, it signaled
            the rebirth of their shared commitment to this music. This summer
            finds the band embarking on their longest tour yet since regrouping
            and Lesh is nakedly excited by the prospect.
            "It's really kind of neat because during that period we weren't
            playing together we were all playing separately. Bobby (Weir) had
            Ratdog, Mickey (Hart) had bands, I had Phil and Friends. We were all
            going out and developing the music. It was a revelation to me to
            realize that Grateful Dead material, the songbook, the body of work,
            was capable of holding up any number of interpretations," states
            Lesh.

                  Phil & Friends :: Photo by Tony Stack
            "My thing was to bring a whole bunch of different players through my
            band in the period of about a year and when I finally found the
            lineup that had the kind of chemistry I knew I'd always been looking
            for we settled in and started really opening up to some of that
            material. Bobby was doing the same thing, Mickey was doing the same
            thing and we came back together and we're better at what we do. We
            all bring more to the table than when we were playing together back
            in the day. To me it's very stimulating to play with these guys
            again and know we still have something to say to each other."
            Anyone who's had their ear to the ground in the past couple years
            has probably been struck by the vast difference in arrangements,
            tone, and pacing laid on the Dead's catalog by these various
            incarnations. At times it's hard to believe one is listening to the
            same song that they first encountered on American Beauty or any
            other slab of vinyl. Lesh comments, "The thing about music is that
            it's infinitely malleable. You can take a song that's been played a
            certain way for 20 years and play it a new way and it's almost a
            completely different song."
            "I found that Grateful Dead music, amongst other types of music, has
            that capability to be almost chameleonic. It takes on the color and
            the shape of whoever is performing it at the moment. Sometimes it
            works, sometimes it doesn't. It's fun to take these songs and do
            them a different way. For instance, in our band (Phil and Friends)
            when we did 'New Speedway Boogie' I straightened it out so instead
            of having it be a shuffle like 'Truckin╞' I made a rock song out of
            it. It gives it a whole different flavor. It's almost like a whole
            different song but it's not."

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            "Those interpretations, those versions are all latent in the song,"
            Phil continues. "The song is just a framework, a skeleton. It's up
            to us to flesh it out whichever we can. To me, the operative
            principle is the kind of variety we can bring to it. Not so much how
            can we do it the way we've always done it and do that well, but how
            can we do it in a new way and do that really well."
            In addition to Lesh, all of the other members of The Dead, save for
            Jimmy Herring, joined Warren Haynes for a long second set at the
            Mule concert in San Francisco. Fresh from rehearsals for their
            summer outing, they crackled with switched-on fervor. Phil, in
            particular, bounced with visible pleasure as they played with a
            snarling, punkish intensity that slam danced with chaos more than
            once. No aging hippie band this but something quite vital and a
            reminder that even if we don't think about it all the time we would
            miss this music if it weren't being constantly cared for by these
            men. Having them simply appear, as if by magic, on this stage is
            like their gift for sliding into treasured songs in the most
            unexpected ways.

                  Photo by Michael Weintrob
            "That's the most fun part, especially when we sneak in through the
            back door or through a side door or just parachute in," states Lesh.
            "For instance, we'll be playing along some song, any song, and we'll
            figure out a way to get to the groove of the next song but without
            going into the key of the next song. It's funny how key dependent or
            pitch dependent the recognition of these songs is. We can be
            grooving along on say the groove to 'China Cat' in a different key
            and no one will notice. As soon as we change the key, everyone goes
            'ahhhh' (the collective gasp familiar to any Dead aficionado)."
            As anyone who's spent time with live recordings by this band knows,
            there are great rewards for paying close attention to these subtle
            shifts.
            "That commitment to the listening experience pays off. Really what
            it is, and I talk about this a lot in my book (Lesh's upcoming
            autobiography), is the group mind. It's something that's bigger than
            all of us put together," adds Lesh. "The sum is greater than the
            whole of the parts? Well, the band is greater than the sum of the
            six musicians or seven musicians that comprise it and the musical
            experience is greater than the sum of all the consciousnesses of the
            band and the audience that make it happen. That's why it's a little
            bit like church."

