gdead.berkeley.edu/gdead.berkeley.edu.tar/gdead.berkeley.edu/pub/gdead/interviews/Phil-Lesh-August1999

Internet Message Format | 1999-08-09 | 9KB

From [e-mail] Thu Aug  5 16:45:01 PDT 1999
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 16:43:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: [e-mail] (Jeff Lester)
Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Denver Phil Lesh Interview

http://denver.sidewalk.com/rockthistown


On the road with a few friends
By Mark Brown, Sidewalk

The Grateful Dead has always been a band for the people, and Phil
Lesh has always held a special place in Deadheads' hearts. He never
did side projects, focused only on the band, tended to the band's
archives and always had time to talk music with anyone who wanted
to talk to him - the workingman's Dead, if you will. While bandmates
Mickey Hart and Ratdog are on the road as well this summer, the
"Phil Lesh and Friends" tour is the pleasant surprise for fans; after his
liver transplant during the winter, many feared they wouldn't see him
for a long while. Instead, he's taking to the road with String Cheese
Incident, Galactic, Gov't Mule, moe and other jam bands for a
short, strange trip.


Sidewalk: So, how you feeling?

Phil Lesh: I'm feeling great, thanks. Everything's moving smoothly, flowing
perfectly well, yes.

SW: It seems kind of ironic that the Furthur Festival was scuttled because you
might not have been well enough to make it, yet now you're the one going out
on the road.

PL: As a matter of fact, I was planning on being up to it. Some people go back
to work in six weeks. I took four months. It's not unusual at all. I just
wanted to wait and see what the best situation could be.

SW: So on the "Phil Lesh and Friends" shows, do you hand-pick the bands?

PL: It's generally what I do; I look around and listen to people I haven't
heard. So far it's been mostly kinda jam-band family members, as it were.
That's one of the reasons I'm joining the summer sessions tour. All those other
bands - Gov't Mule, Galactic, String Cheese, moe - are all part of that jam-band
subculture. It just seemed like a good fit, a good mix.

SW: The media take on the Dead's music has been "This is over." Yet you look at
the numbers these bands and festivals can pull, and it's clearly not over.

PL: I guess that's what we were all hoping - that the goodwill we'd built up
over the years and the strength of the material would allow us to elaborate on
that and interpret the material in new ways and generally continue to put out
the music. The numbers of people coming to see these shows is just frosting on
a cake, the bonus.

SW: You've nearly sold out the two nights here at Red Rocks, which is a pretty
big deal...

PL: "Yeah, I'm looking forward to that very much. Red Rocks is one of my
favorite venues on earth. In fact, it's my favorite outdoor venue, next to the
pyramids."

SW: Did you feel there wasn't a place for you in music? Was it a matter of
confidence or direction? Is that why you didn't tour for a while?

PL: For one thing, I was grateful I didn't have to tour anymore for a while,
so I could spend some time at home with my family. And then I just wanted to
make some music, and I didn't really care if I toured or not. I still don't, to
be perfectly honest with you; I can take it or leave it, as long as I can make
music occasionally with the right people and do it well."

SW: Is life easier with the breakup of the band?

PL: In some ways, yes.

SW: Is it more of a normal life, more of a real life?

PL: I always tried to keep my real life right there with me. Especially after
I had kids. My kids would come out on the road with us, so my family was there
most of the time.

SW: Are you surprised by the strong support fans have given you?

PL: What Deadheads are is a community. What they do when they support
us is support each other. They become closer together, and that's what
they're all about. We're just an excuse for them to get together, really. I
appreciate that, and I want to do everything I can to help them stay
together and grow as a community.

SW: Do you feel you're kind of competing with yourself by allowing fans
to put Dead MP3s on the Web?

PL: That's something that we're continually evolving our stance on. As far
as I know, all we're allowing to be posted is our people's audience tapes. I
don't have any control over those, and we gave up that control when we
made the decision to allow people to tape.

SW: So do you just see this as tape-trading in a different form?

PL: Yes, exactly. As long as they don't charge for it and nobody
advertises and there's no money changing hands, it's perfectly OK with
us.

SW: Where do you draw the line - broadcasts, great-sounding
soundboard tapes?

PL: MP3 is not great quality, so it doesn't bother me.

SW: Your bass playing has been compared to Paul McCartney's, where
it's part of the song and feel of the music, not just rhythm or
accompaniment.

PL: My first musical experiences were in classical music, and the bass is
very important in classical music in a melodic sense as well as harmonic
underpinning and voice-leading, those kind of technical matters. I
brought a little of that to the Grateful Dead, and, as a matter of fact, I
made a conscious decision not to be a background player. I also came out
of jazz music, and in jazz music, the bass functions in many different roles.
I tried to bring all of that sensibility into the Grateful Dead. I felt that was
one way we could make it unique. The other way was the collective improvisation
sort of thing, which eventually spawned the whole jam-band syndrome.

SW: There's always been speculation among fans that you were frustrated in the
band because of your classical training.

PL: Well, there's only so far that you can take those kinds of techniques in
rock music. I just felt that the way I was playing was pretty much sufficient.
We tried to use some related techniques in our segues and sequences and medleys
we put together, and I'd always try to use key symbolism and little motifs to
use as cues in the jams to take em in different directions. I still do that
today.

SW: Has the demise of the Grateful Dead given you a different perspective on
the music you made?

PL: I'm still performing the music at this point. I'm just performing it with
different musicians and getting a different perspective on it, which is very
interesting to me. Each musician is unique like each person is unique. When
they play material that they didn't create themselves, they tend to bring
their own perspective to it. The perspective I get from working with these
other musicians is vastly different from what I got with the Grateful Dead.
We're trying to interpret the material like it was a canon of work, like
Shakespeare or Beethoven.

SW: Are you still the keeper of the Dead vaults?

PL: Sometimes, yeah. I'm just quality control. I just make sure that ...
Dick's thing (the "Dick's Picks" live series) is pretty independent. I don't
pass judgment on what he puts out. Anything else that comes out, I'm
pretty much just quality control. I pass on the mix, I pass on the quality of
the performance.

SW: How did that fall to you?

PL: I was the one who was the most interested in preserving the quality of
what we put out. There's a demand for that material, the old concert tapes. I
just didn't wanna start putting it out haphazardly. In the Grateful Dead, the
quality of the performance was variable. So I wanted to make sure that
everything we put out was as high quality as it could be.

SW: So what's the next project?

PL: There's a box set planned for the fall.

SW: All unreleased stuff, or a career overview?

PL: It's gonna be a spectrum of stuff, some already released, some not. It's a
retrospective in a sense. We're talking about four CDs now.

SW: Have you come across anything brilliant that's just gonna make people's
jaws hit the floor when they hear it?

PL: Every note.

SW: Of course. But anything that has been dug out of hiding, rarities or
anything?

PL: I really can't comment on that right now. We're still in the middle of
looking for it.

SW: What else is coming up? Another Furthur Festival for 2000?

PL: No, we haven't really discussed anything like that. Personally, there's a
possibility I'll be touring this fall; I'm not sure really when or where, but
back East, probably. And I'm still working on my symphonic piece that involves
Grateful Dead song themes and rhythms and stuff like that.

SW: When is that due?

PL: I've given myself a deadline of June 2000, but I don't know if I'm gonna
make it or not. The main thing I have planned is my two sons are both Little
League all-stars, so that's what I'm gonna be doing next spring. And I'll be
doing shows at the Warfield from time to time.




***********************************************************
Email [e-mail] for info about
subscribing/unsubscribing from dead-heads
***********************************************************