Phil Lesh 1940-2024
Phil Lesh wasn’t anything like the person I’d been expecting to meet when I turned up to interview him one Wednesday afternoon in the spring of 1970 at an apartment in Bayswater. Lesh, who died last week aged 84, was acting as the advance guard for the Grateful Dead, whose other members were due to fly into London the next day. The following Sunday they would make their British debut at a rock festival on a piece of Staffordshire farmland. They were bringing their Haight-Ashbury psychedelic legend to Newcastle-under-Lyme on the heels of the UK release of Live/Dead, including its epic 23-minute “Dark Star”, recorded a year earlier at the Fillmore in their native San Francisco.
Far from conforming to the acid-head stereotype, Lesh was alert, bright-eyed and responsive to everything . He was even happy to agree with my somewhat presumptuous suggestion that their first three studio albums had been disappointments, particularly to those who had only been able to read about their live appearances and for whom “Dark Star” was the first piece of conclusive evidence in support of all the claims of collective transcendental genius made on their behalf.
“We simply haven’t known how to make records,” he told me, “and we figured the only way to make them was to learn ourselves, because we tried recording with a producer at the beginning and it was really hopeless. It all sounded completely flat. Anthem Of The Sun is the most satisfying of the first three to me, because we had the almost impossible task of making an album from very little material.
“The way it went very tight from the compositional standpoint was pleasing, and it’s very coherent – I can still follow it all the way through. But still we all knew that it was a hundred per cent non-commercial, and I certainly don’t like the way it was mixed. I know we could have done it better, but we didn’t know how. It was strange because we took stuff from three studio sessions and eight or nine gigs and put it all together without thinking of levels or equalising. We just did it from a musical standpoint, which is not enough. Anyway, it took us four albums and untold thousands of dollars to learn how to record ourselves. The music, though, was really good, and deserved a better fate.
“Even the live album, which I like, was put out six months after it was recorded, and even longer in Britain, and we do all the numbers completely differently now. The music is constantly evolving, progressing and regressing on many different levels.
“We have a new one out in the States, called Workingman’s Dead, which I’m very pleased with. It’s certainly the best of any of our studio work, and I hope it’s a success because we want to stop touring. We’ve been on the road every weekend since October, and we really need a rest… if only to think up some new music.”
I liked Lesh a lot, and I wish I’d gone into the interview knowing more about him — about his background in classical music, his studies with Luciano Berio, his college friendship with Steve Reich. Then I might have asked him some more interesting questions. But there you go. Life is full of unknown answers to unasked questions.
The Dead’s performance in a field that Sunday afternoon was a mix of the countryish songs from Workingman’s Dead (I think they kicked off with “Casey Jones”), R&B standards (Pigpen’s “Turn on Your Lovelight”) and spacey improvisations, including “Dark Star”. Oddly, for a band by then obsessed with developing the best amplification, the sound was a bit weak, which in my memory reduced the impact of the unique contrapuntal interplay between the guitars of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir and Lesh’s bass. Committed Deadheads (readers of IT and Frendz) loved them; others who’d come out of curiosity, or were there primarily to hear other artists, seemed a bit nonplussed. But I’m glad I saw them at that stage of their long, strange trip.
* Here’s the Guardian‘s obituary of Phil Lesh, by Adam Sweeting: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/oct/27/phil-lesh-obituary If you want to know more about the Grateful Dead’s British debut, there’s a website: https://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Holly-dead.70.html
thebluemoment.com 
His memoir Searching for the Sound is a great read.
I was at that festival! I was lured down to deepest Staffordshire not only by the opportunity of seeing the Dead’s debut British appearance but also the offer of a free pass if I became part of a small team selling the infamous “Schoolkids” edition of Oz magazine.
I was pleasantly surprised by the breadth of the Dead’s repertoire: not only the expected trippy stuff but also their new country-rock direction and even some Stax material. “Turn on Your Lovelight” was certainly one of the highlights. It wasn’t until I bought my first Bobby Bland LP, “Here’s the Man!!!”, a few years later that I discovered where it had come from.
One of the concerts I’ll never forget. Farewell, Phil Lesh.
Nice piece. Richard, it was thanks to your review of ‘Live/Dead’ in the MM in 1970 that I jumped on the Dead bus. I always felt that Lesh played with tremendous (albeit oft suppressed) power – a classic case of a light being hid under a bushel. Ditto his West Coast contemporary Jack Casady. Despite many attempts I’ve never quite got a handle on ‘Seastones’ though. Best, Tim
I was there at the “Hollywood farm “ festival. I was a first year student at Keele University about a 1/2 mile walk from the farm. Great atmosphere and good music.