                  "Oversoul" by Alex Grey
            This comment sparks off a discussion of this writer's long held
            belief that the Grateful Dead are part the continuum of American
            Romantic thinkers that starts with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
            Waldo Emerson, who came up with the notion of the Over-Soul, an
            all-encompassing spiritual bond that exists between everything on
            earth and the heavens above.
            Phil readily replies, "The music is given us by the Over-Soul. To
            me, it's always playing out there and we just have to open the door
            and open the valve and let it come down. That's what happens when we
            close the circuit with the audience."
            So, what about the parts that make up the sum of this particular
            whole? He begins discussing his guitarists in both Phil and Friends
            and the Dead, Warren Haynes and Jimmy Herring.

                  Jimmy Herring in The Dead
                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            "Here's two guys who didn't know from Grateful Dead. When I started
            working with Jimmy he'd say, 'I never heard this song before. It's
            great!' These guys are just musicians, accomplished musicians.
            Again, it speaks to the versatility, the depth of the body of work,
            that these guys who are just regular musicians can come in and grasp
            what it is that's needed to interpret these songs. And understand
            that we can do 'Stella Blue' Warren's way. Warren sings 'Stella
            Blue' beautifully but it's not Jerry."
            "Jimmy is really kind of a poet. One little note can carry a whole
            lot of weight and meaning," states Lesh. He laughs when I tell him I
            literally bowed down before Herring the first time I saw him with
            the Aquarium Rescue Unit. There's a kind of epic power to both
            Herring and Warren Haynes that syncs up nicely with the Homeric vibe
            inherent in Lesh's music.
            About Jeff Chimenti, who will be the only keyboard player in The
            Dead this year with Rob Barraco leaving to join Chris Robinson and
            New Earth Mud, Lesh comments, "It's really neat to work with Jeff.
            He's got this demented mind. He sticks these twisted ideas in the
            middle of the jams and suddenly we're off in this totally alien
            space."

                  Jeff Chimenti in The Frog Brigade
            I relate that to the first time I saw Chimenti perform with Les
            Claypool's Frog Brigade and he was wearing a Mad Hatter's top hat.
            Phil responds, "He sounds like he's wearing that hat no matter if
            it╞' on his head or not. That's really a delight. He can just
            interject that weirdness at any moment. The neat thing about him is
            you never know when it's going to happen. We can just be blithely
            playing along and all of he's going 'hnee hnee hnee.' Ooh, what's
            that? Let's go there! And everybody jumps on that. That's a very
            good way to look at the process by which we find our way into these
            new realms and find our way to these islands of order in the sea of
            musical chaos."
            About the summer tour, Phil says, "I'm already feeling that it's
            going to be meaningful for us musically." They are keeping openers,
            save for a string of solo acoustic sets from Haynes, to a minimum.
            They need all the playtime they can get. "It's a real drag to run up
            against a curfew when you're in full flight," says Lesh.
            As for what material we'll be hearing, the possibilities are wide
            open.

                  Photo by Jay Blakesberg
            "I want to play it all. In Phil and Friends we brought back a lot of
            songs that had been dropped from the Grateful Dead repertoire like
            'Viola Lee (Blues).' We never played that much at all after 1972. I
            want to play it all and I want to continue to create new stuff to
            play."
            When asked if he ever has trouble remembering all these hundreds of
            songs, he comments, "No, we have a book. We got 'em in a book. Or
            there's always Deadbase. In some cases, some of the guys in my band
            have a better handle what the Grateful Dead used to do than I do.
            They remember more of the details than I can. That's always handy."
            Is it ever hard to muster up the right parts for each number at a
            moment's notice?
            "That's the name of the game really. If you don't have that
            tremendous backlog--that's not the right word... If you don't have
            such a large book then you end up repeating yourself too often. And
            that's something early on that the Grateful Dead decided--we were
            going to do our darnedest not to repeat ourselves."
            For a long time Lesh has endeavored to tell a story or weave a fable
            in his set list construction, a tradition that will continue this
            summer and especially in the future with his own band.
            "Sometimes it's more subtle than others. Sometimes the sequence of
            the lyrics will tell a story, sometimes it's the music that tells a
            story, or a slightly different story than the lyrics do but the
            whole is what the real story is," explains Lesh. "There's a concept
            in baroque music called tonal allegory which describes a downward
            journey, keys that have sharps in them to keys that have flats in
            them AND an upward journey from keys that have flats in them to keys
            that have sharps in them. I like to use this principle in set lists
            also so that the keys of the songs will tell a story that's not
            perhaps as obvious as the one told in the lyrics. Sometimes they
            take a different path but the totality of the impression is what
            happens, that's what we're looking for."

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            For the untrained ear that most of us bring to the experience, we
            can sense they've made that trip without really knowing how we got
            where we find ourselves standing. Sometimes it's the mood that
            lingers more than any concrete thought.
            "In a film, part of the story is told by the camera. Not even so
            much the angles used but the way the light is represented, whether
            it is gloomy or dark, the kind of filters they use or the colors you
            see on the screen," adds Lesh.
            He stands as a major figure for the new generation of jam bands,
            spiritual descendents of something he helped start. When I suggest
            that elder statesman isn't the right word for him he offers up
            "Godfather" with all the Coppola-like weight of that word ringing
            off his tongue.
            "This kind of improvisation, the way it's developed in the last 25
            years, it sort of makes musicians an offer they can't refuse because
            it's really a lot of fun to take these songs and open them up and go
            somewhere in a collective spirit," Lesh comments. "It's really
            wonderful that the whole spirit of that has been grasped and picked
            up on and expanded by these younger bands. I just say more power to
            them. Keep on rockin'!"

                  The Dead at Bonnaroo 2003 :: Photo by Tony Stack
            The return of the Dead coincides with a live concert scene that's
            been rejuvenated by this new generation of musicians who embrace
            this style of playing. Phil says, "When you contrast it to what's
            available on record and what's on MTV and all that it's almost like
            they're different worlds." This loose network of acts is also
            quietly blossoming without the help of traditional channels like
            radio, television, or big record companies.
            "That's also to be commended highly. I'm very pleased about that.
            Frankly, I think record companies, the record industry, and record
            stores are over. Radio is over, too. It's been trivialized like
            everything else."
            Like many, he laments the loss of freeform commercial radio like the
            Bay Area's KSAN in the '70s. He mentions names like Larry Miller and
            Voco and reminisces, "I literally remember sitting for hours
            listening, just sitting in my living room listening to the radio,
            because there was one great thing after another."

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            While we have Phil Lesh's ear it seemed wise to have him help dispel
            or confirm a few long standing rumors. Let's start with the widely
            propagated story that the Grateful Dead plan to open their own
            performance venue in San Francisco.
            "Off and on, there have been plans made to do that sort of thing. It
            keeps coming up and ultimately we always decide we don't want to be
            in that business," Phil tells us. "We'd have to be in the business
            of promoting concerts. We couldn't play there ourselves all the time
            so we would have to book other acts and we just don't want to be in
            that business. It takes away energy from other stuff."
            How about the symphonic rendition of Dead tunes you were reportedly
            working on a few years ago?
            "I decided not to do the symphonic version of Grateful Dead (music)
            for many reasons. I was looking for closure. This was right after
            Jerry died and I was looking for closure with that music so I could
            go on and do something else. Turns out, the music won't let me have
            closure. It wants me to keep playing (it). It wants to be
            reinterpreted. The music is like a living thing, it's a living
            organism and in some mysterious way it's only alive when we're
            playing it, digging into it and expanding it and playing it in new
            ways. And it wants to live like any other living thing. I just
            realized there wasn't going to be any closure. I was gonna keep
            playing this music, I was going to keep reinterpreting it and there
            was no way in hell I was going to freeze it, to petrify it in
amber."
            However, he does want to do some symphonic writing eventually.
            "Might start doing something for dance," adds Lesh. "I do have some
            music that wants to come out in this manner."

                  In The Vault :: Photo by SuperDee
            And finally, what about putting The Vault (the G.D.'s archive of
            live and studio recordings) on the Internet?
            "I want to do it real bad. I want it all to be out there so
            everybody can just have it. If you want all the 'Dark Stars' ever
            played they'll be available online. That's our plan and our goal."
            Returning to more philosophical terrain, in a highly political
            election year, the subject of one's influence as a counter-culture
            icon comes up. Are music and politics good bedfellows?
            "That's a good question but I'm not sure they're really compatible,"
            Lesh states. "The Grateful Dead have never endorsed a candidate or
            performed for a candidate. Frankly, the use of music in political
            campaigns is like an advertising jingle. It cheapens it."

                  Mickey Hart
            He continues, "Personal influence may be one thing but I don't feel
            music belongs (in this realm). As I said, it's just like
            advertising, which to me trivializes. Music is sacred. It really is.
            We used to say that any place we play is a church and we didn't say
            that lightly. What we're about is not entertainment or advertising.
            Mickey used to say we're in the transportation business, we move
            minds."
            However, both Hart and Lesh made an exception recently when they
            performed at a John Kerry fundraiser. Mayhap our current President
            inspires all of us, even those dedicated to the separation of art
            and state, to make allowances in order to shift things in a more
            positive direction.
            Besides the musical ones already mentioned, Lesh has been influenced
            by a diverse array of artists including sculpture Umberto Boccioni
            and painters Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock. He also finds a
            particular resonance in poetry, citing William Blake, Allen
            Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and Walt Whitman as
            touchstones. He says, "It's all food, food for the soul, and the
            soul takes it and transmutes it in its mysterious ways."

                  Photo by Susan J. Weiand
            Poetry makes particular sense in regards to his music because it too
            requires a leap between stanzas by the audience. The listener, in
            this case, must make an act of faith to truly participate in the
            becoming unfolding around them. Without that existential jump across
            the borderline from the ordinary to the extraordinary the music
            doesn't fully breathe.
            "It's a collaborative effort: we need good listeners just like we
            need good musicians. Sometimes it's just a matter of openness, a
            willingness to take a little trip," Lesh explains.
            "It's like when you open a book for the first time, you don't know
            where the story is going to take you. Why should you expect that
            from music? Why should you expect music to take you to the same
            place you've always been? Maybe it's because people don't listen to
            music for itself anymore. It's always background as they're doing
            something else. The radio's playing or you got your stereo going as
            you're cooking dinner or whatever. It seems like music today is kind
            of trivialized by the process of how it's disseminated. So, when you
            have a group of people together in a concert hall who are putting
            themselves into the music it makes all the difference in the world
            to the depth and the weight of what's going on."
            For better than 30 years, Phil Lesh has been making that difference,
            adding the weight AND the uplifting joy to literally millions of
            lives. But when he began doing this in the '60s there was no inkling
            that his life would run the way that it has.

                  Photo by Jay Blakesberg
            "I don't think any of us thought we'd still be doing this in five
            years to be honest with you," explains Phil. "Just because of the
            nature of the music business at that time. We saw bands crashing and
            burning after six months. But the one thing we knew from the very
            beginning, almost from the first rehearsal, was that we had the
            chemistry and it could be art. It wouldn't be just silly pop songs.
            It could be art in the sense that Coltrane's art, that Miles Davis
            is art. Or like a Japanese painter painting on silk, where you can't
            go back over it, is art. As ephemeral as it can be we knew we were
            onto something really important. But, of course, nobody knew how
            long it was going to last."
            The truth of their music, the truth of this man's character, has
            played out rather admirably in the way it's been woven into the
            fabric of so many lives.
            "I think it's wonderful that it has. And that still today when my
            band goes out or when Ratdog goes or The Dead goes out we see four
            generations of people in the audience. It's like nothing else."
            Words: Dennis Cook
            JamBase | Oakland